- Signs of the Times for Fri, 30 Jun 2006 -



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Editorial: Gaza: "We have nothing left to lose."

Silvia Cattori interviews an ordinary Palestinian

Silvia Cattori: Right from the start, after the capture of an Israeli corporal on June 25, 2006, halls of power have been putting pressure on your authorities. On your side, during the previous two weeks, you have suffered the deaths of more than 50 people, at least 200 wounded, and hundreds of arrests. Among the dead, wounded and those arrested are a number of children. It is significant to note that when the victims are Palestinians, there is no pressure put on Israel!

M.M.: Yes. All of that is revolting. The Palestinians have no weight compared with the Israelis. All the Western media and states treat humans in an unequal way. They don't put any pressure on Israel when it is a question of innocent Palestinians; but for an Israeli soldier who is making war against us, they all put pressure on our authorities. When a single Israeli soldier is captured, the whole world gets interested. When the Israeli army captures and kills thousands of Palestinian civilians, there is no reaction. The Arab countries are the same, which is even more worthy of condemnation. They mobilize to free an Israeli soldier while in Gaza a million and one-half Palestinians live imprisoned and suffer atrociously. Egypt even sent their head of the secret service, Omar Souleman, to obtain the liberation of the corporal.

S.C.: "We'll give you back your corporal, you give us back our prisoners held in Israel" chanted the families of those held after the capture. Israel immediately responded that there was no question of such an exchange. Did the families ask for too much?

M.M.: They didn't ask for a lot! Only the liberation of the women and young prisoners under 18 years old. The liberation of 1,000 prisoners of the 10,000 held by Israel.

S.C.: The secret service Shabak responds to those who criticize them in Israel for not having stopped this operation at the Kerem Shalon passage that they were aware that the tunnel was being dug. Why didn't they stop it?

M.M.: I think that they didn't know about it, and, above all, that they didn't know that the Palestinians had such a strong will to resist. They possess a panoply of technological systems and quantities of sensors to detect tunnels. If they had been aware of it, they would have destroyed it while it was being constructed. We can say that, by their heroic exploit, the men of the Palestinian resistance have destroyed the myth of this Israeli army that never loses a war. The resistance has demonstrated that that the services of the Shabak can be beaten, that Israel can construct all the walls they want, but they won't push back the Palestinians.

S.C.: What does the code name of the resistance for this operation, "Dissipated Illusion", mean?

M.M.: It means that the illusions of the superiority of the Israelis have been wiped away, that the Israelis can lose a war if we act in a consistent way. It indicates to our Arab neighbours that, if they unite to form a movement, the Israeli army can be beaten by simple actions. It also means that the people of Fatah and others who have spread the illusion that peace comes through negotiation and concessions, when Israel will concede nothing, that this path has led us into a dead end.

S.C.: If the corporal isn't returned, you will have to confront an unprecedented military offensive!

M.M.: We have nothing left to lose.

S.C.: Israeli minister Ben Eliezer pointed the finger at Hamas bureau chief Khaled Mechaal who lives in Syria. The American ambassador said the solution lies in Damascus. Are they looking for a pretext to enlarge the conflict?

M.M.: Israel considers itself a military power. It wants to dominate the region. Its tactic has always been to widen the war towards its neighbours and to pull the US into its logic. Since 1967 Israel has talked about "Arab terrorists". It has arranged to never make peace with us and has pushed the US to intervene in Syria, in Iraq, in Iran. The scenario is well known. Israel and the US are waging an intense propaganda campaign to associate Khaled Mechaal, who lives in Damascus, with Syria, and to blame Syria for what is happening in Gaza to justify the next war against it. In Afghanistan, the US did the same thing: they started by trying to blackmail the Taliban by saying they weren't giving up Osama bin Laden, and then they went to war.

S.C.: After the capture of the Israeli soldier, Ehud Olmert declared that Israel was able to kidnap "half of the Palestinian government" of Hamas. Do you think they would dare?

M.M.: Maybe yes. They have sent in more tanks than normal. We are paralysed. But for us, this kind of threat is nothing new. We have been living under Israeli terror for a long time. Their presence is in our heads. How many of our leaders have been assassinated? We live under the constant threat of new massacres. Certainly, we worry that, at one moment or another, they will announce that a missile has hit Ismael Hanyieh, for example. We hope. We hope that the entente between us will be consolidated. As for Israel, there is nothing good to hope for. The Israeli authorities want to get rid of us. We know that we'll be forced to be at war with the Israelis until the end of the world. That nothing will stop their war of destruction against our people.

S.C.: Avy Pazner, one French radio, reproached you for having conducted a "kidnapping on sovereign Israeli soil".

M.M.: You can see for yourself the gall that they have! How can they present things this way and accuse us of penetrating into their territory? What the Israelis call their "sovereign soil" is nothing else than the land they stole from us and that they occupy since. They are the ones who go too far. We, Palestinians, even if we have to conduct operations in the centre of Tel Aviv, don't go too far.

S.C.: Israel has force on their side. They don't care about your claims. This incident of the capture will carry heavy consequences for you!

M.M.: For us, there is never a break. Even when we don't do anything, there are always there drones, their tanks and helicopters that threaten us, that spy on us, that attack us. We know that every action of the resistance increases the brutality of the Israeli soldiers against us. We know that this time, it will be even more terrifying than the last time. In spite of the fear that is very, very strong, the majority of the Palestinians do not want to give in, will not be intimidated. What people can allow itself to be humiliated without reacting? The mothers of the prisoners gathered in front of the Red Cross to demand that the resistance not release the soldier until Israel frees their imprisoned children, even if Israel wishes to cover Gaza with fire and blood.

S.C.: It is a very courageous position!

M.M.: We don't have any choice. The Israeli government was very clear that even if the soldier is released, those who participated, whether close to the operation or not, will be assassinated.

S.C.: You aren't worried that they will comb every house?

M.M.: Even if they wanted to, here in Gaza it is impossible. If not, they would have already done it. They are afraid to venture into our neighbourhoods.

S.C.: Will this new test permit you to overcome the quarrels between Fatah and Hamas?

M.M.: I thank God because now we feel solid, preoccupied to form a united front against Israel. We can hope that the formation of a national unity government is possible with Fatah's participation. This possibility puts us more at ease.

S.C.: You do not have a state. You are the prisoners of the occupier. Isn't it Israel that should be responsible for governing the territories they occupy? Don't you think that Hamas, as Fatah before, is in an impossible situation to govern? Shouldn't the people demand the dissolution of this authority that, in the present context, is absurd?

M.M.: The militants of Hamas presented themselves in the elections. They won. They took up their responsibilities in a blocked and extremely difficult situation. Their principal objective is to honestly help their people. They have sacrificed their whole lives to defend this cause. Asking them to resign will not improve the situation. Because then the corrupt and detested elements in Fatah will take back power in their hands. We are convinced that, if they return, they won't stop at arresting and torturing the militants of Hamas and Jihad as they have done in the past, but, this time, they will liquidate them. It is what Israel expects of them. It is why Israel recently supplied Abu Mazen and Mohammed Dahlan, (2) with arms and ammunition.

S.C.: After what you have just said, do you really believe a sincere union of Fatah with the Hamas government is possible?

M.M.: I belong neither to Hams nor to Fatah. I'm an ordinary citizen who has suffered, as have the majority of us, under the Fatah regime. For this reason, Hamas is considered by the Palestinians as a force that can serve as a blockade against the corrupt people in Fatah who are so eager to return to power. I hope that Hamas will manage to govern honestly and to persuade the people of Fatah to unite to respond to the expectations of the people. What I care about is that the two sides come to an agreement between them, that Fatah fully associates itself with this national unity to avoid civil war, which is exactly what Israel is trying to provoke by offering facilities to Fatah: divide the people to push them to kill each other. We must avoid at all costs this trap offered by Israel.

S.C.: Isn't it worrisome not to know where all this will lead? Are all the lights red at the moment?

M.M.: Our green light is national dialogue. If after a month of dealing, Abu Mazen signs the so-called document of "National Agreement" and works sincerely and fully with the Hamas government, there will be no more red lights for us. United, we can better resist the occupier.

(1) Given the circumstances, we respect the desire of M.M. to remain anonymous.

(2) Mohammed Dahlan is the former Minister of Civil Affairs. He maintains close links with the CIA. From a poor family, he gained his riches by ignoble means, notably by the construction of the so-called "deviation roads". These roads, ordered by Israel, serve to link the Israeli colonies and are forbidden to the Palestinians. Dahlan is a powerful element at the side of President Abu Mazen.

Interview recorded June 27, 2006

Translated by Signs of the Times: http://www.signs-of-the -times.org/
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Editorial: IOF Abducts Palestine's Democratically Elected Leaders

Thursday June 29th 2006, 8:23 am
Kurt Nimmo
Another Day in the Empire

Now that Israel has attacked Gaza and the West Bank and kidnapped members of the democratically elected government there, it will be interesting to see if the United Nations condemns these criminal acts and moves to pass another worthless resolution.

Israel's "Operation Summer Rain" is not specifically intended to win the release of prisoner of war corporal Gilad Shalit so much as continue the nearly sixty year aggression against the Palestinian people. "According to some Western analysts, the military action, rather than being aimed at rescuing the captured Israeli soldier, is aimed at preempting the consequences of a recent agreement [to recognize Israel] reached by the Fatah block and Hamas," notes the Arab Monitor.

Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades and the Popular Resistance Committees, responsible for taking Shalit, want to use him as a "bargaining chip" to gain the release of women and children held in Israel's dungeons in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

It should be noted, although this will not be mentioned in the corporate media, that Israel's Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that abducting Arabs and holding them hostage is entirely legal according to the laws of the tiny outlaw state. As well, the Israeli government has attempted to codify GSS (General Security Services) torture during "interrogation." According to Amnesty International official, "Israel is the only country in the world known to have effectively legalized torture by officially allowing such methods," namely beatings, electric shock, sleep deprivation, forcing prisoners to remain in painful positions, violent shaking, hooding, confinement in tiny spaces, exposure to temperature extremes, prolonged toilet and hygiene deprivation, degrading treatment, and other methods, which have in cases led to the death of the detainees.

Osama Hamdan, a Hamas official, put the capture of Gilad Shalit into perspective. "He's an Israeli soldier, a prisoner of war, taken in a battle and falls under a legal category," Hamdan told the Associated Press. "What happened yesterday [the abduction of elected Palestinians] were hostage-takings and acts of terrorism." Israel, however, has nothing but contempt for such legal categories, as the systematic murder and maiming of more than 24,500 Palestinians since the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada reveals.

"On Wednesday, the crisis seemed to be tipping toward escalation as Israeli tanks hunkered down inside southern Gaza at the airport after warplanes had knocked out half of Gaza's electricity and pounded sonic booms over houses," reports the New York Times. "Also on Wednesday, Israel battered northern Gazan towns with artillery and sent warplanes over the house of the Syrian president, who is influential with the Palestinian leader believed to have ordered the kidnapping."

In other words, the Israelis violated Syrian airspace and terrorized Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, basically an act of war. "In a predawn operation Wednesday morning, Israel Air Force warplanes carried out a low-altitude flight over Assad's palace in the Mediterranean port city of Latakia in northwestern Syria," explains Haaretz. [Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin] said it was 'absolutely unacceptable' to breach the border or air space of any country," a fact lost on the neocon, pro-Jabotinsky, AIPAC seduced government of the United States.

Ehud Olmert, who got his start in the Arab-hating revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar (founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky), declares Israel has "no interest to harm the Palestinian people, and in the operation we carried out tonight, civilians were not harmed. The Hamas Government and its sources in Syria are directly responsible for the reality we've fallen into," according to a translation provided by the World Today.

Granted, according to news reports, the IOF has yet to slaughter Palestinians outright, although it is disingenuous for Olmert to claim "civilians were not harmed," considering the IOF has bombed electrical facilities and "destroyed the main water pipe feeding Nuseirat and El-Bureij refugee camps," according to an by Electronic Intifada press release posted last night.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights "strongly condemns IOF retaliatory measures targeting Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, including the destruction of properties that are not classified as a legitimate military targets. The Center calls upon the international community, particularly the High Contracting Parties of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to force IOF to respect the convention, which prohibits reprisals against protected persons, as stipulated in article 33. In addition, the convention prohibits the destruction of private properties belonging to individuals, groups, organizations or official bodies. The Center calls upon the High Contracting Parties to enforce article 3 regarding adherence to the convention and respect of its stipulations, and to take appropriate sanctions against the serious violations currently being perpetrated."

Of course, this will be ignored, both in Israel and the United States, where the dutiful corporate media portrays the invasion of the Gaza Strip and West Bank as a defensive move against terrorists.

In effect, Israel is attempting to break any agreement between Fatah and Hamas in regard to recognizing Israel's "right" to exist, a "right" predicated on more than sixty years of violence and ethnic cleansing.

Olmert and the Jabotinsky Likudites are engaged in a long-term plan to deny not only Palestinian statehood, but the most basic of human rights. "Zionism is a colonizing adventure and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces," Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote.

As well, it stands or falls on the ability to use such armed forces to terrorize Palestinians, run them off the land, bomb their civilian infrastructure, abduct their elected representatives, throw their women and children in torture dungeons, dynamite their homes, plow under their olive groves, shoot peace activists in the head (or run them over with military bulldozers), and engage in other crimes, illegal and shameful in more civilized places in the world.

Original
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Editorial: Killing a Nation to Rescue a Soldier

By RON JACOBS
June 28, 2006
CounterPunch

I am so tired of hearing Tel Aviv complain that certain Palestinian factions do no represent Israel's right to exist. While some certainly may have this opinion, even Hamas leaders have stated that the fact is that Israel does exist. Meanwhile, Israel is once again waging a military campaign against he Palestinians that, in essence, is just one more battle in its attempt to prevent Palestine from ever existing again. Of course, Washington defends these acts by insisting that Israel has a "right to defend itself," which seems to mean that its military forces can do whatever the hell they want. This also implies that the Palestinians really don't have that same right.

If the true goal of the current Israeli military actions in Gaza is to rescue the Israeli Defense Forces recently taken prisoner, than there is no logic to the military destruction of Palestinian power plants. Not when those power plants provide forty-two percent of the electricity to the Palestinians. There is no logic in invading Gaza to retrieve one soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces, especially when such an action is more likely to lead to the soldier's death. There is no logic in intimidating the president of Syria by buzzing his home with warplanes, especially if the reason for such an act is to retrieve one soldier in the IDF.

From where I sit, that soldier appears to have become one more pawn in Tel Aviv's attempt to destroy forever the Palestinian hope of a homeland. Like expansionist armies everywhere, the foot soldier is never more than a pawn in the game of the rulers. Whether that soldier is being sent to give his life in battle for the power and profit of a few or whether he is kidnapped and held for ransom, that soldier is never more than a pawn. If Tel Aviv was truly only interested in saving the life of the corporal from France, they would negotiate some kind of prisoner exchange. This is what the Palestinian forces have offered and this is all they want.

This is why there is something more at play in Gaza right now. The much ballyhooed withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza last year has proven to be a sham. Not only does Tel Aviv control the borders and skies over that region, it also has freedom of movement both there and in the West Bank. The arrests of several elected Palestinians leaders on June 28, 2006 proves even further that the independent Palestinian nation we are told exists by Tel Aviv and its mentors in Washington, DC is nothing more than a sham. No wonder the majority of Palestinian civilians support taking the IDF soldier prisoner. After all, the Israeli government not only has thousands of Palestinians in its prisons, it also continues to kill civilians at an alarming rate, especially in light of Tel Aviv's claims that it doesn't mean to kill them.

Like Washington in Iraq, there seems to be a sense in Tel Aviv that their overwhelming firepower and monetary superiority will achieve victory over the desire of the people whose lands they occupy to rid themselves of the occupation. Also like Washington, this belief in victory has led the military and political forces in Israel to deny their expressed principles and condone murder, torture and terror. In a poor imitation of their gods, these two capitals attempt to reshape these lands in their own image, no matter how many they have to kill and imprison. The citizens of both Israel and the United States, meanwhile, either support this denial of their nations' principles and even urge for more repression and war; or they vainly struggle against these acts carried out in their name, hoping that someday the great unwashed majorities in both nations will finally become appalled at bloodlust and pillage done in their name. Done so that they may live in their cities and suburbs in constant denial; secure in their belief that they will never answer for the crimes in which we are all complicit.

Original
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Editorial: Ravening Wolves in Sheep's Clothing

Jason Miller
6/29/06

How Many More Innocents Must Die Before the World Realizes that Israel is Gathering Thorns and Thistles?

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

-Bishop Desmond Tutu

In Gaza, the elephant has finally removed its foot from the mouse's tail. Much to the dismay of the mouse, the behemoth is not done with him. Not this elephant. He has decided to bring his immense weight to bear on the mouse's miniscule body, sadistically reveling at the sight of the blood oozing from the mouse's bodily orifices as it is gradually reduces it to a mass of flattened pulp.

I abandoned my neutrality long ago. My thoughts, prayers, support, and activist efforts as an essayist, small Internet publisher, and dissident against the American Empire are with the Palestinians. I am deeply sickened by fact that the United States government finances Israel's genocide against the Palestinians with my tax dollars. It enrages me that AIPAC and bellicose supporters of Israel dictate so much of our foreign policy.

Enabler of Ethnic Cleansing

The elephant has received over $140 billion in financial support from the United States since World War II. US subsidies to the Israeli government and military average $15 million per day. Palestinian NGO's were receiving a pitiful $232,000 per day (for non-military use only) from the United States prior to the termination of US aid to punish Palestinians for choosing the "wrong" leaders in their democratic elections.

Thanks to America's benevolence, Israel possesses a formidable military. Israel has over 3800 tanks, 1500 large artillery pieces, 2000 aircraft (including US manufactured F-16s), and is widely believed to possess powerful nuclear capabilities.

The mouse recently had the audacity to bite the elephant's toe. Some of the more militant members of the Palestinian community, who refuse to quietly acquiesce to extermination, kidnapped an Israeli soldier, an 18 year old Jewish settler and a 62 year old Israeli man.

An Eye for an Eyelash

In the perverse logic widely employed by Americans and Israelis, three kidnappings warranted Israel unleashing hell upon Gaza. Forget that 9,800 Palestinians in Israeli prisons are routinely subjected to torture while Palestinian prisons hold one Israeli. Never mind the 23 civilian Palestinians murdered by Israeli shelling and air strikes over the last four weeks. And disregard the 4,209 Palestinians that Israel has killed (including 892 children) and the 30,122 they have injured since 9/30/00.

Note: By way of comparison, Palestinian inflicted Israeli deaths totaled 1,113 during this period.

As I compose this piece, Israel has launched a ruthless military assault on the Gaza Strip, one of the two pitifully small Palestinian enclaves. Air strikes have knocked out the power plant which provided electricity to most of the 1.3 million inhabitants of Gaza. It will take an estimated 6 months and $20 million to make the plant operational again. The Palestinians can afford neither the time nor the money.

Israeli troops and tanks are rolling into southern Gaza as additional aerial bombardment has essentially split Gaza into northern and southern halves by taking out two key bridges. Recent reports indicate that Israel has violated Syrian air space by flying over the president's home and has launched tank attacks on northern Gaza.

Despite the lack of casualties thus far, Palestinian senior negotiator Saeb Erakat had this to say:

"I condemn in the strongest possible terms this attack on our infrastructure. We have 1.3 million people under siege in Gaza. Israel is in the process of reoccupying Gaza -- not in traditional sense -- but through control of water, electricity, food and medical supplies, and I don't think the international community should allow it. A chance should be given to diplomacy. I urge the United States to intervene immediately."

I shook my head in disbelief as I watched CNN (the "liberal" cable news) manage to portray this gross miscarriage of justice as if the Israeli military strike was justified in its action. It defies logic to argue that Israel was warranted in destroying infrastructure critical to the survival of over a million people and laying siege against brutally oppressed human beings in its "hostage rescue" and in its attempt to root out the perpetrators of recent Qassam rocket attacks which have resulted in zero Israeli casualties. As is often the case, Israel's actions represent blatant abuse of power and violations of human rights.

Yet why would I feel surprised? For years the corporate media has conditioned United States citizens to believe in Israel's right to savagely punish virtually defenseless Palestinian civilians using our military hard-ware. The Israelis specialize in electrocution for stealing a loaf of bread. And they don't care if those receiving the punishment are guilty or not.

The Madness of King George and Prince Ehud

Like its benefactors in Washington, Israel is ruled by Machiavellian militarists who routinely violate international law and human rights. Mainstream media propagandists have worked vigorously to maintain the perception that both nations are pillars of morality and civilization, but the façade is rapidly eroding.

Quotes attributed to Caligula, the hedonistic and blood-thirsty Roman emperor, would roll quite naturally off the tongues of George Bush or Ehud Olmert. It is not much of a stretch to imagine either of them quipping:

"I wish the Palestinian people had but a single neck"

or

"Let them hate, so long as they fear."

Playing With a Stacked Deck and Acting With Impunity

Consider that during its relatively short existence, the United Nations has targeted Israel with Resolutions 65 times. They have condemned Israeli attacks on neighboring Lebanon, collective punishment and repeated human rights violations against the Palestinian civilian population, theft of Palestinian land, and violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel's response to the condemnations? More violations of international law. Incidentally, there have been no United Nations Resolutions against the Palestinians.

From the beginning of the conflict, Israel has held distinct advantages over the Palestinians. In 1850, Palestine was inhabited by about 500,000 Palestinian Arabs, 80% of whom were Muslim. By the 1880's, the European Zionist movement had determined that Palestine was to be a Jewish homeland. Zionists started to establish Jewish settlements there. As the population of Jewish settlers rose, conflicts erupted. By 1947, the United Nations intervened and determined that 55% of Palestine would belong to a newly formed Jewish state. This was an astounding conclusion when one considers that at that time the Jewish settlers only owned 7% of the land. It seems the Zionists had friends in high places.

Harmony eluded Palestine. In 1948 a well-equipped and well-trained Jewish military force predictably crushed the smaller and much more primitive Palestinian army. Israel was born and greedily swallowed 78% of Palestine.

750,000 Palestinians became refugees. To this day Israel persists in denying the United Nations right of the refugees to return to their homes. Approximately 4 million Palestinians currently subsist in squalid conditions in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.

After the 1967 War, Israel began a military occupation of the remaining 22% of Palestinian territory when it seized the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Under the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993, Gaza and the West Bank were eventually to form a Palestinian state. However, Israel has continued to encroach on Palestinian territory and to deny the Palestinian people sovereignty. In September of 2000 the Palestinians launched armed struggle against their oppressors with the Second Intifada. Their courageous resistance to Israeli tyranny persists as I write this article.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip in September of 2005. Ostensibly Israel was fulfilling its obligation to return this region to the Palestinians. However, Israelis maintained austere control of Gaza's air space, ports and borders. The Palestinians were essentially prisoners in their own tiny territory.

When the Palestinians had the audacity to democratically elect Hamas as the majority party in their nominal government known as the Palestinian Authority, Israel responded by withholding the Palestinians' $60 million per month in tax revenue. This has financially crippled the Palestinian Authority and worsened the already devastating poverty in Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas' history of fighting back against their merciless colonial masters and violent rejection of Israel's genocidal agenda have earned them the label of "terrorists". However, Hamas also has a history of providing badly needed social services for many poverty-stricken Palestinians.

While Palestinians are often armed with sticks and rocks in their confrontations with the powerful Israeli military, an occasional suicide bomber or crude Qassam rocket kills Israeli civilians or military personnel. As a result, Palestinian civilians have suffered barbaric Israeli reprisals on many levels.

Israelis have demolished nearly 8,000 Palestinian homes. In one instance an Israeli driving an armored Caterpillar bulldozer intentionally crushed Rachel Corrie, a non-violent American activist who had been attempting to prevent the Israeli from demolishing a Palestinian house.

According to a UN human rights report drafted in 2004:

"Bulldozers have destroyed homes in a purposeless manner and have savagely dug up roads, including electricity, sewage and water lines."

"1,497 buildings have been demolished in Rafah, affecting over 15,000 people"


Israel has uprooted approximately 1.2 million Palestinian olive and fruit trees. Israeli border and checkpoint security has wreaked further havoc on the Palestinian economy as residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are subjected to lengthy and humiliating waits and searches. Transportation of goods and commuting to work are nearly impossible tasks in the Palestinian territories. 66% of Palestinians in Gaza live in poverty and unemployment exceeds 30%.

As one might expect, fresh water is a relatively scarce resource in Palestine. Not surprisingly, Israelis control most of it. In the West Bank, Palestinians are denied access to water from the Jordan River. Palestinians consume only 17% of the water from West Bank aquifers while Israelis consume 73%. Per capita, West Bank Israeli settlers enjoy four times as much water as Palestinians. Israel prohibits Palestinians from drilling new wells and limits the amount of water they can extract from existing wells. Israeli water companies often make grossly inflated profits on water they extract from Palestinian aquifers when they sell it back to Palestinian consumers. Israel is withdrawing groundwater from Gaza so rapidly that saltwater from the Mediterranean is replacing the freshwater. One would think that an adequate supply of potable water would be a basic human right, but it is not for Palestinians.

Adding insult to numerous injuries, Israel is defying a decree by the International Court of Justice that it is violating international law as it continues to build its Apartheid Wall. In yet another example of collective punishment of innocent civilians, Israel is constructing a 620 kilometer barrier through the West Bank which encroaches on Palestinian territory by as much as 10 miles in some places. One purpose of the encroachment is that it will enable Israel to annex and control vital water access points. In building the Apartheid Wall, Israel has uprooted over 100,000 Palestinian olive and citrus trees, confiscated over 4,000 acres of their land, and demolished 75 acres of their greenhouses.

Victim Turned Oppressor

It is sadly ironic that the United States, a nation whose founding fathers overcame tremendous odds to escape the shackles of an imperial power, would support Israel's cruel colonization and extermination of the Palestinians. Perhaps more ironic is the fact that Israel, a nation formed as a homeland for a group which was a principal target of Hitler's genocidal policies, would commit such horrendous humanitarian crimes against the Palestinians.

What Would Jesus Do?

In the very region where the Prince of Peace, who championed the cause of the poor and oppressed against the rich and powerful and was crucified for his idealistic crusade, Israeli hard-liners will not rest until they have crushed those with whom Jesus would be standing were he alive today. While it is true that there are defiant, violent Palestinians who refuse to turn the other cheek, Israel has consistently responded by brutally punishing the 80% of Palestinians who want peace. And many Americans who call themselves Christians are cheering on these barbaric acts of injustice.

Doubt His Resolve?

If there was a doubt about Ehud Olmert's determination to continue the genocide of the Palestinians, he has erased it by deepening their plight with his military incursion into Gaza. Olmert has said to expect "an extended campaign against the Palestinian Authority" and that "all targets" would be considered for possible action. This does not bode well for innocent Palestinian men, women and children who are already suffering from the significant infrastructural damage Israeli forces have inflicted in the early stages of their "extended campaign".

Piercing the Veil of Propaganda

As my family and I started our evening walk yesterday, I found myself on the verge of tears as sorrow and rage sparred with one another to become my predominant emotion. Ominous storm clouds were just beginning to skirt the horizon. Throughout our brief trek, blue sky and sunshine gradually gave way to a dark, foreboding wave of cumulonimbi. Seeing the storm clouds triggered mental images of the acrid-looking jet black smoke pouring from the bombed-out Palestinian power plant I had witnessed on CNN. I found myself imagining what I might feel if I were a Palestinian. With the power unique to raw human emotion, sorrow and rage surged through my being.

While I believe in non-violent solutions, I also embrace an individual's or group's right to self-defense. Corporate propagandists (who are well paid to do our thinking for us) have deluded many Americans into thinking that economic and military actions by the United States and its allies that result in civilian deaths are moral and legal. Concurrently, they have programmed us to believe that if members of populations which have limited organized militaries respond to our oppressive imperialism with violence, they are committing "acts of terrorism". I reject this illusion. I denounce violence by either side, but I recognize that in some instances, it is necessary for victims of US (or Israeli) militaristic aggression to resort to violence to defend themselves.

Partners in Crime

Through its history, the United States has slaughtered and enslaved millions while waging genocidal campaigns against the Native Americans and the Iraqis. Its noble cause? Global economic and military hegemony driven by the twisted notions of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.

Israel has engaged in a long-term, multi-faceted effort to ensure the extinction of the Palestinians. Its patron and benefactor, the United States, shares equal culpability for their egregious crimes against humanity.

Since the United States and Israel are rogue nations with powerful militaries, the response of the international community has been anemic. The Palestinian people have essentially been on their own in their valiant resistance to genocide. Hamas, the PLO, and similar "terrorist" organizations are ultimately enforcers of the universal human right of self defense.

Leaders of Israel and the United States would be wise to heed the words of Pope Paul IV:

If you want peace, work for justice.

As long as Israelis are committing ethnic cleansing, Palestinians will continue to fight for their survival.

And what sane and honest human being can truly blame them?

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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Editorial: The Palestinian government of Hamas is ready to recognize Israel subject to reciprocity

Jennifer Loewenstein
29/06/2006

A June 3rd poll conducted by Near East Consulting based in Ramallah, Palestine shows that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians support the Prisoner's Agreement, an inter-factional agreement signed by one member each of Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, and the DFLP inside Israel's Hadarim prison this past May. [1] ) The document implicitly recognizes Israel by accepting, among other things, a Palestinian state in the lands occupied by Israel in the June 1967 war.

News reports have paid a lot of attention to the Prisoner's Agreement in part because it accepts the Arab League initiative (Saudi Plan) unanimously adopted by the Arab states in Beirut in 2002 at the height of the Second Intifada. By calling for an independent Palestinian state on the '67 lines in return for peace with Israel, both the Saudi Plan and the Prisoner's Agreement echo the international consensus on Palestine since the mid 1970s. Israel has completely ignored the Arab initiative despite overwhelming support among the Palestinians. But the Prisoner's Agreement has also become the focal point of the most recent crisis in internal Palestinian politics: Palestinian Authority president and Fatah deputy leader Mahmoud Abbas has called for a national referendum on the document should Hamas fail to adopt it as part of their official program. So far, Hamas has refused and has labeled Abbas' actions "illegal."
Not surprisingly, there is more to the referendum story than ever makes it into the press. In this case, the information omitted from the public record makes it possible for the United States, Israel and their allies to continue to justify the economic siege imposed on the Palestinian territories, a siege that is causing Palestinian society to teeter on the brink of ruin. In their rush to push forward a regional, pro-US and anti-democratic agenda, those states allied against the Palestine national movement (including Egypt and Jordan) have created the kind of humanitarian crisis one would expect to find as the result of a natural disaster.

No attention has been paid to what the Hamas leadership is actually saying, or to critical factors such as US efforts to build a 3,500 man militia around the office of Abbas in an effort to encourage civil infighting or Israel's recent approval of a large shipment of arms and ammunition from Egypt and Jordan for the equipping of the Presidential Guard. Abbas, who is supported by the US, aims to increase the number of armed soldiers around him to 10,000. He is also aiming, with US support, to create a shadow government that will undermine the legitimate one now controlled by Hamas. [2] It should come as a surprise to no one that, in the words of Mohammed Nazzal, a member of the Hamas government in exile, "Hamas will not submit to blackmail" [3]. This is essentially the goal of Abbas' call for a referendum. There is no need to bring to a popular vote support for the Prisoner's Agreement. Overwhelming popular support for this and other initiatives, including support for the two-state solution, has long been documented.

Most of the rhetoric damns Hamas for refusing to follow Abbas' instructions. Hamas remains the reason why states should support the economic and political blockade on Palestine although this does little more than fuel the "War on Terror" by adding another organization to the blacklist of regional enemies. Labeling Hamas a "terrorist organization" obscures the reality, however. Its political leadership and its electoral/government program (i.e. not its Charter) have put forth both reasonable and moderate demands. Acceptance of an independent Palestinian state has long been part of its strategic agenda. Its reputation as a "rejectionist" movement stems in part from its unwillingness to act alone, without reciprocal moves by Israel, a state whose extremist policies over the past 5 decades have transformed the physical landscape of Palestine so dramatically that the prospects for a genuine peace settlement today are bleaker than ever.

In his latest comments on Abbas' decision to call the referendum, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert summed up his government's view of this effort insofar as it could create a bridge toward peace talks with Israel. He said, "The referendum is an internal game between one faction and the other..It is meaningless in terms of the broad picture of chances towards some kind of dialogue between us and the Palestinians. It's meaningless". [4]
Whether the referendum 'succeeds' or 'fails' therefore, will be of no consequence whatsoever in efforts to resume negotiations or as form of leverage to end the deadly siege on the territories.

Hamas accepts a two-state solution

When asked by Newsweek-Washington Post correspondent Lally Weymouth on February 26th,2006 what agreements Hamas was prepared to honor, the new Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh answered, "the ones that will guarantee the establishment of a Palestinian State with Jerusalem as its capital with 1967 borders". Weymouth went on, "Will you recognize Israel?" to which Haniyeh responded, "If Israel declares that it will give the Palestinian people a state and give them back all their rights then we are ready to recognize them". [5] This view encapsulates the Hamas demand for reciprocity.
In an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer four days after the PLC elections, the new Hamas Foreign Minister, Mahmoud Zahar (considered the party's hard-liner) remarked, "We can accept to establish our independent state on the area occupied [in] 1967". Like Haniyeh and other Hamas members, Zahar insists that once such a state is established a long-term truce "lasting as long as 10, 20 or 100 years" will ensue ending the state of armed conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. [6]

Hamas government spokesman Ghazi Hamad commented to reporters on 10 May 2006, "Yes, we accept an independent state in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War. This attitude is not new and it is declared in the government's platform". [7].
In an effort to clarify the Hamas position on Abbas' call for a referendum, Hamas parliamentary speaker Aziz Duweik explained that it had nothing to do with a lack of support for the two-state settlement. "Everybody in Hamas says 'Yes' to the two-state solution," he said. "The problem comes from the fact that the Israelis so far [have not said they] accept the 1967 borders.between the two states" [8].

Other leaders are just as explicit. "Hamas is clear in terms of the historical solution and an interim solution. We are ready for both: the borders of 1967, a state, elections, and agreement after 10-15 years of building trust," commented Usama Hamdan, the Hamas Chief Representative in Lebanon. [9]
Notable here is that his remarks were made in 2003 well before the Hamas victory of January 2006. Indeed, it should be pointed out that most of the on-the-record comments to this effect were made prior to these elections.
Additional Hamas spokespersons who have made explicit reference to acceptance of an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 lands include Sheikh Ahmad Haj Ali, a Muslim Brotherhood leader and Hamas legislative candidate currently imprisoned in Israel (interviewed in July 2005); Muhammad Ghazal, Hamas spokesperson also currently in an Israeli jail (Sept. 2005); Hasan Yousef, West Bank political leader (August 2005); and the Hamas Electoral Manifesto Article 5:1 which calls for "adherence to the goal of defeating the [1967] occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital". [10].

In 1989, Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin (assassinated by Israel in March 2004) stated, "I do not want to destroy Israel.. We want to negotiate with Israel so the Palestinian people inside and outside Palestine can live in Palestine. Then the problem will cease to exist" [11].
The hard-line Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, assassinated by Israel in April 2004 commented in 2002 that, "[T]he Intifada is about forcing Israel's withdrawal to the 1967 borders". This "doesn't mean the Arab-Israeli conflict will be over, but rather that the armed resistance to Israel would end" [12] .

In a 2004 report published by the highly regarded International Crisis Group, "During the 1987-1993 uprising, Hamas leaders proposed various formulas for Israeli withdrawal to the June 4th, 1967 borders, to be reciprocated with a decades'-long truce (hudna)". That same report notes that,"In a March 1988 meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and then with Defense Minister Rabin in June 1989, Hamas leader (now FM) Mahmud Zahar explicitly proposed an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 boundaries, to be followed by a negotiated permanent settlement". The offer was refused [13] .

In a CounterPunch article posted on 24 February 2006, I wrote that the Hamas leadership had "clearly and repeatedly" called for an independent Palestinian state on the lands occupied by Israel in 1967 [14]. I received numerous emails demanding "proof" of this assertion and calling me a traitor, a liar, a Nazi, a terrorist sympathizer and an anti-Semite.
The statements included in this piece should help put to rest those accusations. Indeed, the statements made to this effect by Hamas members here are but a small sampling of similar statements made over the years that are part of the public (though unreported) record.
Surely, one can find many remarks by Hamas leaders over the years that are much less conciliatory, indeed even inflammatory and often disturbing. It would be misleading to suggest otherwise. Nonetheless the trend especially in the past few years up to the present has been toward a more conciliatory, indeed more realistic policy. As Crisis Group analyst Mouin Rabbani has written,"On Hamas I would not hesitate to say that the organization as a whole has essentially reconciled itself to a two-state settlement as a strategic option but has not formally adopted this as an organisational position. Yasin, Rantisi, Abu Shanab, Mashal, etc. have all made such statements. Have they made others that contradict them? Of course. But I think it can safely be concluded the strategic decisions have been made, the tactics remain unresolved and the formalities will come last".

The question for us is whether or not we will give Hamas the chance to translate their words into actions. Rabbani writes, "it would be as na?ve to take the above statements on faith as it would be foolish not to put them to the test" [15]. _ As Menachem Klein points out in a recent Haaretz article, "The political texts of Hamas indicate that at present the organization is not fundamentalist" [16]. It has moved away from the ideological demands of its Charter into a pragmatism that seeks to respond to the demands of the day without falling into the same traps that Fatah and the Fatah-led PA fell into over the years. It has respected a one-sided truce for the past 16 months -though with the June 9th Israeli artillery attack on a north Gaza beach in which 7 civilians died, six of them from the same family, this truce may have come to an end. Hamas has also agreed to support negotiations between Abbas and Israel.

Hamas' rejection of Abbas' call for a referendum on the Prisoner's Agreement has nothing to do with its willingness to accept an independent Palestinian state on '67 lands and everything to do with its opposition to those in Fatah and in Israel, the US and EU who are doing everything in their power to bring down the Hamas government- and in the most depraved manner: by starving the population into submission and forcing on it the illegal diktats of anti-democratic warlords within the occupied Palestinian territories such as the US-backed Fatah militia leader and former head of the Preventive Security Services, Mohammad Dahlan.
In a June 8th 2006 article in the Financial Times, Henry Siegman commented on remarks made on Israeli television by Israeli security expert Ephraim Halevy. He writes, "Why should Israel care whether Hamas grants it the right to exist, Mr. Halevy asked. Israel exists and Hamas's recognition or non-recognition neither adds to nor detracts from that irrefutable fact. But 40 years after the 1967 war, a Palestinian state does not exist. The politically consequential question, therefore, is whether Israel recognizes a Palestinian right to statehood, not the reverse" [17].

Indeed, until Israel actively agrees to withdraw to the June 4th 1967 borders, Hamas should not fall into the trap that Fatah under Yassir Arafat fell into- of conceding more and more for less and less until there is nothing left. Right now the US-backed annexation/cantonization program seems likely to bring the whole Palestinian tragedy to a hideous end. All the maneuverings are a cover for that, the whole discussion about the referendum included. Fatah should by now know better than to fall into the hands of US and Israeli overlords in its quest for local dominance. The fact that it does not should be reason enough for why it was voted out of power last January. Hamas has good reasons to demand that Israel, with US urging, show its good faith first. In the meantime Hamas' continued opposition to Abbas' dubious call for a referendum on the Prisoner's Agreement is justified.



[1] www.neareastconsulting.com; Press Release: The Palestinian National Dialogue and call for a Referendum Survey#2, June 3rd, 2006.

[2] See "PA Chief Abbas aims to expand presidential guard," by Ze'ev Schiff, Haaretz, May 28th,2006. www.haaretz.com; See also "Talking to Hamas," by Alastair Crooke in Prospect, issue 123, June 2006.

[3] Ibid, Ze'ev Schiff, Haaretz, May 28th, 2006

[4] "Abbas sets Referendum for July 26; Hamas rejects Poll," Mijal Grinberg and Assaf Uni, Haaretz, June 10th,2006. www.Haaretz.com

[5] "We do not wish to throw them into the sea," Interview between Lally Weymouth and Ismail Haniyeh in the Washington Post, Sunday 26th February

[6] "Hamas leader sets condition for truce," on CNN World website, January 29th, 2006. www.cnn.com/2006/World/meast/01/29/...

[7] "Abbas delays referendum decision," BBC News, Tuesday June 6th, 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mi...

[8] "Hamas says ready to accept Palestinian statehood in 1967 border," in China View, May 10th,2006; http://news.xinhuanet.com/English/2...

[9] "Enter Hamas: the challenges of political integration," International Crisis Group Report no. 49, Amman/Brussels; January 18th, 2006. First edition (preliminary) report. www.crisisgroup.org

[10] Ibid; The Hamas Electoral Manifesto also states,"Yes to a free, independent and sovereign state on every portion of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem without conceding any part of historic Palestine". This, of course, will raise red flags for some, which is why I include it here. I do not want to be accused of leaving out important statements or phrases. As with other statements, however, it must be measured against current realities both military and political. www.crisisgroup.org

[11] "Dealing with Hamas," International Crisis Group Report no. 21, Amman/Brussels; January 26th, 2004. From an interview in An-Nahar (Jerusalem), April 30th, 1989. Quoted in Ziad Abu Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism. Op. cit. p.76

[12] "Enter Hamas: the challenges of political integration," [International Crisis Group] report no. 49, 18 January 2006. www.crisisgroup.org

[13] "Dealing with Hamas," International Crisis Group report no. January 21st, 26 2004. Amman/Brussels. www.crisisgroup.org

[14] "For Those Who Haven't Noticed: Watching the Dissolution of Palestine," February 24th, 2006; CounterPunch, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, www.counterpunch.org

[15] Mouin Rabbani; personal correspondence. Also in "Enter Hamas" the ICG preliminary report on Hamas from January 18th,2006.www.crisisgroup.org

[16] "Hamas' Contradictory Voices," by Menachem Klein, Haaretz, June 2nd, 2006

[17] "The Issue is not Whether Hamas Recognizes Israel," by Henry Siegman, Financial Times, June 8th, 2006


Comment on this Editorial


Editorial: Racism, Not Defence, At the Heart Of Israeli Politics

Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
29/06/2006

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came out and publicly stated something that every unbiased observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has privately known for many years: that, to the Israeli oligarchs, the life of an Israeli citizen is "more important" than that of a Palestinian.

Speaking of the recent mass murders by the Israeli army of Palestinian civilians in Gaza (which were ostensibly to stop the firing of impotent qassam rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot by the Palestinian resistance ) Olmert said: "I am deeply sorry for the residents of Gaza, but the lives, security and well-being of the residents of Sderot is even more important."

Of course, Olmert's comment, and the deep-seated racism at the heart of Israeli politics that it appears to belie, can possibly be rationalised with the claim that it is not unreasonable that an Israeli PM would be more concerned about the lives of Israeli citizens than those of the Palestinian 'enemy'. After all, this is "war", is it not? Well, yes and no. Yes, if your definition of "war" is:

Israel has done all of this, and much more

Of course, you will disagree that such can be termed a "war" if you are aware of these same details rather than the propaganda spread by Israeli and American government mouthpieces in the mainstream media. For example, when stating his belief that Israeli citizens were inherently more worthy than their Palestinian brothers and sisters (genetically speaking in large part) Olmert made the comparison between the people of Gaza and the inhabitants of the Israeli town of Sderot who, as stated, have been making a lot of noise about their suffering from qassam rockets fired by the palestinian resistance. The important details, which are as usual ignored by the mainstream press are that, in the 9 day period from June 14th - June 23rd this year, 14 innocent Palestinian civilians were murdered by the IDF as part of the effort to stop the firing of rockets at Sderot. Yet in the past 5 years, just 5 Israeli citizens have been killed by such rockets, despite the fact that dozens have been fired.

Derived from all of this is the obvious fact that, if the Israeli government was truly only concerned with protecting Israeli citizens and bore no visceral, racist hatred towards Palestinians, then we would surely be much further along the road to a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it is hard to convince anyone that your primary goal is defence when:

And all of this when:

Yet the Israeli government does a very good job of convincing the whole world that it is the victim in the conflict. How can this be? Israeli control of the press? Could that ubiquitous "conspiracy theory" actually be closer to a conspiracy fact? I don't really care, all I want is for someone to explain to me how, in a situation where there is massive evidence that 1.4 million completely isolated Palestinian civilians in the Gaza strip are being systematically murdered and starved by the state of Israel with its shiny 21st century military and all the tax dollars and support America can muster, yet somehow the entire world believes that those 1.4 million dispossessed are "evil terrorists" and "only have themselves to blame".

Somebody, please tell me how it comes to pass, if not by control of the mainstream press, and very significant control at that.

In fact, save yourself the bother, here's how it happened:

9 Israeli children’s deaths were reported in the headlines or first paragraphs of AP articles on the Israel/Palestine conflict in 2004, when 8 had actually occurred.

During the same period only 27 out of 179 Palestinian children’s deaths were reported. Additionally, Palestinian children made up a disproportionately large number of Palestinian deaths in general. Children’s deaths accounted for 21.8% of the Palestinians killed, while children’s deaths accounted for only 7.4% of Israelis killed during this period. 22 times more Palestinian children were killed than Israeli children.

AP reported on 113% of Israeli children’s deaths in headlines or first paragraphs, while reporting on only 15% of Palestinian children’s deaths. That is, Israeli children's deaths were reported at a rate 7.5 times greater than Palestinian children’s deaths.


You might want to consider this one also, and realise that, if the BBC "favors Israel", then American networks are positively "in love" with Israel:
BBC news 'favours Israel' at expense of Palestinian view

Dan Sabbagh,
Media Editor BBC News
May 3rd 2006

The BBC’S coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict implicitly favours the Israeli side, a study for the BBC Governors has concluded.

Deaths of Israelis received greater coverage than Palestinian fatalities, while Israelis received more airtime on news and current affairs programmes. The references to “identifiable shortcomings” surprised BBC News executives, who are more used to accusations that their coverage is routinely anti-Israel. [...]

Of course, the questions left unanswered are, "why" and "how".
Gaza power station destroyed by Israeli Air Force
In any case, within a few days of Olmert's remarks about his dear Palestinian neighbors, it was Olmert himself who clarified the situation by way of his response to the capture by the Palestinian resistance of a single Israeli soldier. As most readers are aware, on the morning of Sunday June 25th, Palestinian resistance fighters launched a legitimate attack on an Israeli army check point on the southern border of the Gaza strip. Enshrined in article four of the third Geneva convention is the right of a people to physically resist the invasion and occupation of their land by a foreign power. Nowhere in the world do we find a clearer example of unjust and illegal occupation and oppression of a land and its people than in the Israeli annexation and occupation of Palestine. Such IDF check points are an integral part of the Israeli military apparatus that is being used to terrorize and oppress the Palestinian people in the Gaza strip including the denial of basic provisions like food and water and as such are very obvious military targets. The Palestinian attack left 2 IDF soldiers dead with one, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, taken prisoner. Three Palestinian resistance fighters were also killed.

The Palestinians who are holding Cpl. Shalit have made it clear that they are doing so in an attempt to negotiate a prisoner exchange. Israel is currently detainng, or rather interning, thousands of Palestinians, many of them innocent civilians. Among them are women and small children. Indeed, the three militant groups who claimed responsibility for the capture of Cpl. Shalit have stated that they would release him in return for the release of Palestinian women and under-18s held in Israeli jails. Sounds like a reasonable offer, right? Well, hold on to your hats, because this one is really gonna shock you: Israel refused! Yes indeed, falling back on the old "we don't deal with terrorists" schtick, Olmert stated that there would be no negotiations - either Shalit is handed over, or the residents of the Gaza strip would suffer the dire consequences. Now, I know what you are thinking: Israeli politicians and military advisors don't want their precious soldier back, that they want to use him as an excuse to kill more Palestinians and maybe wage war on Syria. Heck, you might even be thinking that the Israeli military and government actually knew that an attack of this nature was planned, and allowed it to happen. To which I can only say: eh...yep, that's seems to be the measure of it, but please, be careful about using logic and critical thinking, it might get you in trouble.

The initial response by the Israeli government to the capture of Cpl. Shalit was to escalate the standoff and bomb the main power station and several bridges (two days ago) in Gaza, cutting off power and water to most of the 1.4 million people living there. Palestinian workers have said it may take up to 6 months to repair. No power, no water, for 6 months. But before you decide on the appropriateness or otherwise of such an 'opening salvo' that punished 1.4 million people in one go, including 700,000 children under 15 years of age, let me just update you on the conditions, imposed by Israel, in which Gazans were living even before this latest aggression

For close to 60 years, through its original and continuing theft and occupation of Palestinian land, the Israeli government has been in flagrant violation of international law. Repeatedly over that time, the Israeli army has, and continues to engage in what are clearly crimes against humanity in its attempts to utterly extinguish any form of Palestinian resistance and therefore the inherent right of the Palestinian people to oppose Israeli government barbarism and murder.

The forced migration and ethnic-cleansing of Palestinian civilians from their homes and property in 1948, referred to as the Nakba of Palestine, led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to neighboring countries and various countries around the globe. The State of Israel was established on Palestinian towns and villages that had been cleansed of their original inhabitants. Palestinian civilians were scattered and Palestinian refugees came to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria. Most of these refugees continue to live in refugee camps, including 8 camps in the Gaza Strip. These refugees lost their property, land, homes and livelihoods and were therefore subjected to a state of poverty, deprivation and exposure.

- 1967 constituted a continuation of the sequence of poverty and deprivation for Palestinians. IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) occupied the Gaza Strip and West Bank. This occupation was accompanied by uprooting of more Palestinians and the creation of more refugees. As a result, the state of poverty and deprivation was exacerbated.

- IDF imposed a number of policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including the annexation of Jerusalem. These policies included the issuing of a series of military orders that facilitated the confiscation of hundreds of thousands of dunums of Palestinian land and control of Palestinian resources, particularly water resources. These policies ensured Israeli control over the consumer and production sectors of the Palestinian economy, making it a market for Israeli products and a source of cheap labor. In addition, a heavy tax system was imposed, which led to a decrease in the income of Palestinians.

- The living standards of Palestinians decreased at the end of 1987 after the eruption of the popular uprising (Intifada) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This led to an increase in poverty among civilians. IDF imposed restrictions on Palestinian labor in the Israeli market, resulting in the loss of work for tens of thousands of laborers, who now joined in the ranks of the unemployed.

- In 1991, living standards in the Occupied Palestinian Territories deteriorated further due to outbreak of the Second Gulf War. A large number of Palestinians lost work in the region as a result. Many families depended on money transfers from expatriates, particularly those working in the Gulf states (Iraq). In addition, monetary transfers from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to the West Bank and Gaza Strip decreased due to the loss of funding from Gulf states.

- The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was established in 1994 after the signing of the Oslo accords between the PLO and the government of Israel. The accords were based on the Declaration of Principles signed in Washington in 1993. Palestinians were soon disappointed, however, when the economic prosperity expected from the peace agreement was not achieved, especially in light of international promises to establish a developed Palestinian economy. Contrary to promises made, IDF continued to strengthen its control over Palestinian natural resources, as well as control over all border crossings linking the Occupied Palestinian Territories to the outside world or to Israel, and control of the movement of goods and individuals.

- In 1996, IDF introduced policies of comprehensive closure and siege of Palestinian territory. IDF isolated the West Bank and Jerusalem from the Gaza Strip, depriving Palestinians of geographical contiguity. In addition, IDF prevented thousands of Palestinian laborers from reaching their work places in Israel, resulting in the increase of unemployment rates. The living standards of tens of thousands of Palestinian families deteriorated and poverty rates increased.

- On 29 September 2000, the "Al-Aqsa Intifada" erupted. Since then, IDF have imposed a comprehensive closure on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which has led to a halting of economic exchange and which has paralyzed economic and production sectors. More than 120,000 Palestinian laborers from the Occupied Palestinian Territories were prevented from reaching their workplaces inside Israel as a result of closure. In addition, thousands of Palestinians employed in the local market became unemployed due to the closure of workshops and factories, which were affected by the closure policy or were damaged/ destroyed by IDF. Unemployment rates reached unprecedented levels, which further exacerbated the poverty problem in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

- From September 2000 to the end of 2005, the number of Palestinian civilians killed by IDF and Israeli settlers reached 2,936, including 651 children and 106 women. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were injured. The injured included 8,662 injured people from the Gaza Strip, including hundreds who now suffer from permanent disabilities.

- IDF carried out extensive destruction of Palestinian property. This destruction included the bulldozing of agricultural land, demolition of agricultural and industrial establishments, as well as destruction of infrastructure. PCHR documented the bulldozing and uprooting of over 31,699 dunums of agricultural land in the Gaza Strip, comprising approximately 20% of the agricultural land in the Strip.

- IDF actions and the comprehensive closure affected the living standards of Palestinian families. Unemployment reached unprecedented levels, resulting in raised poverty rates. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) indicates that the percentage of Palestinian families living under the poverty line increased to more than 64% from the beginning of Al-Aqsa Intifada to April 2001, meaning that over two million Palestinians were living under the poverty line. The geographical distribution of these impoverished Palestinians was 55.7% in the West Bank and 81.4% in the Gaza Strip.[2]

- The Special UN Rapporteur on the Right to Food in the Occupied Palestinian Territories classified families living on brink of a humanitarian disaster. He indicated that the main reason behind this situation was the strict security procedures imposed by IDF on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, since the outbreak of Al-Aqsa Intifada on 29 September 2000. The Rapporteur indicated that acute malnutrition in the Gaza Strip was on the same scale as that seen in poor countries of the Southern Sahara Given the fertile nature of Palestinian land, such comparisons were startling.

More than 22% of Palestinian children under the age of 5 suffer from malnutrition, including 9.3% suffering from acute malnutrition, 13.2% suffering from chronic mal-nutrition and 15.6% suffering from acute anemia. It is expected that this will lead to long-term negative effects on the physical and cognitive development of many of these children. More than half of Palestinian families eat one meal a day only. Food consumption in Palestinian families dropped by 25-30% per person, especially protein intake. The number of Palestinians living under extreme poverty multiplied threefold since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

- PCBS also indicates that the percentage of families that face extreme difficulties in obtaining healthcare for children during the Intifada is 41%, 32.1% in the Gaza Strip and 44.6% in the West Bank. Anemic children in the 6-59 months age group, 41.6% face extreme difficulties in obtaining healthcare.

- International organizations, including humanitarian organizations working in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, foresee catastrophic humanitarian effects in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in general and the Gaza Strip in particular. World Bank estimates indicate that unemployment is expected to rise to 40% in 2006 and to 47% by 2008. The economic and social situation will be more acute in the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank, where unemployment and poverty rates are high and work is dependent on the PNA civilian and security branches. Some organizations estimate that unemployment in the Gaza Strip will reach 60%. Other estimates point to poverty rates in the Occupied Palestinian Territories rising to 67% in 2006 and to 74% by 2008.

- International organization data indicate that the policy of closure imposed by the Israeli government on the Occupied Palestinian Territories has led to the loss of nearly two-thirds of the international aid donated to Palestinians since the establishment of the PNA.

Israeli soldiers pray before entering Gaza

At present, having cut off electricity and water to a people already suffering terribly and who possess no effective means of defending their lives or the lives of their children, the Israeli military has begun shelling the Gaza strip. Palestinians have fled the areas being occupied by the Israeli military which is poised to launch a wholesale invasion of Gaza, during which, we can be sure, many Palestinians will be killed as "collateral damage" for which Mr Olmert will undoubtedly shed crocodile tears. At the same time, Olmert's government is apparently seeking to escalate the matter by ordering Israeli (American-financed) jets to overfly the home of Syrian President Assad in an act of unmitigated belligerence which, coincidentally occured just a few hours after U.S. ambassador to Israel, Richard Jones, stated that the problem behind the Israeli hostage crisis is in Syria, at the home of Hamas's exiled political supremo Khaled Meshaal, who Israel and America claim is being sheltered by the Syrians. The Syrians, for their part, activated their air defences and claim to have forced the Israeli jets to flee.

But before you start to think that there is more to this than meets the eye, I would like to remind you that the Israeli government would like to remind you that all of this is about one thing and one thing only - bringing a poor Israeli boy home to his parents. In saying this, I am not dismissing the life or plight of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, but as a soldier, he knew the risks involved, however small, in involving himself in the maintenance of the brutal oppression of the Palestinian people. In "war", however inappropriate that term is for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are soldiers and there are civilians. What Cpl. Shalit probably had not bargained for however, was that his life would be used by Israeli politicians in an opportunistic attempt to settle their regional and 'internal' problems once and for all.

What I want you to ask yourself is what the details of this conflict, and the current escalation over the capture of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, say about the value that Israeli politicians assign to the lives of Palestinian civilians, simply as a people, and what, if any, parallels with events in Europe from 1939-1945 come to mind.

I am also waiting on someone to explain to me what mechanism exists to ensure that these details are systematically denied to the international community, and how Israel is promoted in the mainstream press as the 'victim'. Before you decide, consider a relevant recent news story that you surely also somehow missed. It concerns Dana Olmert, the daughter of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who created a stir recently when she joined 200 demonstrators outside the Tel Aviv home of Dan Halutz, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, to protest the murder of those 14 Palestinian civilian adults and children who were accidentally murdered by the IDF as they went about their job of "fighting terrorism".

As an interesting aside on Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Dan Halutz; in August 2002, he ordered the Israeli airforce to drop a one tonne bomb on an occupied apartment block in Gaza where, he claimed, a Hamas member was living. The Hamas leader was killed, along with 14 innocent civilians. When hearing of this "collateral damage", Halutz told his top gun crew:

"Guys, you can sleep well at night. I also sleep well, by the way. You aren't the ones who choose the targets, and you were not the ones who chose the target in this particular case. You are not responsible for the contents of the target. Your execution was perfect. Superb. And I repeat again: There is no problem here that concerns you. You did exactly what you were instructed to do. You did not deviate from that by so much as a millimeter to the right or to the left. And anyone who has a problem with that is invited to see me."
When questioned by a reporter about the morality of the strike and about the feelings of a pilot when he drops a bomb, Halutz stated:
"That is not a legitimate question and it is not asked. But if you nevertheless want to know what I feel when I release a bomb, I will tell you: I feel a light bump to the plane as a result of the bomb's release. A second later it's gone, and that's all. That is what I feel."

There you have it then. To the Israeli oligarchs, the death of Palestinian civilians is "superb", and they feel nothing when they kill women and children. What more can I say - either someone does something about these sick pyschopaths, or they, and their kind in Washington and around the world, will destroy us all.
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How to Destroy the Middle East


Israeli planes strike Palestinian Interior Ministry

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-30 06:39:11

GAZA, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Apache attack helicopters fired two missiles at the headquarters of the Palestinian Interior Ministry in Gaza City on late Thursday night, Palestinian witnesses said.
No casualties were reported and the ministry building was empty at the time of the airstrike, said the witnesses, adding that the building was set on fire and sustained severe damages.

The Interior Ministry is headed by senior Hamas member Saeed Siam.

Meanwhile, Israeli military planes fired another two missiles at an office in downtown Gaza City, which belonged to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement, said Palestinian witnesses.

Some damages were caused to the building but there was no report of any casualties, the witnesses added.

The Israeli army has confirmed the two strikes.

In addition, Palestinian security sources said that two other missiles hit an area near the only power plant in the Gaza Strip,which was located south of Gaza City, causing no casualties.

The power plant was destroyed in an Israeli air raid on early Wednesday, leading to a blackout in most areas of the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli army on Thursday pressed ahead a broad ground operation into the Gaza Strip in a bid to rescue an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Palestinian militants on Sunday.

The operation, launched on early Wednesday, is the first of its kind since Israel withdrew troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip nearly a year ago after 38 years of occupation.



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Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) Carry Out Reprisals against Palestinian Civilians in the West Bank

Report, PCHR, 29 June 2006


PCHR strongly condemns the IOF detention of Palestinian Cabinet Ministers, including the Deputy Prime Minister, and legislative council members from the "Change and Reform" party, affiliated with Hamas. The Centre views these detentions as a form of reprisal against Palestinian civilians and a form of collective punishment prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Centre calls upon the international community, particularly the High Contracting Parties of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to force IOF to respect the convention, which bars reprisals against protected persons, as stipulated in Article 33. The Centre calls upon the High Contracting Parties to enforce Article 3, regarding adherence to the convention and respecting its stipulations, and to take appropriate actions against the serious violations being perpetrated.
PCHR's preliminary investigation indicates that in the early morning hours of Thursday, 29 June 2006, IOF conducted a number of incursions throughout the West Bank, excluding Jericho however. IOF surrounded the places of residence of a number of Palestinian Cabinet Ministers and members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) from the Change and Reform Party. These forces detained nine cabinet ministers, twenty-one PLC members and a number of Hamas political leaders.

The detained Cabinet Ministers are:
# Naser El-Deen El-Sha'er, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education
# Omar Abdel Raziq, Minister of Finance;
# Samir Abu Eisha, Minister of Planning and International Cooperation;
# Khaled Abu Arafa, Minister of Jerusalem Affairs;
# Wasfi Qabha, Minister of Prisoners' Affairs;
# Issa El-Ja'bari, Minister of Local Government;
# Fakhri Torokman, Minister of Social Affairs;
# Nayef El-Rajoub, Minister of Waqf and Religious Affairs; and
# Mohammad El-Barghouthi, Minister of Labor.

The detained PLC members are:
# Hebron: Basem Ahmad Moussa Za'arir, Khalil Moussa Khalil Beb'ei, Samir Saleh Ibrahim El-Qadi, Mohammad Ismail Othman El-Tal, Mohammad Motlaq Abdel Mahdi abu J'heisha, and Mohammad Maher Yousef Bader.
# Bethlehem: Anwar Mohammad Abdel Rahman El-Zoboun and Mahmoud Dawood Mahmoud El-Khatib.
# Jerusalem: Wa'el Mohammad Abdel Fattah Abdel Rahman (El-Husseini), Mohammad Mahmoud Abu Tir, and Ahmad Mohammad Ahmad Attoun.
# Nablus: Hosni Mohammad Ahmad Bourini, Reyad Ali Mostafa Amli, and Yser Suliman Dawoud Mansour. IOF raided the house of PLC member Ahmad Ali Ahmad in Ein El-Ma' refugee camp, but did not find him there.
# Jenin: Ibrahim Mohammad Saleh Dahbour, Khalek Suliman Fayez Abu Hasan, and Khaled (Sa'id) Abed Abdallah Yehya.
# Tulkarm: Reyad Mahmoud Sa'id Radad and Fathi Mohammad Ali Qarawi.
# Qalqilya: Imad Mahmoud Rajeh Nofal
# Salfit: Naser Abdallah Odeh Abdel Jawwad.

PCHR condemns these detentions, which came following the Israeli government's threat to assassinate and detain Hamas political leaders, after the military operation against the Israeli military outpost in Kerem Shalom on Sunday, 25 June 2006. PCHR:
# Affirms that these detentions are a form of reprisal and collective punishment;
# Affirms that these detentions are part of a plan to undermine the democratically elected government and PLC;
# Reiterates the position that Israel is intent on implementing unilateral steps to complete the construction of the Annexation Wall and confiscate more than half the area of the West Bank. Targeting the new Palestinian government underlines the intention of Israel to continue to disregard and undermine the Palestinian leadership;
# Reiterates the call to the International Community to take immediate steps to provide protection to the civilian population, in accordance with International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law, and to work to prevent further deterioration in the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.


The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) is an independent legal body based in Gaza City dedicated to protecting human rights, promoting the rule of law and upholding democratic principles in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It holds Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations and is an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, the Fédération Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l'Homme (FIDH), and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. PCHR is a recipient of the 1996 French Republic Award for Human Rights.




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Israeli Planes Pound Gaza Targets

Friday June 30, 2006 11:46 AM
By IBRAHIM BARZAK
Associated Press Writer

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Israel destroyed the office of the Palestinian interior minister in a series of airstrikes Friday, increasing the pressure on the Hamas government to release a kidnapped soldier a day after it delayed a broad ground offensive into the Gaza Strip.

Also Friday, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said that Israel's offensive in Gaza was part of a premeditated plan to bring down the Hamas-led government.

Israel's air force has struck more than 30 targets in Gaza - including the Palestinian Interior Ministry - in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants on Sunday.
Haniyeh said the military offensive was not only about rescuing the soldier, but also crippling Hamas, which has refused to renounce violence since being swept to power in January parliamentary elections.

Meanwhile, Israel's air force struck more than 30 targets in Gaza over 24 hours, hitting roads, bridges and power plants. The army also fired hundreds of artillery shells in the offensive to force Hamas-linked militants to release Cpl. Gilad Shalit, 19. He was captured Sunday when Gaza militants tunneled under the border, attacking an Israeli outpost and killing two other soldiers.

While thousands of troops massed along both sides of the Israel-Gaza border waiting for the go-ahead for an invasion, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said militants had agreed to Shalit's conditional release, but that Israel had not accepted the terms. Mubarak did not specify the terms.

Israeli officials said they did not know of such an offer. But a senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the secrecy of the diplomacy, said a planned ground offensive had been delayed due to a request by Egypt that mediators be given a chance to resolve the crisis.

Other officials, however, denied the delay was due to Egypt, saying it reflected Israel's overall management of the crisis, which they said required withholding force when necessary.

"The prime minister is managing the campaign while seeing all the balances, including the diplomatic one,'' said Tzahi Hanegbi, head of the Israeli parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee. "He needs to see the big picture, and the big picture is that there is a meaning to sometimes waiting a half a day, or a day. You need to exhaust all options.''

The pre-dawn missile attack on the Interior Ministry scored a direct hit on Interior Minister Said Siyam's fourth floor office, which went up in flames. The ground floor office of Siyam's bodyguard was also destroyed, while the first, second and third floors of the buildings - where passports and ID cards are printed - were not damaged. Nobody was hurt.

In a separate airstrike, three Israeli missiles hit the office of hard-line Interior Ministry official Khaled Abu Ilal, who heads a pro-Hamas militia.

The army said it also attacked a cell that attempted to fire an anti-tank missile at Israeli forces in southern Gaza. Mohammed Abdel Al, 25, a local leader of the Islamic Jihad militant group, died early Friday of wounds he suffered in the strike. His death was the first in Israel's three-day-old offensive.

In a gunbattle in the Jebaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, three Fatah-affiliated gunmen were wounded in what they said was a fight against undercover Israeli forces. Israel denied it had any ground forces in the area.

Israeli ground troops have entered southern Gaza but have not yet penetrated the north.

The Interior Ministry is nominally in charge of the Palestinian security forces, but President Mahmoud Abbas has stripped it of much of its authority in a power struggle with Hamas. The Israeli military said it targeted the ministry because it was "a meeting place to plan and direct terror activity.''

Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz called for leaders with influence over the Hamas government to pressure them to release Shalit.

"The quicker this is done the better it will be. If the soldier will be returned and the Qassam fire will be halted we will also return our soldiers to their bases,'' Peretz was quoted as saying in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot on Friday. He was referring to rockets militants have fired at Israel from Gaza.

Palestinian Foreign Ministry spokesman Taher al-Nunu said the Palestinian government was still seeking a "diplomatic solution to end the crisis.''

There has been no word on Shalit's condition since his abduction. The Popular Resistance Committees, one of the groups holding him, insisted Thursday on swapping him for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, but Israel rejected that demand.

Palestinian police and members of the Hamas militia guarding the Foreign Ministry fled after the attack on the nearby Interior Ministry, fearing their building would be next, witnesses said. The office of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Abbas' house are less than half a mile from the Interior Ministry.

Haniyeh and nearly all the members his Hamas-led Cabinet have not been seen since Shalit's kidnapping, fearing they could be killed or arrested. Israel arrested 64 Hamas officials in the West Bank on Thursday, including eight Cabinet members.

In an unprecedented punishment Friday, the Israeli interior ministry also revoked the Jerusalem residency rights of four senior Hamas officials, officials said. The measure takes away their right to live in the holy city and travel within Israel freely.

Decoy convoys have been sent out ahead of any trips by Haniyeh, Siyam and Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar, who apparently fear Israel's air force will target and kill them as it did Hamas leaders Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi in 2004.

About 2,500 people attended a Hamas rally in Gaza City on Thursday evening, denouncing Israel and calling for more abductions.

Palestinian militants launched homemade rockets Thursday night, and four landed inside Israel, causing no damage or injuries, the army said. Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a militant group affiliated with Abbas' Fatah, claimed responsibility.



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Gaza invasion targets civilian infrastructure

Press Release, Christian Aid, 29 June 2006

Israeli tanks have invaded the Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip, following the capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants on Sunday.

This comes at the end of a month during which 34 Palestinian civilians have been killed in Gaza in Israeli military attacks or 'targeted assassinations' of suspected militants. This includes 10 children.

Christian Aid condemns all violent actions and believes that without an end to violence by all sides there will be no security, no end to poverty and no peace.
Last night Israel also hit a power station which supplies 65% of Gaza's electricity and also the water pumping station.

William Bell, Christian Aid's senior policy officer responsible for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said: 'Christian Aid partners in Gaza are telling us how people are rushing to buy dwindling supplies of bottled water, that tomorrow there will be very little bread available in Gaza as the ovens will not be working and that stocks of petrol and gas remain scarce.

'The message to the civilian population of Gaza could not be clearer - collective punishment is part of Israel's military strategy.

'This is in addition to the internal security chaos that exists in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the lack of Palestinian Authority control.

'Israel, in the name of security, has imposed lengthy closures on the strip which has frustrated any meaningful commercial activity and caused regular shortages of essential supplies.'

Mr Bell said Christian Aid implored the international community to recognise that 'we are facing a humanitarian crisis that is deteriorating at an alarming pace and to respond accordingly.

'Since the election of Hamas in January this year, international aid from the EU and US governments has been suspended. Therefore, the beleaguered population cannot rely on their government to provide essential humanitarian assistance,' he said

'By the weekend it is estimated that water will be in dangerously short supply and that essential foods will be unavailable. After only 24 hours of a military invasion and siege on a civilian population the humanitarian impact is looking perilous.'


Christian Aid is an agency of the churches of the UK and Ireland committed to anti-poverty work. Formed in 1945, Christian Aid today works with church partners, the ecumenical family and sister agencies as well as with alliances of other faiths and secular groups in order to end poverty.



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Gaza hospitals without power

By Motasem Dalloul in Gaza
Friday 30 June 2006, 8:41 Makka Time, 5:41 GMT

Nearly 700,000 Palestinians have been living without electric power since Israel aerial bombed Gaza's only power station earlier in the week.

In addition to plunging the area into darkness, the Wednesday night bombardment also knocked out power to hospitals and clinics.
Sameh Hassan, a witness who could see the power station from his home, said: "After the initial bombing of the station, Palestinian firefighters managed to put out the blaze.

"Then the station was struck again.

"Every time they found the firemen had put out the fire, they repeated their bombing runs," Hassan said.

Israeli warplanes targeted sites in Gaza as a show of force ahead of its incursion into the Gaza Strip to retrieve an Israeli soldier captured at the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Gaza on Sunday.

Medical needs

But the loss of electric power means many Palestinians will be unable to access medical care dependent on an energy source.

Khalid Radi, the spokesman of the ministry of health, told Aljazeera.net: "Al-Shifaa hospital, the main and largest hospital in the Gaza Strip and many clinics in the Strip are now without power which will result in a shortage of generated oxygen.

"In addition, the loss of power will also adversely affect kidney patients whose dialysis and other equipment run on electricity only."

Palestinian doctors will be unable to perform critical surgery and other operations.


Huda Saady, a kidney patient at Al-Shifaa told Aljazeera.net: "I wash my kidney two times a week. I can't skip one week without washing according to the doctors' prescription."

Collective punishment

Raji al-Sorani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, says the targeting of the power station is tantamount to collective punishment for all who live in Gaza.

"It is a violation of the first, second and third articles of the Geneva Conventions. However, targeting the infrastructure isn't a way to free the Israeli soldier, but to topple the Hamas government."

Other rights activists say that power loss will likely lead to the spoiling of foods in refrigerated warehouses and in civilian homes, particularly as temperatures continue to rise in the summer months.

Restoring power is expected to take six months. The power cut is also affecting water supplies which use electricity to pump water.

Khalil Abu-Shamaleh, director of Al-Dameer Human Rights Centre, said in a news conference in Gaza on Thursday: "Targeting the infrastructure is habitual for the Israelis.

"The concept of security in the Israeli mind has been known since the beginning of the occupation until these days; uprooting trees, demolishing homes and destroying infrastructure under the pretext of keeping security."



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Israel revokes Jerusalem residency of four Hamas officials

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-30 17:28:52

ERUSALEM, June 30 (Xinhua) -- Israel has revoked the Jerusalem residency of four Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) officials,including a cabinet minister and three lawmakers, after they refused to meet Israeli demands to quit the ruling group, official sources said on Friday.
They, however, denied that withdrawing the residencies of the Hamas officials was related to an ongoing operation to rescue an Israeli soldier snatched by Palestinian militants on Sunday.

The decision had nothing to do with Israel's efforts to increase pressure on Hamas in order to secure the release of the abducted Gilad Shalit, said an Interior Ministry spokeswoman.

On May 29, Israel gave the four officials 30 days to quit the group or resign their seats, warning them to face expulsion from east Jerusalem if they failed to meet the conditions.The four facing expulsion are Jerusalem affairs minister Khaled Abu Arafeh and lawmakers Mohammed Abu Teir, Ahmed Attun and Mohammed Totah.

At least one of the lawmakers was among dozens arrested in a swift raid carried out by Israel forces in the West Bank on Thursday, according to the official sources.



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Israel 'delays' Gaza invasion after seizing Hamas officials

Last Updated Thu, 29 Jun 2006 05:45:04 EDT
CBC News

Israel will delay launching a ground invasion of the northern Gaza strip as part of the military effort to win the release of an abducted soldier, security officials say.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the officials in Jerusalem quoted Defence Minister Amir Peretz as raising the possibility of trying to resolve the crisis with diplomacy. The officials gave no further details.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said in a newspaper interview that Palestinian militants have agreed to a conditional release of that captured Israeli soldier. But there's no reaction yet from Israel.

Israeli land forces are massed along the border with northern Gaza. There is no word on the fate of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who was seized by militants who tunnelled into Israeli territory from Gaza on Sunday.

Earlier Thursday, eight Palestinian cabinet ministers and 56 other officials of Hamas were rounded up by Israeli soldiers who crossed into the Gaza in the southern sector.

An Israeli army spokesperson said that the officials were not being used as bargaining chips but were taken to await charges in connection with recent attacks against Israel.

In another development, Israeli troops confirmed they had found the body of settler Eliahu Asheri near Ramallah. Military sources told the Agence France-Presse news agency that he had been killed with a bullet to the head and then buried.

Asheri had been missing since Sunday. The Palestinian Resistance Committees later presented identification they said belonged to the 18-year-old and threatened to kill him if Israel continued to attack targets in Gaza.

Israeli air strikes have destroyed bridges to cut Gaza into sections, making it harder for militants to move the captured soldier around. A power station was hit and the Israelis say there is more to come.

The Palestinian militants have demanded the release of women and youths under 18 currently held by Israel in exchange for Shalit, but Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has repeatedly said Israel won't negotiate.

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy condemned the arrest of the Hamas members on Thursday, repeating the country's stance since the abduction of Shalit - who also holds French citizenship - that diplomacy is a better option.

There have been no deaths or injuries reported in the Israeli air strikes and ground incursion this week, but there is concern the loss of power and damaged water pipes in parts of Gaza will further depress the region, which is already suffering economically.

The UN envoy for the Middle East peace process, Alvaro De Soto said there was an "emergency" in Gaza and called on Israel to allow crucial supplies through its military lines.

In Damascus, Syria condemned an incursion by at least two Israeli war planes into its airspace on Wednesday. The jets flew over the summer residence of President Bashar al-Assad.

Israel accuses Syria of support for the leadership of Hamas.



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Haneya vows not to change position despite Israeli detention of ministers

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-30 18:25:47

GAZA, June 30 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haneya vowed on Friday that his government will not fall and will not change its position despite Israeli detention of his ministers and Palestinian lawmakers.




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Israel denies tactical role of arrests

Thursday 29 June 2006, 13:56 Makka Time, 10:56 GMT

The Israeli army has denied it arrested Palestinian government ministers in an attempt to pressure the Palestinian Resistance Committees group into releasing an Israeli soldier kidnapped by them on Sunday.


Mark Regev, the Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, said the arrests were "due to the fact that Hamas over the last few weeks has escalated terror attacks against Israel".

Jacob Dalal, an army spokesman, said: "They are not being used as bargaining chips. These are people with terrorist records, with allegations and charges pending against them."

An army spokeswoman said the ministers would be investigated, brought before a judge, their detention extended and charge sheets prepared.

During raids in Ram Allah and Jerusalem early on Thursday, at least eight Hamas cabinet ministers were detained.

Israeli troops detained five of the ministers at the same Ram Allah hotel, Aljazeera reported.

Some were led away blindfolded and in handcuffs, Palestinian security sources said.

Palestinian officials said Umar Abd al-Raziq, the Palestinian finance minister, and at least seven other cabinet members, along with nearly 20 Hamas legislators in operations across the West Bank were detained.

Israel said 64 Hamas officials in all were taken into custody during the West Bank operation.

In a sign of worsening relations between Israelis and Palestinians, a planned summit between Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has been cancelled.

Abbas condemned the arrests of the Hamas politicians and called on Western powers to intervene to "restore democracy".

Leaflet drop

The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) group, which claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of Corporal Gilad Shalit during a raid on an Israeli army post, said: "Olmert and [defence minister] Amir Peretz will be entirely responsible for the life of the kidnapped soldier if the aggression continues."

Palestinians lined up at public water fountains to fill up jugs after a second night of power cuts, under Israeli military pressure that has sparked fears of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

"When the Israelis come, maybe we'll be stuck in our homes for God knows how long," says Isra Abu Anza, a 16-year-old girl standing in a queue at one of the fountains.

"We need to drink, to wash, to bathe."

An Israeli missile destroyed a crucial power station late on Tuesday. In Rafah, which relied on the destroyed power plant for half of its daily energy needs, residents are now left without power for much of the day.

The Israeli military continued to prepare for a ground assault on parts of Gaza.

In preparation for the offensive, Israel dropped leaflets on northern Gaza urging residents to avoid areas troops may single out for attack.

Israeli aircraft fired missiles at the southern Gaza Strip on Thursday, with the military saying it aimed at open areas, and Palestinian medical officials saying a car was hit.



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Zionism in Action


Major Israeli websites hacked

Gal Mor, Ehud Kinan

More than 750 Israeli websites hacked in recent hours. Among them: Soldier's Treasury Bank, Rambam Hospital, and Globus Group ticket center. Hackers: You're killing Palestinians, we're killing servers
Unprecedented number of Israeli websites hacked: Hundreds of websites were damaged by hackers in recent hours, following IDF activity in the Gaza Strip. The hackers are members of the Moroccan "Team Evil" group, responsible for most of the website damage in Israel in the past year. This is the largest, most concentrated attack on Israeli websites in recent years.

A Ynet investigation revealed that more than 750 Israeli websites, on a number of different domains, were hacked into and damaged in recent days. Prominent among them were the Soldier's Treasury Bank, Bank Hapoalim (not the main page), Rambam Hospital, the Society for Culture and Housing, BMW Israel, Subaru Israel, Jump Fashion, non-profit organization "Yedid," Kadima's youth website, and the Globus Group ticket center. Many of these sites have not yet returned to normal.

Hackers left the message: You're killing Palestinians, we're killing servers.

Early on Wednesday, the IDF began operation "Summer Rains" in Gaza: Forces entered the southern end of the strip, adjacent to the
point of Cpl. Gilad Shavit's kidnap. The air force attacked a power station and blacked out areas of Gaza. Three bridges were bombed in central Gaza, in order to prevent movement of the kidnapped soldier.

Many Israeli websites are hacked every day - most of these are small sites, with inadequate information security. It is significantly different when the sites are ones of large companies, who have adequate defenses from this sort of attack.

Past success of Team Evil

In the past, Team Evil succeeded in hacking into several sites of medium-sized but recognized Israeli companies. In April, they hit tens of sites, including those of the "Shilav" children's store, "The Blue Square" supermarket and McDonald's.

The group's spokesman previously told Ynet that "we are a group of Moroccan hackers that hack into sites as part of the resistance in the war with Israel. We attack Israeli sites every day. This is our duty...hacking is not a crime."

Added another group member: "We want Israel to stop fighting. Stop killing children and we'll stop hacking." According to the spokesman, the group's members are all Moroccan youths, under the age of 20.

The increase in hacking of websites following military operations is a well-known phenomenon, in Israel and in the rest of the world. A similar increase was seen in attacks on both Israeli and Arab websites in the first days of the second intifada, pursuant to military operations that took place in Gaza, Judea and Samaria at that time.



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Irish MP: Israel an "abhorrent and despicable" regime

Press Release, Sinn Féin, 30 June 2006

Statement issued by Aengus Ó Snodaigh Sinn Fein member in the Irish parliament and his party's spokesman on international affairs and human rights

Sinn Féin International Affairs and Human Rights spokesperson Aengus Ó Snodaigh TD has described Israel as "one of the most abhorrent and despicable regimes on the planet." Questioning the Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern in the Dáil today he said the kidnap by Israel of some 25 democratically elected Palestinian representatives demonstrates "the true nature of Israel's commitment to not so democratic principles."
He said, "Israel is without doubt one of the most abhorrent and despicable regimes on the planet. According to the UN Secretary General for Political Affairs, in the month prior to the capture of the Israeli soldier by Palestinians at least 49 Palestinians, including 11 children, were killed by Israeli forces and 259 injured. A ground assault on Gaza began yesterday involving tanks, bulldozers, thousands of troops undercover of air fire and the demolition of key pieces of civilian infrastructure including bridges and Gaza's electric power plant. The bombardment of civilian infrastructure amounts to collective punishment and a crime against humanity and the abduction and imprisonment by Israel of some 25 democratically elected Palestinian representatives demonstrates the true nature of Israel's commitment to not so democratic principles.

"Minister Ahern must clarify whether the Department of Foreign Affairs approves of the use of Shannon for the transfer of helicopters or any military apparatus to Israel. He must also indicate if he agrees that the role played by this state in the sale and transfer of arms and military apparatus to human rights abusers is absolutely unacceptable and must cease immediately and what steps he will take to ensure this ceases."

"The death of the Israeli settler is deeply regrettable and I would call on the Palestinians who are holding the Israeli soldier not to harm him."



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Israeli Offensive Called Premeditated Plan

Friday June 30, 2006 11:46 AM
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -

On Friday, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said that Israel's offensive in Gaza was part of a premeditated plan to bring down the Hamas-led government.

Israel's air force has struck more than 30 targets in Gaza - including the Palestinian Interior Ministry - in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants on Sunday.

Haniyeh said the military offensive was not only about rescuing the soldier, but also crippling Hamas, which has refused to renounce violence since being swept to power in January parliamentary elections.

"This total war is proof of a premeditated plan,'' he said.
Haniyeh also urged followers at a mosque in Gaza City to remain steadfast despite Israel's arrest of 64 Hamas officials in the West Bank on Thursday. Though Haniyeh did not directly address Israel's demand that Palestinian militants hand over the soldier, he implied that the government would not trade him for the arrested officials.

"When they kidnaped the ministers they meant to hijack the government's position, but we say no positions will be hijacked, no governments will fall,'' he said.



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Acts of war: Middle East on edge

Ed O'Loughlin Herald Correspondent in Gaza and agencies
June 30, 2006

AS THE crisis over a captured Israeli soldier lurches towards disaster, the Israeli Government has seized most of the political leadership of the Palestinian Authority - a move that poses a deadly threat to the last shreds of the Oslo peace process.
In night raids across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israeli troops rounded up most of the ministers and MPs representing the non-Gaza wing of the Palestinian ruling party, Hamas.

Hamas has described the raids as an act of "open war against the Palestinian Government and people" and said Israel would have to face the consequences.

Israeli spokesmen have denied that the Hamas leaders - reported to number 64, including most of the Ramallah-based cabinet - were seized as bargaining chips for the release of 19-year-old Corporal Gilad Shalit, captured by Palestinian fighters in a raid on the edge of Gaza on Sunday.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry official, Mark Regev, said Hamas was formally regarded as a terrorist organisation in Israel, the US, the European Union and Australia and that its leaders would be brought before an Israeli judge and charged with terrorist offences.

"If the government of the Palestinian Authority says it's OK to send rockets into Israel, to kidnap Israelis, to behave like terrorists, then they will be treated like terrorists," he said.

Israel's move against the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is only the most serious of a number of grave developments threatening to escalate an already fraught situation into all-out war and humanitarian disaster.

Yesterday Israel launched an air strike on a car in Gaza City carrying a senior Islamic Jihad militant, who survived the attack, Palestinian sources said. The Israeli Army said it had targeted a vehicle, but gave no details about who it believed was inside.

An explosion was also reported in Gaza City near the headquarters of a key security agency loyal to the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, witnesses said.

On Wednesday Israeli jets buzzed the summer palace of Syria's President, Bashar Assad, driving home Israel's threat to assassinate Hamas leaders at large in Gaza and in exile in Syria. Syria said its air defences fired on the aircraft without hitting them.

Early yesterday Israeli troops found the body of a murdered 18-year-old Jewish settler - Eliyahu Asheri, who is the son of an Australian immigrant - abducted by Palestinian militants in the West Bank on Sunday.

In Gaza, meanwhile, militants belonging to the mainstream Fatah military wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, claim to have fired a chemical-tipped missile into Israel for the first time.

The Israeli Army said it had no information to support the claim, but it was likely to increase the pressure for an Israeli crackdown in the Beit Hanoun area of northern Gaza, from where most of the missiles are fired.

During the night, Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets warning residents that the area faced increased bombardment.

Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has said that Israel will not negotiate to release Corporal Shalit and will take "extreme actions" if he is not freed.

"Our aim is not to mete out punishment but to apply pressure so the soldier will be freed," he said. "We want to create a new equation: freeing the abducted soldier in return for lessening the pressure on the Palestinians."

Over the past 48 hours, Israeli attacks - including artillery bombardments, tank incursions and the destruction of two bridges and the strip's only power station - have left 700,000 people without power and threaten to cut off water to 1.3 million Gazans.

The actions have been condemned as "collective punishment" by human rights groups and by the British Foreign Office.

Mr Rejev rejected the allegations, saying that in warfare civilian infrastructure is a "legitimate target". He said the attack on the power station, like the destruction of two bridges, was designed to make it more difficult for Corporal Shalit's captors to move him from place to place.

Militants want Israel to free more than 8000 Palestinian prisoners in return for the corporal.

Palestinians said their attacks were in response to an Israeli blockade that has plunged the enclave into poverty and led to a big increase in civilian deaths.

Comment: Give us a break! The Oslo peace process has been dead for years. Israel never had any intention to come to peace with the Palestinians. Sure in the late 90's there was a glimmer of hope. The violence had calmed down. However, in the background, the Israelis were preparing the attacks of 9/11. They were biding their time, knowing that after they attacked the US and blamed it on "Arab terrorists", the "peace process" would be an irritant of the past.

And so it has been.

Israel is not interested in peace. They want to erase the Palestinians from the map. They want to drive them out or kill those who won't leave. What else has to happen to make that clear? When has Israel ever made a concrete concession? It has never happened and it will never happen, but that won't prevent the media from spewing forth Israeli propaganda, from the US insisting that "Israel has the right to defend itself" -- more Orwellian language twisting.

The fate of the Palestinians is a symbol of the fate of the world at the hands of the psychopaths who are running the show. The fate of the Palestinians is the fate that awaits us all for allowing them to be slaughtered, starved, and eliminated.

But discuss the role of Israel in the events of 9/11??? Horrors! That's anti-Semitism! Forget the Israeli spying on the United States. Forget the Israel Lobby.

No, go back to sleep, and, hopefully, if you are still asleep, then when they come for you, you'll not notice a thing.


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One-sided history in the Middle East

Left I on the News
June 29, 2006

Here's the New York Times' take on why Israel has decided to move against Hamas, arresting dozens of its leaders:

The Israelis cited Hamas's firing of Qassam rockets beginning this month, its public declaration that the cease-fire with Israel was over and its open involvement in the raid into Israeli territory early Sunday that resulted in the deaths of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a wounded corporal, Gilad Shalit, 19.
Any hint as to why Hamas declared an end to its 16-month self-imposed ceasefire, any mention of the Israeli firing of missiles and the murder of dozens of Palestinian civilians in the last few weeks, any hint about the thousands of Israeli shells fired into Gaza during the period which preceded the capture of Shalit, is totally, utterly, 100% missing from the New York Times account. Not a word.




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Olmert said to be at odds with military over Gaza plans

30 June 2006

Reported differences of opinion between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the military leadership have led to the suspension of a planned land offensive in the north of the Gaza Strip, according to local media. Olmert is said to have rejected a proposal by the general staff to launch a major operation in the Beit Hanun area that would put an end to rocket attacks on Israel.
Media said a probably high level of Palestinian civilian casualties was the reason for his decision.

The suspension will also give more time for negotiations to secure the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier seized last Sunday during a Palestinian attack.

Two other soldiers were killed in the attack.

The present crisis is being seen as the first major test for Olmert who, unlike his predecessor Ariel Sharon, does not have a prestigious military record.



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Saban buys US TV company

Nimrod Avraham

Univision Communications, which broadcasts in Spanish, agrees to Saban Group's USD 12 billion offer, 13 percent premium on the share's stock market price
Univision Communications, the largest Spanish-broadcasting television company in the US, agreed to a USD 12.3 billion purchase offer from the Saban Group, led by American-Israeli billionaire Haim Saban.

The deal, equivalent to USD 36.25 per share, represents a 13 percent premium on the share's stock market price. The Saban Group, which is also acquiring the company's USD 1.4 billion worth of debt, includes the companies of Madison Dearborn, Providence Equity, Texas Pacific Group and Thomas Lee.

The Saban group upped their previous offer of USD 35.50 per share, in order to outbid competitors such a Grupo Television. With the purchase of Univision Communications, the group is acquiring the Univision and TeleFutura television stations, together constituting an 80 percent chunk of the fastest growing television market in the United States and dwarfing rivals like NBC Universal's Telmondo and TV Azteca's Azteca America. Univision Communications also contains Galvision, the largest Spanish-language radio network in the US, with 69 radio stations.

Univision CEO, Gerald Francio (75), put the company up for sale in February, hoping to receive USD 40 per share. The sales announcement was almost pulled off the table when Mexico City Television, the largest Spanish broadcast television channel in the world, lost four partners and wasn't able to extend a purchase offer. The company is partners with Baine Capital and Cascade Investments (Bill Gates' investment company). The four partners who left the company, due to differences of opinion regarding the company's prices, were Carlyle, Blackstone, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co, and Newvision Investments.

Saban postpones visit to Israel

Eventually, Mexico City Television did extend an offer, higher than Saban's original bid, but the Saban group upped their offer and won.

Haim Saban was scheduled to arrive in Israel this week, to participate in a director's meeting for the Bezeq Corporation, of which he has partial control, and a director's meeting for Channel 2 Keshet, where he owns 24 percent of the company's stocks.

Pursuant to the deal with Univision, Saban postponed his visit to Israel, which caused the director's meetings of the two companies to be postponed by a week. Currently, however, it seems that Saban will not arrive in Israel in a week's time or any time before August. To replace him at the meetings, he will most likely send Adam Chesnoff, a former Israeli and the president and CEO of Saban Capital Group, who was also involved in closing the current deal.



Comment from Jeff Blankfort: There are those who are skeptical when the subject of zionist ownership or influence in the media comes up, but in the case of Haim Saban, it can't be ignored. The Israeli Saban, a major funder of AIPAC and a close friend of Ehud Barak, already owns 77% of the largest German TV conglomerate and now he has purchased the largest Spanish-language broadcasting company in the US which, one can be assured, will deliver a pro-Israel message to its many listeners. Saban evidently likes the numbers, 1, 2 and 3. In 2002, he donated $12.3 million to the Democratic Party and here he bought Univision for $12,3 billion.

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Land of the Free


US President determined to try detainees

The World Today - Friday, 30 June , 2006 12:20:00
Reporter: Kim Landers

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: The Bush administration is now trying to craft an alternative way of dealing with the Guantanamo Bay detainees after the Supreme Court blocked the military tribunals.

The court ruled that the President overstepped his authority in setting up the tribunals, warning that he did not have a "blank cheque".

It's being interpreted as a stinging rebuke to the President's wartime powers.

Yet George W. Bush is vowing to press ahead, indicating he'll seek approval from Congress to put many of the detainees on trial.

Washington Correspondent Kim Landers reports.

KIM LANDERS: For the Bush administration it's back to the drawing board.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the military commissions convened to try detainees like Australian David Hicks lack the power to proceed and that the Bush administration had no blank cheque to decide how to try terror suspects.

The five-three decision was triggered by the case of Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni man who was Osama bin Laden's former driver.

His lawyer, Neal Katyal, says the ruling shows the Guantanamo Bay tribunals are un-American.

NEAL KATYAL: This was a system that the President controlled from top to bottom. He wrote all the rules, defined all of the offences, hand-picked the judges, and it's just, at bottom it's just fundamentally un-American.

KIM LANDERS: Not everyone agrees.

Charles Samp is from the Washington Legal Foundation, which supported the Bush administration's case.

CHARLES SAMP: The decision today is a travesty in terms of the way that the court has decided to establish itself as a super-military authority and has second-guessed the views not only of the executive branch but also of Congress.

KIM LANDERS: The question now is how, when and where the Bush administration might pursue its case against the 10 foreign terror suspects who've been charged. And that's proving difficult to decipher.

White House counsellor Dan Bartlett says it's a simple technical task. The administration has to design military tribunals that'd pass muster under today's Supreme Court ruling.

Republican leaders in Congress are scrambling to work out how to give the President the authority he needs.

This Supreme Court ruling raises broader questions about a President's wartime powers.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a strongly worded dissent, saying the decision would sorely hamper the President's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy.

Jonathan Turley is a Law Professor at George Washington University.

He says the Supreme Court is pushing back against a President who's asserted he has almost unlimited powers for how he deals with a war.

JONATHAN TURLEY: The Supreme Court is telling the President: you're not a Government unto yourself. You're not an absolute ruler.

KIM LANDERS: Eric Posner is a Professor of Law at the University of Chicago whose research focuses on the laws of war.

He's told The World Today that the Supreme Court ruling curbs the President's powers, but it's a hurdle which can be overcome.

ERIC POSNER: It is unusual for the Supreme Court to interfere with what the President wants to do during a war. But it's not unheard of - there are precedents in the Civil War - so in that sense it's surprising, but the reason why it's not as surprising as one might think is that there is more controversy over whether we're really in a war at the moment than we were during World War II, or the Civil War, or during other wars in American history.

KIM LANDERS: What is the best way forward now? Is it simply a matter of Congress approving some other sort of system for which to try these detainees?

ERIC POSNER: Yes, it is. It is simple, I guess, at least conceptually simple, maybe not politically simple. But if the President goes back to Congress, Congress has the authority, at least as far as I can tell from this case, to pass legislation that would enable the President to set up more or less identical military commissions.

KIM LANDERS: Do you think that this is a blow to one of the arguments that the Bush administration has been using as it prosecutes the war on terror, that this President says he needs to do whatever is necessary to protect the American people?

ERIC POSNER: I think this is a blow for the administration's legal theory, which has emphasised the President's constitutional powers to act unilaterally.

But to the extent that Congress is willing to authorise the President to do what he would have done anyway, I'm not sure it matters.

And I would be surprised if the President couldn't go back to Congress and obtain authority to set up these military commissions.

KIM LANDERS: This Supreme Court ruling alone doesn't mean Guantanamo Bay will be shut down. After all, the President says he doesn't want killers back on the streets.

The detainees won't be set free. Instead many will now find themselves in a longer legal limbo.

This is Kim Landers in Washington for The World Today.



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Restriction of Insanity Defense Affirmed

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 30, 2006; Page A10


States can significantly restrict the insanity defense and still give mentally troubled defendants a fair trial, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

Upholding an Arizona law under which a judge found a paranoid schizophrenic teenager guilty of killing a police officer, the court ruled 6 to 3 that the state's more restrictive insanity defense law did not deny the young man his due process.
Eric Clark was 17 when he shot and killed a police officer in Flagstaff. His lawyers argued that the state's 1993 insanity defense law made it virtually impossible to prove a plea of guilty but insane, and also said the judge had unfairly limited the testimony allowed about Clark's underlying illness.

Writing for the majority, Justice David Souter said that Arizona has the right to define the insanity defense as long as it meets certain standards, which he said the current law does.

Souter also wrote that judges do not have to allow testimony from mental health experts about the characteristics of a mental illness because there is considerable disagreement within the profession, and experts often disagree in court testimony.

The restrictions on testimony are acceptable, Souter wrote, because of the "controversial character of some categories of mental disease, in the potential of mental-disease evidence to mislead, and in the danger of according greater certainty to capacity evidence than experts claim for it."

Attorneys for Clark -- who did not contest the shooting -- presented evidence that he was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed Flagstaff was populated by "aliens" trying to kill him. Prosecutors acknowledged Clark's illness but argued that the schizophrenia did not keep him from understanding right from wrong at the time of the shooting.

Under Arizona's law, defendants may be found "guilty except insane'' only if they prove they were so mentally ill that they did not know what they did was wrong. Before 1993, Arizona also allowed defendants to be found guilty but insane if they were found to be without the mental capacity to know what they were doing.

Clark's case was the first direct constitutional challenge to insanity defense laws to be heard since states began to restrict them after John Hinckley's acquittal by reason of insanity in the 1981 shooting of President Ronald Reagan. Nine other states similarly restricted the insanity defense, and yesterday's ruling gives them additional support.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in dissent that restricting expert testimony keeps a judge or jurors from receiving information they need to make sense of a defendant's claims of mental illness.

"While defining mental illness is a difficult matter, the state seems to exclude the evidence one would think most reliable by allowing unexplained and uncategorized tendencies to be introduced while excluding relatively well-understood psychiatric testimony regarding well-documented mental illnesses," he wrote.

In 2000, Clark killed officer Jeffrey Moritz, who was responding to complaints that a pickup truck playing loud rap music was circling a residential block. The officer was in uniform and was driving a patrol car when he stopped Clark, who shot him and fled.

Clark was found to be incompetent in 2001 and was committed to a state hospital. Two years later, the same trial court found that his competence had been restored and ordered him to trial.

At the trial, Clark was sentenced to life in prison, without possibility of parole for 25 years.



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Bush's Approval Rating Steadies on Terrorism Gains, Poll Finds

June 30 (Bloomberg)

President George W. Bush's approval rating, in a slide since January, stabilized this month amid improved scores for his handling of terrorism.

Forty-one percent say they approve of Bush's handling of the presidency, up slightly from his record low of 39 percent in April and down from 43 percent in January, according to the latest Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll.
Bush still gets poor marks on a range of issues, including his handling of the economy and the war in Iraq, and 63 percent of Americans say the country is on the wrong track. Bush's overall approval rating is among the lowest for recent two-term presidents, with only Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter slipping further in public esteem.

"He's not doing that great,'' said Susan Pinkus, the Los Angeles Times' polling director. "But he kind of stopped the slaughter.''

One bit of good news for the president is that most Americans agree with his position on immigration reform, his top domestic priority, and say they would be disappointed if Congress doesn't pass a bill addressing the issue this year.

The poll of 1,321 adults was conducted June 24-27, and has a margin of sampling error of three percentage points.

Better on Terrorism

Bush's improved ranking on terrorism is largely responsible for halting his free-fall: 51 percent of Americans now approve of the job he is doing on the issue, while 43 percent disapprove -- a reversal from April.

A U.S. air strike this month that killed Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, probably helped flip the numbers, said David Rohde, a professor of political science at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

"More events like the killing of Zarqawi and the president's approval ratings could rebound further,'' said Rohde, who has written books on every national election since 1980. "Bad news would lead to further declines.''

Sentiment that Bush is strong on terrorism has formed the core of his support since the Sept. 11 attacks, even as his ratings on most other issues, such as the economy and health care, slumped.

In the April survey, Bush lost his edge on terrorism, falling to 43 percent approval on that issue, a drop that helped push his overall job approval to a record low.

Headlines Help

Headlines in the past month -- including Zarqawi's death and the completion of a new Iraqi cabinet, the arrest of seven people in Miami who allegedly planned to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower and a trip to Europe during which Bush made progress with allies on a strategy for Iran -- all may have benefited the president.

"More news is getting out,'' said poll respondent Dolores Concannon, a 60-year-old Democrat from Quincy, Massachusetts, who speculated that Zarqawi's death and the Florida arrests have helped change opinions of Bush. "The troops went and pursued them and killed a lot of bad guys,'' she said of Zarqawi.

Concannon, a retired accountant, and women like her may be driving the turnaround in views of Bush's handling of the war on terror, according to the poll. In April, 34 percent of women approved of Bush's handling of the issue; in this month's poll, 45 percent did. Bush also saw a 15-point gain in approval on the issue among self-described moderates, and a 13-point lift from moderate Republicans.

No Iraq Boost

While providing a boost for Bush on terrorism, Zarqawi's death isn't helping him on the Iraq war. Bush's approval rating on Iraq, at 40 percent, was little changed from April. Most Americans, 54 percent, continue to say the war wasn't worth fighting, although 28 percent expect matters to improve in Iraq in the next year, a five-percentage-point increase from April. Twenty-nine percent say things will worsen in Iraq.

Thirty-eight percent of Americans say Iraq is the most important problem facing the country. That compares with 15 percent who say the economy, and 9 percent who say the price of gasoline. Just 7 percent name terrorism and al-Qaeda.

Partisan divisions remain deep, with 79 percent of Democrats disapproving of Bush's handling of the war and 77 percent of Republicans approving.

Loretta Deeds, a 69-year-old Republican who lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, illustrates the divide. Deeds said her opinion of Bush's handling of the war hasn't changed since U.S. troops invaded in March 2003.

'Under Attack'

"Congress gave him the go-ahead,'' said Deeds, a retired clerical worker. "Christians most definitely are under attack. This is a Muslim jihad that wants to take over the religion of the world.''

James Burnell, a 54-year-old Democrat from Wooster, Ohio, said he too hasn't changed his opinion much since the start of the war. "I've opposed it from the get-go,'' he said. "I don't think we had just cause to go in,'' said Burnell, a college economics professor.

The poll found that 68 percent of Americans are closely following reports that U.S. Marines killed unarmed civilians in Iraq. Just about the same amount, 66 percent, say the reports are unlikely to change how they feel about the war. Six in 10 believe those incidents are rare.

On Iran, 56 percent of Americans say that country will eventually acquire nuclear weapons. Just 16 percent say diplomacy can block Iran's nuclear plans, the same percentage who say military intervention can stop them.

Credibility Problem

Even if the situation in Iraq improves, Bush may face problems reversing his approval declines, said Rohde, the Duke scholar. Half of all adults say they have a lower opinion of Bush's credibility than they used to, to just 9 percent who say they have a higher opinion.

"The president's ability to use the bully pulpit and persuade people has declined substantially,'' Rhode said.

Immigration may pose a challenge for lawmakers who delay or oppose legislation addressing the problem, as 87 percent of poll respondents say it's an important problem and three-fifths say they'd be disappointed if lawmakers don't pass a bill this year.

Most Americans, 58 percent, say they would prefer an approach that focuses on tougher enforcement of immigration laws and also creates a guest-worker program that allows undocumented workers to work legally in the U.S. on temporary visas. A third say they prefer tougher enforcement of laws only.

Bush and the U.S. Senate support legislation that creates a guest-worker program while a competing House measure passed last year focuses on border security and enforcement of immigration laws.

Ethics scandals that have led to Democratic charges of a Republican "culture of corruption'' don't appear to have tainted the Bush administration any more than the previous White House.

The poll found a plurality, 43 percent, of adults say Bush has higher ethical standards than former President Bill Clinton. Twenty-nine percent say they are lower.



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Terrorists negotiator on educational panel!

Baghdad Connect
June 30, 2006



Back in the 80s the US government appointed Ms. Charito Kruvant (left, bowed to Ms. Rice) as the Contra terrorists negotiator to talk the US-financed Contra terrorists into laying their arms after waging an illegal warfare against Nicaragua, that cost thousands of innocent lives.

As per the Centre for Public Integrity of the USA "In the late 1980s, Creative received USAID and Defense Department funding to help demobilize and provide civilian training for the Contras, anti-communist 'guerrillas!' in Nicaragua who had fought the Sandinistas. After the first Bush administration and Congress agreed to stop all military aid to the Contras in 1989, the Defense Department contracted Creative to help persuade the Contras to lay down their arms. (Ms.) Kruvant reportedly helped to convince the Contras that the Nicaraguan government wouldn't execute them if they surrendered"

Also, according to this Ms. Kruvant is considered one of the most powerful women in the USA.

Today Ms. Kurvant is helping the Ministry of Education of our country (Iraq) through her DC based Creative International Associates (60% her propriety) to run educational programs, which according to our source - senior Iraqi professors who are quite familiar with Ms. Kruvant's educational methods - those programs are way below our educational standards. Also, the source adds that with reference to Iraq the concept of Creative International Associates in its totality is a scam meant for a good stash grab. One example is when Ms. Kurvant had implemented an education system in our provinces, the system turned out to be an equivalent to some form of chat-line!
Today the Iraqi News Agency ran a flippant and saucy piece of news on how Creative International Associates will launch a costly program to help turn the education system in Iraq into an e-edu, so will provide comprehensive support to include information retrieving system, admin & exam systems, warehouse and school buildings etc. which will facilitate daily activities of the ministry's employees by cutting down on the amount of time 'wasted' when they look up their vacation & leave schedules online!

Our source is quite perplexed that Ms. Kruvant (origin of Bolivian Argentinean and finally American) is still offering services for the ministry or even being in Iraq for that matter. She probably could find a soft landing in South America or other chosen man-made 3rd world disasters where she can negotiate with warlords or terrorists, but on our turf we really deem it's high time for some unpaid retirement for the old lady.

Bon Voyage Ms. Kruvant. Go Home.



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UIW library boss cancels the N.Y. Times in protest

Melissa Ludwig
Express-News Staff Writer
06/30/2006

The dean of library services at the University of the Incarnate Word has canceled the library's subscription to the New York Times to protest articles exposing a secret government program that monitors international financial transactions in the hunt for terrorists.

"Since no one elected the New York Times to determine national security policy, the only action I know to register protest for their irresponsible action (treason?) is to withdraw support of their operations by canceling our subscription as many others are doing," Mendell D. Morgan Jr. wrote Wednesday in an e-mail to library staffers. "If enough do, perhaps they will get the point."
The university released a statement Thursday saying Morgan had the authority to remove the newspaper.

"The University of the Incarnate Word does not take an official position on the recent decision to cancel the subscription of the New York Times at the university's library," the statement said. "This decision was made by the administrator in charge of the library whose authority extends to the contents of the library, and thus it was within his purview to make this decision. The university is supportive of the First Amendment, a free press and of the presentation of diverse points of view."

Morgan was on vacation and not available for comment. UIW President Lou Agnese and board Chairman Fully Clingman also were away and couldn't be reached for comment.
Talkback

* What do you think?

The move outraged library staffers, who complained the dean was censoring information based on personal beliefs.

Staff member Jennifer Romo said she and her co-workers were shocked when they received Morgan's e-mail.

"The censorship is just unspeakable," Romo said. "There is no reason, no matter what your beliefs, to deny a source of information to students."

The removal also runs counter to the American Library Association's Bill of Rights, which states: "Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval."

The New York Times, followed by other papers, published the articles. The Bush administration and conservative bloggers and commentators quickly attacked the reports, lashing out at media, especially the Times. Vice President Dick Cheney singled out the newspaper during a speech in Nebraska. In a letter to the Times posted on the Treasury Department's Web site, outgoing Secretary John Snow said the paper "alerted terrorists to the methods and sources used to track their money trails."

U.S. Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a letter released Monday that the attorney general should investigate the Times for possible violation of the Espionage Act.

The House on Thursday approved a Republican-crafted resolution condemning news organizations for revealing the program, saying the disclosure had "placed the lives of Americans in danger."

The resolution, passed 227-183 on a largely party-line vote, didn't specifically name the Times or other news organizations that reported the story.

The Times reported Tuesday that its managing editor, Bill Keller, said in an e-mail statement that the decision to publish the story was "a hard call."

He noted the Bush administration has launched a number of "broad, secret programs" aimed at fighting terrorism since 9-11.

He went on to say: "I think it would be arrogant for us to pre-empt the work of Congress and the courts by deciding these programs are perfectly legal and abuse-proof, based entirely on the word of the government."

In his e-mail to library staff, Dean Morgan wrote of a "change in quality and shift in coverage in what was once 'the national newspaper of record'" and said that neither average citizens nor enemy terrorists needed to know about the classified program in a time of war.

Romo, the UIW library staffer, said she respects Morgan's opinion about the newspaper's decision to publish the reports. She added, however, that using the university library is the wrong way to express his views.

"We understand that pornography and things not of an academic nature don't have a place in the library, but this is the New York Times," Romo said. "Whether it leans either way, it is still a staple and representation of views in our country."

Romo's colleague, Tom Rice, a recent graduate of the University of North Texas library sciences program, said that in pulling the Times, the library contradicted everything he learned in school.

"We felt like we were in an alternate reality when we read the e-mail," Rice said. "Then we realized how serious it was."

Andrew Herkovic, communications director for Stanford University's libraries in California, said staffers make decisions about what they collect for readers, but don't make those decisions on political grounds. Like UIW, Stanford is a private university.

"We would not withhold information from our readers as an expression of disapproval of an important news source," Herkovic said.

Two UIW students studying outside the library Thursday said they took issue with the Times reports, but did not think it was appropriate to remove the newspaper from the library because it's an academic source.

"I don't think they should have done it," said Richard Renteria, a 29-year-old senior.

This isn't the first time librarians have resisted pressure to limit patrons' freedom or access to information. This week, federal authorities dropped their demand under the U.S. Patriot Act for the identities of patrons who logged on to a Connecticut public library computer in February 2005. The decision came more than a year after local librarians resisted and the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit.

At least one media-watcher said she doubts Morgan's move will have much impact.

"In the real world, it's an almost futile act on many levels," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Fla. "From what we know about the reading habits of college students, it will not make a difference because they read online."

E-mail sent by Mendell Morgan:

From: Morgan, Mendell D
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 1:30 PM
Subject: New York Times cancellation

I have cancelled the J. E. and L. E. Mabee Library subscription to the print version of the New York Times effective today. For some years, many have observed a change in quality and shift in coverage in what was once "the national newspaper of record". Recently they made a very deliberate decision to publish vital intelligence information on specific methods of SWIFT for tracing money transfers used to fund terrorist activities in many parts of the world.

The US government held meetings with them to discuss this sensitive information and had specifically asked them, along with other news organizations, not to make this information public on the grounds of national security interests. Despite the explanation of the serious and sensitive nature of this information, the New York Times decided to make it public, so everyone, including the sworn enemies of the United States, would be fully informed. Now we all know. In time of war-and we are in a time of war-this specific information is not something the average citizen needs and the enemy most certainly does not.

This kind of intelligence operation had been successfully used to apprehend some of the terrorists who have perpetrated crimes, and prevented some other planned actions. These methods are among those that have prevented further 9/11 attacks in our country and kept us relatively safe in our homeland so far. This recent disclosure has now neutralized a valuable method of finding information to keep us safe and placed us and our families in a more vulnerable position. It may also prolong the war effort and claim more American (and other) lives at home and abroad.

Since no one elected the New York Times to determine national security policy, the only action I know to register protest for their irresponsible action (treason?) is to withdraw support of their operations by canceling our subscription as many others are doing. If enough do perhaps they will get the point.

Mendell D. Morgan, Jr.
Dean of Library Services



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How media leaks affect war on terror

By Mark Sappenfield and Mark Clayton | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON AND BOSTON - The news media's recent disclosures of classified intelligence do "great harm" to US security, the Bush administration maintains.

The assertion is difficult to dispute, since nobody outside America's spy agencies knows for sure whether the leaks have caused terrorists to cover their tracks. But analysts and former intelligence officials suggest that the real harm of untimely disclosures lies elsewhere.

"The damage from this, if there is damage, is in the question of whether foreign governments and sources can trust the US to protect sensitive information," says Larry Johnson, a security consultant who worked for the CIA and the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism.
While any information terrorists get about how the US is seeking them is to their advantage, any such gains from the leaks of the past six months may only be slight, Mr. Johnson and other experts say.

"Are terrorists so dumb to think that we wouldn't be doing things like this?" asks Robert Jervis, an intelligence expert at Columbia University in New York.

The issue came to a head this week when the president and administration officials lambasted The New York Times for revealing that the Treasury Department was monitoring an international database of financial wire transfers.

It was the latest in a string of media disclosures about the government's antiterror intelligence operations. In December, The New York Times revealed a National Security Agency (NSA) program that monitored international phone calls and e-mails to and from people in America suspected of being linked to terrorism. In May, USA Today reported that the NSA was also compiling a database of domestic calls.

The administration has argued that each was an effective tool in rooting out terrorist networks. Some former intelligence analysts, however, cast doubts on their importance.

"Nothing that's been revealed in the last few months has had any substantive effect on the war on terror," says Vincent Cannistraro, chief of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counterterrorism operations and analysis from 1988 to 1991. "Hardened, organized groups have been aware or assumed that voice, e-mail communications, and bank transfers are monitored at least since 9/11."

The administration itself has publicly touted its efforts to track terror financing, points out Ira Winkler, an NSA analyst until the mid-1990s and now an Internet security consultant.

"It's more of a public-relations nightmare than a detriment to our operations," he says regarding revelations that financial wire transfers were being monitored by the Treasury Department.

Of course, even the most sophisticated foes can sometimes make elementary slip-ups, these analysts say. Former Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev talked about ballistic missiles on his limousine phone - which the US had tapped. Hambali, Al Qaeda's leader in Southeast Asia, was tracked in part by a money transfer and eventually captured.

But the paucity of high-profile successes suggests to some that these programs were having marginal impact.

"If these systems and programs were all that effective, we would have heard a lot more about arrests," says Johnson. "The absence of those tells me that despite all this hooting and hollering, they've not been that effective."

Moreover, the leaks might not have much influence at all on the success of various programs, like the NSA's efforts to track phone calls and then connect the dots to would-be terrorists - called data mining.

"General knowledge about this social-network analysis is not something that needs to be kept secret in order to be effective," says Jon Kleinberg, a Cornell University professor whose government- sponsored work involves writing algorithms to hunt for patterns of behavior that might match terrorist activity. "Our algorithms take into account the fact that these people are already conscious of being observed and are taking active measures to avoid being spotted."

Still, for most in the intelligence community, the leaks rankle. While several analysts commend the story about NSA eavesdropping, which brought up serious legal issues, they dismiss the other stories as the needless exposure of potentially useful projects.

Of the story on wire transfers, Rep. Peter King, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, went so far as to call for investigation and prosecution of The New York Times. "There was not a whole lot of public value in publishing it," adds Paul Pillar, who was the CIA's National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.

Thursday, the House was expected to weigh a resolution condemning publication of the terror financing surveillance and saying it expects "cooperation" from news organizations in the future in "not disclosing classified intelligence programs."

The coverage betrays an overeagerness to publish classified material regardless of its value to intelligence operations, Mr. Pillar and others say. And leaks do hurt US intelligence, they add. "There were times in my tenure that one could track leaks right to serious losses" in sources, says retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom, who was director of the NSA from 1985 to 1988.

But another former senior intelligence official who asked to remain anonymous because of continuing ties to government is critical of authorized leaks from the administration as well as unauthorized leaks. "We shouldn't be touting our successes in public," the official says. "You're only sensitizing the opposition to how you're being successful against them. I think mistakes have been made on both sides" inside government and through the news media.

The official disagrees with some others' assessment that disclosure of the wire transfer surveillance was a nonevent, saying "the damage from the leak about monitoring was significant."



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New e-voting study shows it's really easy to steal an election

6/29/2006 5:44:56 PM, by Jon Hannibal Stokes

On Tuesday, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU's law school released the most comprehensive study to date on the state of electronic voting. The extensive report is a painful read for anyone concerned about the future of democracy, because it shows just how brain-dead easy it is to rig an election with three popular electronic voting systems: direct recording electronic (DRE), DRE with voter verified paper trail, and precinct count optical scan.
Among the more startling findings are the fact that voting machines with wireless components are very easily compromised by anyone with a little know-how and nearby wireless device-you don't even need a laptop; a PDA will do nicely.

The report also found that voter verified paper trails that aren't backed up by routine, random audits are good only for instilling a false sense of security in the voting process. You'd think it would be obvious to election officials that even if you get a paper receipt documenting the vote that you cast, any later meddling with that machine's vote count can go completely undetected if a sample of those receipts are never compared to the final output. But apparently a lot of things that are obvious to tech people go over the heads of election officials (e.g. the idea that you would never want to give wireless access to voting machines.)

It's worth noting that the Brennan Center task force isn't just another group of activists:

The government and private sector scientists, voting machine experts, and security professionals on the Task Force worked together for more than a year. The members of the non-partisan panel were drawn from the National Institute of Standards and Technology ("NIST"), the Technical Guidelines Development Committee of the federal Election Assistance Commission ("EAC"), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, leading research universities, and include many of the nation's foremost security experts.

The Task Force surveyed hundreds of election officials around the country; categorized over 120 security threats; and evaluated countermeasures for repelling attacks. The study examined each of the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems: electronic machines ("DREs") with – and without – a voter verified paper trail, and precinct-counted optical scan systems ("PCOS"). The report, The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World, is the first-ever systematic analysis of security vulnerabilities in each of these systems.


The task force concluded the report with a number of recommendations for making electronic voting more tamper-proof. But given the widespread, ongoing evidence of rampant insecurity in popular electronic voting systems (Google "Diebold," for instance) and the mystifying nationwide failure to do anything about it, will another voice shouting that the house is on fire be enough?

I have this fantasy where I organize a group of computer science types who've been working for years on electronic voting problems and we write a book called, How To Steal a National Election: An Step-by-Step Handbook. The book would come complete with everything from discussions of the theory underlying how you could steal a presidential election by rigging a few key counties, to a nuts-and-bolts, "push this, pull here, type in this command" guide to how to rig specific machine models. We'd also include a CD with source code, applications, schematics, all the other tools the modern election fraudster needs. I feel that if there were some way to make clear just how real this threat is and just how easy it is to actually steal and election, maybe folks could get motivated to care. But maybe I'm just fantasizing.



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Jury convicts former judge of indecent exposure

Updated: 11:22 p.m. ET June 29, 2006

BRISTOW, Okla. - A former judge was convicted late Thursday of exposing himself by using a sexual device while he presided over court cases.

A Creek County jury found Donald Thompson, 59, guilty on four counts of indecent exposure and recommended one year in prison and a $10,000 fine on each count.

The investigation into Thompson's actions began after a police officer saw a penis pump in the judge's courtroom. The charges involved four jury trials in 2002 and 2003.
Thompson's former court reporter, Lisa Foster, testified that she traced an unfamiliar "sh-sh" in the courtroom to her boss. She testified that she saw Thompson expose himself at least 15 times.

Thompson, who served for more than 20 on the bench in eastern Oklahoma before his retirement in 2004, denied using a penis pump and said it was a gag gift.

Thompson was ordered into custody on $75,000 bond, which his attorneys said would be posted Friday. Thompson's formal sentencing was scheduled for Aug. 14.



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Police Find Skeleton in Cleveland Home

Friday, 30 June 2006, 03:00 CDT

CLEVELAND - Officers who went to a home to serve a search warrant found a skeleton in the bed where an 80-year-old woman said her mother was sleeping.

Police believe the remains belong to woman's 98-year-old mother, who hadn't been seen in at least three years.
Officers went to the home Wednesday to serve a search warrant for building, housing and health code violations, but the woman said they couldn't come inside because her mother was sleeping. After persuading her to let them in the house, the officials pulled back the blanket on the bed and found the skeleton.

The daughter, whose name was withheld until her family was notified, was taken to St. Vincent Charity Hospital.

Cuyahoga County Coroner Elizabeth K. Balraj said Thursday she would need more information to identify the body, which showed no signs of injury.

Police Lt. Thomas Stacho said no charges were expected.



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AsiaNews


US conditionlly to mute criticism of Russia

Friday, June 30, 2006 - İ2005 IranMania.com

LONDON, June 30 (IranMania) - A meeting of G8 Foreign Ministers this week showed that the United States is ready to mute its criticism of Moscow on questions of democracy in exchange for Russian support on the Iranian nuclear issue, a leading broadsheet said Friday.

"The United States is ready not to note Russian problems in exchange for support on the Iran question," the Kommersant daily said.
The newspaper noted that complaints about human rights and state control over the media in Russia got relatively little attention in the closing comments of the Group of Eight ministers who met in Moscow on Thursday to prepare for a G8 summit on July 15-17, AFP noted.

The visiting foreign ministers "conceded all the demands of Russia and" in their closing declaration "kept to a minimum mention ... of questions that in some way bother Russia," the newspaper said.

Thursday's meeting followed pressure from leading US lawmakers for President George W. Bush to take a tough stand on Russian democracy at next month's summit, the first to be hosted by Russia, AFP stated.

There had been no discussion, Kommersant said, of the so-called "frozen conflicts" in two ex-Soviet states, Georgia and Moldova, or the situation in Belarus, which is a close ally of Russia's.

But Washington's demands for support on the Iranian nuclear standoff might prove hard for Moscow to stomach, the paper said.

Moscow remains an ally of Tehran and has called for a diplomatic solution to the dispute over Iran's nuclear programme, which Iran says is peaceful but the United States suspects is a front for developing nuclear weapons, AFP added.

"In the Kremlin they think Washington is asking too much, not offering anything in exchange. This situation offends and annoys the Russian leadership... The utterances of senior Russian officials have more and more taken on a highly emotional tone," Kommersant said.



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Rice, Lavrov Caught Undiplomatic Over Lunch Ahead of G8 Summit

Created: 30.06.2006 12:52 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 12:52 MSK
MosNews

Russia's Lavrov and his U.S. counterpart exchanged undiplomatic remarks in Moscow on Thursday, an inadvertent audio feed from a closed-door lunch has revealed, The Associated Press reported Friday.

The audio feed to news cameras was not switched off during a working lunch among foreign ministers Thursday. A portion of the conversation recorded by reporters included sometimes-testy discussions about the shaky security situation in Iraq.
Over the clink of glassware, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov challenged U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about proposed language in a statement on behalf of the foreign ministers from the Group of Eight industrial democracies. "I don't believe security is fine in Iraq, and I don't believe in particular that security at foreign missions is OK," Lavrov said, referring to the killing of five Russian diplomats in Iraq.

"Sergei, there is a need for improvement of security in Iraq, period," Rice replied in a steely tone. "The problem isn't diplomatic missions," she said. "The problem is journalists and civilian contractors and, yes, diplomats as well. The problem is you have a terrorist insurgent population that is wreaking havoc on a hapless Iraqi civilian population that is trying to fight back and on a coalition force that is trying to fight back, and the implication that by somehow declaring that diplomats need to be protected . . . I think is simply not right."

The two dominated a discussion of a proposed international compact on Iraq aid and political development, an idea supported by the U.S. Rice wanted the G8 statement to endorse the compact, but Lavrov held her off.

"Look, Condi, Condi . . . when we consider assistance programs, IMF and the World Bank, you do not automatically endorse something that a government endorses," Lavrov told her. "It's an important part of the exercise to consider specific features of an assistance program."

In the end, the G8 statement refers to the proposed compact but does not endorse it.

The United Nations and Iraq are expected to unveil the compact next week in Baghdad. It would condition international aid for Iraq's new democratic government on benchmarks of political and structural development, such as making and keeping a disciplined national budget.

Russia has been a consistent critic of the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq and has been the main obstacle to the U.S. drive to impose sanctions on Iran if it will not give up disputed aspects of its nuclear program.

The Bush administration has been critical of democratic backsliding under Russian President Vladimir Putin, but the strongest criticism has come from Vice President Dick Cheney, not Rice.

Rice acknowledges that the U.S. needs Russian help on Iran, which was the main topic of Thursday's meetings. The issue did not come up during the portion of the lunch discussion caught on tape.



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Russian Defense Minister Says Ukraine Supplied Cruise Missiles to Iran, China

Created: 30.06.2006 11:35 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 11:35 MSK
MosNews

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov has said that Ukraine had supplied cruise missiles to Iran and China, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported Friday.

"In 2000 and 2002, Ukrainian company Progress which is a daughter company of the Ukrspetsexport holding, supplied Iran and China with batches of six K-55 cruise missiles (these are air-based long-range Soviet missiles). A criminal probe has been started into these deals and official instances have been informed," the Russian minister said at a press conference in Moscow.

This fact is a blatant violation of the missile technologies nonproliferation control, Sergei Ivanov added.




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Bush Props Up Another Saddam

Ted Rall
06/29/06

When George W. Bush crawled into bed with Islam Karimov in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government knew exactly what kind of man he was. A few years earlier, after a half-dozen bombs destroyed government buildings in downtown Tashkent, the president and former Soviet boss of Uzbekistan appeared on state television, promising to "eliminate the scoundrels" behind the assassination attempt.
I write in my upcoming book Silk Road to Ruin : Is Central Asia the New Middle East?: "Within weeks Uzbekistan was in the throes of a brutal purge of its already beleaguered religious Muslims. That month a presidential decree authorized the punitive arrest of a suspect's father if his extremist sons could not be found. 'If my child chose such a path,' Karimov said, 'I myself would rip off his head.' Head-ripping was a recurring theme of Karimov's rhetoric. He added a promise to 'tear off the heads of two hundred people in order to protect Uzbekistan's freedom and stability.' It is unknown whether Karimov personally supervises such reprisals; however, published reports claim that exactly that number of bodies of 'Muslim extremists'--often the victims are identified as radicals simply because they wear long beards--were strung up from Tashkent lampposts in May. Exceptionally violent and corrupt even by Central Asian standards, the government of Uzbekistan is proof that a ruler can remain in power despite the near-universal contempt of his subjects."

Karimov's police state is pervasive and brutal. Torture is endemic; the battered bodies of political prisoners are returned to their families showing clear proof that they have been boiled to death. Only one candidate, Abdulhasiz Dzhalalov, was allowed to run against the autocratic Karimov in the most recent presidential "election." Dzhalalov announced that he had voted for Karimov.

After 9/11, however, the U.S. ignored numerous reports of Uzbek atrocities--some authored by its own State Department--and began paying Karimov millions of dollars in exchange for hosting a permanent American military base on Uzbek soil. "The expanded relationship," writes The New York Times, "was both praised as realpolitik strategy and criticized as a shortsighted gesture of support for a dictator with a chilling human rights record."

Bush's pact with the devil came due on May 13, 2005, when thousands of protesters gathered in Bobur Square in the southern city of Andijon to complain about corruption, the shattered Uzbek economy and to demand the release of political prisoners. "We hoped the local government would come to hear our grievances," a man named Dolim told The Guardian. "People said even Karimov himself would come. We went because of unemployment, low salaries not paid, pensions not received."

Indeed, Karimov did go to Andijon--to personally supervise the massacre of the demonstrators.

Uzbek security forces firing automatic weapons killed an estimated one thousand people over the course of 90 minutes. "The dead were lying in front of me piled three-thick," said a survivor. "At one point, I passed out. When I regained consciousness, it was raining--on the ground, I could see water running with blood." He survived by hiding under corpses. "Dead people everywhere, and some alive, just moving. I felt sick, because of all the things splattered on my clothes. I went into the college and saw the armored personnel carriers moving over the bodies. They wanted to kill anyone who was wounded. Soldiers walked down the sidewalk, firing single shots at anyone moving."

The Bush Administration resisted international pressure to close its airbase at Karshi-Khanabad (K-2). "The Pentagon wants to avoid upsetting the Uzbekistan government," The Washington Post quoted White House officials two months after the Andijon massacre. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman urged the Uzbeks to investigate themselves: "The United States has repeatedly urged Uzbekistan to undertake a full and transparent inquiry into the Andijon incident."

Even this pro forma criticism proved too much for the testy tyrant, prompting him to evict the U.S. from K-2 earlier this year. But Andijon refuses to go away. On June 22 The New York Times released a detailed analysis of videotapes taken before and during the bloody crackdown. The images "show no sign that [Uzbek authorities] tried nonlethal methods or a gradual escalation of force to break up the crowd, like giving clear warnings or signals to disperse, using water cannons or tear gas, or having snipers eliminate [men who were armed]."

Despite the United States' loss of an airbase and a new mutual defense treaty between Tashkent and Moscow, however, the Bush Administration continues to ply the butcher of Andijon with cash and military aid.

From Silk Road to Ruin: "RAND Corporation pundit Olga Oliker summarized the Bush Administration's position: 'Cutting all ties between the two nations would be a mistake,' Oliker wrote, because 'the country remains a way station for illegal and dangerous trafficking in drugs, weapons and fighters. This has made the Uzbek government a valuable partner in combating those problems.' True, the weapons and the insurgents who carry them drew much of their strength from Karimov's campaign of anti-Muslim repression. But let's not forget the United States' primary policy motivation: Uzbekistan has some of the world's largest reserves of natural gas."

"Internal developments in Uzbekistan are really worrisome," says Royal Institute of International Affairs analyst Yury Federov. "The ruling regime keeps itself in power through repression, and many people in Uzbekistan believe that repression in the final end cannot save the current regime from the crash, which may lead, in turn, to a general destabilization of the situation in the country and in the neighboring region."

It's 1981 all over again. And again, we're arming and funding Saddam.

Ted Rall is the author of "Silk Road to Ruin : Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge. Visit his website www.tedrall.com



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Uzbekistan Deports Canadian Activist to China for Possible Execution

Created: 30.06.2006 15:49 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 15:49 MSK
MosNews

Uzbekistan confirmed on Friday it had deported to China a Canadian rights activist - an ethnic Uighur accused of terrorism by Beijing - despite calls from Ottawa for his return, Reuters news agency reports.
Huseyincan Celil, who fled China in the 1990s, was arrested in Uzbekistan in March. His supporters say he may face the death penalty if tried in China, which has waged a long campaign against Uighur separatism.

Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs account for 8 million of the 19 million people in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang.

"Uzbekistan has extradited to China a terrorist who has committed a number of crimes in that country and who is also wanted by Interpol," Uzbekistan's state-backed press-uz.info news Web site reported.

Interpol and officials in China and Uzbekistan were not available for comment. The Web site is often used by the Uzbek authorities to make statements on sensitive issues.

Uighur activists say they fear China could put Celil, 37, on trial and execute him. Celil has three children in Canada.

China accuses Celil of taking part in a "terrorist attack" on a government delegation in Xinjiang in 2000, as well as murdering an Uighur in Kyrgyzstan, the Uzbek news agency said.

Canada has pressed Uzbekistan to let him go on humanitarian grounds. Canada angered Uzbekistan last year when it agreed to resettle 50 Uzbek refugees who fled to neighbouring Kyrgyzstan after Uzbek security forces fired on crowds in the town of Andizhan when they put down an uprising.

Separately, Amnesty International called on China to release two Uighurs, who it said were forcibly returned from neighbouring Kazakhstan in May and now face "serious human rights violations", including torture and possibly the death penalty.

"Over recent years, Amnesty International has monitored growing numbers of forced returns of Uighurs to China from several of its neighboring countries, including those of Central Asia, such as Kazakhstan," it said in a statement.

At least 1,770 people were executed and 3,900 sentenced to death in China in 2005, Amnesty said, adding that "the true figures, which are classified as a 'state secret', are believed to be much higher."



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China targets blogs, searches in new internet crackdown

Jun 30, 2006, 7:56 GMT

Beijing - China will submit blogs and search engines to 'strict supervision of the government' in its latest effort to control Internet content, state media on Friday quoted a senior official as saying.

'As more and more illegal and unhealthy information spreads through the blogs and search engines, we will take effective measures to put the BBS [bulletin board systems], blogs and search engines under control,' the official Xinhua news agency quoted Cai Wu, director of government's Information Office, as saying.
Blogs, bulletin boards and searches are targeted because they are the 'most active parts of China information industry,' Cai said.

'The market cannot develop without efficient management,' said Cai, adding that the government planned to improve its technology and develop 'admittance standards' websites hosting blogs for China's estimated 111 million internet users.

'We will speed up the technology development to safeguard the network management and do more researches on the internet security issues triggered by the new technologies of blogs and search engines,' Minister of the Information Industry Wang Xudong was quoted as saying.

Wang said China also planned to ensure that all websites were officially registered and enforce a requirement for all telephone subscribers to register their real names, the agency said.

China already has some 37 million blog sites and is forecast to have some 60 million by the end of this year, it quoted a report by Beijing's Qinghua University as saying.

Major Chinese internet search engine providers grouped together two years ago to form a 'self-discipline organization' and take a stand against 'pornographic and obscene websites,' the agency said.

In May, China's leading internet search engine, Baidu, said it had amassed more than 100,000 entries in a censored version of US-based online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is blocked in China.

Baidu bans content in seven categories, warning users that it will delete entries that make a 'malicious evaluation' of China, 'attack government institutions' or 'promote a negative view of life.'

It employs 'experts' to 'ensure the quality of entries and keep the site free of advertisements and junk information,' the Shanghai Daily newspaper quoted a Baidu official as saying.

China's internet police block hundreds of websites that are deemed politically sensitive and try to keep content broadly in line with the ruling Communist Party's ideology.

Tens of thousands of small internet cafes have been closed, with the government favouring large chains that can be relied upon to monitor and control online activity.

Evidence from postings on websites has also been used in the conviction of several dissidents in recent years.



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Iraq


Putin Orders Special Services to Get "al-Qaeda in Iraq"

June 29th 2006
Kurt Nimmo

If we are to believe the line fed to us by the corporate media, "al-Qaeda" abducted and killed Russian embassy staff in Iraq earlier this month, never mind that if this is true Osama's branch of the "insurgency" consists of political retards, as killing the Russians does absolutely nothing to further the resistance against U.S. occupation.


"Four Russian embassy workers were abducted June 3 after an attack on their car in Baghdad's Mansour neighborhood," reports MosNews. "A fifth Russian was killed in the incident. The captives include the embassy's third secretary, Fyodor Zaitsev, and three other staffers: Rinat Agliulin, Anatoly Smirnov and Oleg Fedoseyev."

In response to this senseless attack, "Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian special services to find and kill the criminals" responsible, in other words "al-Qaeda in Iraq," a documented Pentagon black op pseudo-gang designed to discredit the legitimate resistance and deluge Americans with scary images of al-Zarqawi terrorists determined to chop off heads and blow up Shia mosques.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this effort. It should be noted, however, that Russia is basically the flip side of the United States, an authoritarian police state engaged in covert dirty tricks both abroad and at home.

"Russian operations in other countries are wrapped in secrecy, but in 2004 a court in the Middle East state of Qatar convicted two Russian intelligence officers for killing Chechen terrorist leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev," MosNews continues. "After serving some time in Qatar jail both men were handed over to Russia which claimed they will continue to serve their life sentences.... At the trial, the judge said the plot to assassinate Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was carried out with the approval of the 'Russian leadership' and coordinated between Moscow and the Russian Embassy in Qatar," a modus operandi similar to that employed by the CIA, or more specifically (in regard to targeted assassination in foreign countries), the Israeli Mossad.

According to the lap dog United Nations, Yandarbiyev had "suspected links to al-Qaeda," in other words the possibility exists he was connected to Pentagon intelligence operations. It is a well established fact the CIA and U.S. intelligence have aggressively midwifed terrorism, as noted by B. Raman, writing for the Asia Times Online:

The various pan-Islamic terrorist groups [in Chechnya] are estimated to have a total strength of about 6,000, including a large number of foreign mercenaries. There are widely varying estimates of the strength of the foreign mercenaries, ranging between 200 (Western estimate) and 1,100 (Moscow's). The foreign mercenaries, many of them trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the first Afghan war of the 1980s through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for use against Soviet troops, come from countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, the Lebanon, Indonesia and China (Xinjiang).

As Michel Chossudovsky explains, the "two main Chechen rebel armies (respectively led by Commander Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab) estimated at 35,000 strong were supported by Pakistan's ISI, which also played a key role in organizing and training the Chechen rebel army." Chossudovsky cites Levon Sevunts, who wrote for the Gazette, Montreal, 26 October 1999:

[In 1994] the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence arranged for Basayev and his trusted lieutenants to undergo intensive Islamic indoctrination and training in guerrilla warfare in the Khost province of Afghanistan at Amir Muawia camp, set up in the early 1980s by the CIA and ISI and run by famous Afghani warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In July 1994, upon graduating from Amir Muawia, Basayev was transferred to Markaz-i-Dawar camp in Pakistan to undergo training in advanced guerrilla tactics. In Pakistan, Basayev met the highest ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officers: Minister of Defense General Aftab Shahban Mirani, Minister of Interior General Naserullah Babar, and the head of the ISI branch in charge of supporting Islamic causes, General Javed Ashraf, (all now retired). High-level connections soon proved very useful to Basayev.

As well, the "Chechen cause" (in the guise of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya) is supported by the neocons, including "Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be "a cakewalk"; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Center for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush's plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines," writes John Laughland of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.

Allegations are even being made in Russia that the west itself is somehow behind the Chechen rebellion, and that the purpose of such support is to weaken Russia, and to drive her out of the Caucasus. The fact that the Chechens are believed to use as a base the Pankisi gorge in neighboring Georgia-a country which aspires to join Nato, has an extremely pro-American government, and where the US already has a significant military presence-only encourages such speculation. Putin himself even seemed to lend credence to the idea in his interview with foreign journalists...

If Putin indeed sends Russian special services to Iraq in an effort to uncover the "al-Qaeda" operatives putatively held to be responsible for the politically retarded assassination of Russian embassy staff, interesting details may emerge, as interesting and revealing details on British involvement in the black op war against the Iraqi resistance emerged after SAS goons (actually SRS, or Special Reconnaissance Regiment goons) were captured in Basra, disguised as Arabs and driving around in a car loaded up with explosives (see my British "Pseudo-Gang" Terrorists Exposed in Basra, September 24, 2005).

However, as in the case of the Basra story, the corporate media will naturally ignore it and concentrate on meaningless nonsense, for instance, in the current news cycle, a large photo and accompanying story over at the CIA's favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, on Mexican golfer Lorena Ochoa (or on the same page, a "story" about a pregnant Britney Spears posing nude for Harper's Bazaar), while the war crime of Israeli IOF troops abducting members of the democratically elected government of Palestine (and no doubt abusing and torturing them as I write this) is nowhere to be found.





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U.S. soldiers being investigated for alleged rape, killing of family in Iraq

AP
June 30, 2006

BEIJI, Iraq - Five U.S. Army soldiers are being investigated for allegedly raping a young woman, then killing her and three members of her family in Iraq, a U.S. military official said Friday.

The soldiers also allegedly burned the body of the woman they are accused of assaulting in the March incident, the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

The U.S. command issued a sparse statement, saying Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, commander of coalition troops in Baghdad, had ordered a criminal investigation into the alleged killing of a family of four in Mahmoudiyah, south of Baghdad. The statement had no other details.
The case represents the latest allegations against U.S. soldiers stemming from the deaths of Iraqis. At least 14 U.S. troops have been convicted.

The United States also is investigating allegations that two dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. Marines in the western town of Haditha on Nov. 19 in a revenge attack after one of their own died in a roadside bombing.

The entire investigation will encompass everything that could have happened that evening. We're not releasing any specifics of an ongoing investigation, military spokesman Maj. Todd Breasseale said of the Mahmoudiyah allegations.

There is no indication what led soldiers to this home. The investigation just cracked open. We're just beginning to dig into the details.



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Fighting near Baquba Conflicting versions Who fought whom?

June 29, 2006

Here is what a local resident said

Sectarian Fighting Breaks Out North of Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 29 - Intense clashes erupted today between Shiite and Sunni Arab fighters in a village north of Baghdad, highlighting the sectarian violence that is fracturing Iraq. American soldiers also took part in the battles, but it was unclear exactly what role they played.

One local resident, Abdul Hadi al-Dulaimi, said that the village, which is mostly Sunni Arab, was being raided by Shiite policemen working with militiamen to take revenge for a recent suicide bombing. American troops were siding with the Shiites and had deployed aircraft and ground troops, Mr. Dulaimi said. The fighting raged into the night.

An American military spokesman in Baghdad, Maj. William Willhoite, said in the evening that "there is something going on up there," but had few further details.

"It looks like it's an operation of some sort being conducted by coalition forces with Iraqi police and army," he said.

At least one senior Iraqi police officer died in the fighting. Mr. Dulaimi said he knew of five villagers from his tribe who were killed.

The fighting broke out in the morning, when 30 to 40 black-clad Shiite militiamen stormed into the village, called Daliqiya, and began shooting at houses, said Mr. Dulaimi, a member of one of the country's largest Sunni Arab tribes. Daliqiya abuts another village called Khairnabat, about two miles north of the provincial capital of Baquba, where a suicide bomber on a bicycle blew himself up in a crowd on Monday, killing at least 18 people, all of them Shiites.

Militiamen drove into Daliqiya looking for revenge today, said Mr. Dulaimi, 55, a date farmer. About 30 to 35 families live in the village, most of them Sunni Arabs from the Dulaimi or Ani tribes. The area is thick with date palm groves and orange orchards.

The fighting in the morning lasted for three hours, with Iraqi policemen aiding the militiamen, Mr. Dulaimi said in a telephone interview. Many of the villagers sent their wives and children outside the area during a pause in the fighting. The Shiite militiamen and Iraqi security forces returned in the evening with American forces and continued the attack, he said.

"Each of us is armed with the weapons we have at home, and we're willing to defend our homes, our money, our property," said Mr. Dulaimi, whose wife and six children fled to Baquba. "We're willing to die for them."

The area around Baquba, a mixed Sunni-Shiite city 35 miles north of Baghdad, has long been restive, but sectarian tensions appear to have worsened there in recent weeks. The region is a magnet for armed groups from across the political spectrum, including Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the Mahdi Army fighters of the radical Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who founded Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, was killed in an American air strike in another nearby village, Hibhib, this month.

Gun battles also broke out Wednesday in the market in central Baquba, as Shiite militiamen fought with Sunni Arab insurgents, according to a shopkeeper, Hassan Abdul Fattah, 25.


The Shiite militiamen had distributed fliers in the morning warning Sunni storeowners to keep their shops closed or they would be killed, he said. Sunni Arab guerrillas then put out fliers telling the storeowners to open their shops or risk death.

The Shiite fighters, members of the Mahdi Army, rolled in at noon, and "a battle took place with grenades and mortars," Mr. Abdul Fattah said.

Violence flared across other parts of Iraq on Thursday, with at least 31 people killed or found dead.

In the evening, a suicide car bomber rammed into a funeral tent in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least 5 and injuring at least 23, a police official said. The funeral was for a Shiite soldier killed earlier in the week. Gunmen killed a dentist on Wednesday night in Kirkuk, and two murdered bodies were found separately in the province today.

In Baghdad, two civilians were killed and five were injured by gunmen in the Dawra neighborhood, an Interior Ministry official said. A concealed bomb detonated next to a minibus killed a civilian and injured another. Seven bodies were found in five different locations, three of them recruits in the Iraqi commando forces, the official said.

In the areas of Karbala and Hilla, south of Baghdad, 13 people were killed or found dead in various incidents, officials said.

The Romanian prime minister, Calin Tariceanu, said in Bucharest that he would ask for the withdrawal of the country's troops from Iraq by the end of this year because the war was proving too costly, news agencies reported. Romania has 890 soldiers in the country. Any withdrawal must be approved by a defense council headed by the president and parliament.

Two Romanian soldiers have died in Iraq and four in Afghanistan, where Romania has 809 soldiers. Italy has announced the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, and Japan is already removing its roughly 500 soldiers from Samawa province in the south.

The Romanian defense ministry said that four soldiers who are helping to train Iraqi forces would stay in the country.

Mona Mahmoud contributed reporting for this article from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Kirkuk.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/29/world/middleeast/29cnd-ira
q.html?pagewanted=print

Here is what the Iraqi police said


US, Iraqi forces clash with Shi'ite militia

29 Jun 2006
Reuters

BAQUBA, Iraq, June 29 (Reuters) - Iraqi and U.S. troops battled Shi'ite militiamen in a village northeast of Baghdad on Thursday, and witnesses and police said U.S. helicopters bombed orchards to flush out gunmen hiding there.

Iraqi security officials said Iranian fighters had been captured in the fighting, in which a sniper shot dead the commander of an Iraqi quick reaction force and two of his men. They did not say how the Iranians had been identified.

A civilian was also killed and five people were wounded in the clashes. The U.S. military had no immediate comment.

In violence elsewhere, a suicide car bomber rammed into a funeral service for a Shi'ite soldier and killed seven people in the Iraqi northern city of Kirkuk on Thursday, police said.

Deputy police commander Turhan Abdul Rahman said the bomber, who died in the attack, targeted a tent set up for mourners outside the house of an Iraqi soldier killed two days ago.

The blast wounded 25. Oil-rich Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, is an ethnically mixed city claimed by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen which has seen violence in the past.

The fighting between Iraqi and U.S. troops and Shi'ite militias was taking place in the predominantly Shi'ite village of Khairnabat, outside Baquba, capital of Diyala province.

Local residents reported hearing shooting and explosions.

A bomb in the town's main market killed 18 people on Monday. On Wednesday, Shi'ite militiamen fired mortars at a Sunni mosque in nearby Miqdadiya, destroying the building and 20 shops.

Police said the mosque attack and other attacks on Sunnis in Khairnabat itself persuaded Sunnis that it would be safer to leave the village. But as a convoy of vehicles was leaving on Thursday, "gunmen surrounded them and started shooting," a captain in Diyala's police intelligence unit told Reuters.

Baquba's quick reaction force, an Interior Ministry unit, responded and clashed with the fighters, the captain said. Iraqi and U.S. reinforcements then arrived and sealed off the village.

Police and witnesses said U.S. helicopters had bombed orchards where militiamen were believed to be hiding under date palms. Police said the bombing continued as night fell.

"IRANIAN PRISONERS"

The captain and other Interior Ministry sources said the commander of the quick reaction force, Colonel Sami Hussein, and two of his men were killed by a sniper.

No other casualties were reported from the clashes and police said it was not clear how many civilians had been killed or wounded in the initial shooting.

"We captured a number of militants and were surprised to see that some of them were Iranian fighters," the police intelligence captain said.

An Interior Ministry official, who did not want to be named, also said Iranian gunmen had been captured. Baquba lies 90 km (60 miles) from the Iranian border.

The United States and Britain have accused Shi'ite Iran of meddling in Iraq's affairs and providing military assistance to Iraq's pro-government Shi'ite militias. However, there have been few instances of Iranians actually being captured inside Iraq.

Some Iraqis, particularly Sunnis, are quick to label Shi'ite fighters as Iranian agents. And among the militants are Iraqis who grew up in refugee camps in Iran, speak Iranian-accented Arabic and, in some cases, carry Iranian identity papers.

Police have said Shi'ite fighters in the area belong to the Mehdi Army of radical, Iranian-backed cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr's movement, which staged two uprisings against occupying troops in 2004, denies being behind sectarian violence.

Diyala, where al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed earlier this month, has seen much sectarian violence.

Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has made controlling Shi'ite militia groups, as well as Sunni insurgents, a goal of a national reconciliation plan unveiled on Sunday.

Sunni political leaders dismissed on Thursday reports of significant peace moves from insurgents since Maliki's speech in parliament.

Several politicians and figures who claim to speak for militant groups said the plan was short on guarantees about curbing Shi'ite guerrillas and on the withdrawal of U.S. troops. (Additional reporting by Ross Colvin, Mohammed al-Ramahi, Alastair Macdonald, Mussab Al-Khairalla, Ibon Villelabeitia and Hiba Moussa in Baghdad)

Comment: More evidence that US troops are using "death squads" of the worst psychopaths from Iraqi society to do their dirty work for them.

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US surprised at reports Romania wants to leave Iraq

AFP
30/06/2006

The United States said it was surprised by reports that Romania planned to withdraw its troops from Iraq, and said it would ask for clarification.

State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said Washington had not been informed of any plans to pull out the 890-strong Romanian force, which he said had performed ably and courageously.

Earlier, Romanian Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu had said he would ask Romania's Supreme Defence Council (CSAT) to withdraw the soldiers because of the human and financial cost of staying in Iraq.

Adding to the confusion, amid signs of political dischord in Romania, the pro-US President Traian Basescu said later there must be a proper national debate before withdrawing the troops.

"These latest reports from Romania are, frankly, a surprise," Ereli told reporters.
"We hadn't been informed about them. They're certainly not consistent with what we've heard from senior Romanian leadership, and I think we'll be looking for clarification."

Basescu said the manner in which Tariceanu and Defence Minister Teodor Atanasiu had presented their withdrawal plan, without consulting other Romanian decision-makers, hurt Romania's credibility.

The surprise announcement was the first time that Bucharest, an early US ally in the "war on terror", had indicated it wanted to pull out.

Tariceanu invoked similar decisions taken recently by other countries - including Italy - in justifying the move.

Basescu has insisted several times in recent months that Romanian troops will remain in Iraq "as long as necessary" and that any eventual pull-out will only be decided in coordination with other members of the US-led coalition in the oil-rich country.

Relations between the president and the prime minister have been very strained in recent months, especially after Basescu said that he "regretted" that Tariceanu had been named head of government.

Comment: Well paint me pink and call me a daisy! Imagine that! Romanian actually wants to cease its involvement in the systematic slaughter of Iraqi civilians by American troops and their death squads, how absolutely bizarre! - if you're a raving psychopath.

Sadly, this is a surprise from a political point of view because the Romanian President Basescu sold his soul, and that of Romanian, to the US a few years ago.


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US forces have found some old Iraqi WMD, says general

By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military has found more Iraqi weapons in recent months, in addition to the 500 chemical munitions recently reported by the Pentagon, a top defense intelligence official said on Thursday.

Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, did not specify if the newly found weapons were also chemical munitions. But he said he expected more.

"I do not believe we have found all the weapons," he told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, offering few details in an open session that preceded a classified briefing to lawmakers.

Responding to questions from lawmakers anxious to make political points ahead of the November congressional elections, U.S. defense officials said the 500 chemical weapons discovered in Iraq were "weapons of mass destruction." However their degraded state may make them more dangerous to those who find them than anyone else.
Meanwhile, the chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Michigan Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra, wrote to U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte accusing intelligence officials of downplaying the significance of the finds.

Hoekstra said intelligence officials at a June 21 press briefing told journalists the weapons predated the 1991 Gulf War, were too degraded to be used as originally intended and posed no threat to U.S. forces deployed in the region during the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

"I am very disappointed by the inaccurate, incomplete, and occasionally misleading comments made by the briefers," Hoekstra said in the letter.

At the Armed Services Committee, Maples also asserted that the rockets and artillery rounds that had been found were produced in the 1980s and could not be used as intended.

If the chemical agent, sarin, was removed from the munitions and repackaged, it could be lethal. Its release in a U.S. city, in certain circumstances, would be devastating, Maples said.

LITTLE THREAT TO U.S.

But despite statements of concern by Republicans about the risk of terrorists releasing the chemical in the United States, defense officials said the munitions pose as much a threat to people who try to handle them as potential victims.

When asked by a Democrat to confirm the weapons pose a risk to troops in Iraq, not Americans at home, Maples said, "Yes."

Republican lawmakers, some facing tough election battles amid growing anti-war sentiment, called the discovery of the weapons significant.

Republican Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania suggested the munitions were in fact the weapons of mass destruction that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein lied about, leading the United States to war.

"For those who claim that these weapons are not the weapons of mass destruction that the United States went to war over, I would refer them to 17 United Nations Security Council resolutions that Saddam Hussein violated," Weldon said. "It didn't say pre-'91 chemical weapons. It didn't say post-'91 chemical weapons. It said chemical weapons."

But Democrats dismissed such arguments and said the weapons were not the "imminent threat" used to justify the war.

"It's very difficult to characterize these as the imminent threat weapons that we were told we were looking for," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a California Democrat.



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Iran


Iran rejects speedy response to incentives

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-30 04:23:26

UNITED NATIONS, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Thursday rejected calls from the six major powers to give a speedy answer to the incentive package aimed at ending the current crisis over Iran's nuclear programme.

Mottaki told reporters at UN headquarters in New York that Iran is seriously and carefully reviewing the proposed package, stressing that "a response will be in August."
Iran's response will be clear and substantive, he said, adding that the proposed package contains questions and ambiguities which must be cleared.

Mottaki said Javier Solana, the European Union High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy, may be able to answer some of Tehran's questions in technical talks expected to be held early next month.

However, "questions and ambiguities on the Iranian side are pending. Therefore, we welcome the discussions and negotiations for clarification of those ambiguities," he argued.



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Bush Tells Iran To Decide On Proposals By July 5th

Fri Jun 30, 2006
Reuters

The United States reaffirmed on Friday it expected Iran to give a formal reply to a package of incentives to curb its nuclear activities at a meeting between its chief negotiator and European officials on July 5.

"We expect and hope that (Ali) Larijani will give us the answer," UnderSecretary of State Nicholas Burns told a news briefing, referring to Iran's chief nuclear negotiator.

"We always said that this is a process of weeks not months," he said, adding that the offer put to Iran was "quite straightforward."

He said the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany, would discuss whether Iran gave a clear response at a meeting scheduled for July 12.

Burns said the major powers would look to take some "essential decisions" at the G8 summit in St Petersburg, Russia, on July 15.



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Iran Tells Bush To Go Stuff Himself

Friday, June 30
IranMania.com

Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani dismissed any deadline set for Iran to respond to European package of incentives, saying such a subject is a mere propaganda and unreal, IRNA reported.

"We have trodden a long path; in the past too, we had told the negotiating parties that they will gain nothing if they show tough approaches," said Larijani when asked by the press on the fate of negotiations with Europe on Iran's peaceful nuclear program.

Defending Iran's right for peaceful use of nuclear activities, Larijani welcomed diplomacy and a negotiated solution to the case.
"Our nation is for its rights; but defying the issue, they (the Europeans) sent our case to the UN Security Council, which was not a good job. They have however recently turned to solving the problem through negotiations, which is something right and we welcome it." He hoped Iran and Europe will succeed to solve the nuclear case through diplomacy.

"If they are sincere and proceed in the talks rightly, we hope the negotiations would bear good results," he added.

Elsewhere in the interview, Larijani said he will meet the European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana in Spain next week.

"In the next two weeks there will be talks with Mr Solana on our nuclear case; additionally, I will visit Spain next week, on the sidelines of which I will meet with Mr Solana," said Larijani.



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EuroNews


Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested

Henry Porter
29 June 2006

In the guise of fighting terrorism and maintaining public order, Tony Blair's Government has quietly and systematically taken power from Parliament and the British people. The author charts a nine-year assault on civil liberties that reveals the danger of trading freedom for security - and must have Churchill spinning in his grave
In the shadow of Winston Churchill's statue opposite the House of Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A small group of people - mostly young and dressed outlandishly - hold a tea party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much like Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while other members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on the afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket.

Sometimes the police move in and arrest the picnickers, but on this occasion the officers stood at a distance, presumably consulting on the question of whether this was a demonstration or a non-demonstration. It is all rather silly and yet in Blair's Britain there is a kind of nobility in the amateurishness and persistence of the gesture. This collection of oddballs, looking for all the world as if they had stepped out of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, are challenging a new law which says that no one may demonstrate within a kilometre, or a little more than half a mile, of Parliament Square if they have not first acquired written permission from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This effectively places the entire centre of British government, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, off-limits to the protesters and marchers who have traditionally brought their grievances to those in power without ever having to ask a policeman's permission.

The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law. If anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech, then he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is arrested. The device doesn't always work. After drinking tea in the square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the Cenotaph, Britain's national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred yards away.

On that dank spring afternoon I looked up at Churchill and reflected that he almost certainly would have approved of these people insisting on their right to demonstrate in front of his beloved Parliament. "If you will not fight for the right," he once growled, "when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

Churchill lived in far more testing times than ours, but he always revered the ancient tradition of Britain's "unwritten constitution". I imagined him becoming flesh again and walking purposefully toward Downing Street - without security, of course - there to address Tony Blair and his aides on their sacred duty as the guardians of Britain's Parliament and the people's rights.

For Blair, that youthful baby-boomer who came to power nine years ago as the embodiment of democratic liberalism as well as the new spirit of optimism in Britain, turns out to have an authoritarian streak that respects neither those rights nor, it seems, the independence of the elected representatives in Parliament. And what is remarkable - in fact almost a historic phenomenon - is the harm his government has done to the unwritten British constitution in those nine years, without anyone really noticing, without the press objecting or the public mounting mass protests. At the inception of Cool Britannia, British democracy became subject to a silent takeover.

Last year - rather late in the day, I must admit - I started to notice trends in Blair's legislation which seemed to attack individual rights and freedoms, to favour ministers (politicians appointed by the Prime Minister to run departments of government) over the scrutiny of Parliament, and to put in place all the necessary laws for total surveillance of society.

There was nothing else to do but to go back and read the Acts - at least 15 of them - and to write about them in my weekly column in The Observer. After about eight weeks, the Prime Minister privately let it be known that he was displeased at being called authoritarian by me. Very soon I found myself in the odd position of conducting a formal e-mail exchange with him on the rule of law, I sitting in my London home with nothing but Google and a stack of legislation, the Prime Minister in No 10 with all the resources of government at his disposal. Incidentally, I was assured that he had taken time out of his schedule so that he himself could compose the thunderous responses calling for action against terrorism, crime, and antisocial behaviour.

The day after the exchange was published, the grudging truce between the Government and me was broken. Blair gave a press conference, in which he attacked media exaggeration, and the then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, weighed in with a speech at the London School of Economics naming me and two other journalists and complaining about "the pernicious and even dangerous poison" in the media.

So, I guess this column comes with a health warning from the British Government, but please don't pay it any mind. When governments attack the media, it is often a sign that the media have for once gotten something right. I might add that this column also comes with the more serious warning that, if rights have been eroded in the land once called "the Mother of Parliaments", it can happen in any country where a government actively promotes the fear of terrorism and crime and uses it to persuade people that they must exchange their freedom for security.

Blair's campaign against rights contained in the Rule of Law - that is, that ancient amalgam of common law, convention, and the opinion of experts, which makes up one half of the British constitution - is often well concealed. Many of the measures have been slipped through under legislation that appears to address problems the public is concerned about. For instance, the law banning people from demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament is contained in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. The right to protest freely has been affected by the Terrorism Act of 2000, which allows police to stop and search people in a designated area - which can be anywhere - and by antisocial behaviour laws, which allow police to issue an order banning someone from a particular activity, waving a banner, for instance. If a person breaks that order, he or she risks a prison sentence of up to five years. Likewise, the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997 - designed to combat stalkers and campaigns of intimidation - is being used to control protest. A woman who sent two e-mails to a pharmaceutical company politely asking a member of the staff not to work with a company that did testing on animals was prosecuted for "repeated conduct" in sending an e-mail twice, which the Act defines as harassment.

There is a demonic versatility to Blair's laws. Kenneth Clarke, a former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, despairs at the way they are being used. "What is assured as being harmless when it is introduced gets used more and more in a way which is sometimes alarming," he says. His colleague David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair's Labour Party: "If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit - in some cases eradicate - habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up."

Indeed they would. But there's more, so much in fact that it is difficult to grasp the scope of the campaign against British freedoms. But here goes. The right to a jury trial is removed in complicated fraud cases and where there is a fear of jury tampering. The right not to be tried twice for the same offence - the law of double jeopardy - no longer exists. The presumption of innocence is compromised, especially in antisocial behaviour legislation, which also makes hearsay admissible as evidence. The right not to be punished unless a court decides that the law has been broken is removed in the system of control orders by which a terrorist suspect is prevented from moving about freely and using the phone and internet, without at any stage being allowed to hear the evidence against him - house arrest in all but name.

Freedom of speech is attacked by Section Five of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which preceded Blair's Government, but which is now being used to patrol opinion. In Oxford last year a 21-year-old graduate of Balliol College named Sam Brown drunkenly shouted in the direction of two mounted police officers, "Mate, you know your horse is gay. I hope you don't have a problem with that." He was given one of the new, on-the-spot fines - £80 - which he refused to pay, with the result that he was taken to court. Some 10 months later the Crown Prosecution Service dropped its case that he had made homophobic remarks likely to cause disorder.

There are other people the police have investigated but failed to prosecute: the columnist Cristina Odone, who made a barely disparaging aside about Welsh people on TV (she referred to them as "little Welshies"); and the head of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who said that homosexual practices were "not acceptable" and civil partnerships between gays were "harmful".

The remarks may be a little inappropriate, but I find myself regretting that my countrymen's opinions - their bloody-mindedness, their truculence in the face of authority, their love of insult and robust debate - are being edged out by this fussy, hairsplitting, second-guessing, politically correct state that Blair is trying to build with what he calls his "respect agenda".

Do these tiny cuts to British freedom amount to much more than a few people being told to be more considerate? Shami Chakrabarti, the petite whirlwind who runs Liberty believes that "the small measures of increasing ferocity add up over time to a society of a completely different flavour". That is exactly the phrase I was looking for. Britain is not a police state - the fact that Tony Blair felt it necessary to answer me by e-mail proves that - but it is becoming a very different place under his rule, and all sides of the House of Commons agree. The Liberal Democrats' spokesman on human rights and civil liberties, David Heath, is sceptical about Blair's use of the terrorist threat. "The age-old technique of any authoritarian or repressive government has always been to exaggerate the terrorist threat to justify their actions," he says. "I am not one to underestimate the threat of terrorism, but I think it has been used to justify measures which have no relevance to attacking terrorism effectively." And Bob Marshall-Andrews - a Labour MP who, like quite a number of others on Blair's side of the House of Commons, is deeply worried about the tone of government - says of his boss, "Underneath, there is an unstable authoritarianism which has seeped into the [Labour] Party."

Chakrabarti, who once worked as a lawyer in the Home Office, explains: "If you throw live frogs into a pan of boiling water, they will sensibly jump out and save themselves. If you put them in a pan of cold water and gently apply heat until the water boils they will lie in the pan and boil to death. It's like that." In Blair you see the champion frog boiler of modern times. He is also a lawyer who suffers acute impatience with the processes of the law. In one of his e-mails to me he painted a lurid - and often true - picture of the delinquency in some of Britain's poorer areas, as well as the helplessness of the victims. His response to the problem of societal breakdown was to invent a new category of restraint called the antisocial behaviour order, or Asbo.

"Please speak to the victims of this menace," he wrote. "They are people whose lives have been turned into a daily hell. Suppose they live next door to someone whose kids are out of control: who play their music loud until 2 am; who vilify anyone who asks them to stop; who are often into drugs or alcohol? Or visit a park where children can't play because of needles, used condoms, and hooligans hanging around.

"It is true that, in theory, each of these acts is a crime for which the police could prosecute. In practice, they don't. It would involve in each case a disproportionate amount of time, money and commitment for what would be, for any single act, a low-level sentence. Instead, they can now use an Asbo or a parenting order or other measures that attack not an offence but behaviour that causes harm and distress to people, and impose restrictions on the person doing it, breach of which would mean they go to prison."

How the Asbo works is that a complaint is lodged with a magistrates' court which names an individual or parent of a child who is said to be the source of antisocial behaviour. The actions which cause the trouble do not have to be illegal in themselves before an Asbo is granted and the court insists on the cessation of that behaviour - which may be nothing more than walking a dog, playing music, or shouting in the street. It is important to understand that the standards of evidence are much lower here than in a normal court hearing because hearsay - that is, rumour and gossip - is admissible. If a person is found to have broken an Asbo, he or she is liable to a maximum of five years in prison, regardless of whether the act is in itself illegal. So, in effect, the person is being punished for disobedience to the state.

Blair is untroubled by the precedent that this law might offer a real live despot, or by the fact that Asbos are being used to stifle legitimate protest, and indeed, in his exchange with me, he seemed to suggest that he was considering a kind of super-Asbo for more serious criminals to "harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country". It was significant that nowhere in this rant did he mention the process of law or a court.

He offers something new: not a police state but a controlled state, in which he seeks to alter radically the political and philosophical context of the criminal-justice system. "I believe we require a profound rebalancing of the civil liberties debate," he said in a speech in May. "The issue is not whether we care about civil liberties but what that means in the early 21st century." He now wants legislation to limit powers of British courts to interpret the Human Rights Act. The Act, imported from the European Convention on Human Rights, was originally inspired by Winston Churchill, who had suggested it as a means to entrench certain rights in Europe after the war.

Blair says that this thinking springs from the instincts of his generation, which is "hard on behaviour and soft on lifestyle." Actually, I was born six weeks before Blair, 53 years ago, and I can categorically say that he does not speak for all my generation. But I agree with his other self-description, in which he claims to be a moderniser, because he tends to deny the importance of history and tradition, particularly when it comes to Parliament, whose powers of scrutiny have suffered dreadfully under his government.

There can be few duller documents than the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 or the Inquiries Act of 2005, which is perhaps just as well for the Government, for both vastly extend the arbitrary powers of ministers while making them less answerable to Parliament. The Civil Contingencies Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state of emergency in which assets can be seized without compensation, courts may be set up, assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from, or held in, particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might be about to occur. Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance to assess the situation. If the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad faith, he cannot be punished.

One response might be to look into his actions by holding a government investigation under the Inquiries Act, but then the minister may set its terms, suppress evidence, close the hearing to the public, and terminate it without explanation. Under this Act, the reports of government inquiries are presented to ministers, not, as they once were, to Parliament. This fits very well into a pattern where the executive branch demands more and more unfettered power, as does Charles Clarke's suggestion that the press should be subject to statutory regulation.

I realise that it would be testing your patience to go too deeply into the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government has been trying to smuggle through Parliament this year, but let me just say that its original draft would have allowed ministers to make laws without reference to elected representatives.

Imagine the President of the United States trying to neuter the Congress in this manner, so flagrantly robbing it of its power. Yet until recently all this has occurred in Britain with barely a whisper of coverage in the British media.

Blair is the lowest he has ever been in the polls, but he is still energetically fighting off his rival, Gordon Brown, with a cabinet reshuffle and a stout defence of his record. In an e-mail to me, Blair denied that he was trying to abolish parliamentary democracy, then swiftly moved to say how out of touch the political and legal establishments were, which is perhaps the way that he justifies these actions to himself. It was striking how he got one of his own pieces of legislation wrong when discussing control orders - or house arrest - for terrorist suspects in relation to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is incorporated into British law under the Human Rights Act. "The point about the Human Rights Act," he declared, "is that it does allow the courts to strike down the act of our 'sovereign Parliament'." As Marcel Berlins, the legal columnist of The Guardian, remarked, "It does no such thing."

How can the Prime Minister get such a fundamentally important principle concerning human rights so utterly wrong, especially when it so exercised both sides of the House of Commons? The answer is that he is probably not a man for detail, but Charles Moore, the former editor of The Daily Telegraph, now a columnist and the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, believes that New Labour contains strands of rather sinister political DNA.

"My theory is that the Blairites are Marxist in process, though not in ideology - well, actually it is more Leninist." It is true that several senior ministers had socialist periods. Charles Clarke, John Reid, recently anointed Home Secretary, and Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, were all on the extreme left, if not self-declared Leninists. Moore's implication is that the sacred Blair project of modernising Britain has become a kind of ersatz ideology and that this is more important to Blair than any of the country's political or legal institutions. "He's very shallow," says Moore. "He's got a few things he wants to do and he rather impressively pursues them."

One of these is the national ID card scheme, opposition to which brings together such disparate figures as the Earl of Onslow, a Conservative peer of the realm; Commander George Churchill-Coleman, the famous head of New Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist unit during the worst years of IRA bombings; and Neil Tennant, one half of the hugely successful pop group Pet Shop Boys.

The idea of the ID card seems sensible in the age of terrorism, identity theft, and illegal immigration until you realise that the centralised database - the National Identity Register - will log and store details of every important action in a person's life. When the ID card is swiped as someone identifies himself at, say, a bank, hospital, pharmacy, or insurance company, those details are retained and may be inspected by, among others, the police, tax authorities, customs, and MI5, the domestic intelligence service. The system will locate and track the entire adult population. If you put it together with the national system of licence-plate-recognition cameras, which is about to go live on British highways and in town centres, and understand that the ID card, under a new regulation, will also carry details of a person's medical records, you realise that the state will be able to keep tabs on anyone it chooses and find out about the most private parts of a person's life.

Despite the cost of the ID card system - estimated by the Government as being about £5.8bn and by the London School of Economics as being between £10bn and £19bn - few think that it will attack the problems of terrorism and ID theft.

George Churchill-Coleman described it to me as an absolute waste of time. "You and I will carry them because we are upright citizens. But a terrorist isn't going to carry [his own]. He will be carrying yours."

Neil Tennant, a former Labour donor who has stopped giving money to and voting for Labour because of ID cards, says: "My specific fear is that we are going to create a society where a policeman stops me on the way to Waitrose on the King's Road and says, 'Can I see your identity card?' I don't see why I should have to do that." Tennant says he may leave the country if a compulsory ID card comes into force. "We can't live in a total-surveillance society," he adds. "It is to disrespect us."

Defending myself against claims of paranoia and the attacks of Labour's former home secretary, I have simply referred people to the statute book of British law, where the evidence of what I have been saying is there for all to see. But two other factors in this silent takeover are not so visible. The first is a profound change in the relationship between the individual and the state. Nothing demonstrates the sense of the state's entitlement over the average citizen more than the new laws that came in at the beginning of the year and allow anyone to be arrested for any crime - even dropping litter. And here's the crucial point. Once a person is arrested he or she may be fingerprinted and photographed by the police and have a DNA sample removed with an oral swab - by force if necessary. And this is before that person has been found guilty of any crime, whether it be dropping litter or shooting someone.

So much for the presumption of innocence, but there again we have no reason to be surprised. Last year, in his annual Labour Party conference speech, Blair said this: "The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety. It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. It means deciding whose come first." The point of human rights, as Churchill noted, is that they treat the innocent, the suspect, and the convict equally: "These are the symbols, in the treatment of crime and criminals, which mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are a sign and proof of the living virtue in it."

The DNA database is part of this presumption of guilt. Naturally the police support it, because it has obvious benefits in solving crimes, but it should be pointed out to any country considering the compulsory retention of the DNA of innocent people that in Britain 38 per cent of all black men are represented on the database, while just 10 percent of white men are. There will be an inbuilt racism in the system until - heaven forbid - we all have our DNA taken and recorded on our ID cards.

Baroness Kennedy, a lawyer and Labour peer, is one of the most vocal critics of Blair's new laws. In the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture at the City University, London, in April she gave a devastating account of her own party's waywardness. She accused government ministers of seeing themselves as the embodiment of the state, rather than, as I would put it, the servants of the state.

"The common law is built on moral wisdom," she said, "grounded in the experience of ages, acknowledging that governments can abuse power and when a person is on trial the burden of proof must be on the state and no one's liberty should be removed without evidence of the highest standard. By removing trial by jury and seeking to detain people on civil Asbo orders as a pre-emptive strike, by introducing ID cards, the Government is creating new paradigms of state power. Being required to produce your papers to show who you are is a public manifestation of who is in control. What we seem to have forgotten is that the state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state."

The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the British people. "We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free environment," he says. "That architecture only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the Government to have control.

"That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate. They've bought the Government's arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively And that is the great lesson that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of individual freedom."

Those who understand what has gone on in Britain have the sense of being in one of those nightmares where you are crying out to warn someone of impending danger, but they cannot hear you. And yet I do take some hope from the picnickers of Parliament Square. May the numbers of these young eccentrics swell and swell over the coming months, for their actions are a sign that the spirit of liberty and dogged defiance are not yet dead in Britain.

This article is taken from the current issue of Vanity Fair

Charged for quoting George Orwell in public

In another example of the Government's draconian stance on political protest, Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the latest person to be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George Orwell quote: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." In his possession, he had several copies of an article in the American magazine Vanity Fair headlined "Blair's Big Brother Legacy", which were confiscated by the police. "The implication that I read from this statement at the time was that I was being accused of handing out subversive material," said Mr Jago. Yesterday, the author, Henry Porter, the magazine's London editor, wrote to Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing concern that the freedom of the press would be severely curtailed if such articles were used in evidence under the Act.

Mr Porter said: "The police told Mr Jago this was 'politically motivated' material, and suggested it was evidence of his desire to break the law. I therefore seek your assurance that possession of Vanity Fair within a designated area is not regarded as 'politically motivated' and evidence of conscious law-breaking."

Scotland Yard has declined to comment.

Enemies of the state?

Maya Evans 25

The chef was arrested at the Cenotaph in Whitehall reading out the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. She was the first person to be convicted under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which requires protesters to obtain police permission before demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament.

Helen John 68, and Sylvia Boyes 62

The Greenham Common veterans were arrested in April by Ministry of Defence police after walking 15ft across the sentry line at the US military base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Protesters who breach any one of 10 military bases across Britain can be jailed for a year or fined £5,000.

Brian Haw 56

Mr Haw has become a fixture in Parliament Square with placards berating Tony Blair and President Bush. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was designed mainly with his vigil in mind. After being arrested, he refused to enter a plea. However, Bow Street magistrates' court entered a not guilty plea on his behalf in May.

Walter Wolfgang 82

The octogenarian heckled Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, during his speech to the Labour Party conference. He shouted "That's a lie" as Mr Straw justified keeping British troops in Iraq. He was manhandled by stewards and ejected from the Brighton Centre. He was briefly detained under Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act.



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Blair loses popular lead for first time: poll

Reuters
Fri Jun 30, 2006

LONDON - A poll in Britain revealed on Friday that British Prime Minister Tony Blair is less popular than his main rival for the first time in 12 years.

Blair also suffered more bad news on the electoral front, with results from by-elections for two vacant parliamentary seats yielding a poor showing for his Labour Party.

Pollsters YouGov, in a survey commissioned by the Daily Telegraph newspaper, found 30 percent of Britons thought new Conservative Party leader David Cameron would make the best prime minister, against 28 percent who preferred Blair.

The Telegraph said it was the first time any of five successive Conservative leaders had been preferred to Blair since Blair took the helm of the Labour party in 1994 as opposition leader under Conservative Prime Minister John Major.
In the Welsh district of Blaenau Gwent, independent Dai Davies defeated a Labour candidate for parliament, thwarting Labour's hopes of winning back one of its heartland seats, which Blair's party lost at the last election last year.

The area had been safely held by Labour for years until Labour stalwart Peter Law quit the party and ran as an independent, refusing to step aside when Labour leaders said the party's candidate must be a woman.

After Law died of cancer, Labour hoped to win the seat back, and dispatched high profile cabinet members to campaign there, to no avail.

Friday's results also brought bad news for Cameron, who took over the Conservative leadership seven months ago.

A Conservative candidate nearly lost the seat of Bromley, scraping by with just a few hundred votes in a seat which had been held strongly by the Conservatives since 1945.

Labour placed an embarrassing fourth, with fewer than 2,000 votes, behind the fringe anti-European UK Independence Party.

Comment: For so many Labour voters to take the unimaginable step of moving towards the Tories suggests that Blair is one of the most hated British leaders in recent history.

People need to understand; the Tories are the traditional war party! And Labour voters are being forced into the Tory camp because a Labour leader's warmongering!

Having said, that it seems that the British public are not exactly that stupid, and both Blair and the Tory leader Cameron have been dealt serious defeats in the recent by elections. Perhaps the British public want a clean slate - get rid of ALL political parties and start again. This time, however, the first order of business would be ask all for applications from all those people who would like to be a politician. Once they had been placed on a list banning them from ever running for office, things could progress. :-)

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Britain contemplated China nuclear attack

Reuters
Fri Jun 30, 2006

LONDON - Britain discussed raising the threat of U.S. nuclear retaliation to dissuade China from attacking its Hong Kong colony at the height of the Cold War, previously secret papers revealed on Friday.

Dismissing Hong Kong as strategically irrelevant, highly vulnerable and indefensible by conventional means, the British government nevertheless decided that it did have a vital symbolic role as the country's sole frontier with the Communist world.

"For political reasons we have no choice but to stay there at present," cabinet secretary Norman Brook wrote to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in July 1959.

"Though at any time the Chinese could make conditions impossible by cutting off food and water supplies and strangling the trade as to make our presence virtually untenable," he added.

Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997 after 155 years as a British colony.

Developing the argument in 1961, foreign secretary and Macmillan's successor Alec Douglas Home broached the delicate issue of both approaching the Americans to act if necessary and at the same time making the Chinese aware.

"It must be fully obvious to the Americans that Hong Kong is indefensible by conventional means and that in the event of a Chinese attack, nuclear strikes against China would be the only alternative to complete abandonment of the Colony," he wrote in a letter marked "top secret."
"In these circumstances it is perhaps not so much formal staff talks with the Americans that we need so much as an informal exchange of views involving a discussion of the use of nuclear strikes," he added.

However, he also noted the delicate balance of waving the nuclear deterrent at the Chinese while at the same time not provoking them.

"While we should encourage the Chinese to believe that an attack on Hong Kong would involve nuclear retaliation, we must avoid anything that would allow the Chinese to claim that the Colony is a military outpost of the Unites States," he added.

The records of the Prime Minister's office between 1957 to 1961 were among a batch of papers released by the National Archive.

"Our object is to encourage the Chinese to believe that an attack on Hong Kong would involve U.S. nuclear retaliation," wrote Minister of Defense Harold Watkinson.

Comment: Doesn't it just warm you heart to read the words of our wonderful leaders as they calmly discussed dropping nuclear bombs on Chinese civilians in order to hold on to a tiny piece of the British Empire?

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Dutch government collapses

Reuters
Fri Jun 30, 2006

Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende is set to hand in his government's resignation to Queen Beatrix on Friday, after a small party in his ruling coalition quit over the handling of the citizenship of a Somali-born Dutch lawmaker.

Before new elections expected as early as September or October, a minority government based on the two remaining parties in Balkenende's coalition was expected to rule, with the help of rightwing parties.

But Labour is set to grab 44 of the 150 parliamentary seats in the expected autumn elections, according to opinion polls.
This would be well ahead of either party in Balkenende's remaining coalition, the VVD and CDA, which would win up to 33 seats and 38 seats respectively, according to opinion polls if elections were held now.

But the polls show that it would be uncertain whether Labour could build a majority coalition of leftwing parties.

"Current polls show that we could have a left wing government after new elections, although it will be a close call," said economist Aline Schuiling at Fortis, adding that Labour could possibly govern with smaller leftist parties.

If Labour linked up with the Green Left and the Socialist Party, the three would not have a majority right now, needing another five to 10 seats.

The opinion polls show that Balkenende's former junior coalition D66 party, which caused the government's collapse, will be reduced to three seats from six.

SWING TO LEFT

In local elections three months ago, Dutch voters backed leftwing parties, rejecting anti-immigration populists and ruling center-right parties blamed for an economic slump.



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Wild Planet


Earthquake Rattles Southeastern California

Friday, June 30, 2006


BRAWLEY, California - A small earthquake rattled a rugged mountain area in southeastern California, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.
The magnitude-4.3 quake struck about 5:28 p.m. Thursday and was centered about 6 miles southwest of the Salton Sea, according to a preliminary report by the U.S. Geological Survey.

A magnitude-3.2 aftershock struck about two minutes later.

The 376-square-mile Salton Sea, about 75 miles northeast of San Diego, is California's largest lake.





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Prehistoric fish filmed in Indonesian seas

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-30 13:29:12

JAKARTA, June 30 (Xinhua) -- A team of Indonesian and Japanese scientists have filmed the first ever live images of the extremely primitive and rare coelacanth fish in deep waters off Manado, North Sulawesi province, a newspaper report said Friday.

The experts from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) Oceanology Center and the Fukushima Aquamarine Institute used a remotely operated vehicle to take pictures of five of the fish swimming at between 150 and 200 meters below sea level, said The Jakarta Post newspaper.
The coelacanth was first rediscovered in South Africa waters in1938, and was later caught dead in North Sulawesi waters in 1998 and 1999.

Scientists had previously thought the fish had died out around 70-80 million years ago and only knew of its existence from fossils. The discovery of the first coelacanth was described as "akin to finding a living dinosaur roaming the earth".

Researchers said the latest find could indicate these fish originated in the Manado sea and later migrated to South Africa, revising an earlier assumption that the species originated from South Africa.

Kasim Moosa, a researcher involved in the project, said Thursday that this five-foot-long fish liked to dwell in ocean caves.

The coelacanth is a predator that eats smaller fish.

The species from Manado, named the Latimerai manadoensis, is a brownish color with white spots dotted all over its body.

Scientists were surprised at the extra fleshy fins of this species, which they said resembled human hands and feet.

"The fish has a low metabolism. It needs to consume very little to survive for a long time," Kasim said.

Experts said the coelacanth has lived for more 360 million years under water, making it one of the world's oldest fish.

Kasim, a former researcher from LIPI, said the new video of the fish would help put Indonesia on the map for aquamarine research. "We are going to publicize these findings in Nature magazine," he said, adding that the fish was already protected under Indonesian law.



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Bear Flees for 2nd Time Before Neutering

Wednesday, 28 June 2006, 21:00 CDT

GOLDEN, British Columbia - A freedom-loving grizzly bear named Boo smashed a heavy steel door and barreled through two electric fences to escape a second time from a resort near this south-central British Columbia town.

Boo was recaptured Friday, two weeks after breaking out of an artificial den at the Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, but escaped from tighter confinement within a day, resort spokesman Michael Dalzell said Tuesday.

"It's unbelievable," Dalzell said. "We thought there was no way, it was absolutely impossible, but he found a way. It was basically like breaking out of Fort Knox."
He said the bear bashed a nearly 400-pound steel door off its four bolts, destroyed an electrical box while tearing through two electric fences and scrambled over a 12-foot fence anchored with 2 feet of steel below ground.

"I think he just kept charging it (the door) and charging it until it broke off its bolts," Dalzell said. "Everything was completely trashed. We are dealing with a pretty smart and determined bear."

The search team that caught Boo on Friday went back to work Sunday morning but saw no sign of the grizzly after logging more than 50 hours in a helicopter.

Resort staff had planned to neuter Boo, but he got away first. Once he's located, authorities will decide whether to try to recapture him again, Dalzell said.

"Right now we are in the process of looking for him . . . we are not out to try to trap or tranquilize him," he said. "We are looking at all options. Obviously, we need to just really look at our program and figure this one out."

The bear has lived inside a 22-acre enclosure since his mother was illegally shot by a hunter in 2002. It's unclear if he could fend for himself and, being used to humans, would likely be a problem in the wild, experts said.

Boo is now in a "lose-lose situation," said Tracey Henderson of the Grizzly Bear Alliance in Canmore, Alberta.

"The poor guy has now tasted freedom and he is going to be more motivated to keep getting out," she said. "There is a side of me that's saying, 'Way to go Boo,' but there is another side of me that's really worried about this bear being in the wild near humans."

Boo's first escape was blamed on hormones, June being the prime mating season for grizzlies, but Henderson said the second escape might indicate the bear no longer would tolerate confinement.

"It's just a sad situation," she said. "He is clearly a bear that wants to be free, yet we've created a situation where it's not really safe for him to be free."



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Last but not Least


Calling while driving is as dangerous as driving drunk

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-30 14:33:58

BEIJING, June 30(Xinhuanet) -- The U.S. scientists found that making phone calls while driving is as dangerous as driving drunk.

The study, conducted by researcher from the University of Utah, was published Friday in the quarterly Human Factors, the journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
"We found that when people talk on a cell phone they are as impaired as they are when they drive intoxicated at the legal blood-alcohol limit (of 0.08). It was a surprise to us." said Frank Drews, one of the Utah researchers who has published earlier studies showing drivers on the phone are at higher risk of accidents.

Also to our surprise, the study supports the previous findings that there's no difference between hand-held and hands-free. "There is a (more dangerous) component when people are dialing the phone or searching for the cell phone in the briefcase on the seat beside them, but what distracts people when talking on a cell phone is the conversation, not holding the phone." he explained.

"If legislators really want to address driver distraction, then they should consider outlawing cell phone use while driving," said Mr. Drews

Just like many people who have been drinking, the cellphone users did not believe themselves to be affected, the researchers found.



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Vatican vows to expel stem cell scientists from Church

By Malcolm Moore in Rome and Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Telegraph.co.uk
30/06/2006

Scientists who carry out embryonic stem cell research and politicians who pass laws permitting the practice will be excommunicated, the Vatican said yesterday.

"Destroying human embryos is equivalent to an abortion. It is the same thing," said Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family.

"Excommunication will be applied to the women, doctors and researchers who eliminate embryos [and to the] politicians that approve the law," he said in an interview with Famiglia Christiana, an official Vatican magazine.
Excommunication forbids Catholics from receiving communion, assisting in any Church duties, and sometimes from having a Church burial.

But the threat was shrugged off yesterday by Italy's leading expert on cloning, Prof Cesare Galli, of the Laboratory of Reproductive Technologies in Cremona, who was the first scientist to clone a horse.

Prof Galli likened the Vatican to the Taliban and added: "I can bear excommunication. I was raised as a Catholic, I share Catholic values, but I am able to make my own judgment on some issues and I do not need to be told by the Church what to do or to think.

"I will be, together with Elena Cattaneo [a scientist working in the University of Milan] the first to be affected by the excommunication and then there are two other labs that I know using imported embryonic stem cells."

The research is opposed by the Catholic Church because it involves destroying embryos. This occurs at the point when they consist of about 100 to 200 cells and the so-called inner cell mass is removed. These stem cells can grow indefinitely and turn into any of the body's 200 cell types.

Scientists believe research making use of the cells could eventually yield treatments for a range of diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and Parkinson's.

The Vatican's tough stance on the issue came as the Pope prepared to visit Valencia for the fifth annual world conference on the Catholic family. Spain passed a law permitting embryonic stem cell research two years ago to the dismay of the Church.

An Italian senator, Paola Binetti, a member of Opus Dei and a prominent campaigner for Catholic rights, also spoke against the Church's line.

"I am upset and stunned," she said. "It is a mistake to give out the idea that God is angry with Man because he is not in agreement with him."

Cardinal Trujillo said it was not just Spain which had "thrown out the fundamental laws of nature" but also Belgium, Holland, the Scandinavian countries and France. He did not mention Britain, which is at the forefront of embryonic stem cell research.Belgium's divided State.



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Geldof says richest countries' pledge to end poverty in Africa still not honoured

By Philip Thornton, Economics Correspondent
Published: 30 June 2006

The world's richest countries have failed to live up to promises they gave at the Gleneagles summit a year ago to end extreme poverty in Africa, Bob Geldof said yesterday.
The rock star turned Africa campaigner called on the Group of Eight (G8) rich nations to do more to meet the commitments they made in July 2005 in Scotland in the wake of the worldwide "Make Poverty History" campaign and the Live8 concert in London. He said that while G8 countries had honoured pledges to cancel poor countries' debts, commitments on aid were falling behind. A fair deal on world trade was also as distant a prospect as it was a year ago, he said.

Geldof said the performance on debt relief was good, aid "OK", but trade "ugly". He told a news conference: "Summing it up, there's the good, the OK and there is the seemingly ugly.

"A parent makes a promise to a child and if that promise is broken cynicism and a lack of trust set in. The promise from the economically powerful to the economically weak is more important because if we break that promise, we kill them."

Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, addressed the London meeting via a videolink. He said: "We can be the great generation that makes poverty history but to make poverty history we must now make promises happen one by one. Don't give up now, let your politicians know you are watching every step they take."

Mr Mandela and Geldof were speaking at the launch of a report by the campaign group DATA, headed by the U2 frontman and Africa campaigner Bono, to mark the first anniversary of the summit. DATA - which stands for Debt, Aid, Trade, Africa - said progress so far had been "painfully slow, proceeding at best at half-pace".

Last year, the G8 promised $50bn (£27bn) with more aid every year by 2010, half of that going to Africa; comprehensive Aids treatment by 2010; debt cancellation for 38 of the world's poorest countries; primary education for all children by 2010 and a trade deal benefiting Africa.

Jamie Drummond, the executive director of DATA, said: "The G8 strode forward down the promised path of debt, but have shuffled with a halting half-pace on aid, while falling backwards on trade. The campaigners around the world who got the G8 closer to the right path in the first place must now encourage them to accelerate down it."

Campaign groups are building up for protests around the world in the run-up the summit of the heads of state of the G8 in St Petersburg next month.

Out of the G8 countries - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Britain and US - DATA gave top marks to France as the only country on track for the 2010 aid target. It singled out Britain for praise for Gordon Brown's campaign to launch a multibillion-pound initiative to front-load cash to fund vaccinations against killer diseases, and for its "leadership" on debt and the fight against Aids. It reserved its main criticism for Germany, whose aid budget fell last year, and Italy, which it said was "way off track" on the 2010 commitments.

The UK Government said its official aid budget would continue to rise, hitting the global benchmark of 0.7 per cent of national income by 2013, two years ahead of the EU's target of 2015.

Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary, said the DATA report showed the real progress made since the "memorable" Gleneagles summit. "Much progress has already been achieved in a short time," he said. "On debt, 20 of the world's poorest countries have seen their debts written off, meaning countries like Zambia ... can spend the money they would have done on debt repayments to provide free health care instead."

DATA did not assess Russia as it still grappling with development issues of its own.

Meanwhile hopes of a deal to open up agricultural markets to Africa by cutting tariffs and subsidies in the US and Europe were fading. Ministers from 60 countries were meeting yesterday at the headquarters of the World Trade Organisation in Geneva in a last-ditch attempt to get a deal. Celso Amorim, the Brazilian Foreign Minister, said: "I have the impression that the gaps have actually widened or at least have become more rigid."

* The Tories may pledge to spend more than Labour on aid to the Third World. In a speech to Oxfam, in Oxford, yesterday, Mr Cameron promised to match Labour's pledge to boost Britain's aid spending to 0.7 per cent of national income by 2013 but said the Tories might go "further and faster" and would review the position every year. He also said a Tory government might bring in "aid vouchers" so that corrupt governments could not siphon off money and prevent it reaching the people who needed it.

How the G7 nations compare on aid

United Kingdom

Aid:The $115m (£63.5m) increase in aid to Africa must rise to $427m this year.

Trade: The UK has been the most vocal of the G8 and EU countries in calling for steeper subsidy cuts to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

Debt/other issues: Praised for debt cancellation and for Tony Blair's plan for an Africa progress panel to hold the G8 accountable.

Canada

Aid: Aid budget fell by £5.5m last year putting it "clearly off track". It needs an £80m cash injection.

Trade: Like all G8 countries, DATA finds Canada guilty of failing to use the Hong Kong meeting of the WTO to broker a deal.

Debt: The new Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, campaigned on a ticket of hitting the 2010 targets. He must set out a "clear timeline".

France

Aid: Deserves praise for increased aid to Africa and is the only nation on track for the 2010 goal.

Trade: France is the "biggest block" to reform to EU farm subsidies, which go to agribusiness not farmers, and the main obstacle to brokering a new global trade deal.

Debt: Gets credit for leadership on an air ticket levy to raise money to buy Aids drugs.

Germany

Aid: Its budget fell by £540,000 last year and needs to find £362m this year. Praises commitment to raise aid to 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2015.

Trade: Germany must support reform of the CAP which currently sucks £1.8bn out of Germany each year that could diverted to aid.

Debt: Deal to cancel debt was signed under the German presidency of G8. But Germany ought to return its share of £6bn debt repayment by Nigeria.

Italy

Aid: Last year's increase of £14.2m was "way off track" to meet Gleneagles commitments although DATA acknowledged it has an "economy in difficulty".

Trade: Found to be "major block", with France, of CAP reform.

Debt: Another beneficiary of the £6bn Nigerian debt repayment. It has agreed to raise its aid budget to 0.7 per cent by 2015.

Japan

Aid: Only G8 country for which development assistance figures for 2005 were not available.

Trade: As a food exporter, Japan has taken a defensive stance on cutting trade-distorting support.

Debt: The Japanese government, which will have new prime minister by September, must start thinking about an Africa agenda for its 2008 G8 summit.

United States

Aid: Despite increasing aid for Africa by $480m last year it still needs to raise it by $720m this year to meet its commitment.

Trade: Has been "reluctant" to commit to deeper cuts in subsidies and has a specific problem on its payments to cotton farmers that angers African countries.

Debt: Credit for part in multilateral agreement on debt cancellation.

Comment: Are you surprized, Bob? Maybe you should read Signs of the Times to get an understanding of what is really going on? But hey, look on the bright side, it only took you 25 years to figure this one out! Imagine what screamingly obvious facts you could uncover in the next 25 years!

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Oil Prices Rise Ahead of July 4 Holiday

AP
June 30, 2006

Crude oil futures rose Friday on strong U.S. gasoline demand ahead of the Independence Day holiday in the U.S. Brokers said energy futures were also being supported by hints from the Federal Reserve on Thursday that it could be done raising interest rates.

Societe Generale's director of commodity strategy, Michael Guido, said that by highlighting the role energy prices were playing in helping to slow economic growth to more sustainable levels "it was like giving high energy prices an honorable mention."

The question is now, Guido said, "how much higher do (energy prices) go before it becomes a detriment?"
Light sweet crude for August delivery rose 28 cents to $73.80 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, where gasoline futures fell by more than 2 cents to $2.2725 a gallon after settling at a nine-month high on Thursday.

"Earlier in the week, the $73 mark has always been considered the resistance level," said Victor Shum, energy analyst at Purvin & Gertz in Singapore. "Now, we've gone beyond that."

Brent crude futures on the ICE Futures exchange climbed 16 cents to $73.04 a barrel.

Worries about a supply crunch ahead of the July Fourth holiday grew after the U.S. government released a report Wednesday showing gasoline stocks shrank last week for the first time in more than two months.

Gasoline demand in the U.S. continues to rise in spite of soaring pump prices. Over the past four weeks, daily gasoline demand was up 0.9 percent from a year ago at 9.4 million barrels a day, according to Energy Department data released Wednesday. The average retail price of regular gasoline nationwide is $2.87 per gallon.

About 40.7 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more from home during the July Fourth holiday, up 1.2 percent from 40.2 million last year, according to projections by the AAA, the largest motor club in the United States.

"In the short-term, there's some momentum for pricing to go up further," Shum said.

The closure of the Calcasieu Ship Channel on the U.S. Gulf Coast has also caused gasoline prices to rise in the past week. A cleanup is under way following an oil spill at a Citgo Petroleum Corp. refinery in Lake Charles, La. The channel was partially reopened Wednesday, raising hopes that normal traffic could resume as early as this weekend.

Oil prices are up about 30 percent from a year ago, driven higher by strong demand and a limited supply cushion _ conditions that are worrisome to traders given the backdrop of considerable geopolitical uncertainty, such as violence in Nigeria, the war in Iraq and Iran's diplomatic showdown with the West over its nuclear program.

Iran is OPEC's No. 2 producer of oil, and traders are worried about the outlook for those supplies.



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