- Signs of the Times for Wed, 21 Jun 2006 -

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• Provoking Iran
• Terror in Iraq
• Bush in Austria
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• World on Fire

The antiwar Left would prefer that old-style American imperialism and the quest for oil had caused the Iraq War. They are the preferred enemies of the Left. They are the traditional villains. And they are safe villains. Mentioning Israel as a culprit would cause problems: it would lose support for the Left among activist Jews, and it would lead to hostility from the Israel lobby and mainstream Jewish groups.

By way of contrast, no one ever got in trouble berating oil magnates or Arab sheiks - witness Michael Moore's blockbuster 2004 documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," which focuses on those alleged villains while ignoring the neocon/Israel connection to the war. [1] Also important is the fact that Jews, categorically, are considered to be victims; and it is hard for the Left to criticize an officially recognized victim group. In terms of left-wing psychology the ideal is to strike a radical, nonconformist pose without really alienating the powerful, thus avoiding any negative consequences as well as the cognitive dissonance that results from chiding designated victims. The process can go so far as to turn a man into an unintentional apologist for Israel. Such is the case with Stephen Zunes, a prominent leftist historian of the Middle East, whom the leftist Israel-critic Jeffrey Blankfort describes as a Noam Chomsky acolyte. [2]

Zunes teaches at the University of San Francisco and, as his biography at the USF Website indicates, serves as a writer and Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project, and as an associate editor for Peace Review. [3] Zunes has given numerous lectures and conference papers in the United States and abroad, and has published numerous articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers on such topics as U.S. foreign policy, Middle Eastern political developments, African politics, social movements, and nonviolent action. His books include Nonviolent Social Movements (Blackwell, 1999) and, with Richard Falk, Tinderbox: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage, 2003). Zunes has served as a political analyst for National Public Radio, Pacifica Radio, the BBC, and MSNBC. He has also been a board member and consultant for a number of peace and human-rights organizations. As is apparent from this brief description, Zunes is a prominent intellectual activist of the antiwar Left. And his views reflect the characteristic attitude of that broad group.

Writing in Foreign Policy in Focus, Zunes recently offered an analysis [4] of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "Israel Lobby" essay [5] that was similar in some ways to the negative views of leftist luminaries Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein [6] but reflected a more hostile tone not just toward Mearsheimer and Walt but toward anyone who would dare claim that the Israel lobby has had an impact on American foreign policy.
 

To encapsulate Zunes's position: Instead of influencing American policy, Israel is but the passive instrument of American policymakers. Washington has forced Israel to pursue a belligerent policy to enhance American hegemony in the Middle East for the benefit of corporate capitalists, especially arms merchants. Free of American control, Israel would pursue a peaceful policy toward the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states. Therefore, Israel is the victim of the United States.

Moreover, Zunes maintains, those who claim a significant role for Israel and the Israel lobby in determining U.S. foreign policy tend toward anti-Semitism. Thus does the left-wing critic of American policy morph into an apologist for Israel. Like Alan Dershowitz - in some respects worse than Dershowitz - Zunes makes use of misleading half-truths while simultaneously ignoring the unmistakable evidence substantiating the power of the Israel lobby in influencing U.S. policy.

Zunes begins his essay with a blanket attack on the integrity of Mearsheimer and Walt. While Chomsky at least praised the courage of the two scholars, Zunes sees a devious intent behind their work. "What progressive supporters of Mearsheimer and Walt's analysis seem to ignore," Zunes asserts, "is that both men have a vested interest in absolving from responsibility the foreign policy establishment that they have served so loyally all these years. Israel and its supporters are essentially being used as convenient scapegoats for America's disastrous policies in the Middle East." [7]

The presumption here is that anyone who does not identify with the Left somehow serves the foreign-policy establishment, in the manner of an employee or "lackey of American imperialism," as the Communist press used to put it. But the fact is that the two authors opposed the war on Iraq from the outset. They were among 33 academicians who took out an ad in the September 26, 2002, New York Times titled "War with Iraq Is Not in America's National Interest." That would be an odd way of serving the establishment, if said establishment actually directed the American war on Iraq, as Zunes categorically asserts. So let's just put this down as a gratuitous smear at best, not unlike what members of the Israel lobby hurled at Mearsheimer and Walt, along with anyone else who had the temerity to point out the lobby's power.

The idea that the Israel lobby was simply a scapegoat implies its innocence. But nowhere does Zunes try to show that its members, especially the neocons, were not pushing for war on Iraq or Iran. Instead, Zunes's defense is that the Israel lobby does not have the power to have its plans implemented or that it is merely a pawn of the United States.

He argues further that, because its members were divided on the issue, it cannot be said that the Israel lobby per se supported the war on Iraq. Zunes writes that

while Mearsheimer and Walt do not claim that the Israel lobby is monolithic or centrally directed, they fail to emphasize how not all pro-Israel groups support the policies of the Israeli government, particularly its right-wing administrations. Groups like Americans for Peace Now, the Tikkun Community, Brit Tzedek v' Shalom, and the Israel Policy Forum all identify themselves as pro-Israel but oppose the occupation, the settlements, the separation wall, and Washington's unconditional support for Israeli policies.

Even more remarkably, Zunes denies the neocon role in the war. He charges that

perhaps the most twisted argument in [Mearsheimer and Walt's] article is the authors' claim that the 2003 invasion of Iraq "was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure." This is ludicrous on several grounds. First of all, Israel is far less secure as a result of the rise of Islamist extremism, terrorist groups, and Iranian influence in post-invasion Iraq than it was during the final years of Saddam Hussein's rule, when Iraq was no longer a strategic threat to Israel or actively involved in anti-Israeli terrorism.

As suggested above, it is anything but apparent that the war has harmed the security of Israel. As a result of the war on terror, the United States is now militantly opposed to the enemies of Israel, including the Palestinians. Israel has now taken a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians. As a result of American pressure, Syria removed its military from Lebanon. Now the United States and Europe are pressuring Iran with respect to its nuclear policy - in essence we see a de facto international effort to guarantee Israel's nuclear monopoly in the Middle East, in view of the fact that there is no call for Israel to give up its potent nuclear arsenal.

Zunes also omits the fact that the neocons were the driving force for war and that their war agenda was closely linked to that of Israel. For some years before 2001, the neocons had been pushing for war on Iraq, a war that was intended as the first step in restructuring the entire Middle East - what they have referred to as World War IV. It was right in line with Israeli Likudnik thinking. Leading neocons - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser - provided a similar plan to destabilize the Middle East to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996. The fundamental purpose of the plan, titled "A Clean Break," was to enhance Israeli security. And the idea originated not in some irrelevant whim of the neocons but actually in Israel, with a comparable plan being put forth in an article in 1982 by Oded Yinon. (Israel Shahak's translation of Yinon's work appeared under the title The Zionist Plan for the Middle East.)

As a result of neocon efforts, significant aspects of this destabilization plan, developed to enhance Israeli security, became the policy of the United States in the Bush II administration. If I may underline my point: the United States adopted a policy that originated in Israel and that the pro-Israel neocons promoted; there is no evidence that "corporate America" forced Israel or its supporters to develop those policies.

While not ignoring the neocons' actual plans, Zunes downplays their connection to Israel. Zunes writes that "although the neoconservatives who championed the invasion of Iraq were supporters of Israel's rightist governments, they had for many years also been supporters of rightist governments in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere out of a belief that such alliances strengthened American hegemony." To say that the neocons are no more linked to Israel than they were to South Vietnam or Guatemala is simply absurd. Obviously, the neocons' ties and loyalties have been far stronger to Israel than to any other country. On this point I recommend to your attention my article "The second wave against Mearsheimer and Walt: A well-tempered smother-out as a new war looms" (The Last Ditch, May 25, 2006), especially my discussion of some leading neocons and their Israeli ties. As I write in that essay: "Neocons have been involved in institutions that promote the interests of Jews and Israel - especially Commentary magazine, which is funded by the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs."

Neocons have argued that a strong America benefits Israel and Jewish interests. In his sympathetic account of the neocons in The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, Murray Friedman writes: "A central element in [Norman] Podhoretz's evolving views [in the early 1970s], which would soon become his and many of the neocons' governing principle was the question, 'Is It Good for the Jews,' the title of a February 1972 Commentary piece." [8] Exemplifying the focus on Jewish interests, Friedman observes that "Commentary articles now came to emphasize threats to Jews and the safety and security of the Jewish state. By the 1980s, nearly half of Podhoretz's writings on international affairs centered on Israel and these dangers." [9]
 

Zunes asserts that groups other than the Israel lobby - oil and the armaments industries - determine policy in the Middle East: "More fundamentally, the United States has had strong strategic interests in the Persian Gulf predating the establishment of modern Israel. Indeed, oil companies and the arms industry exert far more economic and ideological influence over Washington's policy in the Persian Gulf region than does the Israel lobby." Here we have another half-truth. Undoubtedly, the United States has not handed over American policy to the Israel lobby, or there would have been much less support for catering to the goals of the oil-producing states - necessitating, in part, the expression of some concern for the rights of the Palestinians. However, if American foreign policy had always excluded the interests of the Israel lobby, and that policy had simply rested in the hands of the State Department "Arabists" and the oil industry, it is possible that Israel would never have come into being. [10] And it is a certainty that the Palestinians' rights would have won greater recognition. In fact, concern for those rights was actually demonstrated by the Carter and Bush I administrations.

As I point out in "Gulf War 1991: Prefiguration and prelude to the 2003 Iraq debacle" (TLD, February 18, 2005), between World War II and 9/11 the watchword for U.S. policy in the Middle East was stability, which Washington perceived as fundamental for preserving the flow of oil that made the West run. The United States supported the conservative monarchies in the region - Saudi Arabia being foremost - and resisted radical forces threatening the status quo. In that period, U.S. support for Israel existed within the broader framework of stability. But thanks to the new neocon dominance, the Bush II foreign policy moved away from that traditional orientation and began promoting regional instability in an attempt to weaken Israel's enemies. This was sold to Americans as "regime change" to bring about "democracy."

In the words of veteran neocon Michael Ledeen, "Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically.... It is time once again to export the democratic revolution." [11] Whether the neocons sincerely believe in establishing some version of democracy in the Middle East is uncertain; in any case, the essential part of their definition of a democracy is a government that supports Israel.

Let us note well that instead of promoting war, the oil companies at the beginning of the Bush II administration actually sought to end sanctions on Iraq. They have taken the same stance toward Iran, in contrast to the warlike positions advocated by Israel and the Israel lobby. [12]

Zunes must confine his account of American policy in the Middle East to a hopelessly general level in order to conclude that the Israel lobby is unimportant. According to Zunes, the

claim that the Israel lobby is a major factor in the formulation of overall U.S. Middle East policy is plainly false. Indeed, U.S. policy in the Middle East over the past several decades - orchestrating military interventions and CIA-backed coups, backing right-wing dictatorships, peddling neoliberal economic policies through the International Monetary Fund and other international financial institutions, undermining the United Nations and international law, imposing sanctions against nationalist governments, etc. - is remarkably similar to U.S. policy toward Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. If the United States can pursue such policies elsewhere in the world without pressure from the Israel lobby, why is its presence necessary to explain U.S. policies in the Middle East?

Zunes acknowledges the existence of establishment opposition to the war on Iraq but minimizes its significance. "Mearsheimer and Walt's observation that U.S. support of Israel runs contrary to U.S. strategic interests by stimulating anti-Americanism in the Arab/Islamic world is not an unprecedented dissenting position," Zunes writes. "During any administration, there are elements within establishment circles that come to conclusions challenging the prevailing mindset. For example, Mearsheimer and Walt joined Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jacek Krugler, and other realists who recognized that the invasion of Iraq was contrary to U.S. national security interests, but the Bush administration and a sizable majority of Congress (including the leadership of both parties) believed otherwise."

But in fact the opposition to the war on Iraq in establishment circles was far greater than Zunes acknowledges and seems to have exceeded the actual support for the war. No influential foreign-policy element, save the neocons, pushed for war against Iraq and for the forcible restructuring of the Middle East. In "The second wave" I point out that "leading elements of the American security/foreign-policy establishment - Bush the elder and his cronies, Brzezinski, foreign-policy 'realists,' liberal internationalists, the oil interests, global capitalists (e.g., George Soros), the military brass, career State Department and CIA professionals - were cool or hostile to the war on Iraq and the Middle East war agenda in general." The mainstream media often cited such forces, as represented within the Bush administration, as trying to restrain the neocon war effort. But that effort was directed by what Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, terms the "cabal," which was able to bypass normal State Department channels. [13]

It is hard to see how the war would have taken place if the associates of Bush the elder - Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleberger - were directing foreign policy for George W. Bush, as many commentators in 2000 had expected. The crucial importance of Bush's having neoconservative advisors was acknowledged by neocon Richard Perle:

If Bush had staffed his administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker, which might well have happened, then it could have been different, because they would not have carried into it the ideas that the people who wound up in important positions brought to it. The ideas are only important as they reside in the minds of people who were involved directly in the decision process. [14]

Zunes goes on to maintain that Israel has helped America to fight the "war on terror" presumably to advance American interests, writing:

The Pentagon pre-positions equipment in Israel to enhance military readiness for intervention elsewhere in the Middle East. Israel has also been supportive of U.S. military operations in Iraq by helping to train U.S. Special Forces in aggressive counterinsurgency techniques and sending urban warfare specialists to Fort Bragg to instruct assassination squads targeting suspected Iraqi guerrilla leaders. The U.S. civil administration in Iraq, established following the 2003 invasion, was modeled after Israel's civil administration in the occupied Arab territories following the 1967 Israeli invasion. U.S. officers have traveled to Israel and Israeli officers have traveled to Iraq for additional consulting. What's more, Israelis have helped arm and train pro-American Kurdish militias and have assisted U.S. officials in interrogation centers for suspected insurgents under detention near Baghdad. Israeli advisers have shared helpful tips on erecting and operating roadblocks and checkpoints, have provided training in mine-clearing and wall-breaching methods, and have suggested techniques for tracking suspected insurgents using drone aircraft. Israel has also provided aerial surveillance equipment, decoy drones, and armored construction equipment. In return, Israel has reaped ever-greater U.S. support.

Israeli activity in Kurdistan deserves a mention. There we should note that Israel is simply advancing its own interests - to connect itself with an oil-producing region that provides it a strategic location from which to put pressure on both the Iraqi central government and Iran. [15] From the Likudnik perspective, the reality of a fragmented Iraq was much to be preferred to the neocons' mass-marketed pipe dream of a unified democratic Iraq. Such a division of Iraq simply reflects the Israeli aim to fragment and destabilize its enemies, as proposed in Yinon's 1982 article. Let us recall that in the past past Israel has formed strong secret relationships with leaders of the Kurdish secessionist movement. [16] What is not evident, however, is how a destabilized and fragmented Iraq would benefit American interests. Avoiding that very fragmentation was a fundamental reason Bush the elder curtailed his invasion of Iraq in 1991; indeed, official American policy continues to favor a unified Iraq to the present day.
 

While the thrust of Zunes's thesis is to deny the power of the Israel lobby, he tacitly acknowledges that it possesses some power when he alludes to the "historic precedent ... for a wide bipartisan consensus of lawmakers myopically pursuing policies which end up hurting U.S. interests." He writes that "while the Israel lobby certainly contributes to this myopia through its distortions of the historical narrative and the current situation, there are plenty of other cultural, political, and related factors also at work." Certainly all historical events are multicausal. It is hard to think of any historical event that was caused by only one factor, independent of other underlying or contributing factors. Individuals or groups can achieve their goals only in certain environments.

Also overthrowing his premise of powerlessness, with respect to the lobby, is the homage that Zunes pays to reality by admitting that the Israel lobby does have the power to intimidate critics. But he couches that admission in a distorted manner. For example, he writes that the effort to suppress opposition comes from "organized right-wing forces," an odd description of such organizations as the Anti-Defamation League, which is quick to brand adversaries (especially those on the Right) with the lethal "anti-Semite" stigma.

Furthermore, and strangely, Zunes asserts that attacks on critics of Israel or the Israel lobby are no different from the attacks on those who criticize other American policies, writing that "those who challenge U.S. policy anywhere are going to be subjected to intimidation." But think back to the Vietnam War era. It was almost de rigueur for academics to criticize American foreign policy. Moreover, the criticism of American policy is not analogous to the criticism of Israel or its lobby. A proper analogy to the case of Israel would involve criticism of other countries that the United States has supported. And I have never heard of anyone suffering in the least in the late 1960s or early 1970s for saying that the government of South Vietnam was corrupt. Nor is anyone ever punished today for criticizing the government of Saudi Arabia. Being called anti-South Vietnam or anti-Saudi patently carries nothing like the poison of being branded anti-Semitic.

Continuing, Zunes reverses himself, in part, by admitting the "exceptional nature of the challenges faced by critics of U.S. support for the Israeli government." But after making that admission of inequivalency, Zunes then implies that such harsher treatment is to some extent understandable and largely the result of self-censorship rather than any external actions by the Israel lobby:

Given that Israel is the world's only Jewish state and that some criticism of Israel really is rooted in anti-Semitism, organized attacks against those opposing Israeli policies tend to carry more resonance since they involve alleged manifestations of prejudice against a minority group. If a Jewish state were not the focus, many liberals would dismiss such attacks as passé McCarthyism and would not take them seriously. As a result, assaults on critics of Israeli policies have been more successful in limiting open debate, but this gagging censorship effect stems more from ignorance and liberal guilt than from any all-powerful Israel lobby.

Ignorance and guilt among American liberals are closely related to the power of the Israel lobby. And those not disabled by internal guilt understand that external punishments are always at hand: consider the cases of the brilliant writer Joe Sobran, fired from National Review and subsequently suffering in near-poverty as a result of the "anti-Semite" blacklist, and leading Middle East scholar Juan Cole, recently denied a tenured position at Yale. Those not motivated by guilt are kept in line by fear. Criticizing the Israel lobby will not, to be sure, lead one to be shot at sunrise or sent to the Gulag, but it can do irreparable harm to one's career.

Further militating against his powerlessness thesis, Zunes even acknowledges that the lobby generates fear. But he argues that it is an unwarranted fear: "The myth of an all-powerful Israel lobby is so pervasive that it has often scared off progressive funding and organizing that could conceivably challenge it." Zunes attributes the problem to the lobby's critics, writing that "exaggerating the power of the Israel lobby," as he claims Mearsheimer and Walt do, "leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy." But if, as Zunes's fundamental argument has it, the Israel lobby has no power to influence American policy and is simply a tool of the corporate elite, it is hard to see how any "self-fulfilling prophecy" could possibly occur. Whether the Israel lobby influenced American policy because of its actual power or because of people's irrational fear of its supposed power, the fact would remain that it could or did influence American policy - but the existence of that influence is denied by Zunes's overall thesis.

Having said that, I must add that although the power of the Israel lobby is all too real, fear of it is often excessive. As I pointed out in an earlier article, the Israel lobby is not omnipotent, and Americans have the power to free themselves from its tentacles if they are willing to eschew spineless acquiescence. [17]
 

Ironically, while Zunes denies that the Israel lobby has power, he is willing to attribute power to other lobbies; and by citing them he implies, willy nilly, that the Israel lobby, too, has some influence. He writes:

When examining the power of the Israel lobby in negatively influencing U.S. Middle East policy [which, remember, Zunes denies], it is important to recognize the role of other lobbies that have an interest in encouraging the dangerous direction of current U.S. policy. Placing so much emphasis on AIPAC and its allied groups ignores other special interests and ideologies which also play a role in urging U.S. support for the Israeli government.

Zunes contends that the most important lobby in regard to U.S. Middle East policy is the arms industry. "The military-industrial complex," he writes, "has a considerable stake in encouraging massive arms shipments to Israel and other Middle Eastern U.S. allies and can exert enormous pressure on members of Congress who do not support a weapons-proliferation agenda."

Undeniably, the arms industry is tied in with the Israel lobby, especially the neoconservatives. [19] But it is the latter who determine American policy. Many of their activities are right out in the open. They form an interlocking network of think tanks and organizations that produces a wide variety of materials to disseminate their positions; they appear in the major media; and they staff the executive branch. While some arms merchants and former military officers support the neocons, it is difficult to discern the hand of the military-industrial complex acting alone. Where are the arms industry's organizations and spokesmen that set policy? What influential individuals, organizations, and media outlets does the arms industry have comparable to Norman Podhoretz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs, and the American Enterprise Institute?

It is understandable that the arms industry supports Israel - and maintains ties with Israel and its supporters - because it realizes that Israel's lobby is very influential and sets the parameters for American Middle East policy, within which other lobbies must operate. (Lobbyists tend to donate funds to winning politicians, not to obvious losers who might be more sympathetic to their particular interest.) It is not apparent that the arms industry would support a pro-Israeli policy if it had its druthers. If the arms industry could optimize American foreign policy to serve its own interests, free of the impediment of the Israel lobby, it could earn more profits by selling arms to Israel's enemies. Saddam, for example, would have been willing to buy arms from the United States - and in fact he did so during the 1980s. Iran, which currently has plenty of oil money, is purchasing arms from other nations, especially China and Russia. The "war on terror" has strained the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, and that country, too, is now purchasing arms from China.

Unlike Israel, those countries purchase armaments with their own money, not with military aid extracted from U.S. taxpayers. No doubt the United States could get many countries in the world to purchase American arms if it provided them with the funds to purchase them. In short, if the fundamental goal of American foreign policy were to sell armaments, it is peculiar to propose that a pro-Israel foreign policy would be essential. Similarly, if the goal were to enrich armament producers by preparing for America's defense, there are plenty of potential adversaries around the world to prepare to fight without focusing on those hostile to Israel.
 

Ultimately, as signaled earlier in this essay, Zunes brandishes the anti-Semitic card:

There is something quite convenient and discomfortingly familiar about the tendency to blame an allegedly powerful and wealthy group of Jews for the overall direction of an increasingly controversial U.S. policy. Indeed, like exaggerated claims of Jewish power at other times in history, such an explanation absolves the real powerbrokers and assigns blame to convenient scapegoats. This is not to say that Mearsheimer, Walt, or anyone else who expresses concern about the power of the Israel lobby is an anti-Semite, but the way in which this exaggerated view of Jewish power parallels historic anti-Semitism should give us all pause.

Zunes goes so far as to claim that the idea of a powerful Israel lobby is widely voiced in private by diplomats and politicians seeking to avoid taking steps to aid the Palestinians or to justify their vote for arms funding for Israel. And he declares:

You still hear some peace and human rights activists quoting congressional aides and members of Congress as if these influential and (mostly) wealthy, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant lawmakers were actually helpless, innocent victims of a sinister cabal of rich and powerful Jews. Opposing inhumane Israeli policies is not anti-Semitic, but when those in positions of power utilize an exaggerated claim of Jewish clout in order to divert public attention from their own complicity with unpopular policies, they are indeed flirting with anti-Semitism.

But if such descriptions of the Israel lobby are merely maneuvers to divert attention from real motives, why aren't they expressed in public? Wouldn't that be more effective? If many people - including government officials - are saying something in private but not in public, isn't it reasonable to conclude that they believe it to be true but are afraid to express it openly? This appeal to logic and psychology is, of course, backed up by considerable empirical evidence, as we see when the Israel lobby hurls the deadly "anti-Semite" charge against those few who do dare to publicly mention its power. Zunes himself acknowledges the "exceptional nature of the challenges faced by critics of U.S. support for the Israeli government." If people of considerable stature - including members of Congress and diplomats - share this fear, it is hard to deny that the Israel lobby really does possess extensive power.
 

If Zunes's views are so off base, why is he such a significant figure in the Middle East peace movement? The answer is that his rather convoluted, contradictory account comports with the ideological predilections of large numbers of people in the mainly left-wing Middle East peace camp. For those who relish the memes of Jewish victimology, Third World beneficence, and the unadulterated evil of an American gentile economic elite, Zunes provides the perfect story. In Zunes's imaginary world, it is Israel that is the victim of America - more specifically of American gentiles, since the American Israel lobby is actually powerless, and is perhaps a victim too. As Zunes writes: "It has long been in Washington's interest to maintain a militarily powerful and belligerent Israel dependent on the United States. Real peace could undermine such a relationship." One wonders how that fits in with the efforts of Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush to curb Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, efforts that were totally resisted by Israel and the Israel lobby. But so much for inconvenient facts.

In Zunes's fantasy, all would be sweetness and light if it were not for the United States: "U.S. policy has resulted in dividing Israelis from Arabs, although both are Semitic peoples who worship the same God, love the same land, and share a history of subjugation and oppression." But any evidence that the Zionists and Palestinians got along well before U.S. involvement in the region is, shall we say, scanty. As you see here, unlike a typical member of the Israel lobby Zunes portrays Israel's adversaries as victims, not as evildoers; and therefore he can appeal to the Left's Third World sympathies while simultaneously portraying Israel as a victim.

In Zunes's view the worst thing is to claim that the Israel lobby is responsible for any problems in the Middle East: "To blame the current morass in the Middle East on the Israel lobby only exacerbates animosities and plays into the hands of the divide-and-rule tactics of those in Congress and the administration whose primary objective is ultimately not to help Israel but to advance the American Empire."

Zunes's apology for the Israel lobby is about as strong as it could be for one still labeled a critic of Israel. After all, Zunes would like all mention of the Israel lobby to cease. He believes that to be the essential precondition for peace to take root. For those on the Left who prefer to live in a make-believe world, Zunes has confected the perfect myth - victimized Arabs, victimized Jews, and an ultra-evil American gentile economic elite. But since that state of things is totally imaginary, it worsens rather than solves the real problems that exist; at least, it will not solve them in ways contrary to the goals set by the Israel lobby. It will not provide for a viable Palestinian homeland. It will not stop American military involvement in the Middle East. Quite obviously, if all critics imitated Zunes and deliberately avoided any mention of the Israel lobby's power, that lobby would flourish stronger than ever. [20]
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June 12th Question:

Who do you think is the biggest plant-shill-government op in the patriot movement and/or alternative media?

The jury is in, the results are final, and everyday truth-seekers from all walks of life have spoken.

What follows are the results for our first WING TV viewer’s poll question:

Who do you think is the biggest plant-shill-government op in the patriot movement and/or alternative media?

TOP TEN VOTE-GETTERS

1) Alex Jones – GCN – 24%
2) Jeff Rense – GCN – 12%
3) Mike Ruppert – From the Wilderness – 11%
4) Art Bell – Coast to Coast AM – 7%
5) Kyle Hence – 9-11 Citizens Watch – 6%
6) Amy Goodman – Democracy Now – 5%
7) George Noory – Coast to Coast AM – 4%
8) David Icke – author, The Reptilian Agenda – 4%
9) Greg Szymanski – RBN – 3%
10) Tom Flocco + Daniel Hopsicker – Mad Cow News – 3%

===========

ANALYSIS

ONE: Discernment and Distrust

A total of 41 different individuals were named by voters as who they felt was the biggest shill in the alternative media and patriot movement. The first thing that is very apparent from these results is that nobody trusts anybody in this field! Or, more accurately, a lot of people are waking up to the fact that there are some highly questionable figures delivering their information to them, and as a result they are becoming highly suspicious of these sources. In our opinion, this is a move in the right direction, for the more discernment people use in selecting their news sources, the more able they’ll be to eliminate those who aren’t on the up-and-up.

TWO: GCN

GCN’s top two flagship broadcasters – Alex Jones and Jeff Rense – were voted # 1 and # 2 as the biggest shills, plants, and/or government ops by respondents to our first viewer’s poll. Between the two of them, they received 36% of the entire vote! That means over one of every three people thought these GCN mainstays were the worst of the worst. Ponder this point for a moment. The ramifications are beyond damning. 1 in 3 people listed Jones & Rense as the # 1 ops. Ted Anderson, owner of GCN, should think long and hard about what the people are saying; and in our opinion he should take notice before his network’s credibility is completely destroyed by these two.

THREE: Alex Jones

“Ego” Alex Jones, as many called him, received more than twice as many votes as any other recipient. Over twice as many! Consider what this means. One of every four voters categorized Jones as the biggest shill around; and in all honesty, we were surprised at how deeply the distrust of this man goes in the patriot community. Of course he still has his loyal sheeple-groupies, but this poll is very convincing in that people have caught on to Alex’s schtick.

In addition, his latest publicity stunt at the Canadian Bilderberg meeting backfired horrendously, for people saw immediately that after Jones deliberately got himself detained by customs officials, this “created” event (just like the mainstream media does) quickly became all about Alex Alex Alex. Egomania run rampant.

Furthermore, we get the impression that the community at large is repulsed by Jones’ $74.00 ticket price for his upcoming Los Angeles 9-11 event. Imagine, “Hollywood” Alex Jones is charging good-hearted, well-intentioned, hard-working patriots $74 to walk through the door. Repulsive. This confirms yet again that Jones’ only god is the Almighty Dollar.

FOUR: Jeff Rense

By refusing to step out of the shadows, show a photograph of himself, or produce a resume that substantiates his past claims, Jeff Rense ranks # 2 on the shill-plant government op list. Plus, his latest underhanded tactic of having a lawyer try to strong-arm TV station owner Patsy Smullin into signing a statement – via coercion and intimidation – that they wrote for her was the bottom of the barrel. As one voter commented about Rense, he has “the most sophisticated disinformation,” so be extremely wary.

FIVE: Coast-to-Coast AM

Between Art Bell and George Noory, these two men garnered 10% of the total vote. What’s most regrettable about this duo is that, with their show being broadcast into approximately 550 markets with eight million listeners, they could do more than any other single entity to help the patriot community, yet what we see instead is shadow people, Bigfoot, Prophet Yahweh (UFO con-man), ghosts, and other assorted nonsense.

Plus, Noory’s most frequent New World Order guest is none other than the # 1 least-trusted recipient in our poll – “Hollywood” Alex Jones. As Noory is fond of saying, there are no coincidences. So, could there be collusion between the Clear Channel owned Coast-to-Coast AM and GCN, which is, by its owner's own admission, aspiring to become more "mainstream" every day? It seems to us that this clique is just a little too reminiscent of how the mainstream media operates where only a handful of “selected” mouthpieces [those who stick to the script] are allowed into the protection racket at the exclusion of many other authentic truth-tellers who aren't controlled.

SIX: Mike Ruppert

With his continued attacks on the 9-11 truth movement, embarrassing sexual harassment charges brought by a former female employee, the peak oil ruse, and pathetic panhandling schemes aimed at his followers, Ruppert’s star has undoubtedly plunged further than anyone else’s. Washed-up, exposed, and hung-out to dry; we predict that he won’t even be a part of this movement by next year. Why bother? His gig is up.

SEVEN: Kyle Hence

Nobody will ever forget Hence’s arrogant proclamation about the 9-11 truth movement where he said, “People aren’t ready for the truth.” Well, all we can say is – SCREW YOU! None of us ever made you our spokesman, especially when you’ve suppressed so much vital 9-11 information over the past five years. Here is how one voter cast his ballot for biggest shill: “Kyle Hence (and his minions). He’s definitely the Pied Piper of Propaganda.”

EIGHT: Amy Goodman

No wonder the Democrats don’t control the White House, or either hall of Congress. For some inexplicable reason – totally devoid of logic – the libby-libs still tune into Disinformation Now (and other equally lightweight, controlled leftist sites). Just look at her salary and where the money comes from to support their network (see Leftgatekeepers.com) and you’ll know why Amy Goodman avoids so many pertinent issues. The Left needs to run this woman out of town on a rail, and quickly.

NINE: Greg Szymanski

One voter called him “the most obvious shill,” and considering his alarmist, sensationalistic output, we can’t argue with this assessment. On top of that, anyone who would brazenly FAKE an interview with Morgan Reynolds is a bottom-feeder like none other – even worse than the mainstream media cronies. At least creeps like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass got fired when they pulled similar stunts. How this guy is allowed to be on various networks and in certain publications is beyond us. Now he’s become the biggest money-beggar on the Internet. Pull the plug, for crying out loud.

TEN: Disinfo, Inc.

Hopsicker: This guy’s still promoting the bogus notion that 19 Arab cave-dwellers masterminded 9-11. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Truthfully, we didn’t even know he was still around. 19 Arab cave-dwellers did 9-11. What a buffoon!

Flocco: You remember the headlines: "Bush & Cheney Indicted" (guess what - they're still in office). "Chicago Subway MI5 Shootout" (a total lie). "Barbara Olson Alive - Arrested in Europe" (the biggest hoax in years). This cretin has been so discredited that his name is now synonymous with disinformation.

ELEVEN: David Icke

Another George Noory mainstay. Shape-shifters. Reptilians. What's real; what's fake ???????

TWELVE: CIA Payroll

One element overlooked by voters in our poll was the crucial role that paid spammers and paid chat room trolls play in spreading disinformation. Consider: how does the Tom Flocco-type garbage make its way across the Internet so quickly? Answer: via Poindexters who are bankrolled by the government to disseminate this crap.

In addition, the top-ranking shills & plants listed in this poll are protected in little chat rooms and on message boards (many of them created specifically by the CIA) by a cabal of useful idiots, groupies, sycophants, and worst of all - those on the CIA payroll who run interference for the operatives. These low-life pathetic scum are largely unknown, but they play an integral part in perpetuating the infiltration of our movement. Losers losers losers.

CONCLUSION

It is notable that certain names in the alternative media and patriot movement not only didn’t make the Top Ten list of worst shills, but they weren’t even mentioned once by the voters. These are people like:

    • Michael Collins Piper
    • Vyzygoth
    • Frank Whalen
    • Christopher Bollyn
    • Bill Brumbaugh
    • Mark Glenn
    • Mark Farrell
    • Sam & Trish Britton
    • Michael Corbin
    • Kelly McGinley
    • Patriot Jim Kujawa
    • Michael Langston
    • Laura Knight-Jadczyk
    • Russell Pickering

Of course there are many others, but the point is: not everyone in this movement is corrupted, and there are still honest voices left within our ranks. These are the individuals we need to support, while simultaneously ignoring the shills, plants, and government operatives.

Now the choice is up to you: do you want TRUTH, or will you accept disinformation?

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Editorial: Exceptional Americans Manifest Their Destiny

Jason Miller
21/06/2006

Contrary to the "catapulted propaganda", Enron, Haditha, and Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents or the work of a "few bad apples". American savagery and oppressive behavior pervades our society and predates our nation's birth. Building its patriarchal wealth on the backs of Black slaves and cheap labor while acquiring its territory through Native American genocide, predatory exploitation of non-Anglos, the poor, women, and the working class emerged as a pillar of America's socioeconomic "success" before we even declared our independence.

With the advent of the Industrial Age, transcontinental railroads, and the rapid proliferation of Capitalism, an increasingly empowered young nation with an insatiable lust for more land, resources, and profits began to seek prey beyond its borders. At the close of the Nineteenth Century, the American Eagle spread its wings as it began mimicking the rapacious behavior of its Western European ancestors.

With the sun finally preparing to set on the British Empire, the days of conquest and expansion dawned for the nascent American Empire. Pathologically hubristic notions like Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism served to dehumanize indigenous people to justify invasion, theft and murder as acts of necessity to bring civilization to "primitives".

In his latest book, Overthrow, former New York Times Bureau Chief Stephen Kinzer chronicles America's exploits as an empire and imperialist nation.

What is it that they are spreading?

The Bush Regime's launch of the Project for the New American Century with the invasion of Iraq was not really out of character for the United States. While it was certainly executed with more blatant disregard for international law than America's previous imperial endeavors, it typifies the American sanctimonious belief that it can do no wrong.

George Bush was simply reiterating America's long-standing mendacious rationale for its exploitative behavior when he stated:

"What I'm trying to suggest to you that this program is a part of a strategic goal, and that is to protect this country in the short-term and protect it in the long-term by spreading freedom."

Consider some of the freedoms the United States is spreading:

1. Freedom to work under miserable conditions for a pittance.

2. Freedom to exist in an environment permeated with depleted uranium.

3. Freedom to sell precious resources to soulless multinational corporations at garage sale prices.

4. Freedom to experience a Kafkaesque nightmare including arrest with no charges, no trial to determine guilt or innocence, the endurance of torture, and indefinite detention.

5. Freedom to realize the inherent inferiority of one's culture, religion, and language, and to cast them aside like sacks of rank-smelling garbage.

6. Freedom to be maimed or killed if one dares to reject the "gifts" of these freedoms.

America's corporate media propaganda machine has managed to maintain a fastidiously manicured façade for many years. Despite appearing to exist as a champion of democracy, equality, freedom, and human rights, the reality of the United States was, and is, that its socioeconomic and governmental systems are racist, bigoted, ruthless and plutocratic in nature.

Democracy has never existed in the United States. A de facto aristocracy has dominated our constitutional republic dating back to the Continental Congress. Capitalism is a brutal, pitiless economic system that encourages and rewards greed, selfishness, exploitation, and annihilation of the competition.

Obsessed with materialism, conspicuous consumption, convenience, physical appearance, and winning, many Americans gorge themselves on the abundant fruits of Capitalism, oblivious to the fact that billions of human beings live in abject poverty and misery to make their feast possible.

America is a nation of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. Its ruling elite class is buttressed by the poor and working people who have been rendered politically impotent by the allure of conspicuous consumption (which further enriches the elite), the illusion of democracy, and the extremely remote possibility that one of them could be the next Bill Gates.

Wearing its cloak of benevolence, America is an abstract embodiment of the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing. Governed by avaricious profiteers produced and enabled by a ruthless system that brings out the worst in humanity, the United States is a predacious nation innocently posing as a bastion of human rights and democracy.

Running out of real estate (and victims)

Overthrow captures the essence of the zeitgeist in America in the late Nineteenth Century with an apt quote from American historian Frederick Jackson Turner:

For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion. With the settlement of the Pacific Coast and the occupation of the free lands, this movement has come to a check. That these energies of expansion will no longer operate would be a rash prediction; and the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an inter-oceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries, are indications that the movement will continue.

According to Kinzer's historical analysis, the United States cut its imperial fangs on Mexico in the 1840's, but Hawaii marked America's initial push beyond the North American continent. Two American missionaries, Amos Starr Cooke and Samuel Castle zealously worked to convert native Hawaiian "savages" into "civilized" Christians, but eventually abandoned their missionary work for the profits of the sugar trade. Cooke and Castle were the fathers of the White American aristocracy in Hawaii. This group eventually came to wield powerful economic and political influence on the islands by virtue of the huge sugar plantations they owned. Manipulation of a pliable Hawaiian monarch whom they had educated enabled them to engineer land reform which stripped indigenous people of their traditional communal form of land ownership.

On January 17, 1893 the Marines landed in Hawaii with a small contingency. In a bloodless coup, the 6220 Whites (on an archipelago populated by 41,000 native Hawaiians and 28,000 Asian laborers) seized control of the government and appointed none other than Sanford Dole (cousin to pineapple magnate James Dole) to lead. By 1897 the United States had formally annexed Hawaii.

Remember the Maine....And a few hundred thousand Filipinos

Fueled by the mainstream media lie that Spain had caused an explosion aboard the USS Maine, a battleship President McKinley had dispatched to Cuba in 1898, the United States declared war on Spain, won, and quickly acquired Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines in the process. Despite the Teller Amendment in which Americans had promised Cuban sovereignty, President McKinley justified American rule of Cuba through the "law of belligerent right over conquered territory." The Platt Amendment eventually became the US tool to give outward appearances of Cuban autonomy without actually ceding full self-determination.

Having defeated Spain in the Philippines, Americans encountered another enemy. It seems the indigenous people were prepared to forcefully resist their new masters. Viewing the Philippines as crucial to its business interests in Asia, the United States fought vigorously to retain its new colony. Sending an occupation force of 126,000 (eerily similar to the number of troops in Iraq), America suffered fewer than 5,000 casualties. At least 16,000 Filipino troops and 250,000 civilians were slaughtered by the United States military. Rampant and blatant atrocities committed by American soldiers were white-washed by a compliant mainstream media and farcical Senate hearings in which Henry Cabot Lodge justified American torture, cruelty and murder by characterizing Filipinos as "semi-civilized people with all the tendencies and characteristics of Asiatics."

Better dead than red? Not necessarily....

Throughout its history as an imperial power, the perpetuation of United States corporate interests abroad has been its primary motivation. However, no analysis of America's malignant impact on the world would be complete without addressing its fixation with crushing movements and governments showing even a hint of Socialist or Communist tendencies.

Champions of American Capitalism triumphantly proclaim that the totalitarian and barbaric regimes of Stalin and Mao are "absolute proof" that any socioeconomic system based on "leftist" ideologies dooms its people to torture, despotism, and mass murder. Stalin and Mao were indeed murderous dictators, but the evolution of their regimes do not negate the possibility of a socioeconomic system placing a reasonable degree of power in the hands of the working class and affording a more equitable distribution of wealth.

In fact, critical analysis reveals that the manifestation of Capitalism in the United States has been as morally repugnant and vicious as the regimes the champions of our system love to cite as evil. Those believing otherwise are in deep denial.

Domestically, Americans enslaved millions (3.9 million according to the 1860 census) and committed genocide against the millions of indigenous inhabitants whose land they stole. Aside from the egregious crimes committed against non-Anglos at home, America's system of Capitalism exists as the virtual antithesis of the "Communist" systems of Mao and Stalin in terms of inhumanity. Instead of pointing its malevolence inward on its "own", the United States has committed its wholesale slaughter abroad (i.e. 3 million in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands in Central America, and at least a million Iraqis, including the victims of the Gulf War and the brutal economic sanctions). Anglo exemption from slavery, genocide, and slaughter explains why American Capitalism has outlasted the "Communism" of Russia and China.

Portrait of a truly ugly American

Kinzer devotes a chapter of Overthrow to former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who could easily have been the poster-child for American Capitalism and its inherent hypocrisy and malevolence. Dulles easily warrants his own chapter. He exerted tremendous influence on US foreign policy throughout the Cold War and orchestrated a number of the interventions detailed in Overthrow.

Kinzer writes of Dulles (who in private life had been a highly successful attorney representing multinational corporations for the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell):

"He had been shaped by three powerful influences: a uniquely privileged upbringing, a long career advising the world's richest corporations, and a profound religious father. His deepest values, beliefs, and instincts were those for the international elite in which he had spent his life...."

"According to the most exhaustive book about Sullivan & Cromwell, the firm thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime, and Dulles spent much of 1934 publicly supporting Hitler....Soon after World War II ended, Dulles found in Communism the evil he had been so slow to find in Nazism."

Out of the frying pan....

In Overthrow, Kinzer does more than simply detail the horrific consequences to the victims of America's imperial interventions. He also reminds us of the self-destructive nature of America's foreign policy. Perhaps the most timely and poignant example is that of Iran.

In 1951, Mohammad Mossadegh became Iran's democratically elected prime minister. To alleviate the abject poverty of many of his people, he quickly moved to nationalize the oil industry to utilize the profits to benefit Iranians. The British, who had significant oil interests in Iran, raised serious objections to Mossadegh's actions despite the obscene oil profits they had made over the years in Iran, his offer to compensate them for the oil infrastructure they had built, and the British government's recent nationalization of its own coal and steel industries.

While the existence of the Soviet Union as a rival world power precluded the use of direct military intervention by the United States, John Foster Dulles contrived a plan to crush the Socialist "ambitions" of Mossadegh. Disseminating propaganda through America's mainstream media (including the New York Times and Time Magazine) which portrayed Mossadegh as a Communist while simultaneously utilizing the CIA to create a subversive environment in Iran, the United States succeeded in toppling Mossadegh and replacing him with the Shah of Iran. Representing US and Western business interests with great enthusiasm until he was deposed by radical Islamic elements in 1979, the Shah ruled Iran autocratically. SAVAK, his intelligence agency, tortured and murdered thousands of Iranian dissidents.

Like Hugo Chavez is in Venezuela, Mossadegh was anathema to American Capitalism. Leaders of developing countries who threaten the flow of capital to the Empire by diverting it to their own people quickly become enemies of the United States. The irony is that the replacement rulers America installs to preserve its economic interests are almost always corrupt and murderous dictators who foster deep hatred of the United States. Ultimately, Washington finds itself grappling with reactionary regimes which are overtly hostile to the United States, like the current leadership in Iran.

Like a good neighbor...

Kinzer devotes several chapters of Overthrow to America's numerous interventions in Central and South America over the last century. Virtually all were launched to protect American corporate interests by crushing Leftist governments and installing business friendly despots like Pinochet in Chile. Corporations like the United Fruit Company and presidents like Ronald Reagan were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Hispanics throughout Central America.

Let them burn

Kinzer also provides an enlightening analysis of the Vietnam debacle. In contrast to the tissues of lies propagated by America's media and textbook authors, Ho Chi Minh was not a threat to US interests. He was too busy striving for independence from Japan while facing recolonization by France. Neither China nor the Soviet Union (the "Communist" powers the ruling elite of the United States professed to fear so greatly because of their "conspiracy to spread Communism"), was interested in aligning themselves with Minh because of his nationalism.

When Ho Chi Minh spoke to a large group of supporters in Hanoi in 1945, he stated these subversive "Communist principles":

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Minh greatly admired the United States and even appealed to the American government for help.

America ignored Minh's pleas for help. Instead, the United States chose to take up where France left off and go to war with him. It also chose to support Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader of South Vietnam. Diem was a rotten human being and surrounded himself with family members whose corruption and inhumanity exceeded his own.

When Buddhist leaders led popular protests against the aristocratic and authoritarian rule of Diem and his family, Thich Quang Duc, a revered bodhisattva, burned himself to death at a busy Saigon intersection on June 11, 1963.

New York Times reporter David Halberstam witnessed the event and wrote:

"I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think.... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him."

Madame Nhu, a member of the Diem ruling family responded to the protest by quipping:

"Let them burn. We shall clap our hands."

She was one of America's proxies in Vietnam. What does that say about the United States?

A pattern emerges....

Afghanistan and Iraq are not aberrations in United States foreign policy. Bush and his Neocons are not "a few bad apples". They may be more malevolent than their predecessors, but they are not the first to advance American corporate and plutocratic interests through lies, propaganda, invasion, and flagrant crimes against humanity. America's socioeconomic system has engendered and reinforced such pathological behavior for years.

In Cannery Row, Steinbeck's Doc concluded:

"The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest, are the traits of success."

In America, the inmates truly run the asylum.

Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow, rife with well-researched examples of America's imperial conquests from Mexico to Iraq, further validates the assertion many other writers and I have been making for some time now. While manifestations of the dark side of human nature are inevitable aspects of human civilization, the American Way requires its dedicated adherents to commit their lives to cruelty and inhumanity. If human civilization is to survive, we need to collectively reject this abominable mandate.

Jason Miller is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist with a degree in liberal arts and an extensive self-education (derived from an insatiable appetite for reading). He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
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Screams Unheard

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Jonathan Cook: Burying the Truth Buried in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Palestine Chronicle
21/06/2006

The army's case could be dismissed outright were it not for the racist assumptions that now prevail as Western "thought" about Arabs and Muslims.

If you keep lying long enough and with enough conviction, people start to believe you -- or at least doubt the evidence in front of their own eyes. And so it has been with the Israeli army's account of how seven members of a Palestinian family were killed, and dozens of other Palestinians injured, during shelling close by a beach in Gaza.
This week, according to reports in the Israeli media, even Marc Garlasco, a Pentagon expert on the effects of battlefield weapons hired by Human Rights Watch to investigate the deaths, "conceded" that he could not contradict the findings of the Israeli army's own inquiry.

Presumably that is because Israel is not letting him or anyone else near their evidence. But Garlasco's slight change of tune -- even if it is not exactly a ringing endorsement -- leaves the door ajar just wide enough that the Israeli army will doubtless slip through it to escape being held accountable yet again.

The army has been claiming for more than a week, based on its own evidence, that the lethal explosion was not caused by a stray shell landing on the Gaza beach but most probably by a mine placed there by Palestinian militants to prevent an Israeli naval landing.

The army's case could be dismissed outright were it not for the racist assumptions that now prevail as Western "thought" about Arabs and Muslims.

To be plausible the army account requires two preposterous assumptions: first, that Palestinian militants are so fanatical that they consider it acceptable to lay a mine secretly in an area frequented by local families; and second, that they are so primitive that their best military minds could not work out the futility of placing a single mine along miles of coastline that could be used for a landing (or are we to assume that there are many more of these mines waiting to explode?).

To support its case, the army has produced two pieces of evidence that apparently make its denials of responsibility "airtight".

First, it claims that a piece of shrapnel removed by doctors from an injured Palestinian transferred to an Israeli hospital was not from one its shells but more likely from a Palestinian explosive device.

Given that, unlike Israel, the Palestinians do not have any factories manufacturing mines or rockets and are forced instead to make them out of any spare metal parts they can get their hands on -- doors, pipes, wrecked cars, fridges -- this evidence is meaningless. Palestinian witnesses have already said the beach victims were standing close to taxis when the shell exploded. So if the shrapnel was not from an Israeli shell, it suggests only that the missile also damaged other metal objects -- possibly the cars -- sending a shard into at least one of the victims.

The army will have a lot of explaining to do if reports on Israeli TV, not usually noted for its independent approach, confirm that another piece of shrapnel found in a victim is from an Israeli shell. So far, of course, the army is denying the report.

The second piece of evidence is supplied by the army, which says one of its many drones that circle overhead spying on Gaza round the clock shows the families calmly still on the beach, and later an ambulance arriving, tens of minutes after the army had finished shelling the area.

The problem with the Israeli evidence is that we have to take the army's word for it: that the families shown are the ones who were about to be shelled, and that the timings given are accurate.

It also means we have to discount a lot of counter-evidence supplied by Garlasco, journalists, doctors and Palestinian witnesses -- and even the Israeli army. The army, for example, has admitted that one of the shells it fired in the area is unaccounted for, a striking admission in itself. The drones apparently were no help in locating this "missing" explosion, even though they were spying on the area.

Garlasco has already determined that the injuries sustained by the beach victims accord with a blast above ground -- an Israeli shell -- rather than one underground -- a Palestinian mine.

The many Palestinian witnesses have all put the time of the blast close to when the shelling occurred, and report that the reason they were queuing for taxis was because of panic sown by the shells they were hearing landing nearby.

Independent journalists have shown that, according to the clocks on the hospital computers that admitted the dead and injured, the timing of the first blood tests were taken soon after the Israeli army shelling -- and certainly too soon to accord with the army's account of when the Palestinian mine supposedly exploded. Doctors have also confirmed that they were called to the nearest hospitals well before 5pm -- at about the time, or even before, the army claims the mine went off.

The outrage expressed in some quarters at the failure simply to believe the army's version might sound more convincing were Israel welcoming an international investigation to adjudicate on the matter. But of course it is not. Just as in spring 2002, following the deaths of many civilians in the Palestinian town of Jenin and the destruction of the heart of the local refugee camp during a prolonged attack by the Israeli army and air force, Israel is rejecting all suggestions of an independent inquiry.

So why not just take Israel's word for it? Its army is the most moral in the world, after all, and a state of law like Israel would gain nothing from lying in such a bare-faced manner.

The only problem is that Israel and its security forces have been caught out lying repeatedly during this Intifada and before it, not just to people on the other side of the world who cannot verify the facts but also to its own courts and public.

This week, for example, the Supreme Court ordered the army and Ministry of Defense to pull down several kilometers of the steel and concrete barrier they have erected on Palestinian land in the West Bank after it was proved that the security considerations behind the choice of the wall's route were entirely bogus. Official documents reveal that the wall was located there to allow for the future expansion of nearly illegal Jewish settlements on yet more Palestinian land. The army and government concocted the fib and then stuck to it for more than two years. Chief Justice Aharaon Barak called their systematic lying "a grave phenomenon".

And at the start of the Intifada, back in October 2000, the government and police covered up the fact that live ammunition and sniper units trained to deal with terror attacks had been used against unarmed Arab demonstrators inside Israel. For more than six months the government and security services denied that a single live round had been fired, despite mounting evidence to the contrary that lawyers and journalists like myself had unearthed.

They might have got away with their brazen lies too, had it not been for an unusual series of events that led to the appointment of a state inquiry headed by a Supreme Court judge, Theodor Or, who quickly exposed the truth.

That happened not because of any urge by official bodies to come clean or the inevitable triumph of Israeli justice. It happened for one reason alone: the prime minister of the day, Ehud Barak, feared losing the impending general election to his rival Ariel Sharon and thought he could buy back Arab votes by setting up an inquiry.

The inhabitants of Gaza have no such leverage inside the Israeli legal and political system. They have no friends inside Israel. And now it looks like they have no friends in the international community either.

-Jonathan Cook, a writer and journalist living in Nazareth, Israel, is the author of "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State", published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net



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Three Palestinians children killed in Israeli airstrike

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-21 02:48:17

GAZA, June 20 (Xinhua) -- Three Palestinians children were killed and 11 others wounded Tuesday evening in an Israeli airstrike on a car north of Gaza City, medics said.

Joma'a Saqqa, chief of emergency at Shiffa Hospital in Gaza City, said that a six-year-old boy, a five-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy were killed in the airstrike and 11 others injured.
He said that of the injured, three children were in critical condition and the rest sustained moderate injury.

Palestinian witnesses said that an Israeli drone fired at least one air-to-surface missile at a car that drove on a road between Gaza and the town of Jabalya, adding that those who were in the car managed to jump out of the car and ran away. They added that the missile directly hit the car, and its shrapnel hit 14 people, most of them children.

Palestinian security sources said that the three militants in the car were members of the al-Aqsa Brigades, the Fatah movement's armed wing.

An Israeli army spokesman told Israel Radio that the Israeli air forces targeted a group of Palestinian militants involved in firing homemade rockets at Israel.
The airstrike came shortly after the Israeli Defense Ministry decided to carry out tough measures against Palestinian militant groups which fire homemade rockets at towns in southern Israel.



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Israel threatens to step up attacks on militants

by Marius Schattner
AFP
June 21, 2006

JERUSALEM - Israel has threatened tougher strikes against militants as international players slammed an air raid that killed three Palestinian children, casting a pall over a meeting Thursday between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

In Gaza City, bitter rivals Hamas and Fatah appeared likely to extend a fresh round of talks, initially due to expire Wednesday, on an agreement that would end an acute political and economic Palestinian crisis.

The focus of talks has been a policy initiative that could see the radical Islamist movement Hamas, which heads the Palestinian government, implicitly recognise Israel and so avert a July 26 referendum called by Abbas.
The three children -- a five-year-old boy, a six-year-old girl and 16-year-old teenager -- were killed late Tuesday when Israeli aircraft targeted militants in the
Gaza Strip connected to Abbas's Fatah party.

The raid was condemned by Russia, one of the four sponsors of the stalled Middle East peace process, with Moscow expressing "extreme concern" and calling attacks on civilians "inadmissible".

In Geneva, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan deplored the strike, called on the Palestinian leadership to prevent attacks by militants and urged Israel to respect international law.

In Gaza City, hundreds of Palestinians attended the children's funerals as gunmen fired volleys into the air.

Almost simultaneously, militants fired three makeshift rockets at Israel, amid a surge in cross-border violence that has seen more than 140 missiles launched this month, an Israeli military source said.

Speaking at a World Zionist Congress meeting in Jerusalem late Tuesday, Olmert vowed there would be no immunity for Palestinians who attack Israel.

"I want to say here to those who want to attack us, we will take hard measures, very hard, more hard and more painful that those taken in the past.

"There will be no immunity for those implicated in terrorism, no matter what they do or what movement they belong to," he said, making it clear Israel would not refrain from striking Hamas members involved in attacks.

The army said Tuesday's air strike had targeted an Al-Aqsa cell involved in rocket attacks on Israel and that it regretted civilian casualties.

Israel has recently been embarrassed by a series of deaths of children and innocent Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Nine civilians were killed in an air raid on June 13, four days after eight civilians died in an explosion while picnicking on the beach in an attack a rights group blamed on an Israeli shell.

The Palestinian leadership condemned Tuesday's "new crime", insisting it was making efforts to preserve a ceasefire. Abbas earlier called for a halt to rocket attacks, warning that Israel could launch a ground assault in Gaza.

Olmert has repeatedly called on Abbas to dismantle armed Palestinian factions, including the armed wing of Hamas, as a precondition for resuming stalled peace talks.

The two leaders are set to hold their first "informal" top-level meeting on Thursday at a breakfast hosted by King Abdullah II at a forum of Nobel laureates in Jordan.

The meeting at Petra will be a first between Abbas and Olmert as leaders, and the first top-level Israeli-Palestinian contact since June 2005.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli troops shot dead a wanted Palestinian from the Al-Aqsa Brigades near the volatile city of Nablus, after the faction urged its fighters to turn the Israeli desert town of Sderot, bombarded by rockets, into "a hell".

Four Palestinians were later wounded by Israeli rubber bullets when troops entered Nablus, witnesses and medical sources said.



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7,400 millionaires living in Israel

Eli Shimoni

According to World Wealth Report 2005, number of Israeli millionaires per capita is twice world average. Israel's nine richest: Shari Arison, Stef Wertheimer, Ofer family, Haim Saban, Lev Leviev, Yitzhak Tshuva, Benny Steinmetz, Morris Kahn, Judith and Jacob Richter
Roughly 7,400 people living in Israel have liquid assets worth over USD 1 million, among them 84 multimillionaires have fortunes worth over USD 30 million, according to the Merrill Lynch/Capgemini World Wealth Report 2005.

The number of Israeli millionaires grew by 12 percent and the number of multimillionaires leapt a whopping 20 percent since last year. The total liquid assets of Israel's wealthy class grew by 25 percent to sum USD 30 billion.

The number of Israeli millionaires per capita was twice the world average. Uri Goldfarb, vice president of Merrill Lynch Israel for private banking, said that the increase in the number of multimillionaires (20 percent) was significantly higher than the world growth rate of 8.5 percent.

The wealth report reveals that in 2005, three Israelis joined the list of the top 500 richest people in the world - lifting the number of Israelis gracing the list to nine.

Nine richest Israelis in the world:

* Shari Arison (holder of controlling interest of Bank Hapoalim): USD 5 billion

* Stef Wertheimer and his familty (Iscar owners): USD 3.5 billion
* Ofer family (Israel Corporation and Bank Mizrahi): USD 3 billion
* Haim Saban (Bezeq owner, made fortune in communications and entertainment): USD 2.8 billion
* Lev Leviev (holder of controlling interest of Africa Israel): USD 2.6 billion
* Yitzhak Tshuva (holder of controlling interest of Delek group): USD 2 billion
* Benny Steinmetz (real estate and diamonds): USD 1.5 billion
* Morris Kahn (founder of Amdocs and Golden Pages): USD 1 billion
* Judith and Jacob Richter (Medinol founders): USD 1 billion

By next year, Stef and Eitan Wertheimer are expected to overtake Arison and reach first place as Israel's richest people. Their fortune after selling Iscar is estimated at over USD 7 billion. In addition businessmen defined as "oligarchs" and Arnon Milchan, who were included in Forbes' list of the world's wealthiest, were left off the current tally because they were not considered Israelis or because their wealth was not in available assets.

The report only considers millionaires whose fortune includes over USD 1 million in available assets, not considering money invested in fixed properties (such as real estate). The report also reveals that very few of Israel's wealthiest dropped off the list since last year.

In the world

According to the report, the total fortune of all the world's millionaires equaled USD 33.3 trillion in 2005 - an increase of 8.5 percent compared to 2004.

In 2005 the number of millionaires in the world grew by 6.5 percent to USD 8.7 million, and the number of multimillionaires grew by 10.2 percent to reach 85,400.

Comment: Meanwhile, the US government funnels USD $3 billion in non-returnable loans to the state of Israel every year.

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Key Gaza crossing fails to open due to Israeli security alert

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-21 15:54:48

GAZA, June 21 (Xinhua) -- The key Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border failed to open as usual on Wednesday due to an Israeli security alert, said Palestinian security sources at the crossing.

The sources said that the Israeli troops shut down the Kerem Shalom crossing near Rafah on Wednesday citing a security alert and that the move blocked the access of European Union (EU) monitors, who use Kerem Shalom to enter Rafah.
The Rafah crossing will be re-opened until further notice, the sources added.

Palestinian witnesses said that hundreds of Palestinians were unable to leave the Gaza Strip via Rafah on Wednesday morning due to the crossing's shutdown.

The Rafah crossing, sitting on the southern Gaza border with Egypt, is the only terminal for Palestinians to travel in and out of the Gaza Strip.

The European Union monitors have been inspecting the crossing since late last year in accordance with a U.S.-brokered agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Israel withdrew from the entire Gaza Strip last summer and the Rafah crossing is co-operated by the Palestinian and Egyptian troops.



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The State of Israel's Education

By Dan Ben-DavidWed., June 21, 2006 Sivan 25, 5766

This country has learned the term "spin" very well. Determined acts of intentional disorientation and the deliberate inundation of the public with unrelated and misleading details have ascended to an advanced art form. In this country, there are no such things as facts, just opinions. So why should it surprise anyone that policy makers do not feel at all obligated to provide relevant answers to real problems, in the absence of any public agreement as to what is real and what is not? This is how we operate in the realm of - among other things - education.
There are two primary facts that characterize the educational system: (1) Israel provides the worst primary and lower secondary education in the western world, and (2) the system does not lack money, when compared to average educational expenditures in other countries. On the naive assumption that the first fact is by now common knowledge, I allowed myself to focus my article "Where Did the Money Go" (Haaretz, June 1, 2006) on highlighting the second fact. Big mistake.

The title of an article written in response to mine by Dr. Ami Volansky, among the educational system's leaders until a few years ago, reflects the thinking of many of those affiliated with the system: "After the budget cut, the downward slide" (Haaretz, June 7, 2006?). He is referring to the budget cuts that the system experienced after I presented a comprehensive picture of it for the first time - as part of the Ben-Shahar team - to Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his cabinet in 2000.

However, there is one small problem with Volansky's observation. It is completely disconnected from the facts. In the 1990s, Israel's education budget actually rose steadily. But during this period, the scholastic achievements of Israel's eighth graders deteriorated to 39th place among the countries that participated in the TIMSS mathematics and science exams (based on average math and science scores in 1995 and 1999).

We ranked below all the Western countries, and below additional countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Romania, which provide us - still, though apparently not forever - with cheap textiles and labor.

As if a low level of education were not enough, educational gaps within Israel are considerably higher than in other Western countries, and in general, higher than in 49 of the 53 participating countries. These results are not due only to the "weak" segments of our population, as many people prefer to think. In fact, Israel's highest achievers, those students in the top fifth percentile, were ranked in only 35th place.

All this took place during years when budgets were relatively large compared with the budgets of countries that overtook us in achievements. And it is important to note that despite the extremely problematic implications of these rankings, the picture they depict is actually rosier than the reality, since Israel did not include in the test the many pupils studying in its ultra-Orthodox education system.

Reading comprehension among fourth graders was examined in the PIRLS tests that were given in 2001. Israel ranked 23rd out of 35 countries, while education gaps within the country were higher than in 30 other countries.

In another article written in response to mine, Abraham Yogev, Idit Livne and Yariv Feniger (Haaretz in Hebrew, June 8, 2006) focused on the PISA exam administered to 15-year-olds in 2002. In their attempt to minimize the gravity of the situation, the writers forgot to mention the bottom line - the results. Israel's average grade in all three of the subjects, mathematics, science and reading comprehension, placed it 31st out of 41 countries - once again, below all Western countries, as well as additional nations with living standards well below ours. And as if this were not enough, education gaps within Israel were the highest among all the 41 participating countries.

The quality of education, as measured by international exams, has a significant impact on living standards and their growth rates. Findings by Eric A. Hanushek and Dennis D. Kimko published in the American Economic Review, one of the leading research journals in economics, indicate that an improvement in the average level of education by one standard deviation increases economic growth by about 1.5 percentage points. Even if we assume that the growth improvement is only half of what Hanushek and Kimko find, this would mean an annual addition to gross domestic product that starts at NIS 4 billion and increases each year.

In addition, the researchers found that an increase in education spending does not significantly affect growth.
In short, the time has come for those who demand higher education budgets to distinguish between facts and opinions and to provide a detailed explanation of what exactly causes the lethal combination of low achievements and large budgets in the country of the People of the Book. In light of the speed with which the surrounding global environment is changing, it should be clear that this is an existential need.

Dr. Ben-David teaches economics in the Department of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University.



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Provoking Iran

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Iran ready for talks on nuclear offer: FM

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-21 02:39:50

MOSCOW, June 20 (Xinhua) -- Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Tuesday his country is ready to enter talks with European countries without any preconditions to clarify Tehran's position on the new nuclear offer by six major world powers.

"Talks could take place before we give an eventual answer. A number of issues and doubts in the package of proposals need to beclarified," Mottaki told a press conference in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, during a foreign ministers' meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Interfax news agency reported.
"That is why there is a need to start negotiations between Iran and other countries, of course without any preconditions, in order to achieve a rapprochement of the parties," he said.

Iranian officials are studying the package of incentives by the six major powers and will inform European countries of Iran's position as soon as they finish work, he said.

The package, aimed at getting Tehran to halt nuclear enrichment, was backed by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany and presented to Iran by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

The offer contains economic and political incentives, including talks with the United States, Western help to build nuclear reactors for Iran, a guaranteed supply of nuclear fuel and permission for Iran to buy aircraft and spare parts if Tehran suspends uranium enrichment.

Mottaki said on Saturday Iran would give a response with complete transparency to the six-nation package.



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Bush Accuses Iran of Dragging Its Feet

By JENNIFER LOVEN
Associated Press
Jun 21, 2006

VIENNA, Austria - President Bush on Wednesday accused Iran of dragging its feet on a Western incentive package aimed at getting Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment activity. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said earlier in the day that his country will respond by mid-August to the proposals presented to Tehran in early June by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

If Iran accepts the offer, it has to suspend its uranium enrichment - a process that can produce material for nuclear generators or bombs.

"We'll come to the table when they verifiably suspend. Period," Bush said at an annual U.S.-European Union summit here.

He said that the mid-August timetable "seems like an awfully long time" to wait for an answer. "It shouldn't take the Iranians that long to analyze what's a reasonable deal," Bush said.
Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel stressed U.S.-European cooperation in various areas, including the efforts to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions.

"Iran has to make the right choice," Schuessel said, adding that the European community welcomes U.S. involvement, particularly the recent historic signal that the United States is ready to join negotiations if Iran suspends enrichment activities.

Bush dismissed as "absurd" a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in which European nations said that U.S. involvement in Iraq was a worse problem than Iran and its nuclear program.

Bush, however, did acknowledge European concerns about the 460 detainees the United States is holding at Guantanamo Bay, but said some are "cold-blooded" killers that need to be brought to justice.

"I understand their concerns," Bush said. "I'd like to end Guantanamo. I'd like it to be over with."

Bush said that 200 detainees had been sent home, and that of the 460 remaining, most are from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Afghanistan.

"There are some who need to be tried in U.S. courts," Bush said. "They're cold-blooded killers. They will murder somebody if they are let out on the street."

Bush said North Korea faces further isolation from the international community if it test fires a long-range missile believed capable of reaching U.S. soil.

"It should make people nervous when non-transparent regimes who have announced they have nuclear warheads, fire missiles," Bush said. "This is not the way you conduct business in the world."

He said he was encouraged that the Chinese government had spoken out against North Korea.

"I'm pleased that they are talking responsibility in dealing with North Korea," Bush said. "It's a very positive sign."

North Korea said in comments published Wednesday that its self-imposed moratorium on testing long-range missiles, dating to 1999, no longer applies because Pyongyang no longer is direct dialogue with Washington, suggesting it would hold off on any launch if Washington agreed to new talks.

Pyongyang has consistently pressed for a direct dialogue with the United States, while Washington insists it will speak to the North Koreans only in the format of six-nation nuclear talks.

Schuessel said that if North Korea fires the missile, Europe would join the United States in condemning it.

"There will be a strong statement, strong answer from the international community and Europe will be part of it," Schuessel said.



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Iran war 'could triple oil price'

BBC
Wednesday, 21 June 2006

World oil prices could triple if the West's stand-off over Iran's nuclear programme escalates into conflict, the Saudi Arabian government has warned.

The Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, said such an event could send prices spiralling from their current level of about $70 per barrel.

Iran is the Opec cartel's number two oil producer and analysts fear it could halt exports if the dispute worsens.
Tehran is currently examining proposals aimed at ending the diplomatic impasse.

Strait of Hormuz

"The idea of somebody firing a missile at an installation somewhere will shoot up the price of oil astronomically," Prince Turki told a conference hosted by the United States Energy Association.

He warned that any conflict involving Iran would threaten the Strait of Hormuz, through which most Middle East nations export their oil.

Tankers carry 17 million barrels of oil through the channel every day, according to the International Energy Agency.

US President George W. Bush has refused to rule out a military attack should diplomatic efforts to reach an agreement with Iran fail.

The US Energy Secretary, Sam Bodman, has maintained that the country would be in "good shape" if Iran did put a stop on its oil exports, thanks to America's emergency stockpile of almost 700 million barrels of crude oil.

The threat of a cut in Iranian oil exports has been the main factor driving oil prices higher in recent months, with the price fluctuating either side of $70 per barrel.



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Bush's America opposes verifiable ban on fission

By Michael Carmichael
06/20/06 "Information Clearing House"

In 2005, Mohammad El Baradei was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his outstanding work in the international control of nuclear weapons. In 2003, El Baradei had proposed a verifiable ban on the production of weapons grade fissile material - a positive move that would severely limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

In a vote of the Disarmament Committee of the United Nations (UN), one and only one nation voted against El Baradei's proposal - George Bush's America. In that same vote, Israel abstained, apparently fearing international interference with their own outlaw nuclear weapons programme, and Britain abstained in an act of diplomatic fealty to the 'special relationship' between Tony Blair and George Bush. The final tally was 147 nations to one with the two abstentions. In a later vote of the entire UN General Assembly, Israel and Britain abstained, while America and Palau voted against El Baradei's verifiable ban on fission, and 179 nations voted in favor of his proposal. The final vote on that occasion was 179 in favor, 2 opposed (US and Palau) and 2 abstentions (Israel and Britain).
El Baradei's proposal would monitor all nuclear fission and guarantee that non-nuclear weapons states would be able to obtain adequate supplies for their non-military usage of enriched plutonium.

One nation has publicly accepted El Baradei's proposal, Iran.

In light of this important back story, it is now perfectly obvious that the so-called 'negotiations' between America, its intermediaries and Iran have been designed to camouflage, distort and erase the historical record. America and Israel are opposed to El Baradei's proposal for a verifiable ban on nuclear fission (Fissban) apparently to prevent the intrusion of international inspectors into the Israeli nuclear industry.

Worryingly, the Bush White House has deliberately misled the American people concerning their suspicion of a threat from Iran. The Bush campaign against Iran is nothing more than a conspiracy theory.

Given the facts of the highly publicized "Iran Plans" for a massive American military intervention against the Iranian nuclear industry and the constant threat of bombing of Iran leveled by American authorities from George Bush and Condoleezza Rice to Richard Perle and John Bolton, it is equally clear that American policy is being driven by a Machiavellian political calculus.

Over the past two weeks there have been a chain of interlocked events: the execution of Zarqawi; the Camp David summit on Iraq; Bush's secret flight to Baghdad and the narrow escape of Karl Rove from federal indictment in the Valerie Plame case. These events are fitting into a discernible pattern designed to resuscitate the dying political corpse of the Bush administration in time for the midterm elections this November.

Continuing weakness of the Bush administration as measured by the president's approval rating will embolden those proponents for the unilateral bombardment of Iran's nuclear industry as a measure that could precipitate the resurgence of the deeply unpopular president. With so little left to lose, Bush would press the button for war in hopes of gaining the approval in red state America where his political fate will be decided on the 6th of November.

Darker plans may even be afoot or so we are led to believe by scholars of the US intelligence industry. The former CIA official, Ray McGovern, has warned of 'staged' atrocities as part of a covert US programme for the manufacture of 'synthetic terror.' Robert Woodward warned an academic audience in Texas that the next major atrocity on US soil would reduce 9/11 to a footnote in world history. There are persistent back-channel rumors of Republican Party officials circulating memoranda longing for the return to the heady days in 2001 and the immediate aftermath of 9/11 to revive the ailing Bush presidency - even at the cost of a new 9/11.

Neither America's people nor the peoples of other nations are being adequately informed about the history of international planning for the control and ban on fissionable materials that are the essential ingredients for nuclear weapons. The global media is complicit in the increasing threats to peace of a deeply unpopular American president and his loyal cadre of neoconservative apparatchiks now threatening the future of the planet with a holocaust of gigantic proportions.



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World "sleepwalking" to nuclear proliferation: Annan

By Richard Waddington
Reuters
Wed Jun 21, 2006

GENEVA - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned on Wednesday that the world was "sleepwalking" toward nuclear proliferation and must urgently revive efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.

Addressing the United Nations Conference on Disarmament, he said that without moves to halt proliferation, more and more states were likely to seek nuclear weapons which could also fall into non-state hands.

"The international community seems almost to be sleepwalking down that latter path -- not by conscious choice, but rather through miscalculation, sterile debate and paralysis," Annan said.
He was speaking against a backdrop of international tension over North Korea's nuclear program and Western fears that
Iran may be trying to develop nuclear arms.

North Korea says it is preparing to test a long-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead as far as Alaska in what the United States, South Korea and Japan have called a grave threat to regional security.

"I hope the leader of the DPRK (North Korea) will listen to what the world is telling them, and take care not to make the situation on the peninsular even more complicated," Annan said in his speech to the 65-state conference.

For its part, Iran needs to reassure the world of its peaceful intentions by cooperating fully with the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he added.

Globally, he called for a major drive toward nuclear disarmament to restore confidence between the nuclear powers and the rest of the international community, along with the strengthening of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The argument between those wanting to see moves on disarmament before agreeing further non-proliferation measures and those who demand the opposite "is self-defeating," he said.

"If we want to avoid a cascade of nuclear proliferation, we need a major international effort," he said.

There was an urgent need to revive the Geneva-based arms' forum, whose last negotiating success was the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty nine years ago -- even though it has still not come into force.

Negotiations must start on halting the production of fissile material as well as talks on preventing the weaponisation of outer space, Annan said.

The United States opposes any negotiations on outer space, while Russia and China want discussions to move forward on both fronts.

"If any single group has the collective power to wake the world ... it is the Conference on Disarmament," Annan said.



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Terror in Iraq

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Lynching Saddam

Gabriele Zamparini
The cat's dream
21/06/2006

On June 12, 2006 after reporting:

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An American lawyer on Saddam Hussein's defense team lashed out at the court Monday, saying it was not giving defenders enough time and was intimidating witnesses. Curtis Doebbler chided the chief judge for not responding to a series of defense motions, including ones challenging the court's legitimacy and seeking documents. He asked for a break in the proceedings until those issues were resolved.

"We are at a serious disadvantage to the prosecution because of the way we have been treated by the court," Doebbler told chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman. "We want to work for justice. But that must start by having a fair trial.

"But under the current circumstances, that doesn't seem possible. We ask that the trial be stopped to allow us adequate time to prepare our defense."

He pointed out that the prosecution took more than five months to present its case, while the court is rushing the defense, which began its arguments in April. Abdel-Rahman has repeatedly demanded the defense present full lists of witnesses.

"Our witnesses have been intimidated by the court and have been assaulted," Doebbler said. "Several lawyers were assaulted as well."

the Associated Press concluded:

"The perceived fairness of the trial is a crucial issue, since U.S. and Iraqi officials have hoped that showing justice toward Saddam will help heal the deep Shiite-Sunni divisions that have exploded since his regime's fall."

Today, June 21, 2006, the BBC reports:

Saddam defence lawyer shot dead

One of the main lawyers defending former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein at his trial has been shot dead.

Khamis al-Obeidi's body was found dumped in the capital, Baghdad, hours after he was abducted from his home.

Defence lawyers have frequently complained that they have not been given enough protection, calling the trial's fairness into question.

Two other defence lawyers were murdered last year in the early stages of the trial, which is set to end next month.

Do the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, the European Union, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the "liberal media" (among others) have anything to say about this peculiar form of "justice"?

Or should we assume that in the New World Order we have accepted the pre-emptive concept of justice: lynching!




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Iraqi police finds body of Saddam Hussein lawyer

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-21 15:26:28

BAGHDAD, June 21 (Xinhua) -- The Iraqi police found the body of the killed lawyer for former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on Wednesday, an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua.

"Our patrols found a body at about 10:00 a.m. (0600 GMT) in the Sabah al-Khaiyat Square in Ur neighborhood, which later was identified as Khamis al-Ubaidi's," the source said on condition of anonymity.
He said the victim was kidnapped few days ago from Baghdad's southern district of Doura.

Earlier, the Iraqi state-run television reported breaking news saying that gunmen assassinated Khamis al-Ubaidi, without giving further details.

Two of the defense team lawyers for Saddam and his seven top aides were also killed by gunmen in Baghdad in the past, it was reported.



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U.S. Dunkirk In Iraq; The Tipping Point

By K Gajendra Singh
06/20/06 "Information Clearing House"

In an excellent recent piece 'Nightmare Scenario' in the respected US magazine 'The Nation ', Nicholas von Hoffman ,speculates that the badly outnumbered American expeditionary force in Iraq , now in danger of being trapped in spite of all its firepower, could possibly face some kind of a military defeat.

Already the number of US soldiers dead has crossed 2500 and counting ; two per day , with tens of thousands maimed and injured. Following the power vacuum and consequent chaos in the wake of illegal US invasion in March 2003, a fierce Iraqi resistance against the occupation and now a US ignited civil war has almost immobilized the US troops to their bases .The diplomats and the ruling Iraqi elite composed of exiles , Iran supported and trained Shias and others , remain under siege in the Green Zone fortress in Baghdad. Some liberation, freedom and democracy!
Sooner or later , the US must evolve an exit strategy "to extract our (US) people with a minimum of loss." wrote Hoffman. "We could be moving toward an American Dunkirk ", he added ,like the defeated British Army in 1940 stationed in Belgium , sent fleeing by the Germans to the French coastal city of Dunkirk, where abandoning its equipment it escaped across the English Channel on what ever floating vessels it could get hold off .

The Nazi war machine was grounded , blunted and destroyed by the stubborn Soviet resistance and great sacrifice, with the Americans , through 'war history writing and films' try to corner almost all the credit for the allied victory , with Britain 'pillion riding to glory' . But just watch the caricature of Britain's greatest commander Field Marshal Montgomery in the US film on Gen Patton.

If US had dared adopt the plan requiring sacrifice in men and material to attack the Nazis via Greece , East Europe could have been saved from Communism . But then even against a depleted Nazi onslaught in west Europe at the end , US troops reported a very high desertion rate.

The 'Nightmare Scenario' of the 1991 Gulf War for the coalition assembled by George Bush Senior after UN approval was ; if a few germ-loaded Iraqi Scuds killed a few hundred Israelis, even the presence of senior US officials stationed in Israel to restrain Tel Avia would not have stopped the Israelis from marching to Iraq . In the event of that happening, the coalition, almost a mini-UN force, with Pakistani, Egyptian and even Syrian and other Muslim troops in it for the money and other considerations, would have unraveled. That 'Nightmare Scenario' did not come about.

The current 'coalition of the willing' in Iraq bribed or coerced into joining the invasion, is slowly melting away , leaving the 'opened Iraqi grenade ' in US - UK hands. Who will come to US help? UN ;diminished and declared irrelevant by US and regularly abused by US Ambassador John Bolton; Europeans , insulted and humiliated ,to now become the cannon fodder and suffer backlash as Australia , Spain and UK have. A new book 'Londonistan' by Melanie Phillips paints a frightening picture of what UK might face. It is a sobering warning to all.

The US Neo-cons , responsible for the current US ills having exposed their ignorance of history , incompetence in post war planning , and arrogance based on an evil and racist Straussian ideology have come a cropper .The Republicans are trying to whistle through the dark days to next November elections , in trepiditation. But does it matter , in an almost bi-partisan consensus on gobblisation of others' wealth by US led West.

The cold blooded massacre in Haditha of Iraqi civilians including women and children by US marines , earlier 'Guernica' like destruction of Fallujah and a possible repeat in Ramadi and elsewhere , have only exposed the tip of US crimes .Why blame the troops when the whole western discourse , specially from USA has racist overtones.

There is little fight left on the ground except to drop more lethal bombs and kill more civilians . Ignoring and defying International conventions and human rights ( and civil rights at home ) Washington has experimented with prohibited lethal arms like depleted Uranium , phosphorous and other devices . As it has always done , earlier in Serbia and Afghanistan.

"The wife of a staff sergeant in the 3/1 battalion--members of which are currently accused of murdering Iraqi citizens in Haditha--says that there was 'a total breakdown' in discipline and morale after Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani took over as battalion commander when the unit returned from Fallujah at the start of 2005.... 'There were problems in Kilo Company with drugs, alcohol, hazing, you name it,' she tells Newsweek...'I think it's more than possible that these guys were totally tweaked out on speed or something when they shot those civilians in Haditha." [With few children of the US ruling elite fighting in Iraq there is no personal pain to feel either.]

After an insulting code named 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' to gobble Iraqi oil by force, Washington is directly responsible for all deaths, murders and atrocities under its watch , which the US corporate controlled media hides from American TV viewers and ordinary newspaper readers. Still thanks to many intrepid US journalists and websites , some turning even among the corporate worms masquerading as journalists , Americans are leaning some of the truth .Dead body caskets reaching home and presence of tens of thousands US maimed and injured in the war , brings home the truth of escalating brutal ground reality inIraq.

Hoffman added that in the British occupied Basra region, they have all but given up aggressive patrol and are holed up in their encampments." It is now too dangerous for them to fly helicopters by day. At the point when they must choose between being overrun or withdrawing, the small contingent of British troops facing unknown numbers of militia hidden in and among a hostile population should be able to evacuate the port of Basra even under fire.'

But the situation for US troops is really precarious. Any attempt to carry out aggressive patrolling only increases local hostility, making it easier for the resistance to operate. " It appears that in many places our people may have simply hunkered down to stay out of trouble. The vast construction projects of a few years ago are all but closed down, too, as the American forces appear to be doing less and less of anything but holding on and holding out. "

What can US do ? "Blow what's left of the country to smithereens ' with unspeakable political effects around the world and backlash .But the ground troops have to be still extracted from their plight."

The discourse from so called western politicians , experts and strategicians who claim that a force of half million could have done the job in Iraq , presumes that the colonization and exploitation of resources of others is a western divine right .[ The British failed to subdue Iraq in 1920s and 30s using similar means ; bombings and killings, using poison gas. ]

And in any case the chances of reactivating the draft for half-million pair of boots on the ground for Iraq are nil." If our political leaders have to choose between a new conscription and risking a defeat, there is no question about what they will do." Hoffman concluded "Should discipline continue to break down at the platoon and company level, pulling the scattered American forces together and getting them out may be a harrowing experience. --Air evacuation would mean abandoning billions of dollars of equipment. There is no seaport troops could get to, so the only way out of Iraq would be that same desert highway to Kuwait where fifteen years ago the American Air Force destroyed Saddam Hussein's army."

"Dunkirk in the desert"!

The British were able to escape and return pillion riding with US in the 2nd World War, because the Nazis were more focused for lebensraum in the east to destroy their ideological enemy, the Bolsheviks .But what would US do, fly out helicopters from the Green Zone .A much bigger humiliation than of the US ambassador with the flag, and others scrambling on to the last helicopter from the Embassy Residence helipad.

Influential Congressman John Murtha , a decorated Vietnam War veteran , after being reportedly briefed by senior commanders has repeatedly said that the US Army was " broken , worn out" and "living hand to mouth." In a statement last November he said ,"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of us. The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq, but it is time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We can not continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region."



"Our military has been fighting a war in Iraq for over two and a half years. Our military has accomplished its mission and done its duty. I said over a year ago, and now the military and the Administration agrees, Iraq can not be won "militarily." I said two years ago, the key to progress in Iraq is to Iraqitize, Internationalize and Energize. I believe the same today. But I have concluded that the presence of US troops in Iraq is impeding this progress. --Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. "

If not inevitable, the US denouement was not totally unexpected .Many independent strategic thinkers and analysts had so forecast. In dozens of articles written since August 2002 , the author with decades spent in the region including a ringside view from Amman ( 1989-92) of the 1991 Iraq war had so concluded too. Written for Atimes, com, Saag.com, Al Jazeerah.Info, MWCnet.com , Informationclearinghouse.info , the articles were widely copied all over the world .

A preview assessment based on articles written before the March, 2003 invasion was covered in "Before the March 2003 US-Led Invasion of Iraq" dated 31 March, 2006 in Al Jazeerah.Info, MWCnet.com , Informationsclearinghouse .info and other websites.

This is a sequel based on post 2003 invasion articles up to the June 2004 handing over to Iraqi quislings of the ' sovereignty' in a furtive and secretive manner inside the Green Zone fortress. The articles selected cover how Iraq fought and got rid of British colonial rule after the first world war, similar to the current Iraqi resistance against US led occupation ,which compares with the struggle by Turks under Ataturk in Anatolia under Allied occupation after the first world war and of the Algerians after the second world war against the French settlers and Paris .The nefarious and irresponsible role of US corporate propaganda machine and pro-Government BBC in support of the illegal war , underlining the decline and fall of this noble profession in the West has also been highlighted. Extracts are given below.

Read the articles



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Al-Qaeda says new leader 'beheaded' kidnapped US soldiers

Scotsman
21/06/2006

TWO United States soldiers missing in Iraq for three days after being kidnapped at a checkpoint have been found dead, their bodies showing signs of "barbaric" torture, it was announced yesterday.
Click to learn more...

An internet statement by al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed its new leader, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, had personally "slit the throats" of, or beheaded, Thomas Lowell Tucker, 25, and Kristian Menchaca, 23, both privates. [...]


Comment: "al-Qaeda" also said that their new leader ate the brains of the two soldiers and cursed America while he was doing so. Afterwards, he dined on some American babies that he had specially imported and washed it all down with a nice glass of Chianti.

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Australian troops to redeploy in Iraq

AFP
Tue Jun 20, 2006

CANBERRA - Hundreds of Australian troops are to redeploy for a more dangerous mission in Iraq, Prime Minister John Howard's government said, sparking calls to bring them home.

Defence Minister Brendan Nelson said that 460 soldiers currently guarding Japanese engineers in the southern city of Samawa would move soon to the nearby city of Tallil.

They would provide back-up and training for Iraqi forces who are set to take control of the southern province of Al-Muthanna, and help secure the dangerous Syrian border, Nelson said.
The move is politically sensitive for Howard's government, which backed the US-led offensive in Iraq in the face of widespread public opposition.

Protests have faded and the issue has largely slipped from the headlines in recent months, largely because Australia has suffered only one fatality in Iraq.

But the new mission near the volatile city of Nasiriyah, where roadside bombings by insurgents are commonplace, is likely to be more dangerous.

Thirty-one Italian soldiers stationed in Nasiriyah have been killed and Rome plans to withdraw its contingent, once the fourth largest in Iraq, by the end of the year.

"This has the potential to be more dangerous for our soldiers," Nelson said.

He said insurgents were "totally opposed to Iraqi people having the same democratic rights as Australians and other people in the world (and) might possibly want to target Al Muthanna as being the first province to go to Iraqi control."

Howard said Monday that Australian troops would continue guarding the 600-strong Japanese contingent until they left the country, and called the redeployment a "sensible next step."

Japan was expected to announce its withdrawal later in the day.

"The aim is to have the Iraqis look after themselves," Howard said. "If we pull out too quickly ... the whole thing will fall to the ground."

But political opponents seized on the news to demand the withdrawal of the 800 Australian troops.

"They should be brought home right now," said Australian Greens leader Bob Brown. "Moving them from one province to a less safe province is not a good thing to do."



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Bush in Austria

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Crowds gather to protest Bush visit to Austria

21/06/2006

About 350 students chanting "Bush Go Home!" marched through Austria's capital Vienna today to protest against a visit by US President George Bush for the US-European Union summit.

About 350 students chanting "Bush Go Home!" marched through Austria's capital Vienna today to protest against a visit by US President George Bush for the US-European Union summit.

The students gathered at the Westbahnhof train station and set off on foot to a church square not far from the former imperial Hofburg Palace, where Bush was meeting with top European Union officials. No violence was reported.
Led by US "peace mom" Cindy Sheehan - who lost her son in Iraq and energised the anti-war movement last summer with her month-long protest outside Bush's Texas ranch - students waved black flags, blew whistles, banged on drums and shouted, "Hey, ho, Bush has got to go!"

Others carried banners that read, "World's No. 1 Terrorist," and signs that included slogans such as "Mass murderer," "Islam is not the enemy" and "Against war and capitalism".

Protesters also sang "We will, we will fight Bush" to the tune of the rock band Queen's We Will Rock You.

"Bush should at least see that this is real, that people will protest," said demonstrator Darko Martinovikc (aged 20). "But in the end I don't think it will help much."

Security was tight at the palace, with 1,000 police officers assigned solely to deal with demonstrators and 2,000 others patrolling the city, and authorities said protesters would not be allowed anywhere near the venue.

A larger demonstration expected to draw as many as 10,000 anti-Bush protesters was scheduled for this afternoon.

Bush is unpopular in neutral, non-aligned Austria, where recent polls suggest fewer than three in 10 people support him.

Today's protests were organised by a coalition calling itself "Bush Go Home". But organisers stressed that the demonstrations were intended to object to Bush's policies and should not be interpreted as anti-American.



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US to vow at EU summit to respect rights in anti-terror fight

by Michael Adler
AFP
Wed Jun 21, 2006

VIENNA - US President George W. Bush has opened a summit with the 25-nation European Union that is expected to show the two sides closing ranks over respecting human rights while fighting terrorism.

European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso, in comments published ahead of the meeting Wednesday, stressed the need to protect civil liberties, saying the West otherwise risked "losing our souls" in its global anti-terror battle.
The Vienna talks are not expected to cover the Iran nuclear crisis, since the United States and the EU have already agreed on a stance calling on Tehran to give up its sensitive nuclear fuel work, US national security advisor
Stephen Hadley told reporters.

Bush's first meeting here Wednesday was with Austrian President Heinz Fischer, whose country is the current EU president. The two were flanked by their foreign ministers,
Condoleezza Rice and Ursula Plassnik.

Bush, the first US president to visit Austria since Jimmy Carter in 1979, told Fischer they were "two thorns between the roses," referring to the female ministers.

Some 1,000 students were demonstrating in the north of Vienna, far from the massive, baroque Hofburg palace where the summit was being held, chanting slogans such as "Bush go home!" and "Mass murderer".

Security was tight in Vienna, with police closing off roads around the Hofburg and the Intercontinental Hotel, where Bush stayed overnight.

The US president is to leave Vienna Wednesday for Budapest where he will Thursday attend ceremonies commemorating the Hungarian uprising against communism a half-century ago in 1956.

Bush is set to pledge at the summit that the United States will respect human rights in his war on terror, according to the draft of a final summit statement.

European governments and rights groups have called on the United States to shut down Guantanamo Bay, a US military prison in Cuba, for detaining inmates in legal limbo.

Barroso, in comments published Wednesday in the International Herald Tribune, warned that suppression of civil rights in the name of anti-terrorism "would be a victory for the terrorists."

"We believe that the moral ground that we have in fighting terrorism should not be changed by any kind of vacuum or break in the respect of human rights," he also told the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper.

The draft of the joint Vienna summit statement by Bush and EU leaders says: "Consistent with our common values, we will ensure that measures taken to combat terrorism comply fully with our international obligations, including human rights law, refugee law and international humanitarian law.

"We attach great importance to our ongoing in-depth dialogue and our common fight against terrorism and our respected domestic and international legal obligations," according to extracts of the text read to AFP.

The text does not specifically mention Guantanamo, which the United States insists is needed as part of its worldwide terrorism efforts.

But it shows apparent EU and US efforts in Vienna to paper over their differences and pursue reconciliation efforts under way since the powers split deeply over the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Hadley told reporters last week in Washington that the summit was "an opportunity to reaffirm the strong relationship between the United States and the European Union."

The EU and the United States are world economic leaders and major partners, conducting 1.7 billion dollars (1.3 billion euros) per day in trade.

EU states have criticized the United States for
CIA flights that allegedly stop in European countries on their way to delivering prisoners for other nations where they could face torture. Washington says its CIA flights adhere to US and other nations' laws, particularly against torture.

The United States has refused to join in the Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse gases but the draft text, which diplomats cautioned was still being worked on, pledges to "work more closely to address the serious and long-term challenge of climate change, biodiversity loss, and air pollution and will act with resolve and urgency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

Comment: So what?? The Bush government has already claimed that it has been respecting human rights when the evidence clearly shows otherwise. If a known compulsive liar came up to you and said, "Honestly, I'm not gonna lie anymore", would you believe him?

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Guantanamo clouds EU-US meeting

Wednesday, 21 June 2006, 11:00 GMT 12:00 UK

US President George W Bush is holding talks with EU leaders at a summit which may be overshadowed by calls for the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel, who is hosting the meeting in Vienna, has made it clear he will press Mr Bush to shut down the Cuba detention centre.
For his part, the US president is expected to urge his European allies to push on with sanctions against Iran.

Hundreds of people have marched through Vienna in protest at Mr Bush's visit.

Police have prepared for demonstrations and defused a number of hoax bombs the day before the summit. Tight security includes the closure of roads, airspace and an underground railway station.

The White House said the meeting would be a chance to reaffirm strong ties.

Correspondents say that, aside from Guantanamo, the meeting is likely to include a number of other contentious issues.

Continuing trade differences between Europe and the US are unlikely to be resolved, says the BBC's Jonathan Beale in Washington.

And EU leaders will be pushing Mr Bush to extend visa-free entry to the US for the 11 member states not covered by the waiver scheme.

But BBC Europe correspondent Tim Franks says that despite the sticking points, European officials say there will be commitments to work together on a number of issues.

The agenda includes:

* proposals to strengthen EU-US co-operation in dealings with energy suppliers, such as Russia

* a plan to create joint teams to find and seize counterfeit goods

* a US plea for Europe to honour pledges of aid to the Iraqi government

* steps to strengthen co-operation on counter-terrorism

* the creation of a joint panel on climate change and clean energy

Austria, which holds the EU's rotating presidency, said last week that the suicides of three detainees at Guantanamo underlined the need to close the prison camp.

EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, told the BBC he would endorse Austria's position in talks with Mr Bush, saying Guantanamo Bay was an anomaly.

On the subject of Iran's nuclear programme, before leaving Washington Mr Bush said Europe and the US were united in one of the most difficult challenges facing the world.

The US president believes a common position on Iran has shown that the US and Europe have put past divisions behind them.

The US has backed European-led efforts to persuade Iran to halt its uranium enrichment programme.

But Mr Bush is now looking to step up the pressure on Tehran if it rejects an international package of incentives.

North Korea's reported plans to test a long-range ballistic missile are also likely to be discussed.

Hungary trip

Up to 1,000 people marched through Vienna as the summit began, carrying banners reading "World's No 1 Terrorist" and chanting "We will, we will fight Bush".

A 10,000-strong protest is expected in the capital in the afternoon.

Mr Bush will travel to Hungary after the day's meetings, where he will take part in events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the country's failed anti-communist uprising.

Mr Bush is the first US president to visit Vienna since Jimmy Carter signed a nuclear disarmament pact with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev there in 1979.



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US and the UN: 'Bring out the wackos'

By Ian Williams

It is approaching a year since the administration of US President George W Bush sent John Bolton to the United Nations. In some ways, it is a foreign-policy achievement of a high order to appoint someone who has so successfully poked his thumb up the nostrils of almost 190 other countries simultaneously. However, it is a dubious achievement.
As Bolton mouthed indignation at Mark Malloch Brown's recent, almost grovelingly polite exhortations to Washington to show proper leadership at the UN, he was of course compounding the immense damage he has already done to US diplomacy, which is, of course, exactly what the deputy secretary general was pointing out.

In fact, for a long time, as Malloch Brown noted, albeit more politely, successive US administrations have used the United Nations and tossed it aside like a used condom after achieving their satisfaction. The difference is that Bill Clinton would be sweet-talking as he did it, while the current administration is much more into rough wooing, berating and belittling the organization before and after its perfunctory consummations.

Taking the International Criminal Court (ICC) as an example, Clinton approved it in principle, but pandered to the Pentagon by having his emissaries water it down in negotiations, and then did not sign it until he was leaving office. It was a classic diplomatic application of Clinton's "smoking but not inhaling", or "fellatio but no sex", approach.

Equally typically, Bolton promptly unsigned the attenuated treaty setting up the court. But, emblematic of the difficulties that brute prejudice has when it clashes with reality, Bolton is now trying to force Sudan to cooperate with the same ICC in its investigation of what the US claims is genocide.

The genocide issue itself shows a perverse continuity in US foreign policy. The Clinton administration fought shy of calling mass murders in the Balkans and Rwanda "genocide" because it believed that would entail a responsibility to act - and Clinton was notoriously reluctant to risk US casualties.

In contrast, the Bush administration calls events in Darfur genocide - because that is what the evangelical Christians call it - but it argues that the Genocide Convention does not actually require signatories to intervene. Indeed, Bolton is on the record as saying that he does not regard any international law as binding - at least on the US. The net effect is the same - the victims die while politicians score political points in Washington.

Underlying all this is a strange sub-current in US politics. While polls show consistently high US public support for international law and bodies such as the UN, like most polls in the US, they should carry a rider - "So what're you gonna do about it?" The good guys would mostly answer, not a lot, while the sundry isolationists, xenophobes, unilateralists, survivalists and neo-cons have shown that the mere existence of the UN renders them speechful with rage.

They will send donations, bombard legislators and fill the Web with their virtual version of reality. Despite the widely different sources for their obsession with the UN, they unite in their hatred and fear of the world body. That makes them somewhat vulnerable to manipulation by the unscrupulous, of whom there are, shall we say, a statistically significant sample in the US political classes. Senator Joe McCarthy was one of a type, not a standalone figure.

The recent trials and congressional inquiries into lobbying activities by the former aide to Republican Senator Tom DeLay, Michael Scanlon, provided the perfect description of how anti-UN campaigners can tap into this subculture. He was using native American tribes' money to stop off-reservation gambling, but the strategy is spot-on.

"Our mission is to get specifically selected groups of individuals to the polls to speak out against something. To that end, your money is best spent finding them and communicating with them on using the modes that they are most likely to respond to. Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information from the Christian Right, Christian radio, mail, the Internet and telephone trees."

And how do they get away with it? Because there are few politicians prepared to put themselves on the line for a multilateral policy in a system where "all politics is local". The exception that proves the rule is Congressman Jim Leach, one of the few Republicans whom Abraham Lincoln would recognize as a colleague.

At the same conference at which Malloch Brown barked back at attack dog Bolton, the congressman said sadly, "Our policy response is an entirely parochial one, rooted in the so-called doctrine of American exceptionalism, which neo-cons do not define as refining a shining city on a hill but as the right of a superpower to place itself above the legal and institutional restraints applied to others. In the neo-con world, values are synonymous with power. The implicit assumption is that American security can be bought and managed alone, without allies, without consideration of contrasting international views or the effect of our policies on others."

So is there light at the end of the tunnel? Well, the beginning of next year's congressional session sees the end of Bolton's "emergency" appointment by Bush, because he could not secure endorsement by the Senate. Ironically, he has been calling for a clean sweep of senior UN officials to clear the deck for the new secretary general, presumably in hopes that he can secure the appointment of someone abjectly servile to US policy.

The UN secretary-generalship is an important position, far too important to leave to the prejudices and whims of a dyspeptic walrus. One can only hope that sane voices like Congressman Leach and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice get involved and remind Bolton that his time is up, and that the rest of the world expects more of a new UN secretary general than dancing to the tune of assorted wackos. It is time to rally the too-silent majority of Americans to redeem their nation's plummeting international credibility.

And it is perhaps time for Asia's acquiescent governments to stand up to the US if they really want an Asian secretary general. Bolton is quite prepared to veto until he gets what he wants - a like-minded Eastern European.

Ian Williams is author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.



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Professors of Paranoia?

By JOHN GRAVOIS
June 23, 2006

Nearly five years have gone by since it happened. The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui is over. Construction of the Freedom Tower just began. Oliver Stone's movie about the attacks is due out in theaters soon. And colleges are offering degrees in homeland-security management. The post-9/11 era is barreling along.

And yet a whole subculture is still stuck at that first morning. They are playing and replaying the footage of the disaster, looking for clues that it was an "inside job." They feel sure the post-9/11 era is built on a lie.
In recent months, interest in September 11-conspiracy theories has surged. Since January, traffic to the major conspiracy Web sites has increased steadily. The number of blogs that mention "9/11" and "conspiracy" each day has climbed from a handful to over a hundred.

Why now?

Oddly enough, the answer lies with a soft-spoken physicist from Brigham Young University named Steven E. Jones, a devout Mormon and, until recently, a faithful supporter of George W. Bush.

Last November Mr. Jones posted a paper online advancing the hypothesis that the airplanes Americans saw crashing into the twin towers were not sufficient to cause their collapse, and that the towers had to have been brought down in a controlled demolition. Now he is the best hope of a movement that seeks to convince the rest of America that elements of the government are guilty of mass murder on their own soil.

His paper - written by an actual professor who works at an actual research university - has made him a celebrity in the conspiracy universe. He is now co-chairman of a group called the Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes about 50 professors - more in the humanities than in the sciences - from institutions like Clemson University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.

But even as Mr. Jones's title and academic credentials give hope to the conspiracy theorists, his role in the movement may undermine those same credentials. What happens when science tries to function in a fringe crusade?

***

It was a gorgeous early June day in Chicago. Jetliners taking off from O'Hare were throwing clean, quick shadows on the ground. And a tall, biblically hairy man was weaving his way through the crowded first floor of the airport Embassy Suites hotel wearing a black T-shirt with Steven Jones's picture on it.

On this Friday afternoon, 500 conspiracy theorists descended on the Embassy Suites for a conference called "9/11: Revealing the Truth - Reclaiming Our Future." It was the most substantial gathering of the "9/11 truth movement," as the conspiracy theorists call themselves, to date. And for Mr. Jones, it was a coming out of sorts.

The 57-year-old professor, who has a long history of research in the controversial field of cold fusion, had not ventured outside Utah since he first posted his paper about the collapses seven months before. He was by now a huge figure in the movement - he was slated to deliver a keynote address that night - but he had not actually met many people involved, not even his co-chairman of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. On the airport shuttle ride to the hotel, he was almost sheepish. "This is one of the more unusual conferences I've been to," he said. "I don't know quite what to expect."

He probably did not know to expect that two journalists from Finnish TV would accost him at the hotel before he made it to the front desk. Or that the conference would draw so heavily on references to The Matrix.

***

That night, the first keynote address was delivered by Alex Jones (no relation to Steven), a radio personality from Austin, Tex., who has developed a cult following by railing against the New World Order. He is a bellicose, boyish-looking man with a voice that makes him sound like a cross between a preacher and an announcer at a cage wrestling match.

"It energizes my soul at its very core to be here with so many like-minded people," he began, "defending the very soul of humanity against the parasitic controllers of this world government, who are orchestrating terror attacks as a pretext to sell us into even greater slavery."

"If they think they're gonna get away with declaring war on humanity," he thundered, "they've got another think coming!"

The audience was a mix of rangy, long-haired men with pale complexions, suntanned guys with broad arms and mustaches, women with teased bangs, serious-looking youngsters wearing backpacks and didactic T-shirts, and elderly people with dreadlocks. But everyone seemed to get behind what Alex Jones had just said. In fact, they went absolutely wild with cheers.

Alex Jones then plunged into a history of what he called "government-sponsored terror." In this category, he included the Reichstag fire of 1933, the sinking of the USS Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and a shadowy, never-executed 1962 plan called Operation Northwoods, in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved false terror attacks on American soil to provoke war with Cuba.

Then he got to matters closer at hand. He mentioned the Project for the New American Century, the think tank of prominent neoconservatives that wrote a report in 2000 called "Rebuilding America's Defenses," which includes a line that many 9/11 Truthers, as they call themselves, know by heart: "The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."

To Alex Jones and to those in the audience, this was as good as finding the plans for September 11 in the neoconservatives' desk drawers.

"These people are psychopathic predators," Alex Jones rumbled. "They've got to be met head on!" The audience cheered like it was ready to tar and feather someone.

When Alex Jones finished, it was Steven Jones's turn to speak. The audience gave the professor a standing ovation before he had even said a word.

He stepped up to the podium in a tweed jacket. He had a kind face, a round nose, and hair somewhere between corn-silk blond and pale gray. He began to speak. His voice was reedy and slightly nasal. Someone yelled:

"Louder!"

***

One of the most common intuitive problems people have with conspiracy theories is that they require positing such complicated webs of secret actions. If the twin towers fell in a carefully orchestrated demolition shortly after being hit by planes, who set the charges? Who did the planning? And how could hundreds, if not thousands of people complicit in the murder of their own countrymen keep quiet? Usually, Occam's razor intervenes.

Another common problem with conspiracy theories is that they tend to impute cartoonish motives to "them" - the elites who operate in the shadows. The end result often feels like a heavily plotted movie whose characters do not ring true

Then there are other cognitive Do Not Enter signs: When history ceases to resemble a train of conflicts and ambiguities and becomes instead a series of disinformation campaigns, you sense that a basic self-correcting mechanism of thought has been disabled. A bridge is out, and paranoia yawns below.

Steven Jones's contribution to the September 11 conspiracy movement is that he avoids these problems - or at least holds them at bay - by just talking about physics.

Like many others in the movement, Mr. Jones sees a number of "red flags" in the way the buildings fell. Why did the towers collapse at speeds close to the rate of free fall? Why did they fall straight down, instead of toppling over? Why did World Trade Center 7, a 47-story high-rise that was never hit by a plane, suddenly collapse in the same fashion - fast and straight down - on the evening of September 11?

A rather hefty report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology explains how high-temperature fires started by jet fuel caused the buildings' outer columns to bow in, leading to the buildings' collapse. But the conspiracy theorists complain that the report stops short of showing computer models of the collapses.

Mr. Jones's hypothesis is that the buildings were taken down with preplanted thermite - a mixture of iron oxide and aluminum powder that burns hot enough to vaporize steel when it is ignited. Mr. Jones says that this hypothesis offers the most elegant explanation for the manner in which the buildings collapsed. He says it best explains various anecdotal accounts that molten metal remained pooled in the debris piles of the buildings for weeks. And he says it offers the only satisfying explanation for a weird sight captured in video footage of the south tower just before its collapse.

Near a corner of the south tower, at around 9:50 a.m., a cascade of a yellow-hot substance started spewing out of the building. The National Institute of Standards and Technology says in its report that the substance was most likely molten aluminum from the airplane fuselage. But Mr. Jones points out that aluminum near its melting point is a pale-silver color, not yellow. By his reckoning, then, that spew is a thermite reaction in plain sight.

Mr. Jones is petitioning Congress to release the raw data that went into the National Institute of Standards and Technology report. "If they just give us the data," he says, "we'll take it from there."

***

Soon after Mr. Jones posted his paper online, the physics department at Brigham Young moved to distance itself from his work. The department released a statement saying that it was "not convinced that his analyses and hypotheses have been submitted to relevant scientific venues that would ensure rigorous technical peer review." (Mr. Jones's paper has been peer-reviewed by two physicists and two other scholars for publication in a book called 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, from Olive Branch Press.)

The Brigham Young college of engineering issued an even stronger statement on its Web site. "The structural engineering faculty," it read, "do not support the hypotheses of Professor Jones." However, his supporters complain, none of Mr. Jones's critics at Brigham Young have dealt with his points directly.

While there are a handful of Web sites that seek to debunk the claims of Mr. Jones and others in the movement, most mainstream scientists, in fact, have not seen fit to engage them.

"There's nothing to debunk," says Zdenek P. Bazant, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University and the author of the first peer-reviewed paper on the World Trade Center collapses.

"It's a non-issue," says Sivaraj Shyam-Sunder, a lead investigator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology's study of the collapses.

Ross B. Corotis, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the editorial board at the journal Structural Safety, says that most engineers are pretty settled on what happened at the World Trade Center. "There's not really disagreement as to what happened for 99 percent of the details," he says.

Thomas W. Eagar is one scientist who has paid some attention to the demolition hypothesis - albeit grudgingly. A materials engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Eagar wrote one of the early papers on the buildings' collapses, which later became the basis for a documentary on PBS. That marked him for scrutiny and attack from conspiracy theorists. For a time, he says, he was receiving one or two angry e-mail messages each week, many accusing him of being a government shill. When Mr. Jones's paper came out, the nasty messages increased to one or two per day.

So Mr. Eagar has become reluctantly familiar with Mr. Jones's hypothesis, and he is not impressed. For example, he says, the cascade of yellow-hot particles coming out of the south tower could be any number of things: a butane can igniting, sparks from an electrical arc, molten aluminum and water forming a hydrogen reaction - or, perhaps most likely, a spontaneous, completely accidental thermite reaction.

Occasionally, he says, given enough mingled surface area, molten aluminum and rust can react violently, à la thermite. Given that there probably was plenty of molten aluminum from the plane wreckage in that building, Mr. Eagar says, it is entirely possible that this is what happened.

Others have brought up this notion as well, so Mr. Jones has carried out experiments in his lab trying to get small quantities of molten aluminum to react with rust. He has not witnessed the reaction and so rules it out. But Mr. Eagar says this is just a red herring: Accidental thermite reactions are a well-known phenomenon, he says. It just takes a lot of exposed surface area for the reaction to start.

Still, Mr. Eagar does not care to respond formally to Mr. Jones or the conspiracy movement. "I don't see any point in engaging them," he says.

Hence, in the world of mainstream science, Mr. Jones's hypothesis is more or less dead on the vine. But in the world of 9/11 Truth, it has seeded a whole garden of theories.

***

"Steven Jones! Who'd like Steven Jones!" hollered a man outside the main convention room as people exited Mr. Jones's speech. "Dripping metal! Steven Jones!"

He was selling DVD's of a speech Mr. Jones gave a few months earlier in Utah.

Another man walked by on the conference floor and pointed to a picture of the yellow-hot spew from the south tower. "There's your smoking gun," he said, to another conferencegoer.

The evening ended just after midnight, with the 9/11 Truthers chanting en masse in the conference hall, "We're mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore."

"We have all kinds of weird conferences," said the concierge the next morning. "I mean, not to say this is weird. Last year we had one that was all tall people."

***

"For a while there, people who wanted to dismiss us could say, 'Well, it's just a bunch of crazies on the Internet,'" says David Ray Griffin, a well-known theologian and philosopher and a prominent member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. "The very existence of the organization has added credibility," he said.

By many accounts, scholarly contributions to the movement began with Mr. Griffin, who retired from the Claremont School of Theology in 2004. About a year and a half after September 11, Mr. Griffin began reading books and Web sites arguing that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks. Eventually, they won him over.

That left him feeling a peculiar sense of obligation, he says. The official story had all the voices of authority on its side, and the case for government complicity in the attacks had no real standing. "It was not reaching a really wide audience," he says.

So Mr. Griffin wrote his own book, trading on his authority as an academic. He called it The New Pearl Harbor. It was mostly just a synthesis of all the material he had read, tidied up by a philosopher's rhetorical skills.

When it was finished, he aggressively pursued blurbs for the book jacket - and eventually scored one from Howard Zinn, the radical professor emeritus of political science at Boston University. Mr. Zinn said the book was "the most persuasive argument I have seen for further investigation on the Bush administration's relationship to that historic and troubling event."

It went on to become one of the most successful books on the purported conspiracy.

"There's a big chasm between those who are even willing to entertain the hypothesis enough to look at the evidence and those who aren't," Mr. Griffin says. "The only way to overcome that is by appeal to authority."

"You can't just appeal in terms of straight argument," he says. "You've got to do something to break through, to get people to look at the evidence."

Now that the movement has progressed, and more voices of authority have joined, Mr. Griffin is more convinced than ever.

"I think now it's just irrefutable," he says. People who don't question the official story, he says, are "just whistling in the dark."

***

James H. Fetzer, the co-chairman of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, retired last month from his post as a distinguished McKnight university professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. He wanted to focus more on the movement. "Whether there's another critical-thinking course being taught at the University of Minnesota is relatively trivial," he says, "compared to this."

Mr. Fetzer, a voluble, impassioned man who often speaks in long paragraphs, is no stranger to conspiracy theory. Before September 11, he had a side career investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But the issues surrounding the Scholars for 9/11 Truth are far more acute, he thinks. In Mr. Fetzer's mind, the country is in a state of dire emergency.

Hence, it does not much bother Mr. Fetzer that outside scientists have largely refrained from tackling the group's arguments. "I don't think it's a problem," he says, "because we have so much competence and expertise among ourselves."

911myths.com, a Web site run by a software developer in England, is one of the few venues that offers a running scrutiny of the various claims and arguments coming out of the 9/11 Truth movement. Mr. Fetzer has heard of 911myths .com, but he has never visited the site.

"I have been dealing with disinformation and phony stories about the death of JFK for all these years. There's a huge amount of phoniness out there," he says. "You have to be very selective in how you approach these things."

"I can assure you the things I'm telling you about 9/11 have objective scientific status," he says. 911myths.com, he says, "is going to be built on either fabricated evidence, or disregard of the real evidence, or violations of the principles of scientific reasoning."

"They cannot be right," he says.

***

On the second afternoon of the conference, Mr. Fetzer gave a speech in one of the hotel salons to a standing-room-only crowd. It began like an introductory lecture in moral philosophy he might have given at the University of Minnesota. He discussed different theories for the origins of right and wrong - moral egoism, utilitarianism, deontological moral rights. Then he came to the emergency.

"The threat we face," he said, is "imminent and ominous." He recommended arming the citizenry.

During the question-and-answer session, an audience member asked whether there might be a way to capture a TV station, to get the word out about September 11. Mr. Fetzer upped the ante on the idea.

"Let me tell you, for years, I've been waiting for there to be a military coup to depose these traitors," he said from the podium.

"Yeah!" shouted some men in the audience.

"There actually was one weekend," Mr. Fetzer went on, "where I said to myself, my God, it's going to happen this weekend, and I'm going to wake up and they will have taken these guys off in chains."

His voice was building. "Listen to me," he said. "The degree of perfidy involved here is so great, that in the time of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, frenzied mobs would have dragged these men out of their beds in the middle of the night and ripped them to shreds!"

"Yeah!" cried a chorus of voices in the audience. "Yeah!"

Amid the cheers and applause that swept the room, there was Steven Jones, sitting quietly in a chair against the wall. He had one leg crossed over the other, and he was looking around at the cheering audience with a vaguely uncomfortable smile on his face, holding his foot in his hands.



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Money to Kill

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US House passes 427.6 bln dollar defense bill

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-21 16:01:48

WASHINGTON, June 20 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. House of Representatives approved a 427.6 billion-U.S. dollar defense bill late Tuesday for the 2007 fiscal year, including an extra 50 billion dollars for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The bill for the year starting October was passed with a 407-19 vote in the House, and the Senate has to approve its own budget measure.
The sum, excluding the extra money for Iraq and Afghanistan, is almost 20 billion dollars higher that the 2006 defense budget, but is still 4 billion dollars short of the White House had wanted.

House Majority Leader John Boehner said the bill underscores the House's commitment to supporting U.S. soldiers and "making sure they have every available resource at their disposal" during the fight on terror.

The bill also includes an extra 500 million dollars for equipment for the National Guard, a 2.2 percent military pay rise and 1.5 billion dollars for new jammers designed to protect U.S. servicemen from attacks using improvised explosive devices in Iraq.



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Florida's first biometric payment system goes online

By MARK ALBRIGHT
St Petersburg Times
June 20, 2006

TAMPA - Customers can pay with cash, plastic or their index finger at a new Coast to Coast Family Convenience store here.

Taking a big step beyond the ease of the Mobil SpeedPass, Coast to Coast has installed what's claimed as Florida's first biometric payment system.

There are no cards or PIN numbers to remember. Just stick your finger in the scanner and be on your way.
While applications are available to process credit and store loyalty card transactions by fingerprint, this one is limited to processing only debit account transactions.

"People either love it or think it's a sign of the coming apocalypse,'' said Amer Hawatmeh, owner of the new convenience store at 110 E Bearss Ave. who signed up a few hundred customers for Pay By Touch. "But to me, it's the wave of the future.''

Pay By Touch is one of several speedier payment technologies racing to build enough retailer acceptance to ace out rivals and overcome consumers' rising concerns over identity theft.

It's all on the road to payment gurus' vision of a cashier-free future, in which customers just walk out the door while their transaction is automatically processed.

The big credit card companies, for instance, are deploying a card reader developed by MasterCard International that picks up a radio signal to record a transaction when a card is merely tapped on or waved around a reader at the checkout stand. Other wireless systems in use in other countries use built-in payment system prompts broadcast to and from a cell phone to activate vending machines.

Pay By Touch is a closely held San Francisco startup that uses finger-scan technology to authenticate payment account holders. Backed by $130-million in venture capital money, Pay By Touch recently paid $82-million to acquire BioPay LLC, its biggest finger-scan competitor that has won a following in Europe big enough to authenticate $7-billion worth of transactions to date.

Pay By Touch now has tests under way with several convenience stores, gas stations and supermarket chains around the United States, including Harris Teeter in the Carolinas, Farm Fresh in Virginia and Jewel Osco in Chicago.

"Finger scanning is new, so we want to get people used to it by building acceptance at high-frequency, high-traffic retail locations such as gas stations and grocery stores,'' said Leslie Connelly, spokeswoman for Pay By Touch. "We're also going into places where people who don't have a banking relationship cash paychecks.''

The company is a bit puzzled by customer privacy fears. After all, they say, how can using a unique fingerprint for identification be riskier to theft than a plastic card, key chain token or account number that's tapped into a computer or spoken over the phone?

The company pledges not to sell or rent personal information, or access to it. The fingerprint image recorded is not the same as those collected by the federal government or law enforcement.

It's similar to the finger-scan technology used at theme park gates. Those systems take measurements of patrons' hands and fingers and link them to a multi-day pass to prevent several people from using one person's pass.

The Pay By Touch computer records a multitude of point-to-point measurements and stores them in an encrypted form in an IBM data center. Images of both index fingers are kept in case a shopper's trigger finger is hidden by a bandage.

To create an account, you must let the store get a fix on you and your bank account by scanning in a sample check and a driver's license. You can also apply online and be assigned a PIN number. The number is keyed in the first time you buy something to link your fingerprint to the personal account information.

The shopper needs neither a card nor a PIN number after that. Just place a finger on the scanner.

Retailers are paying a minimal amount to test the system. But many retailers such as Coast to Coast are drawn to Pay By Touch because it can process debit account payments or eChecks, an Internet version of a paper check, without subjecting the store to interchange fees that cost the retailers 2 to 3 percent of the transaction.



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The Strange Language of Capitalism

By Charles Sullivan
06/20/06 "Information Clearing House"

When George Bush and other capitalists speak of bringing freedom to the world you must understand that they do not mean freedom in the sense that most of us understand it. We must realize that they are speaking from the perverted, oddly-skewed language of capitalism. By freedom they do not mean the spread of democracy or the liberation of oppressed peoples. They mean the unfettered access to markets through the use of coercive military and economic force. The majority of the world conceives of freedom in human terms. Capitalists conceive of freedom in terms of corporate personhood, access to markets by any necessary means and absolute dictatorial rule. This is the face of free markets and fair trade as it relates to human beings.

Not only did capitalism give birth to the idea of corporations, it endowed them, by very questionable means, with all of the rights of personhood and none of the social responsibility of real persons. The idea of corporate personhood has to be one of the most twisted and bizarre creations ever produced by the human imagination. Like Frankenstein's fictional monster, it is sociopathic and evil, and it has wrecked havoc wherever its monstrous tread has touched the earth.

By freedom Bush and company mean corporate freedom. They are speaking about the freedom of corporations to operate with impunity in all parts of the world without regulation of any kind. Simply stated, they are talking about corporations ruling the world backed by the strong arm of the U.S. military. They are covertly advocating the oppression of the world's people's, the plunder of the earth, the destruction of culture and language, the exportation of jobs to the cheapest, least regulated and most exploitable pools of labor. That is what they mean by freedom-the freedom for Plutocrats to rule the world; Poppy Bush's New World Order; the global domination of the working class by the ruling Plutocrats.

They go about their grim business with religious fervor, like the Puritans who set about methodically destroying the American wilderness and slaughtering the Indians. I call it predatory capitalism and it is not limited to just the Bush clan. It is equally championed by Congress, the major presidential candidates, all of whom are in the pockets of their corporate funders; and it is preached in our educational institutions as economic gospel. Congress sold us out long ago but we continue to believe that reform is possible by exercising our right to vote and exchanging one Plutocrat for another. It is a wonder that any of them can keep a straight face. It is like taking candy from a baby-no challenge at all.

Understanding requires little more than a willingness to connect the dots and to comprehend the patterns of history from the working people's perspective. It is literally that simple.

The core idea of predatory capitalism is to rule by force, to subdue the earth and her inhabitants to the will of the world's wealthiest men. Under this model, less than five percent of the global elite will lord power over the remaining ninety-five percent of the population. This philosophy is embodied by the Bilderbergs and the Carlyle Group (do a Google search to learn more).

The U.S. military is an appendage of the corporations that have hijacked the government from the people. The Pentagon is the iron fist of oppression that smashes the face of resistance to Pax Americana and absolute corporate rule. Only in the perverted language of capitalism is the military a force for freedom-corporate freedom to rule the world by sheer force. If those in control of the government succeed in executing their agenda, ninety-five percent of the world's people will become the property of the wealthiest five percent or less.

So we must understand what predatory capitalists mean when they use the word freedom. As conceived by the people running the government, the world is one vast resource ripe for the stealing. This includes the raw materials necessary for industrial production and human beings as an inexpensive or, ideally, a free exploitable source of labor. By freedom the capitalists mean the private ownership of everything and everyone. Such are the twisted dreams of the American Plutocracy. The rich man's dream is the poor man's nightmare.

While political reformists continue to be fooled into choosing between political parties, both of them the servants of the same corporations, the way is being prepared for the final solution. Anyone opposed to Pax Americana are terrorists in the minds of the ruling elite. That is why Bush is using the NSA, FBI, CIA and the Pentagon against law abiding U.S. citizens. These cryptogamous organizations are monitoring the resistance and planning a pre-emptive strike against any democracy that shows signs of sprouting and organizing itself into a populist movement. The pitiless iron boot of capitalism stands ready to snuff it out like a smoldering cigarette butt on a city sidewalk.

So profitable are the spoils of war that the capitalists have created a permanent war time economy. War is the cash cow that keeps the money flowing from our pockets into theirs'. They have no intention of relinquishing power through the electoral process or by any other means. They are creating a world-size gulag; a labor concentration camp of global proportions in which there will be two classes: master and servant.

According to Donald Rumsfeld (Foreign Affairs, 2002), "Wars in the twenty-first century will increasingly require all elements of national power: economic, diplomatic, financial, law enforcement, intelligence, and both overt and covert military operations." Rumsfeld has thus defined the core of the Bush agenda: Economics as a weapon against democracy.

Therefore, any nation, individual, or group of people that resists Pax Americana is an enemy of the state-the corporate state. Any efforts to divert a nation's wealth from the multi-national corporations to social programs for the public good will be summarily abolished by the strong arm of the U.S. military. The respective governments of Venezuela and Bolivia are prime examples. The CIA's economic hit men are already on the ground in Latin America and it is a safe bet that the death squads have already formed. If these attempts to decapitate Democratic Socialism fail, a full scale military invasion will be launched. That has been the pattern of history.

The unapologetic corporate media is already fervently portraying two of the most popular democratically elected leaders in the world, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, as terrorists. This is the writing on the wall and it is finger painted in human blood.

If we treasure anything above our own selfish comfort; if we believe in the ideals of freedom and democracy for people; if we believe in peace and justice, we must not sit by idly and allow these good men to be overthrown or assassinated by illegitimate Plutocratic henchmen. We must take our country back and give it to the people.

Author's note: The concepts discussed in this essay are fully explored and chronicled in great detail in "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time ", authored by Antonia Juhasz. They are also detailed in Steven Kinzer's book Overthrow .



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Blood For No Oil, Part 2

June 14, 2006
By Greg Palast

The War To Keep Iraq's Oil In The Ground

In sum, Big Oil, whether in European or Arab-OPEC dress, has done its damned best to keep Iraq's oil buried deep in the ground to keep prices high in the air. Iraq has 74 known fields and only 15 in production; 526 known "structures" (oil-speak for "pools of oil"), only 125 drilled.

Did the U.S. invade Iraq to tap its oil reserves or to make sure they stayed under the sand?
World oil production today stands at more than twice the 15-billion a-year maximum projected by Shell Oil in 1956 -- and reserves are climbing at a faster clip yet. That leaves the question, Why this war?

Did Dick Cheney send us in to seize the last dwindling supplies? Unlikely. Our world's petroleum reserves have doubled in just twenty-five years -- and it is in Shell's and the rest of the industry's interest that this doubling doesn't happen again.

The neo-cons were hell-bent on raising Iraq's oil production.

Big Oil's interest was in suppressing production, that is, keeping Iraq to its OPEC quota or less.

This raises the question, did the petroleum industry, which had a direct, if hidden, hand, in promoting invasion, cheerlead for a takeover of Iraq to prevent overproduction

It wouldn't be the first time.

If oil is what we're looking for, there are, indeed, extra helpings in Iraq. On paper, Iraq, at 112 billion proven barrels, has the second largest reserves in OPEC after Saudi Arabia. That does not make Saudi Arabia happy.

Even more important is that Iraq has fewer than three thousand operating wells... compared to one million in Texas.

That makes the Saudis even unhappier.

It would take a decade or more, but start drilling in Iraq and its reserves will about double, bringing it within gallons of Saudi Arabia's own gargantuan pool. Should Iraq drill on that scale, the total, when combined with the Saudis', will drown the oil market.

That wouldn't make the Texans too happy either.

So Fadhil Chalabi's plan for Iraq to pump 12 million barrels a day, a million more than Saudi Arabia, is not, to use Bob Ebel's (Center fro Strategic and International Studies) terminology, "ridiculous" from a raw resource view, it is ridiculous politically.

It would never be permitted.

An international industry policy of suppressing Iraqi oil production has been in place since 1927. We need again to visit that imp called "history."

It began with a character known as "Mr. 5%"-- Calouste Gulbenkian -- who, in 1925, slicked King Faisal, neophyte ruler of the country recently created by Churchill, into giving Gulbenkian's "Iraq Petroleum Company" (IPC) exclusive rights to all of Iraq's oil. Gulbenkian flipped 95% of his concession to a combine of western oil giants: Anglo-Persian, Royal Dutch Shell, CFP of France, and the Standard Oil trust companies (now ExxonMobil and its "sisters.") The remaining slice Calouste kept for himself -- hence, "Mr. 5%."

The oil majors had a better use for Iraq's oil than drilling it -- not drilling it.

The oil bigs had bought Iraq's concession to seal it up and keep it off the market.

To please his buyers' wishes, Mr. 5% spread out a big map of the Middle East on the floor of a hotel room in Belgium and drew a thick red line around the gulf oil fields, centered on Iraq. All the oil company executives, gathered in the hotel room, signed their name on the red line -- vowing not to drill, except as a group, within the red-lined zone. No one, therefore, had an incentive to cheat and take red-lined oil.

All of Iraq's oil, sequestered by all, was locked in, and all signers would enjoy a lift in worldwide prices. Anglo-Persian Company, now British Petroleum (BP), would pump almost all its oil, reasonably, from Persia (Iran). Later, the Standard Oil combine, renamed the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), would limit almost all its drilling to Saudi Arabia. Anglo-Persian (BP) had begun pulling oil from Kirkuk, Iraq, in 1927 and, in accordance with the Red-Line Agreement, shared its Kirkuk and Basra fields with its IPC group -- and drilled no more.

The following was written three decades ago:

Although its original concession of March 14, 1925, covered all of Iraq, the Iraq Petroleum Co., under the ownership of BP (23.75%), Shell (23.75%), CFP (of France) (23.75%), Exxon (11.85%), Mobil (11.85%), and Gulbenkian (5.0%), limited its production to fields constituting only one-half of 1 percent of the country's total area. During the Great Depression, the world was awash with oil and greater output from Iraq would simply have driven the price down to even lower levels.

Plus ça change...

When the British Foreign Office fretted that locking up oil would stoke local nationalist anger, BP-IPC agreed privately to pretend to drill lots of wells, but make them absurdly shallow and place them where, wrote a company manager, "there was no danger of striking oil."

This systematic suppression of Iraq's production, begun in 1927, has never ceased.

In the early 1960s, Iraq's frustration with the British-led oil consortium's failure to pump pushed the nation to cancel the BP-Shell-Exxon concession and seize the oil fields. Britain was ready to strangle Baghdad, but a cooler, wiser man in the White House, John F. Kennedy, told the Brits to back off. President Kennedy refused to call Iraq's seizure an "expropriation" akin to Castro's seizure of U.S.-owned banana plantations. Kennedy's view was that Anglo-American companies had it coming to them because they had refused to honor their legal commitment to drill.

But the freedom Kennedy offered the Iraqis to drill their own oil to the maximum was swiftly taken away from them by their Arab brethren.

The OPEC cartel, controlled by Saudi Arabia, capped Iraq's production at a sum equal to Iran's, though the Iranian reserves are far smaller than Iraq's. The excuse for this quota equality between Iraq and Iran was to prevent war between them. It didn't. To keep Iraq's Ba'athists from complaining about the limits, Saudi Arabia simply bought off the leaders by funding Saddam's war against Iran and giving the dictator $7 billion for his "Islamic bomb" program.

In 1974, a U.S. politician broke the omerta over the suppression of Iraq's oil production. It was during the Arab oil embargo that Senator Edmund Muskie revealed a secret intelligence report of "fantastic" reserves of oil in Iraq undeveloped because U.S. oil companies refused to add pipeline capacity.

Muskie, who'd just lost a bid for the Presidency, was dubbed a "loser" and ignored. The Iranian bombing of the Basra fields (1980-88) put a new kink in Iraq's oil production. Iraq's frustration under production limits explodes periodically.

In August 1990, Kuwait's craven siphoning of borderland oil fields jointly owned with Iraq gave Saddam the excuse to take Kuwait's share. Here was Saddam's opportunity to increase Iraq's OPEC quota by taking Kuwait's (most assuredly not approved by the U.S.).

Saddam's plan backfired. The Basra oil fields not crippled by Iran were demolished in 1991 by American B-52s. Saddam's petro-military overreach into Kuwait gave the West the authority for a more direct oil suppression method called the "Sanctions" program, later changed to "Oil for Food." Now we get to the real reason for the U.N. embargo on Iraqi oil exports. According to the official U.S. position:

Sanctions were critical to preventing Iraq from acquiring equipment that could be used to reconstitute banned weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

How odd. If cutting Saddam's allowance was the purpose, then sanctions, limiting oil exports, was a very suspect method indeed. The nature of the oil market (a cartel) is such that the elimination of two million barrels a day increased Saddam's revenue. One might conclude that sanctions were less about WMD and more about EPS (earnings per share) of oil sellers.

In other words, there is nothing new under the desert sun.

Today's fight over how much of Iraq's oil to produce (or suppress) simply extends into this century the last century's pump-or-control battles.

In sum, Big Oil, whether in European or Arab-OPEC dress, has done its damned best to keep Iraq's oil buried deep in the ground to keep prices high in the air. Iraq has 74 known fields and only 15 in production; 526 known "structures" (oil-speak for "pools of oil"), only 125 drilled.

And they won't be drilled, not unless Iraq says, "Mother, may I?" to Saudi Arabia, or, as the James Baker/Council on Foreign Relations paper says, "Saudi Arabia may punish Iraq."

And believe me, Iraq wouldn't want that.

The decision to expand production has, for now, been kept out of Iraqi's hands by the latest method of suppressing Iraq's oil flow -- the 2003 invasion and resistance to invasion.

And it has been darn effective.

Iraq's output in 2003, 2004 and 2005 was less than produced under the restrictive Oil-for-Food Program.

Whether by design or happenstance, this decline in output has resulted in tripling the profits of the five U.S. oil majors to $89 billion for a single year, 2005, compared to pre-invasion 2002.

That suggests an interesting arithmetic equation. Big Oil's profits are up $89 billion a year in the same period the oil industry boosted contributions to Mr. Bush's reelection campaign to roughly $40 million.

That would make our president "Mr. 0.05%."



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Rich get even richer in third world

Hans Kundnani
Wednesday June 21, 2006
The Guardian

Developing countries are experiencing a rapid emergence of a new elite of super-rich individuals as their economies expand and mature.

A report published yesterday shows that the number of "high net-worth individuals" (HNWI) increased by 21% in South Korea, 19% in India and 17% in Russia over the past year. These dramatic increases in individual wealth were largely as a result of booming stock markets - the Dow Jones South Korea Index gained 55% in 2005, for example.
The World Wealth Report, published annually by the investment bank Merrill Lynch and the consultancy firm Capgemini, examines the growth and spread of individuals around the world who have liquid assets of more than $1m (£540,000), excluding their primary residence and consumables. At the end of 2005, it said, there were 8.7 million HNWIs worldwide - 6.5% more than a year before. Their wealth had grown by 8% to $33 trillion.

There was an even bigger jump in the number of "ultra high net-worth individuals" - those with financial assets of more than $30m. This exclusive club now has 85,400 members worldwide, an increase of more than 10%. Together, these individuals, who represent 1% of the richest 1% in the world, control 24% of global wealth.

The report suggests that the world's wealthiest are also able to get more for their money. What the report calls the "cost of living extremely well" - in effect, the cost of luxury items from jets and yachts to five-star hotel rooms and spa treatments - has not kept pace with the increase in wealth.

In Britain, the growth in the wealthy population was modest compared with the developing world. The number of HNWIs grew by 7% to just under 450,000, compared with a jump of nearly 9% in 2004. The authors of the report say this was probably because of a slowdown in the growth of the UK's gross domestic product (GDP) and a weaker stock market performance.

However, the rise in the number of rich individuals in Britain remained above the rate of GDP growth and compared well with that of other western European countries, such as France and Germany, reflecting the attractiveness of the UK as a home for the European rich. Overall in Europe, there was a 4.5% increase in the number of HNWIs, compared with 6.8% in the US. Despite slowing GDP growth, eastern European countries, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, also saw sharp increases in the number of HNWIs on the back of surges in the values of stocks in those countries.

In Britain, the main source of the wealth was owning businesses or selling a business or stocks. In the US, by contrast, 32% of HNWIs' wealth was derived from income, compared with 13% in Europe. The authors of the report attribute the continued increase in the number of HNWIs in Britain in 2005 to profits derived from the increase in oil prices. Some 18% of British HNWIs' wealth is inherited.

The report also suggests the world's super-rich are starting to move their money out of the United States. Although it remains the world's most popular region for investment, an increasing number of HNWIs are transferring assets to emerging markets such as Asia-Pacific and Latin America. There was also a shift away from hedge funds to "alternative investments", in particular private equity, which is now more popular than at any time since the dotcom boom.

Jason McLean, one of the report's authors, said: "The world's wealthiest individuals are not only becoming more sophisticated investors, they are also more determined than ever to achieve returns comparable to those experienced in 2003 and 2004."

The report also highlights an ongoing shift in the lifestyles of the world's richest people. As well as being spread around the globe, they are increasingly global in their tastes. For example, over a quarter have residences and financial advisers abroad and a fifth of them have children who live abroad. That shift presents a challenge to companies such as Merrill Lynch, which are having to create global teams to manage the wealth of individuals or families.

However, despite the continued growth in their numbers and wealth, the super-rich in the west are facing a crisis. As the baby-boomers, who make up a significant proportion of the world's wealthiest individuals, reach retirement age, they are having to work out how to pass on their wealth - whether to the next generation of the family or though philanthropy - without being hit by inheritance taxes. According to the report, 61% of HNWIs around the world are over 56 years old, compared with just 15% of the world's population as a whole. This will soon create what the authors call "the largest wealth transfer in history".

"All HNWIs will have to review their inheritance plans," said Nick Tucker, the head of Merrill Lynch's UK private client business.

While 2005 was a good year for the world's super-rich, this year may see more troubled times. Volatility in global markets in the first six months of this year threatens to cancel some of the gains they made last year. Given their relatively large exposure to investment in oil, the wealth of British high net-worth individuals (HNWIs) may also depend to a large extent on whether crude prices continue to rise as they did in 2005. In the long-term, however, the authors of the World Wealth Report expect current upward trends to continue and HNWIs' wealth to grow over the next few years at an annual rate of 6%. They predict that by 2010, the total wealth of the world's super-rich to have reached $44.6 trillion (£24 trillion). They expect HNWIs to continue to reduce their investments in North America and Europe as they seek higher returns in emerging markets, and to move funds to shares and alternative investments. Although HNWIs tended to hold on to their investments in property in 2005, they are expected to reduce the amount invested in the sector this year.



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Don't Forget About Us!

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All options open if North Korea tests missile: US envoy

Reuters
Wed Jun 21, 2006

TOKYO - U.S. ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer said on Wednesday that if North Korea launched a long-range ballistic missile it would be a "clear violation" of agreements it has made in the past.

The United States has activated its ground-based interceptor missile-defense system amid concerns over an expected North Korean missile launch, a U.S. defense official said on Tuesday.

Asked if the United States would try to shoot down a North Korean missile, Schieffer said: "I think what we have said is that we have greater technical measures of tracking than in the past and we have options that we have not had in the past, and all these options are on the table."




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US makes missile defense system operational

Tue Jun 20, 2006 10:00am ET16

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Amid concerns over an expected North Korean missile launch, the United States has moved its ground-based interceptor missile defense system from test mode to operational, a U.S. defense official said on Tuesday.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed a Washington Times report that the Pentagon has activated the system, which has been in the developmental stage for years.

"It's good to be ready," the official said.

U.S. officials say evidence such as satellite pictures suggests Pyongyang may have finished fueling a Taepodong-2 missile, which some experts said could reach as far as Alaska.

"There's real caution in how to characterize it so as to not be provocative in our own approach," the defense official said of the move to activate the system.



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Rumsfeld was on ABB board during deal with North Korea

February 24, 2003 - 8:51 AM

Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, was on the board of technology giant ABB when it won a deal to supply North Korea with two nuclear power plants.

Weapons experts say waste material from the two reactors could be used for so-called "dirty bombs".
The Swiss-based ABB on Friday told swissinfo that Rumsfeld was involved with the company in early 2000, when it netted a $200 million (SFr270million) contract with Pyongyang.

The ABB contract was to deliver equipment and services for two nuclear power stations at Kumho, on North Korea's east coast.

Rumsfeld - who is one of the Bush administration's most strident "hardliners" on North Korea - was a member of ABB's board between 1990 and February 2001, when he left to take up his current post.

Wolfram Eberhardt, a spokesman for ABB, told swissinfo that Rumsfeld "was at nearly all the board meetings" during his decade-long involvement with the company.

Maybe, maybe not

However, he declined to indicate whether Rumsfeld was made aware of the nuclear contract with North Korea.

"This is a good question, but I couldn't comment on that because we never disclose the protocols of the board meetings," Eberhardt said.

"Maybe this was a discussion point of the board, maybe not."

The defence secretary's role at ABB during the late 1990s has become a bone of contention in Washington.

The ABB contract was a consequence of a 1994 deal between the US and Pyongyang to allow construction of two reactors in exchange for a freeze on the North's nuclear weapons programme.

North Korea revealed last year that it had secretly continued its nuclear weapons programme, despite its obligations under the deal with Washington.

The Bush government has repeatedly used the agreement to criticise the former Clinton administration for being too soft on North Korea. Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, has been among the most vocal critics of the 1994 weapons accord.

Dirty bombs

Weapons experts have also speculated that waste material from the two reactors could be used for so-called "dirty bombs".

Rumsfeld's position at ABB could prove embarrassing for the Bush administration since while he was a director he was also active on issues of weapons proliferation, chairing the 1998 congressional Ballistic Missile Threat commission.

The commission suggested the Clinton-era deal with Pyongyang gave too much away because "North Korea maintains an active weapons of mass destruction programme, including a nuclear weapons programme".

From Zurich to Pyongyang

At the same time, Rumsfeld was travelling to Zurich for ABB's quarterly board-meetings.

Eberhardt said it was possible that the North Korea deal never crossed the ABB boardroom desk.

"At the time, we generated a lot of big orders in the power generation business [worth] around $1 billion...[so] a $200 million contract was, so to speak, a smaller one."

When asked whether a deal with a country such as North Korea - a communist state with declared nuclear intentions - should have been brought to the ABB board's attention, Eberhardt told swissinfo:

"Yes, maybe. But so far we haven't any evidence for that because the protocols were never disclosed. So maybe it was a discussion point, maybe not," says Eberhardt.

A Pentagon spokeswoman, Victoria Clark, recently told "Newsweek" magazine that "Secretary Rumsfeld does not recall it being brought before the board at any time".

It was a long time ago

Today, ABB says it no longer has any involvement with the North Korean power plants, due to come on line in 2007 and 2008.

The company finalised the sale of its nuclear business in early 2000 to the British-based BNFL group.



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Nature's Way

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69 killed, 15 missing in landslide in Indonesia

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-21 12:05:49

JAKARTA, June 20 (Xinhua) -- At least 69 people were killed and 15 others missing on Wednesday due to Tuesday's landslide and flood which were caused by torrential rains for three consecutive days in Indonesia's South Sulawesi province, police told Xinhua.

The fatalities were from several parts of the province in east Indonesia, including the districts of Sinjai, the worst hit area, Goa, Bulukumba, Bantaeng, Jeme Ponto, Bone, said provincial police officer named as Wahid.
"The latest report we get, the death is 69 and 15 missing," he told Xinhua by telephone from the province.

He said that the natural disaster also damaged hundreds of houses.

The rescue team was searching those who were still missing, said Wahid.

So far, there was no aid arrival yet in the area, he said.

Indonesia, which is located in tropical areas, often suffers from landslide due to rampant deforestation.



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Northeast Ohio Hit With 12th Earthquake Since 2005

POSTED: 5:03 pm EDT June 20, 2006
UPDATED: 6:27 pm EDT June 20, 2006

PAINESVILLE, Ohio -- Northeast Ohio experienced another minor earthquake Tuesday afternoon, the 12th and largest earthquake to hit the area since 2005.

According the United States Geological Survey center, it has been confirmed that the earthquake hit northeast Ohio at 4: 11 p.m.
The quake had a magnitude of 3.3 with the epicenter being off the shore of Lake Erie, northwest of Ashtabula near Painesville.

Several other earthquakes have hit northeast Ohio so far this year. The last one hit near Mentor in May, with a magnitude of 3.0.

The quakes before that ranged in magnitude from 2.0 to 2.6



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Moderate earthquake jolts China, 3 injuries reported

First posted 01:28pm (Mla time) June 21, 2006
Associated Press

BEIJING -- A moderate earthquake jolted western China on Wednesday, injuring three people, state television said.

The magnitude 5.0 temblor struck near Wenxian and Wudu counties in Gansu province, damaging the walls of several houses, China Central Television said.




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Firefighters battle wildfires in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico

By AMANDA LEE MYERS
Associated Press
Wed Jun 21, 2006

SEDONA, Ariz. - Firefighters early Wednesday battled a 1,770-acre wildfire that forced hundreds of people to evacuate and threatened a highway and homes at the bottom of Arizona's scenic Oak Creek Canyon.

Only 5 percent contained, the blaze was within 200 yards of the highway in some stretches along the canyon bottom, authorities said. However, they said no structures were lost and most homes are on the opposite side of the two-lane highway.

Crews also battled wildfires in Colorado, New Mexico and California.
At risk in Arizona are hundreds of homes, lodges, picnic areas, campgrounds and structures in the area of Slide Rock State Park, a popular recreation spot that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

"The fire just behaved badly," said Matt Shobert, chief of the Sedona Fire District. "It definitely moved and has the potential to threaten some structures."

The fire started Sunday as a transient's campfire and spread quickly, forcing the evacuation of about 400 homes and businesses in the canyon more than 90 miles north of Phoenix. About 100 homes in five subdivisions on the north side of Sedona were also evacuated.

Meanwhile, firefighters in Colorado battled an 8,960-acre wildfire that forced the evacuation of more than 270 homes.

The fire, ignited by lightning and first reported Sunday, was burning in logging debris, dry grass and drought-stressed pines near Fort Garland, about 150 miles south of Denver.

"I've never seen a fire that size," Myers Archoata said as he sat in his pickup along U.S. 160. "I've lived here all my life. We've had fires, but we've been able to put them out."

Gov. Bill Owens was scheduled to visit Fort Garland on Wednesday to sign an executive order providing $3 million in state relief funds, a spokesman said.

In Santa Maria, Calif., firefighters battled a 10,000-acre blaze that stopped short of reaching a critical ridgeline in Los Padres National Forest.

No homes were threatened as the fire burned away from the small town of New Cuyama, about 45 miles east of Santa Maria.



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Earthquake hits India's Andaman Islands

AFP
June 21, 2006

NEW DELHI - An earthquake measuring 5.5. on the Richter scale has struck India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which were badly hit by the December 2004 tsunami.

"The intensity of the earthquake was moderate. It was recorded in the Nicobar Islands this evening," an official at the Indian Meteorological Department said Wednesday.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.

The US Geological Survey measured the quake, which struck at 12:34 GMT, at a magnitude of 6.0 and said its epicentre was 151 kilometres (94 miles) southwest of Misha in the Nicobar Islands.

The 2004 tsunami was triggered by a massive undersea earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra.




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New Cosmic Defense Idea: Fight Asteroids with Asteroids

By Robert Roy Britt
Space.com
20 June 2006

In a Space Age version of fighting fire with fire, French scientists have suggested using one asteroid to destroy another rather than letting Earth get pummeled.

The offbeat plan is intentionally incomplete and would allow the planet to be showered by fragments. But it might be better than a civilization-ending whack.
No asteroids are presently known to be on collision courses with Earth. But existing holes in the ground suggest that inevitably one will eventually be found. There is no firm plan for how to deflect or destroy an incoming asteroid, though scientists have pondered firing rockets at them, moving them gently with solar sails, or nudging them with nuclear explosions.

Lock and load

The new idea is to capture a relatively small asteroid-perhaps 100 feet (30 meters) wide-by sending a robot to it.

The robot would heave material from the asteroid's surface into space, and the reaction force would gradually direct the asteroid to a Lagrange point, one of a handful of nodes along Earth's orbit where the gravity of Earth and the Sun balance out. Scientists know that objects can be kept stable at a Lagrange point with little or no energy.

The captured rocky weapon would be held there, traveling around the Sun ahead of or behind the Earth, held until needed.

Then, if a large asteroid threatens to hit us, the small one is moved into its path, using the same heaving technique. The rocks collide, and the big one is broken into somewhat less harmfull bits.

The collision disperses the fragments of the incoming asteroid, so that not all of them hit the planet.

But...

Depending on the relative masses of the two objects, between 10 and 20 percent of the incoming asteroid mass would still hit, "but the fragments would be dispersed all over the Earth and, hopefully, none would be large enough to reach the ground with a large remaining destructive power," said Didier Massonnet of the CNES research center in France.

Massonnet and colleague Benoit Meyssignac say the collision should be engineered to occur at least 620,000 miles (1 million kilometers) from Earth and would take about eight months to execute from the Lagrange point.

The plan is detailed in the July-September, 2006 issue of the journal Acta Astronautica. The researchers first floated it at a scientific conference last fall.

One small asteroid that could fit the bill already been identified; it is called 2000 SG344, and Massonnet suspects there are many others that would work.

Fuel for thought

The researchers admit their entire scheme is not quite ready for prime time.

"We are more confident in our capability to capture the asteroid than in our capability to redirect it to an incoming body," Massonnet told SPACE.com. "The scenario of this last stage requires further studies on the very unstable trajectories which will be required."

Meanwhile, there is another aspect to the plan that could make it appealing.

Material mined from a small, nearby asteroid could provide liquid oxygen for other space missions more efficiently than mining it from the Moon, which other researchers have proposed. Liquid oxygen could be used as fuel at a cosmic gas station that would allow spacecraft to be launched from Earth with much smaller tanks and therefore more cheaply.

Other researchers have suggesting mining asteroids for their metals.

"Several thousands of tons of oxygen might become available sitting on the outer rim of Earth's gravity field," the researchers write.



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States, cities urged to ready for disasters

Associated Press
Tue Jun 20 2006

WASHINGTON - Communities should be ready to fend for themselves without federal help for up to three days after a disaster hits, two former governors said Tuesday in calling for new plans to prepare states and cities for emergencies.
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The push for new national disaster plans, by former Republican Govs. James Gilmore of Virginia and Jim Geringer of Wyoming, comes days after a federal analysis concluded that states and cities are widely unprepared to respond to catastrophes.

"We can get prepared," said Gilmore, who chaired a congressionally appointed counterterrorism panel between 1999 and 2004. "There is, I think, a consensus at this point that we are not prepared."
Gilmore declined to blame Congress or the
Homeland Security Department for the security gaps. But he mildly criticized a national response plan, issued by Homeland Security in 2004, as too vague to help communities in the first 72 hours following disasters.

"This isn't going to get done until the communities take charge of their own futures," he said.

Gilmore now chairs the National Council on Readiness and Preparedness, a nonprofit group aiming to give businesses and charities greater roles during disasters. Doing so, the council says, will ease demands on emergency responders as they attend to the most urgent needs.

The council and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University will develop new response guidelines for local and state officials after holding a series of town meetings, starting next month in Detroit, to gage community emergency needs.

The council is privately funded by eight private firms and six individuals, including the Sprint Corp. and author Patricia Cornwell.

Meanwhile, House Democrats rapped the Bush administration for what they called continued vulnerabilities in U.S. rail and mass transit systems nearly a year after the London subway and bus bombings on July 7.

"Rail and mass transit security absolutely is not a priority," said Rep. Bennie Thompson (news, bio, voting record) of Mississippi, top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. "Americans deserve more than this type of wait-and-see approach to homeland security."

Comment: So what disasters might these be then...? Anyone care to inform us?...No? Didn't think so.

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Science, 'Science', and more Dead

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Fizzing Space Around the Earth

June 20th, 2006

New observations from ESA's Cluster and Double Star spacecraft have found that that space around the Earth fizzes as bubbles of superheated gas are created and popped. These bubbles are known as density holes, and they occur when gas in a region drops in density, but rises in temperature. The European spacecraft encountered these bubbles on the day-lit side of Earth at an altitude of 13-19 Earth radii. Scientists aren't exactly sure what's causing these bubbles, but it has something to do with the interaction between the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind.
Space is fizzing. Above our heads, where the Earth's magnetic field meets the constant stream of gas from the Sun, thousands of bubbles of superheated gas are constantly growing and popping.

Their discovery could allow scientists to finally understand the interaction between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetic field.

This exciting new view of near-Earth space has been made possible by ESA's four-spacecraft flotilla, Cluster, and Double Star, ESA's collaborative space mission with China. The spacecraft encounter the bubbles every time they are on the day-lit side of the Earth, at altitudes of between 13 and 19 Earth radii.

The bubbles, known as density holes, are regions of space where the density of gas suddenly falls by ten times but the temperature of the remaining gas leaps from 100 000 ºC to 10 000 000 ºC.

When Cluster first flew through the bubbles, George Parks, University of California, Berkeley, thought that they were just instrumentation glitches. "Then I looked at the data from all four Cluster spacecraft. These anomalies were being observed simultaneously by all the spacecraft. That's when I believed that they were real," says Parks.

Somewhat similar bubbles have occasionally been encountered in the past by other spacecraft. They were called hot flow anomalies but Parks decided the bubbles he saw are significantly different.

He found their signature in Double Star data too. During every orbit, the spacecraft usually fly through 20-40 bubbles. By carefully correlating the different spacecraft readings, Parks and his collaborators learnt that the bubbles expand to about 1 000 kilometres and probably last about 10 seconds before bursting and being replaced by the cooler, denser solar wind.

Space around Earth is fizzing
The energy source to drive these bubbles is currently uncertain but there is strong circumstantial evidence that the collision of the solar wind with the Earth's magnetic field, which forms a boundary known as the bow shock, is probably creating the energy to drive them.

Bow shocks exist throughout nature. The familiar place is at the front of a ship; the bow shock is the swell of white water that builds up and precedes the boat. Another is in supersonic air travel. As an aircraft flies faster than the speed of sound, the sound waves pile up in front of the plane. That energy is finally dissipated in the sonic boom that occurs.

The bow shock between the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind is similar in many respects. The big difference is that scientists do not know how the energy in the magnetic bow shock is dissipated. This is to say they do not know what the equivalent of the sonic boom is. The newly discovered bubbles might provide a clue.

It is possible that they are caused by the energy that piles up at the bow shock - however, being certain is a long way off yet.

"For now, our job is to study them as thoroughly as possible. Then we will try to simulate them on computers and finally we will know what effect they have," concludes Parks.



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Pentagon Lists Homosexuality As Disorder

By LOLITA C. BALDOR
Associated Press
Jun 20, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A Pentagon document classifies homosexuality as a mental disorder, decades after mental health experts abandoned that position.

The document outlines retirement or other discharge policies for service members with physical disabilities, and in a section on defects lists homosexuality alongside mental retardation and personality disorders.
Critics said the reference underscores the Pentagon's failing policies on gays, and adds to a culture that has created uncertainty and insecurity around the treatment of homosexual service members, leading to anti-gay harassment.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin said the policy document is under review.

The Pentagon has a "don't ask, don't tell" policy that prohibits the military from inquiring about the sex lives of service members but requires discharges of those who openly acknowledge being gay.

The Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, at the University of California at Santa Barbara, uncovered the document and pointed to it as further proof that the military deserves failing grades for its treatment of gays.

Nathaniel Frank, senior research fellow at the center, said, "The policy reflects the department's continued misunderstanding of homosexuality and makes it more difficult for gays and lesbians to access mental health services."

The document, called a Defense Department Instruction, was condemned by medical professionals, members of Congress and other experts, including the American Psychiatric Association.

"It is disappointing that certain Department of Defense instructions include homosexuality as a 'mental disorder' more than 30 years after the mental health community recognized that such a classification was a mistake," said Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass.

Congress members noted that other Pentagon regulations dealing with mental health do not include homosexuality on any lists of psychological disorders. And in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Monday, nine lawmakers asked for a full review of all documents and policies to ensure they reflect that same standard.

"Based on scientific and medical evidence the APA declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973 - a position shared by all other major health and mental health organizations based on their own review of the science," James H. Scully Jr., head of the psychiatric association, said in a letter to the Defense Department's top doctor earlier this month.

There were 726 military members discharged under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy during the budget year that ended last Sept. 30. That marked the first year since 2001 that the total had increased. The number of discharges had declined each year since it peaked at 1,227 in 2001, and had fallen to 653 in 2004.



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3000-year-old "pyramid" discovered in NE China

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-21 14:15:40

CHANGCHUN, June 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese archaeologists have discovered a group of ancient tombs shaped like pyramids, dating back at least 3,000 years, in Jiaohe City of northeast China's Jilin Province.

The tombs, covering an area of 500,000 square meters (1,000 meters long and 500 meters wide), were found after water erosion exposed part of a mountain, revealing two of the tombs.
Six smaller tombs had eroded away leaving no indications of their original scale and appearance, but the biggest tomb, located on the south side of the mountain, could clearly be discerned as a pyramid shape with three layers from bottom to top.

The pyramid's square bottom is about 50 meters long and 30 meters wide, about the size of a basketball court, with an oval platform on the top, about 15 meters long and 10 meters wide. The tomb was made of stone and earth dug out from the hill.

A stone coffin, surrounded by four screen boards and covered by a granite top, was placed on the top platform.

The coffin appeared to belong to the king of an early tribe based on the dimensions of the site, according to experts with the Jiaohe Archaeological Research Institute.

The tombs are part of the Xituanshan cultural ruins site, which dates back 3,000 years to China's Bronze Age period. The ruins were excavated in Jilin in 1950.

A lot of ancient hunting and domestic tools, including a stone knife and axe, as well as bronzeware and earthenware, have been unearthed from the stone coffin and other six smaller graves.

The discovery will provide valuable clues on study of ancient funeral customs and the tomb structure and culture of ethnic groups in the area.



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Ignorance a key factor in H5N1 infections: experts

By Fitri Wulandari
Reuters
June 21, 2006

JAKARTA - Many people who contracted the H5N1 bird flu virus in Indonesia were ignorant and never warned about the disease and children are the ones most vulnerable, medical experts said on Wednesday.

"Children may be off to play with sick chickens ... an activity that adults do less of," Thomas Grein, a leading epidemiologist at the World Health Organization, told Reuters on the sidelines of an experts meeting on bird flu.
"Other high risk exercises are slaughtering of sick birds, de-feathering and preparing food. But if you wash your hands, it can reduce that risk very dramatically," he said. "But again, this is less often done by the younger person than adult."

The H5N1 virus has infected 51 people and killed 39 of them in Indonesia since 2005 and is now endemic in poultry in nearly all of the country's 33 provinces.

It is common in the far-flung country of 17,000 islands for households to keep chickens for food and extra income - which means that everyone, and not just poultry workers, is at risk.

School-age children and children less than 10 years of age make up over 40 percent of Indonesia's H5N1 human infections. People are not used to the idea that sick birds could be dangerous and children play with chickens and are sent to clean up after them.

"It shows that the risk profile is much broader than we expected. It's not only poultry workers. This is because the virus is found so widely in backyard chicken," said Steven Bjorge, WHO's medical officer of communicable diseases.

"There were other diseases in birds but they did not cross over to humans in the past. That's the situation that they are not familiar with," he said.

"People need to understand that dead chickens are a high risk factor. If there is dead chicken, they need to call the authority to clean them properly and should not let children touch them."

NOT JUST INDONESIA

In Hong Kong, where the virus made its first documented jump to humans in 1997, nine of the 18 human infections involved children who were six years old or younger.

The first victim was a three-year-old boy who died 12 days after he developed fever, a sore throat and a cough in May, 1997. While experts never confirmed how he came to be infected, he attended a nursery which kept chicks and ducklings in a pet zoo.

At least two other children attended a school that was next to a wholesale market and often played in an area used to store chicken cages that were unwashed and splattered with feces.

H5N1 infected birds shed plenty of virus in their feces and experts say stool particles are a main vehicle of transmission. Kept moist and cool, the virus can survive for days on feces.

"If chickens infected with H5N1 are shedding the virus in their feces on the floor of houses where people live, then they are more likely to be exposed to H5N1 infection," said Julian Tang, a microbiologist at Chinese University in Hong Kong.

"The virus may survive for some time in the chicken feces, then when dry, can be inhaled as dust. This may occur if the feces on the floor is disturbed by walking, playing. You can breathe or have direct contact with it, when you are just present in the area, whether sleeping or doing other things."

"Children are probably more vulnerable because they tend to play on the floor, more often, where the risk of contact with such infected material is higher. If they are sent to clean up dead chickens, well, you have your answer," Tang said.

Ignorance is also believed to have played a role in the deaths of four young Azerbaijanis in February and March, who de-feathered dead swans to make pillows before they fell sick.

Feathers too may infected an 18-year-old Indonesian shuttlecock maker, who died last month. While officials have not said how he got infected, he sorted feathers for a living.

"Infected birds preen their feathers which could be contaminated with beak excretions. The virus would then be transferred to the person by hand or breathing in feather dust contaminated with virus," said John Oxford, virology professor at the Royal London Hospital.



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2 dead in Fla. detention center shooting

By BRENT KALLESTAD
Associated Press
June 21, 2006

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - A guard at a federal detention center opened fire as investigators came to arrest six corrections officers Wednesday, starting a gunfight that killed two workers and wounded another, the FBI said.

FBI agents and Justice Department investigators were at the center to serve arrest warrants when one of the six guards shot a federal correctional institution officer, said FBI spokesman John Girgenti.
Girgenti said an officer fired back while trying to escape the shooting. He declined to comment on whether the shooter was among the victims. Tallahassee police said earlier that the shooter was in custody.

The condition of the survivor and identities of the victims were not immediately released.

It also wasn't immediately clear why the six guards were being arrested; Girgenti said he didn't have details about what the warrants involved.

"The community is safe. The institution is in lockdown status," federal Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Carla Wilson said.

The detention center houses mostly men and is part of the Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institution. A low security prison for female inmates is next to the detention center. Together the men's and women's units total 1,445 inmates.



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Texas hurricane supply warehouse burns down

AP
Tue Jun 20, 2006

PEARLAND, Texas - A warehouse fire destroyed millions of pounds of donated food and supplies that a charity had stockpiled for the upcoming hurricane season and dozens of other efforts.

The 64,000-square foot Christian Alliance for Humanitarian Aid Inc. warehouse, filled with several million dollars worth of donations, was largely ruined after Monday's blaze that firefighters are still investigating. No one was injured.
Among the few items salvaged was half a shipping container of goods bound for a missionary project in Haiti. Another container headed for missionaries at an African university also was saved.

Insurance won't cover much of the losses, said Curtis Wilke, the nonprofit's executive director.

"Just Thursday a retired doctor gave us his entire office full of medical equipment," Wilke said. "Now it's all gone."

Another nonprofit group has set up a phone bank to help Wilke's alliance recover.

"I imagine some people are going to be missing some meals," said Reuben Sanchez, head of the men's ministry for Somebody Cares.



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World on Fire

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Russia's Population Will Halve by End of Century - President Putin

Created: 20.06.2006 15:47 MSK (GMT +3)
MosNews

Russian President Putin said Tuesday that Russia's demographic problems are critical, and that urgent action needs to be taken. "If nothing is done, Russia's population will halve by the end of the 21st century," Putin said at a session of Russia's Security Council, RIA Novosti news agency reports.

The United Nations earlier warned that Russia's population - which stood at roughly 145 million in a 2002 census - could fall by as much as a third by 2050.

"We are facing a critical line - during the last 13 years the number of dead [Russian] citizens exceeded the number of newborns by 11.2 million people," Putin said.

Demographic problems dominated the president's May 10 state of the nation address, when he said the population was falling by 700,000 people a year and instructed the government to give women at least 250,000 rubles ($9,200) each as financial aid following the birth of a second child.



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Turkmenistan Accuses French Diplomat, OSCE Official of Spying

Created: 20.06.2006 12:23 MSK (GMT +3)
MosNews

A French embassy official and representative of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) mission has been accused of spying on the terriotory of the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan, the Interfax news agency reported.
Turkmen National Security Minister Geldymukhammed Ashirmukhammedov has accused Henri Tomasini, a cultural adviser at the French embassy in Turkmenistan, and Benjamin Moreau, an employee of the OSCE Turkmen office, of espionage.

President Saparmurad Niyazov has ordered an investigation and promised to make public the results of the probe.

"All confirmed facts of involvement of any foreign embassy officials in this case will be made known to the heads of these diplomatic missions and will entail measures set in the law," the president said.



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'Al-Qaeda video' of 20th hijacker

Wednesday, 21 June 2006, 12:08 GMT 13:08 UK

A video said to be from al-Qaeda shows the man it says was the planned "20th hijacker" for the 9/11 US attacks.

The video, released by a US intelligence organisation, is of Saudi man, Fawaz al-Nashimi, who was killed in a shootout in Saudi Arabia in 2004.
The US has not commented and the video claim cannot be independently verified.

The identity of a 20th hijacker has been the subject of great debate, although there is no concrete evidence one was part of the plans for 9/11.

Three of the four hijacked planes on 9/11 had five al-Qaeda men on board, but the plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field - UA 93 - had only four.

The CIA had initially suspected jailed al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui as the 20th hijacker, but later revised its opinion.

Khobar raid

The latest al-Qaeda video was released by IntelCenter, which is based in Virginia and works on intelligence with the US government.

US intelligence services have so far declined to comment on the authenticity of the 54-minute video or its claims.

In the video, Fawaz al-Nashimi, also known as Turki bin Fuheid al-Muteiry, justifies attacks on the West.

The video also includes audio material said to be of an al-Qaeda attack he took part in on oil facilities in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, in 2004.

Militants took up to 60 hostages in the attack. Saudi forces stormed the complex and 22 people, mostly foreigners, were killed.

Nashimi escaped but was killed in a shootout with security forces the following month.

A statement said to be from al-Qaeda had appeared on a website on 13 June identifying Nashimi as the planned 20th hijacker.

It said that "for some reasons" alleged ringleader Mohammed Atta brought forward the date of the attacks and it was "not in Allah's design for [Nashimi] to become a martyr along with his 19 brothers".

The posting denied Moussaoui was the 20th hijacker, backing up an audio recording released in May purported to be from al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

The man in the tape says: "I am the one in charge of the 19 brothers and I never assigned brother Zacarias to be with them in that mission."

The 9/11 Commission, which investigated the attacks, suggested a number of al-Qaeda members may have tried to enter the US, possibly to take part in them.

They included Mohammed al-Kahtani, who was refused entry at Orlando airport in Florida in August 2001.

Other names that have been suggested include Mushabib al-Hamlan and Ramzi Binalshibh, who was repeatedly denied entry to the US.



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French PM in crisis over 'insult'

Wednesday, 21 June 2006, 11:25 GMT 12:25 UK

French premier Dominique de Villepin faces questions in parliament after a blazing row in the chamber on Tuesday.

Mr de Villepin repeatedly accused Socialist leader Francois Hollande of cowardice, after he criticised his handling of several major issues.
These include delivery delays at the European defence contractor, EADS, and an alleged smear campaign over which Mr de Villepin is suing two journalists.

One senior Socialist has said President Jacques Chirac should sack the premier.

Jean-Marc Ayrault, the Socialist Party's parliamentary leader, also said the Socialists would walk out of the chamber on Wednesday if Mr de Villepin did not apologise.

Mr de Villepin's centre-right predecessor, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, has called on the prime minister to make a goodwill gesture.

But the government spokesman, Jean-Francois Cope, said Mr Hollande should have expected a robust response to what he described as highly aggressive accusations.



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Fourteen Die As Pakistan Tribes Clash Over Water

AFP
Jun 20, 2006

Pakistani authorities Tuesday negotiated a temporary truce after at least 14 people died and 35 were wounded in a gunbattle between two tribes over access to water, officials said. The rival groups left their hillside trenches after two days of fighting with assault rifles and rocket launchers near Parachinar, the main town in the Kurram tribal agency bordering Afghanistan, a government statement said.
"The clashes left 14 people dead and 35 wounded from the two sides," local administration chief Mohammad Saleem Khan said in the statement.

The shootout erupted on Monday when members of one clan diverted water from a canal near Parachinar and attacked farmers from a rival tribe when they demanded a share.

The two sides took up positions on nearby hills and heavy firing continued until midday Tuesday, residents said. The authorities arranged a council of tribal elders to negotiate with leaders of the feuding tribes.

"A ceasefire has been arranged and the armed men have come out of their trenches," Khan said.

The tribal council is also engaged in negotiating a settlement of the water dispute, he added.

Police and paramilitary soldiers have been deployed amid tensions in the area, he said.



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