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Editorial: Ehud Olmert's Ties to 9/11

ChristopherBollyn
Date: Sunday, 18 June 2006

The first two months of Ehud Olmert's term as Israel's prime minister have been described as "the bloodiest, deadliest and the most criminal period of the 58-year-old state of Israel." Although the controlled press overlooks the new Israeli leader's crimes, Olmert's ties to the convicted Israeli criminal who controlled airport security at Boston airport on 9/11 cannot be ignored.

Although Zionism is probably the most potent force influencing U.S. politics, it is safe to say that it remains a political philosophy woefully misunderstood by the majority of the U.S. population. Although President George W. Bush and his war cabinet are clearly Zionists advancing the Zionist agenda, an agenda which is promoted and supported by nearly every member of Congress, Zionism and its bloody history are subjects which most Americans know virtually nothing about.

While American universities offer courses and degrees in practically every subject imaginable, a college curriculum offering a critical examination of Zionism and its history is not to be found.

This public's general ignorance of Zionism, its goals and history, is compounded by the controlled media, which grossly distorts and misinterprets Zionism to make this most un-American philosophy appear to be something familiar and benevolent to Americans. The well-documented bloody history of Zionist terror and ethnic cleansing, something which is well known to all Israelis and Palestinians, is strange and unknown terra incognita to most Americans, primarily due to academic and media censorship.
After the terror attacks of 9/11, which a large body of evidence indicates involved Israeli intelligence agents, and with more than 150,000 Americans engaged in costly and disastrous wars in the Middle East, it is simply no longer sustainable for Americans to remain blissfully ignorant of political Zionism.

ZIONISM AND COMMUNISM

Zionism, as a political movement, developed with Communism in the late 1800s among the Jewish communities in the western regions of the Russian Empire. In Lithuania, Poland, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, particularly in areas with large Jewish populations, Zionism became a new national religion. From the beginning, the Communist and Zionist movements were closely intertwined.
In the late 1800s, the religious-political ideology of Zionism led Jews in search of a national identity to shun the local language and begin speaking and writing Hebrew, a language which had not been spoken for thousands of years. In the Soviet Union, Jews were considered a national group and Jewish nationality was marked as such in Soviet passports. A Jewish Autonomous Region was even established in the Soviet Union in the area of Birobidjan in 1934 with Yiddish as the official language.

Although the Russian and Eastern European Jews known as the Ashkenazi are not even Semites, but Slavic and Asiatic converts to Judaism, Zionist zeal led them to misidentify themselves as "Hebrew," when for example, they entered the United States at Ellis Island.

As Zionists had "reconstituted" the "Hebrew" language, the primary political objective of political Zionism has always been the formation of a purely Jewish state in Palestine, something which has never actually existed in history. The fact that 20th Century Palestine was already inhabited by Palestinians, many of whom are real Semites, descended from the original Jews, Arabs, Greeks, and other races of the Holy Land, was something the Zionists intended to use military force to correct.

The armed conquest and ethnic cleansing of Palestine was vigorously promoted in the 1930s by Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, one of the most militant of Zionists. Jabotinsky, born in Odessa in 1880, became commander of the Zionist militia known as the Irgun in 1937. Jabotinsky headed the New Zionist Organization (N.Z.O), the Betar youth movement, and the Irgun militia, three extensions of the same extremist movement.

The Jabotinsky ideology maintains that the Jewish people have exclusive rights to all the Land of Israel, which it claims extends from the Nile of Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq.

OLMERT AND JABOTINSKY

Ehud Olmert, like his Russian-born parents who emigrated first to China and then to Palestine, is an ideological child of Jabotinsky. Olmert's father, Mordechai, was a devoted follower who joined the right-wing Herut movement and the Irgun militia then led by the notorious Zionist terrorist Menachem Begin.

Olmert's intensely right-wing family lived on a cooperative farm called Nahalat Jabotinsky. As a child, Olmert was a member of Betar, the militaristic youth movement. Begin, the hard-line Israeli prime minister who held the credo "In blood and fire Judea fell; in blood and fire Judea shall rise," would later refer to Olmert as "Ehud, my son."

Olmert, a member of parliament since 1973, later became mayor of Jerusalem, the occupied capital city of Palestine, and oversaw Israel's territorial expansion of the city limits. The area that Israelis now call Jerusalem extends from Bethlehem in the south, to Ramallah in the north, and Jericho is the east.

In the thinking of Jabotinsky Zionists like Olmert, there is simply no place for the Palestinians in the Land of Israel: "There is no choice: the Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel," Jabotinsky wrote. "If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs."

The barrier wall that has been built across the West Bank is an idea straight from the writings of Jabotinsky: "Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population - an iron wall which the native population cannot break through," Jabotinsky wrote in his 1923 book, The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs.

"Talking peace and drumming up support for his realignment plan of settlement, Ehud Olmert's 8 weeks in power proved to be the bloodiest, deadliest and the most criminal period of the 58-year-old state of Israel," Duraid Al Baik, foreign editor of Gulf News wrote in a recent article, "Olmert: The criminal who peddles peace."

"Since he was sworn in as the 12th prime minister of Israel on April 14, the Israelis have killed more than 50 Palestinians and injured around 200 almost at a rate of 1 killed and 4 injured per day," Al Baik wrote. "The new prime minister has set a record, surpassing the one established by his predecessor Ariel Sharon during the bloodiest days of the Palestinian uprising or intifada."
Seeking to foment a civil conflict among Palestinians, Olmert is now providing weapons to support the "private army" of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is seen by many as a Palestinian quisling working against the elected Hamas-led government.

The most egregious terrorist act, among the many recently committed by Israeli forces, was the shelling of the beach in Gaza in which 8 members of one family were killed. This blatant act of Israeli terror was followed by the official denial of responsibility although the Israelis had been shelling the Gaza Strip at the time the family on the beach was hit.

Mark Garlasco, a military expert working for the US-based Human Rights Watch group, was the first independent investigator to reach the scene of the crime and found shrapnel from a 155 mm artillery shell. "My assessment [is] that it's likely that this was incoming artillery fire that landed on the beach and was fired by the Israelis from the north of Gaza," Garlasco said.

OLMERT AND ATZMON

Olmert, who has long been tarnished by allegations of financial crimes, was implicated in a financial scandal involving forged receipts for donations to the 1988 Likud campaign, of which he was co-treasurer. This affair culminated in the March 1996 conviction of three other Likudniks, including Menahem Atzmon, the Likud treasurer. Olmert was also later indicted in the Likud affair, but was acquitted.

During the 1970s Olmert had worked in the law firm owned by another Atzmon, Uzi Atzmon.

Menahem Atzmon, convicted in Israel, went on to become the founder and head of International Consultants on Targeted Security (ICTS), the parent company of Huntleigh USA, the airport security firm that ran passenger screening operations at the airports of Boston and Newark on 9/11.

Huntleigh USA is a wholly owned subsidiary of an Israeli company called International Consultants on Targeted Security (ICTS) International N.V., a Netherlands-based aviation and transportation security firm headed by "former [Israeli] military commanding officers and veterans of government intelligence and security agencies."

Menachem Atzmon, convicted in Israel in 1996 for campaign finance fraud, and his business partner Ezra Harel, took over management of security at the Boston and Newark airports when their company ICTS bought Huntleigh USA in 1999. UAL Flight 175 and AA 11, which allegedly struck the twin towers, both originated in Boston, while UAL 93, which purportedly crashed in Pennsylvania, departed from the Newark airport. The convicted Israeli criminal Atzmon also controls and operates the German port of Rostock on the Baltic Sea.

Some 9/11 victims' families brought lawsuits against Huntleigh claiming the security firm had been grossly negligent on 9-11. While these relatives have a right to discovery and to know what Huntleigh did or did not do to protect their loved ones on 9-11, Huntleigh, along with the other security companies, was granted complete congressional protection in 2002 and will not be called to account for its actions on 9-11 in any U.S. court.

Atzmon, a convicted criminal, political ally and co-defendant of Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, was directly responsible for passenger and airline security at Boston's Logan Airport, whence the two airliners which struck the World Trade Center originated.
Olmert's relationship with Atzmon and the failed airport security of 9/11 is obviously more than coincidental yet the controlled press in the United States has failed to investigate this Israeli link to the terror attacks as it has with so many other links.

Finis
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Editorial: Bombs Bursting in Air

By Cindy Sheehan
Information Clearing House
07/04/06

The rockets red glare,
Bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that Star spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free,
And the home of the brave.

The star spangled banner has been in the news quite a lot lately. Some "courageous" Senators, including one of my own, Dianne Feinstein and everyone's favorite left-wing liberal, Hillary Clinton, bravely stuck their necks out to support an amendment that would make it illegal to burn the flag of the USA under certain circumstances.

Heaven forbid one of these pussillanimous public servants introduce, or even support a bill, that would call for an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq...or to even require that the President set a timeline for the withdrawal of our troops from a deadly quagmire of an occupation while they are handing him more money to wage the war crime in Iraq. As our nation's children are trying to only survive in the worst of circumstances, and by surviving are committing reprehensible atrocities on an innocent population which (especially in Ramadi right now) is having bombs burst in air all around them, that our Senate would even consider taking away first amendment rights from Americans is wretchedly ironic. Call me naïve, but I always thought that we elected our representatives to protect our rights, not take them away from us.

When I look at the star spangled banner I think of my son who began wearing a uniform with the flag on it from the time he went into scouting at the age of 6. I also think of one of the last pictures taken of Casey when he was awaiting deployment to Iraq from Kuwait. He was standing in a tent holding a bottle of water, wearing his desert cammies with an American flag patch on the chest. When we buried him a few weeks after that picture was taken, I was handed a folded flag which reminded me of the swaddling blanket that I wrapped him in to bring him home from the hospital almost 25 years before.

The star-spangled banner, which I can now see whipping in the wind outside of an airport terminal where I am writing this from does not fill me with pride: it fills me with shame and that flag symbolizes sorrow and corruption to me right now. The flag represents so much lying, fixed elections, profiting by the war machine, high gas prices, spying on Americans, rapid erosion of our freedoms while BushCo literally gets away with murder, torture and extreme rendition, contaminating the world with depleted uranium, and illegal and immoral wars that are responsible for killing so many. A symbol which used to represent hope to so many around the world now fills so many with disgust.

When I look at that rectangular piece of cloth that has red and white stripes and white stars on a blue field, I wonder what the Iraqi people think when they see American tanks and other vehicles rumbling through their streets carrying doom with that symbol emblazoned upon them. Or, what could our flag possibly represent to them when their women are being raped and burned to conceal crimes and entire families are being killed by soldiers whose uniforms carry that symbol? I am sure that the flag symbolizes death and destruction to them which I hope they are not confusing with freedom and democracy.

I often get told that I should "love America, or leave it." This is ridiculous logic and empty rhetoric. I love the country that I was born in and I love Americans...I am an American and so are my children. Casey was born and died a fine American who was abused by the same leaders that are abusing the world as I type. I could leave if I wanted to and, in fact, have received many offers to be an ex-patriate in many friendly countries. However, I want to stay and fight for my country. I want my country and the flag that symbolizes it around the globe to stand for something that we can all be proud of again.

BushCo and the neocon regime embarked on this disastrous misadventure in Iraq to prove to the world how strong and virile Pax Americana is. Their abjectly failed mission, which was evil and corrupt from the beginning, has not proven how strong our nation is, but, on the contrary, how weak. However, the neocons have managed to prove, that how, with the "mightiest" war machine in the world an insurgency in a country smaller than the state of California can hold their false freedom and deadly democracy at bay. One other thing that the neocons have proven is that America is no longer the moral touchstone of the world but is a nation that commits torture and crimes against humanity with the presidential seal of approval. BushCo has destroyed any credibility our nation ever had in the world and all of us need to fight to regain it and thereby redeem our own souls.

I implore you, while you are enjoying your potato salad and fireworks on the 4th to reflect on what the star-spangled banner means to you. If our flag symbolizes the same thing to you as it does to the neocons, then by all means, enlist and go to Iraq to let some of our soldiers come home that are tired of suffering and committing war crimes for Halliburton, Dick and Donny.

If, however, you realize that the flag no longer waves "o'er the land of the free" and you would like it to again, we invite you to come out to Camp Casey this summer and help us fight for the heart and soul of our nation. If you realize that while you are "oohing and ahing" over the pretty fireworks in your home town that there are real bombs bursting on the people of Iraq, killing them and destroying their nation for no reason other than Dick Cheney wanted to, then you need to digest your 4th of July BBQ and get out and show Dicky and the world that we mean business when we say we want our troops to come home to save them and our brothers and sisters in Iraq.

Thousands of peace loving and war hating members of the human race from all over the world are planning on coming to Crawford, Tx to Camp Casey again this summer to stand, sit, or camp in the face of the neocon war machine and prove to the world that there are Americans who will courageously speak for the people of Iraq and our soldiers who have no voices but who just want to be left in peace.

Come to Camp Casey.

We have room for everyone and everyone is welcome.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan who was killed in Iraq on April 04, 2004; Founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace (www.GSFP.org) and author of Not One More Mother's Child. Cindy is also the very proud mother of Carly, Andy, and Janey Sheehan who hold down the fort in Vacaville, California.

[ Original ]
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Editorial: Patriotism & The Fourth of July

By Howard Zinn
zmag
07/04/06

According to the Declaration of Independence-the fundamental document of democracy-governments are artificial creations, established by the people, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," and charged by the people to ensure the equal right of all to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Furthermore, as the Declaration says, "whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."

It is the country that is primary-the people, the ideals of the sanctity of human life and the promotion of liberty. When a government recklessly expends the lives of its young for crass motives of profit and power, always claiming that its motives are pure and moral ("Operation Just Cause" was the invasion of Panama and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in the present instance), it is violating its promise to the country. War is almost always a breaking of that promise. It does not enable the pursuit of happiness but brings despair and grief.

Mark Twain, having been called a "traitor" for criticizing the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, derided what he called "monarchical patriotism." He said: "The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: 'The King can do no wrong.' We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: 'Our country, right or wrong!' We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had-the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism."

If patriotism in the best sense (not in the monarchical sense) is loyalty to the principles of democracy, then who was the true patriot, Theodore Roosevelt, who applauded a massacre by American soldiers of 600 Filipino men, women, and children on a remote Philippine island, or Mark Twain, who denounced it?

Today, U.S. soldiers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan are not dying for their country, they are dying for their government. They are dying for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. And yes, they are dying for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American empire, for the political ambitions of the President. They are dying to cover up the theft of the nation's wealth to pay for the machines of death. As of July 4, 2006, more than 2,500 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, more than 8,500 maimed or injured.

With the war in Iraq long delcared a "Mission Accomplished," shall we revel in American military power and-against the history of modern empires-insist that the American empire will be beneficent?

Our own history shows something different. It begins with what was called, in our high school history classes, "westward expansion"-a euphemism for the annihilation or expulsion of the Indian tribes inhabiting the continent, all in the name of "progress" and "civilization." It continues with the expansion of American power into the Caribbean at the turn of the century, then into the Philippines, and then repeated Marine invasions of Central America and long military occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
After World War II, Henry Luce, owner of Time, LIFE, and Fortune, spoke of "the American Century," in which this country would organize the world "as we see fit." Indeed, the expansion of American power continued, too often supporting military dictatorships in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, because they were friendly to American corporations and the American government.

The record does not justify confidence in Bush's boast that the United States will bring democracy to Iraq. Should Americans welcome the expansion of the nation's power, with the anger this has generated among so many people in the world? Should we welcome the huge growth of the military budget at the expense of health, education, the needs of children, one fifth of whom grow up in poverty?

Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights. I suggest that a patriotic American who cares for her or his country might act on behalf of a different vision.

Should we not begin to redefine patriotism? We need to expand it beyond that narrow nationalism that has caused so much death and suffering. If national boundaries should not be obstacles to trade-some call it "globalization"-should they also not be obstacles to compassion and generosity?

Should we not begin to consider all children, everywhere, as our own? In that case, war, which in our time is always an assault on children, would be unacceptable as a solution to the problems of the world. Human ingenuity would have to search for other ways.

[ Original ]
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Eve of Destruction


Israeli Cabinet OKs deeper Gaza incursion

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip

Israel's Security Cabinet approved a deeper military incursion into the Gaza Strip Wednesday after Palestinian militants fired a rocket at a major Israeli city, an official at the meeting said.
The army has been given the green light to enter residential areas but will not reoccupy the Gaza Strip, the official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because no official statement has been released from the meeting yet.

Ground troops entered Gaza last week after Palestinian militants captured an Israeli soldier.



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Israeli planes bomb Gaza ministry

Wednesday, 5 July 2006, 08:31 GMT 09:31 UK

Israeli warplanes have carried out more raids in the Gaza Strip, with targets including a Palestinian ministry complex where four people were injured.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has warned of stiff retaliation after a rocket fired by Palestinian militants struck the Israeli city of Ashkelon.


Israel's security cabinet is meeting to discuss the unprecedented attack.

Israel has carried out more than a week of raids in response to the abduction by militants of one of its soldiers.

In the latest raid, witness said the Palestinian interior ministry complex was badly damaged. Nearby apartments were also hit, Reuters news agency reported.

The attack on Ashkelon struck an empty school in the deepest rocket strike inside Israel yet.

The Qassam rocket landed in a car park in the high school in the centre of the city shortly after 1900 (1600 GMT) on Tuesday.

Pupils were on holiday and there were no injuries, although the rocket caused some damage and left a crater.

The BBC's Nick Thorpe in Jerusalem says the attack is being taken very seriously by Israel.

While Qassams regularly strike another small Israeli town, Sderot, Ashkelon - with about 120,000 inhabitants - is further away from Gaza and has been spared direct hits until now.

Mr Olmert called the attack "a major escalation in the war of terror that the Hamas organisation is responsible for".

A large Israeli force has been waiting on the northern edge of the Gaza strip for days, following the capture of 19-year-old Cpl Gilad Shalit.

A small force entered the area on Monday morning and a larger force might now be sent in, to try to prevent more rockets being fired, our correspondent says.

'Long war'

Cpl Shalit is believed to be held in southern Gaza.

Despite the expiry of a Tuesday deadline set by the militants for Israel to free Palestinian prisoners, Israel said the 19-year-old tank gunner was alive.

"We know that until now Gilad Shalit is alive, we know that he is injured, that he was seen by a Palestinian doctor a few days ago," government spokesman Avi Pazner told French television.

But Abu al-Muthana, from the Islamic Army - one of three groups holding Cpl Shalit - said there would be no more talks nor information released about the soldier's fate.

As the crisis wore on, Mr Olmert warned that the fight against Palestinian militants would be drawn out.

"This is a long war. It requires lots of patience, sometimes endless restraint. We have to know when to clench our teeth and to deal a decisive blow.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya of Hamas, whose Gaza offices were hit in a Israeli missile strike three days ago, has appealed for Cpl Shalit's life to be spared.

"The government... is still calling for preserving the life of the captured Israeli soldier and for him to receive good treatment," Mr Haniya said.

The BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen says nobody on either side knows how long this crisis will last.

Their public statements are a form of psychological warfare, to show resolution and to put pressure on their opponents, he says.



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Airstrike hits pro-Hamas university in Gaza

Tue Jul 4, 2006 12:03 AM BST14

GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli airstrike hit the pro-Hamas Islamic University in Gaza City on Tuesday, Palestinian witnesses said.
The army said it was checking the report.

There were no immediate reports of casualties.

The airstrike came several hours before the expiry of a deadline set by Palestinian militants for Israel to agree to free hundreds of prisoners in exchange for a captured soldier.



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Israeli soldier kept in Gaza bunker: report

Reuters
Wed Jul 5, 2006

JERUSALEM - Palestinian gunmen who seized an Israeli soldier have holed up with him in an underground bunker somewhere in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Quoting Arab mediators, the Yedioth Ahronoth daily said Corporal Gilad Shalit and 7 militants were living off food hoarded in advance to spare the captors the risk of emerging.
Israel has sent troops and tanks into southern Gaza, saying that is where Shalit is believed to be held after three militant factions abducted him in a cross-border raid from Gaza on June 25.

Mediation efforts to negotiate his release have stalled.

Israel has refused demands that it free hundreds of jailed Palestinians in return for the 19-year-old soldier. The crisis has been further complicated by the fact that some of Shalit's captors are linked to the governing Palestinian faction Hamas.

In what appears to be a precaution against detection by Israeli intelligence services, Shalit's captors have turned off their mobile telephones and are communicating with the outside world using trusted "bosses" aboveground, Yedioth reported.



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Visiting US official evades queries on Mossad-backed terror network

By Meris Lutz
Special to The Daily Star
Tuesday, July 04, 2006

BEIRUT: The US House of Representatives Democratic Assistance Committee arrived in Lebanon Monday with the intention of "exchanging expertise" with Lebanese lawmakers, but the visit merely highlighted the US delegation's unwillingness to waiver from the official agenda to answer specific questions on the Lebanese case.

Committee chairman David Drier pointedly ignored repeated questions from reporters about the recently uncovered Mossad-linked terrorist group while speaking to the press after talks with Speaker Nabih Berri.
"I repeat, this visit focuses on democracy in the parliaments, which we are seeking to build relations with, and this is our mission," he said after being asked a second time about his opinion on the Mossad-sponsored network and the US reaction to it.

The US committee faced more difficult questions during a seminar on congressional committees which was attended by academics and politicians who took the opportunity to pose questions about the US legal process and the country's policies.

"There's a wide range of views in America toward our policy in Iraq and the Middle East, and even within our delegation," said Drier, responding to criticism of the US role in Iraq and its continued support of Israel.

"I agree with some [policies] and not others, but our mission is to focus on building relationships," he said. "We are here to talk about our own experiences, not to impose ideas on anyone."

"We understand that we have very different constitutional systems, but we are both democracies with a strong stake in representative government," added Congressman Dave Price.

Drier concentrated on the "need for an independent Parliament and adequate oversight of decisions by the executive branch," but would not elaborate on the US refusal to recognize the current chief executive, President Emile Lahoud.

"We're not in the midst of determining what should happen in Lebanon," Drier told The Daily Star. "All I'm doing is talking about the United States and what we do, and we're setting it as an example: We work independent of the executive branch and we do everything we can to make sure that others around the world can see that."



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Panel: Zionists use anti-Semitism card to suppress debate

Ynet News
05/07/2006

Britain's largest Muslim TV channel, Islam channel, hosts debate titled 'Zionism: The cancer at the heart of international affairs,' hosted by former BBC correspondent Alan Hart

Britain's largest Muslim TV channel, the Islam channel, last week hosted a debate on anti-Semitism and Zionism, with discussion centering on the idea that informed and honest debate on the Middle East is rendered impossible because critics are immediately accused of anti-Semitism.

The debate, "Zionism: The cancer at the heart of international affairs," was filmed by the London-based Islamic TV station.

Alan Hart, a former ITN and BBC correspondent, chaired the debate. He said that "the anti-Semitism card is something the Zionists have exploited to suppress debate."

Hart, author of the recently published "Zionism: The real enemy of the Jews," blamed the mainstream media for complicity in the suppression
of truth of history, out of fear of offending Jews and thanked Mohammed Ali, the CEO of Islam Channel for his "courage" in widening the debate.

Expanding the debate, Hart added that the assumption is that "Zionism and Judaism are the same thing, therefore criticism of Zionism is anti-Semitism but Zionism is the nationalism for some Jews, a tiny minority."

"The propaganda they use, the Melanie Phillips version (a Jewish journalist for the British newspaper The Daily Mail), is that Israel faces annihilation and fears being pushed into the sea," Hart said, which he added was an unfounded myth.
Zionism vs. Judaism

On the panel were three Jewish anti-Zionists and Palestinian scholar Dr Ghada Karmi.

Dr. Ilan Pappe, the Haifa University historian at the forefront of a campaign calling for sanctions and an academic boycott of Israel, said that in order to divorce Zionism from Judaism we must not adopt their discourse.

Rabbi Ahron Cohen, who represented the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta Hasidic sect, said, "Zionists imposed a secular faith state on the Palestinians, this is immoral and the underlying cause of the strife. Zionism and Judaism are incompatible concepts. Many Jews do not approve of Zionism but they cannot say this publicly."

European problem

Dr. Karmi, a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at Exeter University, said the tragedy of the Holocaust had been acted out in Europe and that it was therefore a European affair that had nothing to do with the Palestinians.

The former consultant to the Palestinian Authority offered her own interpretation: "The Europeans did it to atone for their sins and guilt, but the Jews who arrived in Palestine were not the Jews we knew, they were complicated and miserable and the problem is that they're still there."

"Israel has been a total disaster for the entire Arab world, nothing positive or beneficial has come from it," she added.

Dr. Hajo Meyer, a German born scientist and Holocaust survivor, was another panel member. Now living in Holland, he is a board member of Another Jewish Voice, part of the European Jewish Alliance for a Just Peace. In his latest book, "The End of Judaism", he has criticised Israel for "treating the Palestinian people in the same way the Nazis treated Jews during the Second World War".

Dr. Meyer said that anti-Semitism is a form of xenophobia, but accusations are met with much swifter condemnation and reprimands.

Islam Channel plans to release a DVD of the debate later in the year.



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Occupied Iraq


The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds

By Nir Rosen
07/04/06 "Truthdig"

Three years into an occupation of Iraq replete with so-called milestones, turning points and individual events hailed as "sea changes" that would "break the back" of the insurgency, a different type of incident received an intense, if ephemeral, amount of attention. A local human rights worker and aspiring journalist in the western Iraqi town of Haditha filmed the aftermath of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians. The video made its way to an Iraqi working for Time magazine, and the story was finally publicized months later. The Haditha massacre was compared to the Vietnam War's My Lai massacre, and like the well-publicized and embarrassing Abu Ghraib scandal two years earlier, the attention it received made it seem as if it were a horrible aberration perpetrated by a few bad apples who might have overreacted to the stress they endured as occupiers.
In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media.

Americans, led to believe that their soldiers and Marines would be welcomed as liberators by the Iraqi people, have no idea what the occupation is really like from the perspective of Iraqis who endure it. Although I am American, born and raised in New York City, I came closer to experiencing what it might feel like to be Iraqi than many of my colleagues. I often say that the secret to my success in Iraq as a journalist is my melanin advantage. I inherited my Iranian father's Middle Eastern features, which allowed me to go unnoticed in Iraq, blend into crowds, march in demonstrations, sit in mosques, walk through Falluja's worst neighborhoods.

I also benefited from being able to speak Arabic-in particular its Iraqi dialect, which I hastily learned in Baghdad upon my arrival and continued to develop throughout my time in Iraq.

My skin color and language skills allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were just another haji, the "gook" of the war in Iraq. I first realized my advantage in April 2003, when I was sitting with a group of American soldiers and another soldier walked up and wondered what this haji (me) had done to get arrested by them. Later that summer I walked in the direction of an American tank and heard one soldier say about me, "That's the biggest fuckin' Iraqi (pronounced eye-raki) I ever saw." A soldier by the gun said, "I don't care how big he is, if he doesn't stop movin' I'm gonna shoot him."

I was lucky enough to have an American passport in my pocket, which I promptly took out and waved, shouting: "Don't shoot! I'm an American!" It was my first encounter with hostile American checkpoints but hardly my last, and I grew to fear the unpredictable American military, which could kill me for looking like an Iraqi male of fighting age. Countless Iraqis were not lucky enough to speak American English or carry a U.S. passport, and often entire families were killed in their cars when they approached American checkpoints.

In 2004 the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that by September 2004 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the American occupation and said that most of them had died violently, mostly in American airstrikes. Although this figure was challenged by many, especially partisans of the war, it seems perfectly plausible to me based on what I have seen in Iraq, having spent most of the postwar period there. What I never understood was why more journalists did not focus on this, choosing instead to look for the "good news" and go along with the official story.

My first direct encounter with American Marines was from the Iraqi side. In late April 2003, I was attending the Friday prayers in a Sunni bastion in Baghdad. Thousands of people were praying and the devout flooded out of the mosque and laid their prayer rugs on the street and the square in front of it. A Marine patrol rounded a corner and walked right into hundreds of people praying on the street and listening to the sermon, even approaching the separate section for women. Dozens of men rose and put their shoes on, forming a virtual wall to block the armed Marines, who seemed unaware of the danger. The Marines did not understand Arabic. "Irjau!" "Go back!" the demonstrators screamed, and some waved their fists, shouting "America is the enemy of God!" as they were restrained by a few cooler-headed men from within their ranks. I ran to advise the Marines that Friday prayers was not a good time to show up fully armed. The men sensed this and asked me to tell their lieutenant, who appeared oblivious to the public relations catastrophe he might be provoking. He told me: "That's why we've got the guns."

A nervous soldier asked me to go explain the situation to the bespectacled staff sergeant, who had been attempting to calm the situation by telling the demonstrators, who did not speak English, that the U.S. patrol meant no harm. He finally lost his temper when an Iraqi told him gently, "You must go." "I have the weapons," the sergeant said. "You back off."

"Let's get the fuck out!" one Marine shouted to another as the tension increased. I was certain that a shove, a tossed stone or a shot fired could have provoked a massacre and turned the city violently against the American occupation. Finally the Marines retreated cautiously around a corner as the worshipers were held back by their own comrades. It could have ended worse, and a week later it did when 17 demonstrators were killed by American soldiers in Falluja, and several more were killed in a subsequent demonstration, a massacre that contributed to the city's support of the resistance.

I believe that any journalist who spent even a brief period embedded with American soldiers must have witnessed crimes being committed against innocent Iraqis, so I have always been baffled by how few were reported and how skeptically the Western media treated Arabic reports of such crimes. These crimes were not committed because Americans are bad or malicious; they were intrinsic to the occupation, and even if the Girl Scouts had occupied Iraq they would have resorted to these methods. In the end, it is those who dispatched decent young American men and women to commit crimes who should be held accountable.


Next Page: "I still feel guilt over my complicity in crimes the one time I was embedded..."

I still feel guilt over my complicity in crimes the one time I was embedded, in the fall of 2003. (I spent two weeks with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment stationed in Husaybah, an Iraqi town near the Syrian border that is a suspected entry point for foreign insurgent fighters.) Normally, I like to think, if I witnessed an act of bullying of the weak or the elderly, or the terrorizing of children, I would interfere and try to stop it. After all, a passion for justice is what propelled me into this career. It started when I arrived in the main base in the desert. Local Iraqi laborers were sitting in the sun waiting to be acknowledged by the American soldiers. Every so often a representative would come to the soldiers to explain in Arabic that they were waiting for their American overseer. The soldier would shout back in English. Finally I translated between them. One soldier, upset with an Iraqi man for looking at him, asked him: "Do I owe you money? So why the fuck are you looking at me?"

After a week, the Army unit I was living with went on a raid targeting alleged Al Qaeda cells. Included were safe houses, financiers and fighters as well as alleged resistance leaders such as senior military officers from elite units of the former Iraqi army. All together there were 62 names on the wanted list. A minimum of 29 locations would be raided, taking out the "nervous system" of the area resistance "and the guys who actually do the shooting."

The raids began at night. The men descended upon villages by the border with Syria in the western desert. After half an hour of bumpy navigating in the dark the convoy approached the first house and the vehicles switched their lights on, illuminating the target area as a tank broke the stone wall. "Fuck yeah!" cheered one sergeant, "Hi honey I'm home!" The teams charged over the rubble from the wall, breaking through the door with a sledgehammer and dragging several men out. The barefoot prisoners, dazed from their slumber, were forcefully marched over rocks and hard ground. One short middle-aged man, clearly injured and limping with painful difficulty, was violently pushed forward in the grip of a Brobdingnagian soldier who said, "You'll fucking learn how to walk." Each male was asked his name. None matched the names on the list. A prisoner was asked where the targeted military officer lived. "Down the road," he pointed. "Show us!" he was ordered, and he was shoved ahead, stumbling over the rocky street, terrified that he would be seen as an informer in the neighborhood, terrified that he too would be taken away. He stopped at the house but the soldiers ran ahead. "No, no, it's here," yelled a sergeant, and they ran back, breaking through the gate and bursting into the house. It was a large villa, with grape vines covering the driveway. Women and children from within were ordered to sit in the garden. The men were pushed to the ground on the driveway and asked their names. One was indeed the first high-value target. His son begged the soldiers, "Take me for 10 years but leave my father!" Both were taken. The children screamed 'Daddy, Daddy!' as the men were led out and the women were given leaflets in Arabic explaining that the men had been arrested

Home after home met the same fate. Some homes had only women; these houses too were ransacked, closets broken, mattresses overturned, clothes thrown out of drawers. Men were dragged on the ground by their legs to be handcuffed outside. One bony ancient sheik walked out with docility and was pushed forcefully to the ground, where he was wrestled by soldiers who had trouble cuffing his arms. A commando grabbed him from them, and tightly squeezed the old man's arms together, lifting him in the air and throwing him down on the ground, nearly breaking his fragile arms.

As her husband was taken away, one woman angrily asked Allah to curse the soldiers, calling them "Dogs! Jews!" over and over. When his soldiers left a home, one officer emerged to slap them on the back like a coach congratulating his players during halftime in a winning game. In a big compound of several houses the soldiers took all the men, even the ones not on the list. A sergeant explained that the others would be held for questioning to see whether they had any useful information. The men cried out that they had children still inside. In several houses soldiers tenderly carried out babies who had been left sleeping in their cribs and handed them to the women. When the work at a house was complete, or at the Home Run stage (stages were divided into 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Home Run and Grand Slam, meaning ready to move on), the soldiers relaxed and joked, breaking their own tension and ignoring the trembling and shocked women and children crouched together on the lawns behind them.

Prisoners with duct tape on their eyes and their hands cuffed behind them with plastic "zip ties" sat in the back of the truck for hours, without water. They moved their heads toward sounds, disoriented and frightened, trying to understand what was happening around them. Any time a prisoner moved or twitched, a soldier bellowed at him angrily and cursed. Thrown among the tightly crowded men in one truck was a boy no more than 15 years old, his eyes wide in terror as the duct tape was placed on them. By daylight the whole town could see a large truck full of prisoners. Two men walking to work with their breakfast in a basket were stopped at gunpoint, ordered to the ground, cuffed and told to "Shut the fuck up" as their basket's contents were tossed out and they were questioned about the location of a suspect.

The soldier guarding them spoke of the importance of intimidating Iraqis and instilling fear in them. "If they got something to tell us I'd rather they be scared," he explained. An Iraqi policeman drove by in a white SUV clearly marked "Police." He too was stopped at gunpoint and ordered not to move or talk until the last raid was complete. From the list of 34 names, the troop I was with brought in about 16 positively identified men, along with 54 men who were neighbors, relatives or just happened to be around. By 08:30 the Americans were done and started driving back to base. As the main element departed, the psychological operations vehicle blasted AC/DC rock music through neighborhood streets. "It's good for morale after such a long mission," a captain said. Crowds of children clustered on porches smiling, waving and giving the passing soldiers little thumbs up. A sergeant waved back. Neighbors awakened by the noise huddled outside and watched the convoy. One little girl stood before her father and guarded him from the soldiers with her arms outstretched and legs wide.


Next Page: "Did they just arrest every man they found?" he asked, wondering if "we just made another 300 people hate us."

In Baghdad, coalition officials announced that 112 suspects had been arrested in a major raid near the Syrian border, including a high-ranking official in the former Republican Guard. "The general officer that they captured, Abed Hamed Mowhoush al-Mahalowi, was reported to have links with Saddam Hussein and was a financier of anti-coalition activities, according to intelligence sources," a military spokeswoman said. "Troops from the 1st and 4th squadrons of the Third Armored Cavalry cordoned off sections of the town and searched 29 houses to find 'subversive elements,' including 12 of the 13 suspects they had targeted for capture," she said.

That night the prisoners were visible on a large dirt field in a square of concertina wire. Beneath immense spotlights and near loud generators, they slept on the ground, guarded by soldiers. One sergeant was surprised by the high number of prisoners taken by the troop I was with. "Did they just arrest every man they found?" he asked, wondering if "we just made another 300 people hate us." The following day 57 prisoners were transported to a larger base for further interrogation. Some were not the suspects, just relatives of the suspects or men suspected of being the suspects.

The next night the troop departed the base at 0200, hoping to find those alleged Al Qaeda suspects who had not been home during the previous operation. Soldiers descended upon homes in a large compound, their boots trampling over mattresses in rooms the inhabitants did not enter with shoes on. Most of the wanted men were nowhere to be found, their women and children prevaricating about their locations. Some of their relatives were arrested instead. "That woman is annoying!" one young soldier complained about a mother's desperate ululations as her son was taken from his house. "How do you think your mother would sound if they were taking you away?" a sergeant asked him.

Three days after the operation, a dozen prisoners could be seen marching in a circle outside their detention cells, surrounded by barbed wire. They were shouting "USA, USA!" over and over. "They were talkin' when we told 'em not to, so we made 'em talk somethin' we liked to hear," one of the soldiers guarding them said with a grin. Another gestured up with his hands, letting them know they had to raise their voices. A first sergeant quipped that the ones who were not guilty "will be guilty next time," after such treatment. Even if the men were guilty, no proof would be provided to the community. There would be no process of transparent justice. The only thing evident to the Iraqi public would be the American guilt.

In November 2003 a major from the judge advocate general's office working on establishing an Iraqi judicial process told me that there were at least 7,000 Iraqis detained by American forces. Many languished in prisons indefinitely, lost in a system that imposed the English language on Arabic speakers with Arabic names not easily transcribed. Some were termed "security detainees" and held for six months pending a review to determine whether they were still a "security risk." Most were innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor did not like them. A lieutenant colonel familiar with the process told me that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, there would be a court-martial, which would imply that the U.S. was occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an occupation or liberation. Two years later, 50,000 Iraqis had been imprisoned by the Americans and only 2% had ever been found guilty of anything.


***

The S2 (intelligence) section in the Army unit I was with had not proved itself very reliable in the past-a fact that frustrated soldiers to no end. "You get all psyched up to do a hard mission," said one sergeant, "and it turns out to be three little girls. The little kids get to me, especially when they cry."

The reason for the lack of confidence in S2 was made clear by the case of a man called Ayoub. I accompanied the troop when it raided Ayoub's home based on intelligence S2 provided: intercepted phone calls, in which Ayoub spoke of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons.

On the day of the raid, tanks, Bradleys and Humvees squeezed between the neighborhood walls. A CIA operator angrily eyed the rooftops and windows of nearby houses, a silencer on his assault weapon. Soldiers broke through Ayoub's door early in the morning and when he did not immediately respond to their orders he was shot with nonlethal ordinance, little pellets exploding like gunshot from the weapons grenade launcher. The floor of the house was covered in his blood. He was dragged into a room and interrogated forcefully as his family was pushed back against a garden fence. Ayoub's frail mother, covered in a shawl, with traditional tribal tattoos marking her face, pleaded with an immense soldier to spare her son's life, protesting his innocence. She took the soldier's hand and kissed it repeatedly while on her knees. He pushed her to the grass along with Ayoub's four girls and two boys, all small, and his wife. They squatted barefoot, screaming, their eyes wide in terror, clutching each other as soldiers emerged with bags full of documents, photo albums and two CDs with Saddam and his cronies on the cover. These CDs, called "The Crimes of Saddam," are common on every Iraqi street, and as their title suggests, they were not made by Saddam supporters; however, the soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and assumed they were proof of guilt.

Ayoub was brought out and pushed onto the truck. He gestured to his shrieking relatives to remain where they were. He was an avuncular man, small and round-balding and unshaven with a hooked nose and slightly pockmarked face. He could not have looked more innocent. He sat frozen, staring numbly ahead as the soldiers ignored him, occasionally glancing down at their prisoner with sneering disdain. The medic looked at Ayoub's injured hand and chuckled to his friends, "It ain't my hand." The truck blasted country music on the way back to the base. Ayoub was thrown in the detainment center. After the operation there were smiles of relief among the soldiers, slaps on the back and thumbs up.


Next Page: "Oh shit," said the S2 captain, "[we've got] the wrong Ayoub."

Several hours later, a call was intercepted from the Ayoub whom the Americans were seeking. "Oh shit," said the S2 captain, "[we've got] the wrong Ayoub." The innocent father of six who was in custody actually was a worker in a phosphate plant the Americans were running. But he was not let go. If he was released, there would be a risk that the other Ayoub would learn he was being sought. The night after his arrest a relieved Ayoub could be seen escorted by soldiers to call his family and report he was fine but would not be home for a few days. "It was not the wrong guy," the troop's captain said defensively, shifting blame elsewhere. "We raided the house we were supposed and arrested the man we were told to."

When the soldiers who had captured Ayoub learned of the mistake, they were not surprised. "Oops," said one. Another one wondered, "What do you tell a guy like that, sorry?" "It's depressing," a third said. "We trashed the wrong guy's house and the guy that's been shooting at us is out there with his house not trashed." The soldier who shot the nonlethal ordinance at Ayoub said, "I'm just glad he didn't do something that made me shoot him [with a bullet]." Then the soldiers resumed their banter.

A few days later, the Army did a further analysis of the phone calls that had originally sent them in search of a man named Ayoub. In the calls, Ayoub had indeed spoken of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons. This had rightfully alarmed the Army's intelligence officers. But at some point an analyst realized that Ayoub was not a terrorist intent on obtaining weapons; he turned out to be a kid playing video games and talking about them with his friend on the phone.

The Procrustean application of spurious information gathered by intelligence officers who cannot speak Arabic and are not familiar with Iraqi, Arab or Muslim culture is creating enemies instead of eliminating them. The S2 captain could barely hide his disdain for Iraqis. "Oh he just hates anything Iraqi," another captain said of him, adding that the intelligence officers do not venture off the base or interact with Iraqis or develop any relations with the people they are expected to understand. A lieutenant colonel from the Army's civil affairs command explained that these officers do not read about the soldiers engaging with Iraqis, sharing cigarettes, tea, meals and conversations. They read only the reports of "incidents" and they view Iraqis solely as security threat. The intelligence officers in Iraq do not know Iraq.

In every market in Iraq hundreds of wooden crates can be found piled one atop the other. Sold for storage, upon further examination these crates reveal themselves to be former ammunition crates. For the past 25 years Iraq has been importing weapons to feed its army's appetite for war against Iran, the Kurds, Kuwait and America. When empty, the crates were sold for domestic use. The soldiers with the Army unit I was with assumed the crates they found in nearly every home implicated the owners in terrorist activities, rather than the much simpler truth. During the operation described here I saw one of the soldiers find such a crate overturned above a small hole in a man's backyard. "He was trying to bury it when he saw us coming," one soldier deduced confidently. He did not lift the crate to discover that it was protecting irrigation pipes and hoses in a pit.

Saddam bestowed his largesse upon the security services that served as his praetorian guard and executioners. Elite fighters received Jawa motorcycles. Immediately after the war, Jawa motorcycles were available in every market in Iraq that sold scooters and motorcycles. Some had been stolen from government buildings in the frenzy of looting that followed the war and was directed primarily against institutions of the former government. Soldiers of the Army unit I accompanied were always alert for Jawa motorcycles, and indeed it was true that many Iraqi paramilitaries had used them against the Americans. On a night the troop had received RPG fire, its members drove back to base through the town. When they spotted a man on a Jawa motorcycle they fired warning shots. When he did not stop they shot him to death. "He was up to no good," the captain explained.

On Nov. 26, 2003, after two weeks of brutal daily interrogations by military intelligence officers, Special Forces soldiers and CIA personnel, Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, the former chief of Iraqi air defenses whose arrest I had witnessed, died in a U.S. detention facility. Twenty-four to 48 hours before that, he had been interrogated and beaten by CIA personnel. The Army's Criminal Investigation Division began looking into Mowhoush's death that same day. The next day an Army news release stated that he had died of natural causes. "Mowhoush said he didn't feel well and subsequently lost consciousness," according to the statement, " ... the soldier questioning him found no pulse and called for medical authorities. A surgeon responded within five minutes to continue advanced cardiac life support techniques, but they were ineffective." On Dec. 2, 2003, an Army medical examiner's autopsy said the general's death was "a homicide by asphyxia," but it was not until May 12, 2004, that the death certificate was issued, with homicide as the cause. The Pentagon autopsy report in May said he had died of "asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression" and that there was "evidence of blunt force trauma to the chest and legs." Mowhoush was one of several Iraqis whose death certificates were not issued until May of 2004, long after their deaths.


Next Page: "Iraqis in their own country are reminded at all times who has control over their lives, who can take them with impunity."

American soldiers had no mission and viewed Iraqis as "the enemy" through a prism of "us and them." An officer returning from a fact-finding mission complained of "a lot of damn good individuals who received no guidance, training or plan and who are operating in a vacuum." Inside the G2, or intelligence, section of the Army's civil affairs headquarters in Baghdad, on a bulletin board I saw an anecdote meant to be didactic. It told of American soldiers suppressing Muslim Filipino insurgents a century before. They dipped bullets in pig's blood and shot some Muslim rebels, to send a warning to the others. A Latino civil affairs officer, fed up with Iraqis, explained that the only solution was to shut down Baghdad entirely. Military civil affairs officers are supposed to provide civil administration in the absence of local power structures, minimize friction between the military and civilians, restore normalcy and empower local institutions. One brigade commander explained to a civil affairs major that "I am not here to win hearts and minds, I am here to kill the enemy." He failed to provide his civil affairs team with security, so it could not operate.

One morning in Albu Hishma, a village north of Baghdad cordoned off with barbed wire, the local U.S. commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever they cared about the most before their homes were flattened. In Baquba, two 13-year-old girls were killed by a Bradley armored personnel carrier. They were digging through trash and the American rule was that anybody digging on road sides would be shot.

The 4th Infantry Division was especially notorious in Iraq. Its soldiers in Samara handcuffed two suspects and threw them off a bridge into a river. One of them died. In Basra, seven Iraqi prisoners were beaten to death by British soldiers. A high-ranking Iraqi police official in Basra identified one of the victims as his son. It is common practice for soldiers to arrest the wives and children of suspects as "material witnesses" when the suspects are not captured in raids. In some cases the soldiers leave notes for the suspects, letting them know their families will be released should they turn themselves in. Soldiers claim this is a very effective tactic. Soldiers on military vehicles routinely shoot at Iraqi cars that approach too fast or come too close, and at Iraqis wandering in fields. "They were up to no good," they explain. Every commander is a law unto himself. He is advised by a judge advocate general who interprets the rules as he wants. A war crime to one is legitimate practice to another. After the Center for Army Lessons Learned sent a team of personnel to Israel to study that country's counterinsurgency tactics, the Army implemented the lessons it learned, and initiated house demolitions in Samara and Tikrit, blowing up homes of suspected insurgents.

It is hard to be patient when mosques are raided, when protesters are shot, when innocent families are gunned down at checkpoints or by frightened soldiers in vehicles. It is hard to be patient in hours of izdiham, or traffic jams, that are blamed on Americans closing off main roads throughout Baghdad. The Americans close roads after "incidents" or when they are looking for planted bombs. Their vehicles block the roads and they answer no questions, refusing to let any Iraqi approach. Cars are forced to drive "wrong side," as Iraqis call it, with near fatal results. Iraqis have become experts in walking over the concertina wire that divides so much of their cities: First one foot presses the razor wire down, then the other steps over. They are experts in driving slowly through lakes and rivers of sewage. They are experts in sifting through mountains of garbage for anything that can be reused.

It is hard to relax when the soldier in the Humvee or armored personnel carrier in front of you aims his machine gun at you; when aggressive white men race by, running you off the road as they scowl behind their wraparound sunglasses; when soldiers shoot at any car that comes too close. Iraqis in their own country are reminded at all times who has control over their lives, who can take them with impunity.

An old Iraqi woman approached the gate to Baghdad international airport. Draped in a black ebaya, she was carrying a picture of her missing son. She did not speak English, and the soldier in body armor she asked for help did not speak Arabic. He shouted at her to "get the fuck away." She did not understand and continued beseeching him. The soldier was joined by another. Together they locked and loaded their machine guns, chambering a round, aiming the guns at the old woman and shouting at her that if she did not leave "we will kill you."

The explosive-sniffing dog in front of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels is hated by the Iraqi security guards as well as the American soldiers who stand there because it, like the rest of us who live in the area, is subject to olfactory whims as it imagines every day that it smells a bomb, forcing them to close off the street for several hours. Two of my friends were arrested for not having a bomb last week when the dog decided their bag smelled funny. They were jailed for four days.

Imagine. The American occupation of Iraq has lasted over three years. The above stories are based on my two weeks with one unit in a small part of the country. Imagine how many Iraqi homes have been destroyed. How many families have been traumatized. How many men have disappeared into American military vehicles in the night. How many crimes have been committed against the Iraqi people every single day in the course of the normal operations of the occupation, when soldiers were merely doing their duty, when they were not angry or vengeful as in Haditha. Imagine what we have done to the Iraqi people, tortured by Saddam for years, then released from three decades of his bloody rule only to find their hope stolen from them and a new terror unleashed.

Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.



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Fallujah's Restoration is Far From Reality

By Dahr Jamail and Ali Fadhil, IPS News. Posted July 3, 2006.

One and a half years after the November 2004 U.S. military assault on Fallujah, residents tell of ongoing suffering, lack of jobs, little reconstruction and continuing violence.
The U.S. military launched Operation Phantom Fury against the city of Fallujah--destroying an estimated 70 percent of the buildings, homes and shops, and killing between 4,000 and 6,000 people, according to the Fallujah-based non-governmental organisation the Study Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (SCHRD).

IPS found that the city remains under draconian biometric security, with retina scans, fingerprinting and X-raying required for anyone entering the city. Fallujah remains an island: not even the residents of the surrounding towns and villages like Karma, Habbaniya, Khalidiya, which fall under Fallujah's administrative jurisdiction, are allowed in.

Security badges are required for anyone wishing to enter the city. To obtain a badge, one has to be a Fallujah native from a certain class. That is, if one is from Fallujah and a government official, a high-class badge of grade G will be issued. Journalists with an X-grade badge will be allowed. Then there are B for businessmen and C for those who have contracts with U.S. military in the city. Last are the R-grade badges, which will not be admitted through the main checkpoint at the west side of the city, and must seek entrance through "second class" checkpoints elsewhere.

Having entered the city through the main checkpoint, the first thing visible is the destroyed homes in the Al-Askari district. Virtually every home in this area has been completely destroyed or seriously damaged.

"I could not rebuild my house again because rebuilding is rather costly nowadays," Walid, a 48-year-old officer with the former Iraqi army, told IPS. With sorrow in his eyes he told of how he built his home six years ago. After the destruction, "They [U.S.. Military] paid us 70 percent of the compensation and with the unemployment in the city we spent most of it on food and medicines. Now everybody is waiting for the remaining 30 percent."

Slightly different version of this same story could be told by the hundreds of people who lost their houses in the April and November 2004 bombing campaigns.

Across the Euphrates River from the city sits Fallujah General Hospital. Built in 1964, the hospital was unable to function during either U.S. siege because it was being occupied by the U.S. military.

Doctors were reluctant to talk to IPS unless promised anonymity. "It is more a barn than a hospital and we are not honoured to work in it," said one doctor. "There is a horrible lack of medical supplies and equipment, and the Ministry of Health is not doing much about it," added another doctor, also speaking on condition of anonymity.

When IPS mentioned a new hospital under construction in the city, one of the doctors replied, with irony, that half of the people of Fallujah would be dead before that hospital project was completed. He said an emergency plan for the existing hospital is essential, especially because people are too afraid of seeking medical attention in any of the Baghdad hospitals for fear of being kidnapped and killed by death squads. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Ramadi General Hospital, often used by residents of Fallujah, is no longer accessible due to the ongoing U.S. military siege of that city.

During the interview of the doctors, patients and their companions gathered around and started complaining about "the lack of everything" in the hospital. "You press people always come here and talk to us, but there is no result," said an elderly woman in a challenging tone. "If you put me on television, I will tell the whole world how bad the situation is in this city."

The doctors interviewed, however, did praise the role of some local and international NGOs that had offered help to the hospital on occasion.

The people of Fallujah are struggling to survive amidst skyrocketing unemployment, lack of supplies and ongoing violence in the city. At a grocery market, there was another side to the story. Haji Majeed Al Jumaily, 64, was a blacksmith before his hands weakened. He asked the grocer a dozen times how much an item cost before saying, "I only have 2,000 dinars, less than a dollar and a half, to spend and I don't know what to buy with it. Everything is so expensive and my nine family members must be fed."

He told IPS how his two sons were killed by random gunfire from the new Iraqi army two years ago. "Now I have to take care of their two wives and six children as well as my wife," he said. The market was full of people, but poverty is obvious from the way people wandered about trying to balance what to spend with what they have in hand.

"Unemployment in Fallujah is a major problem that should be handled," commented Jassim Al Muhammadi, a lawyer. "The financial situation is collapsing every day and people do not know what to do. The siege is adding a lot to this problem."

Ali Ahmed, a 17-year-old student, interrupted: "We do not need press releases in this city, sir. What we really need is a solution to the everlasting problem of this city... The Americans and Iraqis in power accused us of terror, killed thousands of us and now they are just talking about reconstruction. Well, they are all thieves who only care for what they can pinch off the Iraqi fortunes. Just tell them to leave us alone as we do not want their fraudulent reconstruction."

Ahmed added that the U.S. military continues to kill and arrest people for any reason whatsoever, and sometimes for no reason.

Infrastructure in Fallujah is just as bad as any other part of Iraq. Water, electricity, cooking gas, fuel, telephone and mobile services are very poor. All of the residents interviewed complained about the government's indifferent attitude towards them. The majority believed it was for sectarian reasons, although some others thought it is the same all over Iraq.

The mayor of Fallujah was not available to interview, but in his latest appearance on television he announced his resignation. In his statement televised on Jun. 14, he declared firmly, "The Americans did not fulfill their promises to me and so I resign."

Similar reports about the situation in Fallujah were made by the United Nations Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN) on May 21: "there is still slow progress on humanitarian issues, according to local officials."

The report stated that two-thirds of the city's residents had returned, but 15 percent remained displaced in the outskirts of Fallujah, "living in abandoned schools and government buildings."

"Approximately 65,000 people are still displaced out of Fallujah," reported Bassel Mahmoud, director of the city's reconstruction projects.

The IRIN report, similar to what IPS found here, said, "Despite Baghdad allocating 100 million dollars for the city's reconstruction and 180 million dollars for housing compensation, very little can be seen visibly on the streets of Fallujah in terms of reconstruction. There are destroyed buildings on almost every street. Local authorities say about 60 percent of all houses in the city were totally destroyed or seriously damaged and less than 20 percent of them have been repaired so far... Power, water treatment and sewage systems are still not functioning properly and many districts of the city are without potable water."

Residents complained to IPS that they had less than four hours of electricity per day, and there was great frustration that at least 30 percent of the allocated reconstruction funds were shifted to pay for extra checkpoints and security patrols in the city.

And while the residents continue to wait for the promised compensation funds, of the 81 reconstruction projects slated for the city, less than 30 have been completed and many others will most likely be cancelled due to lack of funding, according to a Fallujah council member who spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity.

Current estimates of the amount needed to rebuild Iraq are between 70 and 100 billion dollars. Only 33 percent of the 21 billion dollars originally allocated by the United States for reconstruction remains to be spent. According to a report by the U.S. inspector general for reconstruction in Iraq, officials were unable to say how many planned projects they would complete, nor was there a clear source for the hundreds of millions of dollars a year needed to maintain the projects that had been completed.

As for Fallujah in particular, security has eaten up as much as 25 percent of reconstruction funding, but even more has reportedly been siphoned off by corruption and overcharging by contractors.

Last year, a U.S. congressional inspection team was set up to monitor reconstruction in Iraq. On May 1, they published a scathing report of the failure of U.S. contractors to carry out projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The report also noted that nearly nine billion dollars in Iraqi oil revenues which had been disbursed to ministries was "missing."



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'Significant' troop numbers home from Iraq within 18 months: Blair

AFP
Tue Jul 4, 2006

LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair said "significant numbers" of British troops could be withdrawn from Iraq within 18 months.

British forces would remain in the war-shattered country for as long as the Iraqi government wished them to, Blair reiterated before the senior members of Parliament who make up the Commons Liaison Committee.

"I suspect over the next 18 months there will obviously be opportunities to draw down significant numbers of British troops because the capacity of the Iraqi troops will build up," he added.
British and Australian troops in southern Iraq are preparing to leave Muthanna province next month in the first such handover to Iraqi forces.

"What we have discussed in government is how, as progressively the Iraqi forces are more capable of taking over individual provinces, we will withdraw," Blair said.

"If one's talking about substantial troop reductions, I think the Iraqi government are keen to get control of their own security situation."

Britain was the major coalition partner in the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and has 7,200 troops stationed in the south of the country around the second city of Basra.

Challenged on whether the mere presence of British troops in southern Iraq was aggravating the security problems there, Blair agreed that their presence was "used by certain of the groups".

Iraqi troops were deployed in greater numbers on Basra's streets last month amid fears that the city was descending into factional violence.

Asked if British forces needed to reassess their approach in Basra, Blair said: "What you have got is you have got the extremists on both sides. Both of them have got the same aim, to prevent the democratic government having its writ run.

"They may use in Basra the presence of British forces as an excuse but that's not really their aim. Their aim is to get political and security control of Basra so they can run it rather than have the democratic government run it.

"It's a very tough situation there but the important thing is always to say to our own people 'Who are the authentic voice of the Iraqis?' The people they elected will give you the best opinion as to what Iraqis really want."

He added: "What the Iraqis say is yes, we want you to leave as soon as possible, but that possibility is not now."

Blair was speaking during a twice-yearly grilling by the committee on a range of government policy issues.



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Man serves in Iraq due to clerical error

AP
Tue Jul 4, 2006

MOUNT ORAB, Ohio - A former National Guard captain whose military service was supposed to end seven years ago was sent to Iraq for a year by mistake because of an incorrect discharge date in his records.

Jim Dillinger was 43 when he received a letter from the Defense Department in May 2004 saying he was one of 5,600 members of the Individual Ready Reserve being sent to Iraq. The IRR is a component of the Army made up of retired soldiers who agree to be subject to recall to active duty for a defined time.

When Dillinger signed up for the IRR in 1997, his contract said his military obligation would end in April 1999. But his personnel record mistakenly said his service would end in July 2010 - the date he would have been discharged had he remained in the Ohio National Guard. He had resigned his captain's commission in 1996 after serving 17 years in the Guard.

"They were still carrying me on the books as a captain," Dillinger, now 45, told the Cincinnati Enquirer. "And nobody caught it. Including me."
Dillinger was told he had not been discharged because of the military's "stop-loss" program, which kept thousands of soldiers from ending their tours or retiring.

"That explanation didn't make complete sense to me, but I accepted it," he said. "I'd been in the Army a long time, and when they tell you something, you believe it."

A message left at a listing for Jim Dillinger in Mount Orab was not immediately returned Tuesday evening.

Dillinger left in January 2005 for Iraq, where he spent a year searching for and destroying roadside bombs. When he returned to the U.S. in December, he saw the erroneous discharge date in his records.

"My eyes popped out of my head," he said. "I couldn't believe that was right. And I knew darn well that it could mean I'd be deployed again."

He got the Guard and the Army Human Resources Command to investigate. On May 22, a human resources assistant reported that Dillinger's discharge date was incorrect. His discharge papers were issued the next day, followed by apologies.

The Human Resources Command did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

"I honestly believe I helped accomplish something over there, and the men I served with, they are like brothers to me," Dillinger said. "But I can't get past the fact that I should never have been sent there in the first place."



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Iraq considers arming insurgents

7/4/2006
USA TODAY

BAGHDAD - Iraq's government is studying a request from some local insurgent leaders to supply them with weapons so they can turn on the heavily armed foreign fighters who were once their allies, according to two Iraqi lawmakers.

Leaders claiming to represent about 11 insurgent groups asked for weapons to fight foreign al-Qaeda elements in Iraq, said Haider al-Ibadi, a Shiite lawmaker and member of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa Party.

"They want to take part in the war against terrorists," said al-Ibadi, who supports the proposal. "They claim they could wipe out the terrorists and work with the government."
The insurgent request was confirmed by al-Ibadi and Mithal al-Alusi, another lawmaker. Al-Maliki was out of the country, and several officials in his office declined to comment.

The request came out of talks between people claiming to represent insurgent groups and the Iraqi government.

The U.S. military said insurgent talks are an Iraqi matter.

Coalition forces would "fully support the broad dialogue for reconciliation" but would not discuss details, military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said in an e-mail.

Al-Ibadi said a committee of top Iraqi officials is being formed to study the request.

A cornerstone of al-Maliki's government has been a reconciliation plan aimed at undermining Sunni support for the insurgency and drawing Sunnis into the political process.

Al-Maliki has called for the release of 3,000 detainees in U.S.-run prisons and amnesty for some fighters.

Al-Maliki has not specified which fighters might be pardoned. The issue of whether to extend amnesty to fighters who have killed Iraqi or American soldiers has generated a vigorous debate. The idea of arming insurgent groups also could raise troubling issues.

Al-Alusi, an independent lawmaker, said when he heard that Sunni insurgents had asked for weapons to fight foreign groups, he advised al-Maliki against it. Al-Alusi said al-Maliki was considering it.

"We should stop creating militias," al-Alusi said. "We have too many political mafia groups in this country. Enough is enough."

U.S. and Iraqi military officials have been trying for the past couple of years to drive a wedge between Iraqi fighters and foreign groups.

Foreign fighters account for 4% to 10% of the estimated 20,000 or more insurgents in Iraq, according to a U.S. State Department report.

Foreign fighters are behind some of the deadliest bombings, however.

Asked about the measure, some parliamentary members opposed the idea.

Others, including Mahmoud Othman, a leading Kurdish lawmaker, said they were unaware of it, highlighting the secrecy and sometimes confusion surrounding government meetings with insurgents.

The insurgents are represented by a mix of tribal leaders and former Iraqi army leaders. Government officials are still trying to determine whether the officials speak with authority for the insurgents, al-Ibadi said.

Comment: The Iraqi government is entirely controlled by the US government and the CIA are running death squads out of the Iraqi interior ministry as part of their counter-insurgency operations. These death squads are being used by the US government as evidence that "al-Qaeda" is active in Iraq. If the insurgent groups are genuinely asking for arms to combat "al-Qaeda" in Iraq, then it is a clever move because the Iraqi government, on behalf of the CIA will have no option but to refuse.

In any case, see the following story for evidence that the US government has been arming "terrorists" for years.

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Flashback: The two faces of Rumsfeld

Randeep Ramesh
Friday May 9, 2003
The Guardian

2000: director of a company which wins $200m contract to sell nuclear reactors to North Korea

2002: declares North Korea a terrorist state, part of the axis of evil and a target for regime change


Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration.
The reactor deal was part of President Bill Clinton's policy of persuading the North Korean regime to positively engage with the west.

The sale of the nuclear technology was a high-profile contract. ABB's then chief executive, Goran Lindahl, visited North Korea in November 1999 to announce ABB's "wide-ranging, long-term cooperation agreement" with the communist government.

The company also opened an office in the country's capital, Pyongyang, and the deal was signed a year later in 2000. Despite this, Mr Rumsfeld's office said that the de fence secretary did not "recall it being brought before the board at any time".

In a statement to the American magazine Newsweek, his spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said that there "was no vote on this". A spokesman for ABB told the Guardian yesterday that "board members were informed about the project which would deliver systems and equipment for light water reactors".

Just months after Mr Rumsfeld took office, President George Bush ended the policy of engagement and negotiation pursued by Mr Clinton, saying he did not trust North Korea, and pulled the plug on diplomacy. Pyongyang warned that it would respond by building nuclear missiles. A review of American policy was announced and the bilateral confidence building steps, key to Mr Clinton's policy of detente, halted.

By January 2002, the Bush administration had placed North Korea in the "axis of evil" alongside Iraq and Iran. If there was any doubt about how the White House felt about North Korea this was dispelled by Mr Bush, who told the Washington Post last year: "I loathe [North Korea's leader] Kim Jong-il."

The success of campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have enhanced the status of Mr Rumsfeld in Washington. Two years after leaving ABB, Mr Rumsfeld now considers North Korea a "terrorist regime _ teetering on the verge of collapse" and which is on the verge of becoming a proliferator of nuclear weapons. During a bout of diplomatic activity over Christmas he warned that the US could fight two wars at once - a reference to the forthcoming conflict with Iraq. After Baghdad fell, Mr Rumsfeld said Pyongyang should draw the "appropriate lesson".

Critics of the administration's bellicose language on North Korea say that the problem was not that Mr Rumsfeld supported the Clinton-inspired diplomacy and the ABB deal but that he did not "speak up against it". "One could draw the conclusion that economic and personal interests took precedent over non-proliferation," said Steve LaMontagne, an analyst with the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.

Many members of the Bush administration are on record as opposing Mr Clinton's plans, saying that weapons-grade nuclear material could be extracted from the type of light water reactors that ABB sold. Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the state department's number two diplomat, Richard Armitage, both opposed the deal as did the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, whose campaign Mr Rumsfeld ran and where he also acted as defence adviser.

One unnamed ABB board director told Fortune magazine that Mr Rumsfeld was involved in lobbying his hawkish friends on behalf of ABB.

The Clinton package sought to defuse tensions on the Ko rean peninsula by offering supplies of oil and new light water nuclear reactors in return for access by inspectors to Pyongyang's atomic facilities and a dismantling of its heavy water reactors which produce weapons grade plutonium. Light water reactors are known as "proliferation-resistant" but, in the words of one expert, they are not "proliferation-proof".

The type of reactors involved in the ABB deal produce plutonium which needs refining before it can be weaponised. One US congressman and critic of the North Korean regime described the reactors as "nuclear bomb factories".

North Korea expelled the inspectors last year and withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in January at about the same time that the Bush administration authorised $3.5m to keep ABB's reactor project going.

North Korea is thought to have offered to scrap its nuclear facilities and missile pro gramme and to allow international nuclear inspectors into the country. But Pyongyang demanded that security guarantees and aid from the US must come first.

Mr Bush now insists that he will only negotiate a new deal with Pyongyang after the nuclear programme is scrapped. Washington believes that offering inducements would reward Pyongyang's "blackmail" and encourage other "rogue" states to develop weapons of mass destruction.



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Go Team!


Italian spy director arrested over CIA kidnap

Wed Jul 5, 2006 05:38 AM ET
By Massimiliano Di Giorgio and Phil Stewart

ROME (Reuters) - Police have arrested a director at Italy's military intelligence agency on suspicion of helping the CIA in the alleged kidnapping of a terrorism suspect in Milan, officials said on Wednesday.

It is the first time an Italian official has been linked to the 2003 abduction of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Nasr says he was flown to Egypt and tortured.
The arrest of Marco Mancini, a director of a division of the Sismi military intelligence agency, was first leaked by judicial sources and later confirmed in a statement by former Italian President Francesco Cossiga.

An Italian court has issued European arrest warrants for 22 suspected U.S. agents over the abduction, but no Italians had been sought until now.

If an Italian role is confirmed, it would lend evidence to allegations that European countries colluded with the United States in the secret "renditions" of terrorism suspects.

Italian investigators had been wiretapping Nasr before his abduction and accuse him of having ties to al Qaeda and recruiting combatants for Iraq, according to court documents. They say the kidnapping broke Italian law and ruined a promising investigation.

Mancini was accused of collaborating in the kidnap, the sources said, adding that an official statement would be made later on Wednesday by the prosecutor's office.

Cossiga, who is also a former interior minister with close contacts with the secret services, said in a statement that other Sismi officials were also being arrested.

An investigative source said the operation was still in progress.

The chief prosecutor in the case, Armando Spataro, declined comment.

The European Union's Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini said he respected Spataro's decision to arrest Mancini.

"The prosecutor is investigating, he is accusing this officer of the Italian secret service, we'll see whether he is responsible or not," Fratini said in Brussels.

The Abu Omar case is one of the best known examples of alleged CIA secret operations in its war on terror, including the practice of "extraordinary renditions."

Human rights groups condemn the practice, saying suspects have frequently been sent by the United States to countries that practice torture.

Washington acknowledges making secret "rendition" transfers of terrorism suspects between countries, but denies either using torture itself against terrorist suspects or handing them over to countries that do so.



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Street protests are Mexican leftist's trump card

By Alistair Bell
Reuters
July 4, 2006

MEXICO CITY - When the chips are down, Mexican leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador always plays with an ace in his hand: large crowds who will take to the streets.

As he faces a narrow defeat in a contested presidential election, the fiery former Indian welfare officer may again try to bring hundreds of thousands out to protest irregularities in Sunday's election that put him in second place.

Senior aides told Reuters on Tuesday he was first taking his challenge to election authorities but may then bring out supporters to back his fight against the apparent razor-thin victory of ruling party candidate Felipe Calderon.
"We are not calling for immediate demonstrations but of course it could happen at some point," Manuel Camacho Solis, the candidate's main political operator, told Reuters.

Mass demonstrations are just one arrow in Lopez Obrador's quiver as he tries to shoot down official returns showing Calderon won by a hair's breadth on Sunday,

"The path of protests is open to us but we've decided not to turn it into our main instrument at the moment," he said. "We are going to do this in stages, responsibly and within the law."

Former Mexico City mayor Lopez Obrador would accept defeat if Mexico's electoral tribunal rules against him, Camacho Solis said. A tribunal decision could take up to two months.

The chance of street protests after the vote has long worried foreign investors concerned that oil-exporter Mexico could be heading for political chaos.

Lopez Obrador brought 250,000 protesters onto the streets last April to oppose a government-backed attempt to ban him from the election race because he had disobeyed a judge's order in a minor land dispute when he was the capital's mayor.

President Vicente Fox gave up the attempt after the massive protests and the case was dropped.

PROTEST HISTORY

Lopez Obrador organized mass demonstrations in his home state of Tabasco when he lost an election for governor in 1994. His followers staged a sit-in that closed down the state government for three weeks, and he led a march of 560 miles to Mexico City to protest.

Lopez Obrador finally lost that fight even though there was clear evidence his opponent exceeded campaign spending limits.

The leftist suspected fraud in the presidential race but would not claim Calderon's side rigged the vote until seeing the result of a recount that begins on Wednesday, Camacho Solis said. "We are sure there are irregularities but we would have to have more elements to be confident enough to call it fraud," he said.

A main concern is that 42 million people voted but only 38.5 million votes were tallied in the preliminary count that Calderon is basing his claims of victory on, he said.

Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution has called for a recount of every single vote.

Mexico's left is especially wary of electoral fraud because it lost a presidential election in 1988 when the government was widely believed to have rigged the vote count.

It is also deeply suspicious of the role in the election of Fox, who it says illegally voiced support for his former energy minister, Calderon.


Camacho Solis said leftists' willingness to protest the election result was greater than the anger at last year's attempt to knock him out of the race. "Walking in the streets you get people asking us not to let this one go. That's what people want. Here you have a bigger social movement," he said.

Comment:
Mexico's left is especially wary of electoral fraud because it lost a presidential election in 1988 when the government was widely believed to have rigged the vote count.

It is also deeply suspicious of the role in the election of Fox, who it says illegally voiced support for his former energy minister, Calderon.
Add to this the fact that Fox seems to be best buddies with Bush, the White House was cheering for Calderon (a Harvard-educated lawyer and economist), and Bush and his gang are quite skilled at stealing elections, and... well, you do the math.


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Anti-war protesters begin July 4 fast

By Amanda Beck
Reuters
March 3, 2006

WASHINGTON - About 150 protesters sat in front of the White House on Monday to savor their last meal before starting a hunger strike that some said will continue until American troops return from Iraq.

The demonstration marking the Independence Day holiday was organized by CodePink, a women's anti-war group that called on volunteers to abstain from eating for 24 hours from midnight on Monday.
Some protesters said their fast would continue beyond July 4th.

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, said she would drink only water throughout the summer, which she said she would spend outside President George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas.

"This war is a crime," Sheehan told a crowd of clapping, cheering protesters. "We represent millions of Americans who withdraw their support from this government."

The demonstrators crouched in the muggy evening next to a piece of pink plastic, spread down the road as a table and table-cloth in one. It was covered with wilted pink sunflowers and plates of vegetarian curry, white rice, and beans.

The demonstration aimed at highlighting the costs of the war, in which more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers and thousands of Iraqis have died, said CodePink spokeswoman Meredith Dearborn.

"We have to put our own lives on the line, and I'm willing to do that," said activist Diane Wilson, who pledged to fast until the United States withdraws from Iraq.

Dearborn said 2,700 other activists nationwide, including actors Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, would work as a relay team passing the fast daily from one to another.



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Lieberman faces his war critics

By Rick Klein, Globe Staff | July 5, 2006

WILLIMANTIC, Conn. -- Senator Joseph I. Lieberman was smiling past the hecklers yesterday in this town's massive Independence Day parade. "Shame on you!" one yelled. "War-monger!" screamed another. "You're a traitor, Joe!" came a third voice.
Lieberman's grin didn't break. Jogging to keep pace, the Connecticut Democrat responded with kisses -- some blown to the crowd, others of the Hershey's variety, distributed by campaign volunteers.

When one heckler marched alongside the senator and continued to hurl vitriol in his direction, Lieberman's wife, Hadassah, suggested a response.

"Send him a kiss," Hadassah Lieberman said. Campaign aides obliged, with chocolate.

It was a clever play on the purported "kiss" that has become the most famous embrace in this state's political history.

A few hundred yards behind the Liebermans, giant papier-mâché heads of Lieberman and President Bush were locking lips in a pose meant to evoke memories of the president's bear hug of Lieberman -- the senator insists that no kiss was involved -- after Bush's 2005 State of the Union address.

"Just [politically] married," read the sign on the back of the float, which was constructed by some of the liberal bloggers who are backing Lieberman's challenger, Ned Lamont.

A day after sending a jolt through the political establishment by saying he will run for a fourth term even if he loses the Democratic nomination, Lieberman confronted face-to-face much of the anger that has fueled the campaign of Lamont. The cheers for Lieberman still generally swamped the boos, but the senator saw up close what he's up against in the final month of the Democratic primary campaign.

Lieberman pronounced himself unconcerned about the reaction, calling his critics a "distinct minority." He said he still thinks he'll win the Aug. 8 primary, and said members of all parties in Connecticut will ultimately support him because they respect his heartfelt belief that the war in Iraq remains necessary.

"I am a hugger, not a hater," Lieberman said after the parade in Willimantic, a small town about 30 miles east of Hartford. "But when I disagree, I'm going to have the courage of my convictions to do what's right for my state or my country."

But Lamont said Lieberman's decision to begin collecting signatures for a possible run as an unaffiliated candidate confirms what he's been saying about the senator all along: that he too often stands against the interest of Democrats.

"Senator Lieberman every day inches more and more toward non-Democrat status," Lamont said. "Too often he hedges his bets. People want to know who you are, what you believe, and what you stand for."

Lamont drew virtually no hecklers yesterday in Willimantic, and was swarmed for handshakes by Democrats who said they're fed up with Lieberman. In a vacation-season election, fervor for Lamont -- and against Lieberman -- could be decisive, said Paul Best, a political science professor at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven.

"I don't feel a passion, frankly, for Lieberman," Best said. "If there is a passion, it is going to be on the side of Lamont, because of the war situation."

It is the Iraq war above all else where Lieberman's break with party orthodoxy has upset the voters who have sent him to the Senate for three terms.

Mary Thompson, a travel agent who saw Lamont march yesterday in Canterbury, said Lieberman's position on the war shows that he's working to advance his own agenda more than representing the views of Connecticut voters.

"I've always thought Joe Lieberman is a very good man, but lately, he seems like a Bush man, not a Democrat," Thompson said. "He's not there to state his own opinions. He's there for representing the people who put him in office."

Terry Jackson, a 63-year-old T-shirt printer who lives in Pomfret, said the fact that Lieberman would maneuver around the Democratic Party to get on the ballot shows that he has been in Washington too long.

"They get really complacent after they're in office for a while," Jackson said.

"We've got to get some new blood in there."

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, one of the nation's most visible Democrats, issued a statement yesterday saying that while she supports Lieberman in the primary, she will back Lamont if Lamont beats him.

"I have been pleased to support [Lieberman] in his campaign for reelection, and hope that he is our party's nominee," the former first lady said in the statement. "But I want to be clear that I will support the nominee chosen by Connecticut Democrats in their primary."

Lieberman is calculating that many of the same voters he is asking to respect his position on Iraq will also respect his determination to stay in the race regardless of the primary's outcome.

"I want to make sure, after 18 years of service to all the people of the state, that I give all the people the decision in November as to whether they want me to continue to work for them," Lieberman said yesterday. "I'm going to be there on Nov. 7 one way or the other, but I hope to be there as the Democratic nominee."

Polls show that while Lamont is gaining ground in a head-to-head matchup against Lieberman, Lieberman would probably beat Lamont and Republican Alan Schlesinger in a three-way general-election race, in which all the state's voters can participate.

But Lamont said the race's dynamic would shift if he beats Lieberman.

"If we win, we're going to energize Democrats who have been sitting on the sidelines for an awful long time," Lamont said. "It's going to be a tidal wave. If Senator Lieberman leaves the party, I think Democrats are going to rally behind our campaign."



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Information not so freely given anymore, despite law

By Wendell Cochran
and Coral Davenport

Washington | Today marks the 40th anniversary of the signing of the federal Freedom of Information Act, but open government advocates say there's little to celebrate.

The historic law, enacted to ensure that citizens have the greatest possible access to government information, is widely seen as broken. The backlog of requests is growing, with some Americans waiting years for information from government agencies.
Each administration since 1966 has used every tool at its disposal to thwart disclosure of information it deems dangerous or embarrassing. The Bush administration is no different, often citing the changed security environment after the Sept. 11 terror attacks as justification for secrecy.

"The marching orders are now: if there's a basis to withhold, do it," said Elizabeth Withnell, chief counsel at the Department of Homeland Security's Privacy Office.

The law, commonly known as FOIA, presumes that federal records will generally be available to the public. But Congress gave agencies nine broad exemptions they could use to withhold records from the public, including the press.

An analysis of annual FOIA reports from 13 Cabinet-level departments shows that between 2000 and 2004, the number of fully granted FOIA requests fell by 27 percent.

Increasingly, agencies are relying on one of several "executive privilege" claims to deny the release of data and documents. During the 2000-2004 period, the use of those claims to withhold information nearly doubled.

Daniel Metcalfe, director of the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy, defended the increased use of the executive privilege exemption, saying it "must be viewed in light of increased sensitivity of information in a post 9/11 context." Metcalfe's office oversees all federal Freedom of Information activity.

Open government advocates say agencies are now using creative interpretations of the FOIA exemptions to conceal as much information as possible.

For example, in November 2001 the military unilaterally decided to remove nearly all proper names from documents it releases, citing a FOIA exemption meant to protect employees' privacy. Between 2000 and 2005, the Defense Department's use of that exemption to withhold information jumped 42 percent.

Pentagon FOIA officers say this has been necessary to protect employee safety. But open government advocates say it's been abused to withhold information such as names of key decision-makers.

"They're taking a legitimate exemption and turning it on its head," said Christopher Farrell, director of investigations and research at Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog group that regularly uses FOIA to request government documents.

He said that among government agencies, the Pentagon uses "the most outrageous, novel application" of the FOIA privacy exemption.

"We have reams of paper where every proper name is knocked off," Farrell said. "That exemption talks about personnel records and medical files, and other similar files. It doesn't say you can't use any proper names. The reason (the Pentagon) doesn't follow the letter or spirit of FOIA is, they're attempting to conceal who's making decisions on stuff; who's approving things."

Judicial Watch is one of several groups that has had to resort to lawsuits to force the government to turn over documents.

A study released last week found a sharp increase in the backlog of requests under the Freedom of Information Act. The 22 departments and agencies studied by the non-partisan Coalition of Journalists for Open Government found there were 148,603 FOIA requests unprocessed at the end of last year, or 31 percent of the total number of requests. The backlog was 20 percent in 2004.

The study also found that it was not uncommon for businesses or individuals to wait years for agencies to process "complex" requests, which typically involve tracking down and analyzing a series of records. The median waiting time for complex requests to the Securities and Exchange Commission was 410 working days.



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Even More Good News


N Korea tests long-range missile

Wednesday, 5 July 2006, 07:21 GMT 08:21 UK

North Korea has test-fired at least six missiles, including a long-range Taepodong-2, despite repeated warnings from the international community.

US officials said the Taepodong missile - thought capable of reaching Alaska - failed shortly after take-off, while the others fell into the Sea of Japan.
The US called the tests "provocative" and Japan has announced sanctions.

The UN Security Council is due to hold an emergency meeting later on Wednesday to discuss the developments.

Comment: And when is the UN going to do something about Israel's attacks on Palestine? Obviously North Korea is a greater threat than Israel, right?


The closed UN session was requested by Japan, which said it was co-ordinating its response to the missile tests with the US and other countries.

Australia said it expected North Korea to make further test firings.

Strong condemnation

Pyongyang remained defiant. A foreign ministry official said such launches were a matter of national sovereignty, Japanese media reported.

In the US, White House spokesman Tony Snow said the launches "demonstrate North Korea's intent to intimidate other states" and Washington would take necessary steps to protect itself and its allies.

Comment: That's ripe coming from the White House!


President George W Bush is sending Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill out to the region.

Japan - one of North Korea's harshest critics, and in easy reach of a long-range missile - announced bans on the entry of North Korean officials, chartered flights and a ferry.

In South Korea - which has been anxious to promote reconciliation with its unpredictable northern neighbour - the government called an emergency cabinet meeting soon after the tests took place.

South Korea has consistently opposed the imposition of sanctions, but in recent days it warned of cutting food aid to the North should the missile tests go ahead.

Analysts said the firing - North Korea's first test of a long-range missile since a self-imposed moratorium in 1999 - would also seriously damage prospects for stalled international talks on the North's nuclear programme.

Heightened alert

According to US officials, the North fired at least six missiles over a four-hour period, beginning at 0332 Japan Time (1832 GMT).

South Korea has confirmed that five of the missiles were medium-range versions of the old Soviet Scud missile. The sixth was the long-range Taepodong-2, fired from the Musudan-ri missile base.

The Taepodong-2 crashed 42 seconds after it was launched, according to US sources.

The US and North Korea's neighbours have been on heightened alert in recent weeks amid suspicions that Pyongyang was preparing to launch the Taepodong-2, which has a range of up to 6,000 km (3,730 miles), putting parts of the US within striking distance.

The BBC's Charles Scanlon in Seoul says the North has been feeling under pressure and ignored in recent months, with the US refusing to negotiate on its demands over its nuclear plans.

Long-running talks over North Korea's nuclear capabilities have stalled, with six-party negotiations on the issue being repeatedly postponed as neither Washington nor Pyongyang are prepared to give ground.

North Korea may see this action as a way to get attention and break the diplomatic log jam, our correspondent adds.

The tests came as the US celebrated its Independence Day holiday and launched the space shuttle from Florida.

The last time North Korea tested a long-range missile was in 1998, when it launched a Taepodong-1 over northern Japan.



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Report: N. Korea launches 7th missile

AP
July 5, 2006

TOKYO - North Korea has launched a seventh missile, a news report said Wednesday, citing Japanese government sources.

North Korea fired the latest missile at 5:22 p.m. (4 a.m. EDT), Kyodo News agency reported. The missile landed 6 minutes later, the report said.

Defense officials could not immediately confirm the report. It was unclear what type of missile was launched or where it landed.




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UN meets on North Korea

Reuters
July 5, 2006

UNITED NATIONS - The U.N. Security Council met in closed session on Wednesday to consider a response to a barrage of North Korean missile tests.

John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said going into the meeting that the 15-nation U.N. body would have before it a resolution drafted by Japan.

"This is obviously a very serious matter because of the North Korean provocation," he told reporters.




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EU-Iran nuclear talks off: Iranian official

Wed Jul 5, 2006 05:26 AM ETBy Parisa Hafezi

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Iran said on Wednesday crucial talks between the European Union and Iran on incentives aimed at ending a nuclear stand-off have been postponed for a week, giving no immediate official reason for the delay.

"The meeting has changed to the next week. They (the Iranian delegation) will not come (to Brussels) today," a senior Iranian nuclear official who requested anonymity told Reuters.
Iran's Fars news agency reported that Larijani had canceled his trip to Belgium "for some reasons" and that the meeting could be rescheduled in coming days.

The office of EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, whose had been due to meet Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, could not immediately confirm when the meeting, set by Western powers as a deadline for Iran's response, would take place.

Solana spoke by telephone with Larijani on Wednesday, an EU official said.

Iran had said it needs more time to reply to the incentives offer, adding to longstanding Western suspicions that it has been playing for time in the stand-off.

But an analyst in Tehran said a visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on the same day by the leader of the outlawed National Council of Resistance of Iran, regarded by the government as a terrorist group, appeared to be the reason.

Maryam Rajavi, who is based in France and whose organization is the political wing of the outlawed People's Mujahideen armed group, was invited to the legislature by a cross-party group of EU lawmakers who call themselves "Friends of a Free Iran."

"One might think that this didn't please the Iranians, but it could also be a welcome pretext for the Iranians," the analyst said, who asked not to be identified.

Diplomats said divisions in the U.N. Security Council over what action to take on Iran meant there had been little chance of responding either at the Brussels meeting or before a July 15 summit of G8 leading industrialized nations in Russia.

The United States has accused Iran of having a secret program to build nuclear weapons. Iran denies the charge, saying its nuclear program is solely for power generation.

Iran says it sees ambiguities in the June 6 offer by Germany and the five permanent, veto-wielding U.N. Security Council members -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.

The major powers offered a state-of-the-art nuclear reactor with a guaranteed fuel supply, economic benefits and support for the idea of a regional security framework if Iran halted uranium enrichment.

Diplomats believe that as Russia and China were unlikely to back any U.N. sanctions against Iran at this stage, the West was in no position to set deadlines.



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Monetary Mayhem


Is Cheney betting on Economic Collapse?

Mike WhitneyJuly 4, 2006

Wouldn't you like to know where Dick Cheney puts his money? Then you'd know whether his "deficits don't matter" claim is just baloney or not.

Well, as it turns out, Kiplinger Magazine ran an article based on Cheney's financial disclosure statement and, sure enough, found out that the VP is lying to the American people for the umpteenth time. Deficits do matter and Cheney has invested his money accordingly.
The article is called "Cheney's betting on bad news" and provides an account of where Cheney has socked away more than $25 million. While the figures may be estimates, the investments are not. According to Tom Blackburn of the Palm Beach Post, Cheney has invested heavily in "a fund that specializes in short-term municipal bonds, a tax-exempt money market fund and an inflation protected securities fund. The first two hold up if interest rates rise with inflation. The third is protected against inflation."

Cheney has dumped another (estimated) $10 to $25 million in a European bond fund which tells us that he is counting on a steadily weakening dollar. So, while working class Americans are loosing ground to inflation and rising energy costs, Darth Cheney will be enhancing his wealth in "Old Europe". As Blackburn sagely notes, "Not all 'bad news' is bad for everybody."

This should put to rest once and for all the foolish notion that the "Bush Economic Plan" is anything more than a scam aimed at looting the public till. The whole deal is intended to shift the nation's wealth from one class to another. It's also clear that Bush-Cheney couldn't have carried this off without the tacit approval of the thieves at the Federal Reserve who engineered the low-interest rate boondoggle to put the American people to sleep while they picked their pockets.

Reasonable people can dispute that Bush is "intentionally" skewering the dollar with his lavish tax cuts, but how does that explain Cheney's portfolio?

It doesn't. And, one thing we can say with metaphysical certainty is that the miserly Cheney would never plunk his money into an investment that wasn't a sure thing. If Cheney is counting on the dollar tanking and interest rates going up, then, by Gawd, that's what'll happen.

The Bush-Cheney team has racked up another $3 trillion in debt in just 6 years. The US national debt now stands at $8.4 trillion dollars while the trade deficit has ballooned to $800 billion nearly 7% of GDP.

This is lunacy. No country, however powerful, can maintain these staggering numbers. The country is in hock up to its neck and has to borrow $2.5 billion per day just to stay above water. Presently, the Fed is expanding the money supply and buying back its own treasuries to hide the hemorrhaging from the public. Its utter madness.

Last month the trade deficit climbed to $70 billion. More importantly, foreign central banks only purchased a meager $47 billion in treasuries to shore up our ravenous appetite for cheap junk from China.

Do the math! They're not investing in America anymore. They are decreasing their stockpiles of dollars. We're sinking fast and Cheney and his pals are manning the lifeboats while the public is diverted with gay marriage amendments and "American Celebrity".

The American manufacturing sector has been hollowed out by cutthroat corporations who've abandoned their country to make a fast-buck in China or Mexico. The $3 trillion housing (equity) bubble is quickly loosing air while the anemic dollar continues to sag. All the signs indicate that the economy is slowing at the same time that energy prices continue to rise.

This is the onset of stagflation; the dreaded combo of a slowing economy and inflation.

Did Americans really think they'd be spared the same type of economic colonization that has been applied throughout the developing world under the rubric of "neoliberalism"?

Well, think again. The American economy is barrel-rolling towards earth and there are only enough parachutes for Cheney and the gang.

The country has lost 3 million jobs from outsourcing since Bush took office; more than 200,000 of those are the high-paying, high-tech jobs that are the life's-blood of every economy.

Consider this from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) June edition of Foreign Affairs, the Bible of globalists and plutocrats:

"Between 2000 and 2003 alone, foreign firms built 60,000manufacturing plants in China. European chemical companies, Japanese carmakers, and US industrial conglomerates are all building factories in China to supply export markets around the world. Similarly, banks, insurance companies, professional-service firms, and IT companies are building R&D and service centers in India to support employees, customers, and production worldwide." ("The Globally integrated Enterprise" Samuel Palmisano, Foreign Affairs page 130)

"60,000manufacturing plants" in 3 years?!?

"Banks, insurance companies, professional-service firms, and IT companies"?

No job is safe. American elites and corporate tycoons are loading the boats and heading for foreign shores. The only thing they're leaving behind is the insurmountable debt that will be shackled to our children into perpetuity and the carefully arranged levers of a modern police-surveillance state.

Welcome to Bush's 21st Century gulag; third world luxury in a Guantanamo-type setting.

Take another look at Cheney's investment strategy; it tells the whole ugly story. Interest rates are going up, the middle class is going down, and the poor dollar is headed for the dumpster. The country is not simply teetering on the brink of financial collapse; it is being thrust headfirst by the blackguards in office and their satrapies at Federal Reserve.



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Homelessness a threat for Iraq vets

By VERENA DOBNIK
Associated Press
Tue Jul 4, 2006

NEW YORK - Herold Noel had nowhere to call home after returning from military service in Iraq. He slept in his Jeep, taking care to find a parking space where he wouldn't get a ticket.

"Then the nightmares would start," says the 26-year-old former Army private first class, who drove a fuel truck in Iraq. "I saw a baby decapitated when it was run over by a truck - I relived that every night."

Across America on any given evening, hundreds of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan like Noel are homeless, according to government estimates.
The reasons for their plight are many. For some, residual stress from daily insurgent attacks and roadside bombs makes it tough to adjust to civilian life; some can't navigate government assistance programs; others simply can't afford a house or apartment.

They are living on the edge in towns and cities big and small, from Washington state to California and Florida. Some of the hardest hit are in New York City, where housing costs "can be very tough," says Peter Dougherty, head of the federal government's Homeless Veterans Program. Studio apartments routinely exceed $1,000 a month - no small sum for veterans trying to land on their feet.

As a member of the National Guard, Nadine Beckford patrolled New York train stations after the Sept. 11 attacks, then served a treacherous year in the Gulf region.

But when she returned home from Iraq, she found her storage locker had been emptied of all of her belongings and her bank account had been depleted. She believes her boyfriend took everything and "just vanished."

Six months after her return to America, she lives in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn, sharing a room with eight other women and attending a job training program. Her parents live in Jamaica and are barely making ends meet, she says.

"I'm just an ordinary person who served. I'm not embarrassed about my homelessness, because the circumstances that created it were not my fault," says Beckford, 30, who was a military-supply specialist at a U.S. base in Iraq - a sitting duck for around-the-clock attacks "where hell was your home."

It was a "hell" familiar to Noel during his eight months in Iraq. But it didn't stop when he returned home to New York last year and couldn't find a job to support his wife and three children. Without enough money to rent an apartment, he turned to the housing programs for vets, "but they were overbooked," Noel says.

While he was in Iraq, his family had lived in military housing in Georgia.

In New York, they ended up in a Bronx shelter "with people who were just out of prison, and with roaches," Noel says. "I'm a young black man from the ghetto, but this was culture shock. This is not what I fought for, what I almost died for. This is not what I was supposed to come home to."

There are about 200,000 homeless vets in the United States, according to government figures. About 10 percent are from either the 1991 Gulf War or the current one, about 40 percent are Vietnam veterans, and most of the others served when the country was not officially at war.

"In recent years, we've tried to reach out sooner to new veterans who are having problems with post-traumatic stress, depression or substance abuse, after seeing combat," says Dougherty. "These are the veterans who most often end up homeless."

About 350 nonprofit service organizations are working with the Department of Veterans Affairs to help veterans.

But the veterans still land on a hard bottom line: Almost half of America's 2.7 million disabled veterans receive $337 or less a month in benefits, according to the government. Fewer than one-tenth are rated 100 percent disabled, meaning they get $2,393 a month, tax free.

"And only those who receive that 100 percent benefit rating can survive in New York," says J.B. White, a 36-year-old former Marine who served with a National Guard unit in Iraq. His colon was removed after he was diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis, which civilian medical experts believe started in Iraq under the stress of war.

"I'd be homeless if it weren't for the support of my family," says White, who is trying to win benefits from the VA. He also helps others, like Beckford, as head of a Manhattan-based social service agency that finds non-government housing for vets.

Noel now attends a program to get work in studio sound production. He was the protagonist of the documentary film "When I Came Home," which was named best New York-made documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival this year.

Just after the news reports about his plight, he learned the government was granting him the 100 percent disability compensation he sought - after being turned down.

Noel doesn't blame the Army, which "helped make my dreams come true," he says, recalling the military base life in Georgia and in Korea that his family enjoyed before his deployment to Iraq.

"I had a house, a car - they gave me everything they promised me," he says. "Now it's up to the government and the people we're defending to take care of their soldiers."



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US automakers' June sales sag

By Kevin Krolicki and Jui Chakravorty
Reuters
Monday July 3, 2006

DETROIT - U.S. sales fell for all three big American automakers in June, led by a 26 percent drop at General Motors Corp. (GM), while Japan's Toyota Motor Corp. surged.

Higher gas prices, slower sales of trucks and sport utility vehicles and a lack of deep incentives compared to last summer -- when GM rolled out employee-level pricing -- hurt the Detroit-based automakers in a weaker U.S. auto market.
The tough sales comparison comes at a time when GM's board is under pressure to consider a three-way alliance with Renault SA and Nissan Motor Co.

Ford's June sales dropped 7 percent and DaimlerChrysler's plunged 13 percent, underscoring the pressure on Detroit automakers at the start of a summer season they are counting on to clear an unsold inventory of 2006 models.

By contrast, Toyota -- now No. 3 in the U.S. market for cars and trucks -- posted a 14 percent sales gain. Toyota sold more cars in June than Ford and Chrysler combined.

Toyota's share of the total U.S. vehicle market rose to 15 percent in June, up from 12 percent a year earlier. The Detroit-based companies' market share sagged to 56 percent, down from 62 percent.

"Toyota is unstoppable. They have the right product mix, the right price, the right image, and momentum of product," said analyst Jesse Toprak of industry tracking service Edmunds.com.

Overall, U.S. light vehicle sales -- cars, pickup trucks and SUVs -- fell to 1.5 million units, down 11 percent, according to industry tracking firm Autodata Corp.

Toyota has taken a bigger share of a weakening U.S. market on the fuel efficiency of its line-up, which trails only Honda Motor Co. in average fuel economy among major manufacturers.

In the first half of 2006, Toyota sales rose 10 percent, boosted by the revamped Camry sedan and the new Yaris subcompact. "We expect that sales pace is going to continue in the rest of the year," said Jim Lentz, executive vice president of Toyota Motor Sales.

He said Yaris sales were stronger than anticipated and Toyota was working to import them in higher volume from Japan.

Toyota has only a 9-day inventory of the Yaris, and an even tighter 4-day sales inventory of its Prius hybrid, essentially making both vehicles sellout hits.

Meanwhile, sales of Ford's Explorer, a best-selling SUV, dropped by 36 percent in June while sales of the larger Expedition were down 46 percent. "There's no question that higher gas prices have hurt demand for these products," said Ford sales analyst George Pipas.

Auto executives said there were signs that consumers were also waiting for better deals in July, when both GM and Chrysler rolled out new discount offers.

CHRYSLER INCENTIVES UP, SALES DOWN

The weak June numbers capped a rough quarter for Chrysler, the only Detroit-based automaker to post a profit in the first quarter. Chrysler saw its inventory balloon to 91 days of sales at the end of June, and has had to resort to the biggest discounts in the industry this year.

DaimlerChrysler's first-half U.S. sales were down 5 percent as a 17 percent gain for Mercedes-Benz was more than offset by a 3 percent drop for the bigger-volume Chrysler brand.

Chrysler is attempting to shore up its flagging sales with the most aggressive discount offer of the year, combining employee-level pricing with zero-percent financing and a 30-day money back guarantee.

Chrysler executives said they were confident that would boost July sales and run down a glut of almost 648,000 unsold vehicles, with trucks representing almost 85 percent of the total.

GM said its June result, in line with the company's cautionary forecast, was on track with the terms of its restructuring plan, which includes a dozen plant closings and some 30,000 job cuts.

The year-on-year GM decline reflected an unusually strong performance in 2005 when it rolled out an employee pricing offer that touched off a summer price war in Detroit.

GM has vowed to avoid cutting margins through a similarly sweeping program this year, saying last year's discounts hurt the image of its brands and the resale value of its vehicles.

GLOBAL POWERHOUSE?

Billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian is looking to broker the three-way alliance among GM and Nissan-Renault. Such a tie-up would create a global automotive powerhouse with almost twice the sales of Toyota, the No. 2 automaker worldwide.

The boards of Nissan and Renault on Monday approved discussions about the deal.

But Nissan has struggled in the U.S market this year, and its June sales tumbled by 19 percent.

Nissan's difficulties have included a disruptive move in its headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, production cuts and an embarrassing recall of some Altima and Sentra sedans due to evidence of engine fires.

Rival Honda Motor Co. , which is building a new U.S. assembly plant to keep up with demand, posted flat overall sales in June. Strong sales for its fuel-efficient Fit and Civic models were offset by declines in truck sales and for its Acura luxury line.



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Russia to withdraw WTO pledges if no agreement with U.S. - Putin

MOSCOW, July 4 (RIA Novosti)

Russia will revoke all obligations it has assumed during negotiations on joining the World Trade Organization if it cannot reach agreement with the United States on its WTO bid, President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday.

"We believe that the conditions under which the Russian economy functions are more open and liberal than in certain WTO member countries. If for some reason we fail to reach agreement, we will reject all the obligations on agreements that we have taken on ourselves and are fulfilling, before joining the organization," Putin said.
Russia now has signed bilateral protocols with 57 members out of the 58-member Working Party on accession. Talks with the United States have been complicated over a number of issues, including access to Russia's banking sector, intellectual property rights, import duties, and agricultural subsidies.

Putin said America's position contradicted rules of diplomacy, as did "attempts to negotiate a protocol in accordance with U.S. legislation, rather than with WTO rules."

Russia this year holds the chair of the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations, and will host the group's annual summit in St. Petersburg, Putin's hometown, July 15-17.

A Kremlin aide said earlier Tuesday that Russia wanted to sign a bilateral deal with the United States on its WTO accession at the July summit.

"But if it does not happen, it will be no tragedy," Sergei Prikhodko said. "We will continue working."



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The Shrub


Bush's foreign friends fading fast

By TOM RAUM
Associated Press
Tue Jul 4, 2006

WASHINGTON - President Bush's stalwart foreign friends are fading fast.

Most of the leaders who defied criticism at home to stand with him on Iraq and win his friendship are no longer players on the world stage, or are on their way out. And it was a small band of brothers to begin with.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he'll step down before the next national election and is coming under increasing pressure from his own party to do it sooner. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi paid a farewell visit to the United States last week. He is leaving office in September.

Italy's Silvio Berlusconi resigned in early May after his party's election losses. Spain's Jose Maria Aznar was earlier forced out of office, the first casualty of supporting Bush on Iraq.

"It can be a little lonely at the top. And to have stalwart friends like Koizumi or John Howard in Australia or Prime Minister Blair matters a lot," said Michael Green, a former Bush national security aide.

Koizumi will be especially missed, Green said. Bush played host to the Japanese leader at the White House on Thursday, and then took Koizumi - an unabashed Elvis Presley fan - to the home of the rock-and-roll king, Graceland, in Memphis on Friday.

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, "Koizumi would send handwritten notes. You know, 'Hang in there.'" The notes "probably counted for a lot" with Bush, said Green, as did Koizumi's support on Iraq even though the war was unpopular with the Japanese.

That leaves Howard. Australia has around 1,320 troops in Iraq and the Middle East and Howard has repeatedly said Australia will remain in Iraq for as long as its troops are needed - or until the Iraqi government asks them to withdraw - despite widespread public opposition in Australia to the war.

Newer leaders, particularly those in Europe, have seen the political penalties paid by those who stood too close to Bush - and have been more reluctant to embrace him so openly. One exception is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has visited the White House twice this year. She and Bush seemed to hit it off, even though they had some differences. Bush, en route to a summit of world leaders in Russia this month, will stop to see the old East Germany where Merkel grew up.

Goodwill that flowed to the United States right after the Sept. 11 attacks has long been offset by growing opposition to the war in Iraq and to Bush's foreign policy leadership, polls show.

A May poll by the Pew Research Center shows Bush's ratings and confidence in him to do the right thing on foreign affairs to be slipping ever lower in Europe - even at a time of growing apparent consensus with European allies on efforts to restrict the nuclear programs of
Iran and North Korea.

"Clearly the U.S. presence in Iraq is a drag on the image of the United States. It is cited more often than the current Iranian government as a threat to regional stability and world peace by many people in these countries," said Pew director Andrew Kohut.

Bush lacked his father's coalition-building prowess, notably on Iraq. But, like his father, he developed particularly close relationships with some leaders and liked to fuss over them.

His father took the late King Hussein of Jordan for spins in his speedboat, escorted then-French President Mitterrand on a walk in the woods in Maine and dragged Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak to an Orioles-Red Sox baseball game.

Clinton, like the current Bush, courted Blair. He enjoyed eating outings with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and for seven years hugged, laughed and bickered with Russian President Boris Yeltsin as if they were fraternity brothers. He had an especially warm relationship with then-South African President Nelson Mandela.

Reagan developed close friendships with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

"Personal relationships are important ... but ultimately relationships are between nations," said Kurt Campbell of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "And I think you have to be careful and not find yourself in a situation that you are influenced one way or the other about a state just because of your personal relationship."

Time and politics have taken a toll not just on Bush buddies, but on his critics.

Among the harshest anti-war critics, German Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder was retired by voters earlier this year. French President Jacques Chirac, with approval ratings hovering near an all-time low, is not widely expected to seek a third term. Jean Chretien, Canada's prime minister at the time of the invasion of Iraq, is long gone.

Bush started off with a good relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but that soured soon after Putin criticized the Iraq war.

Palling around with foreign leaders "is part of the protocol now," said Stephen Hess, a White House aide in the Eisenhower administration and a student of the presidency. "It's useful to understand each other and it certainly promotes civility in the world, which is most needed."

Still, Hess said, presidents and prime ministers are keenly aware of their own national interests. He said he is suspicious of claims that leaders can win concessions because of special relationships, "the twinkle in somebody's eye or a firm handshake."



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Bush Directed Cheney To Discredit War Critic

By Murray Waas
07/04 "National Journal"

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president's statement.

Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.
But Bush told investigators that he was unaware that Cheney had directed I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, to covertly leak the classified information to the media instead of releasing it to the public after undergoing the formal governmental declassification processes.

Bush also said during his interview with prosecutors that he had never directed anyone to disclose the identity of then-covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife. Bush said he had no information that Cheney had disclosed Plame's identity or directed anyone else to do so.

Libby has said that neither the president nor the vice president directed him or other administration officials to disclose Plame's CIA employment to the press. Cheney has also denied having any role in the disclosure.

On October 28, 2005, a federal grand jury indicted Libby on five felony counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice, for allegedly concealing his own role, and perhaps that of others, in outing Plame as a covert CIA officer.

One senior government official familiar with the discussions between Bush and Cheney -- but who does not have firsthand knowledge of Bush's interview with prosecutors -- said that Bush told the vice president to "Get it out," or "Let's get this out," regarding information that administration officials believed would rebut Wilson's allegations and would discredit him.

A person with direct knowledge of Bush's interview refused to confirm that Bush used those words, but said that the first official's account was generally consistent with what Bush had told Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Libby, in language strikingly similar to Bush's words, testified to the federal grand jury in the leak case that Cheney had told him to "get all the facts out" that would defend the administration and discredit Wilson. Portions of Libby's grand jury testimony were an exhibit in a recent court filing by Fitzgerald.

Dana Perino, a spokesperson for the White House, declined to comment. James E. Sharpe, an attorney for President Bush, did not return a phone message left at his home on Saturday. The special prosecutor's office also declined to comment.

The disclosure of classified information as part of an effort to discredit Wilson, and the unmasking of Plame as a CIA "operative" by columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003, occurred after Wilson began asserting that the Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence to bolster its case to go to war with Iraq.

Wilson had led a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger in March 2002 to investigate claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy enriched uranium from the African nation to build a nuclear weapon. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were almost certainly not true. Still, President Bush cited the Niger allegations during his 2003 State of the Union address as evidence that Saddam had an aggressive program to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Wilson has said he sought out White House officials, believing they did not know all the facts, and was rebuffed, he began speaking to reporters about his Niger mission, although he initially asked journalists not to reveal his identity.

On June 12, 2003, the same day that news accounts appeared citing Wilson's allegations against the administration-albeit without him being named-Libby first learned from Cheney that Plame worked at the CIA and might have played a role in sending her husband to Niger. Libby's indictment stated: "On or about June 12, 2003, Libby was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division. Libby understood that the Vice President learned this information from the CIA."

On July 6, 2003, Wilson himself went public in an op-ed piece in The New York Times and on NBC's "Meet the Press" with his claims that the Bush administration had misrepresented the Niger information to make the case for war.

Among those who took notice was Cheney.

Cheney cut Wilson's op-ed out of the newspaper and wrote in the margins: "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb[assador] to answer a question. Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

In grand jury testimony, Libby testified that Cheney would "often... cut out from a newspaper an article using a little penknife he had" and "look at, think about it." Whether Libby saw Cheney's annotation of Wilson's column is not clear. Libby testified: "It's possible if it was sitting on his desk that, you know, my eye went across it."

That aside, court papers filed by Fitzgerald's office have asserted: "At some point after the publication of the July 6 Op Ed by Mr. Wilson, Vice President Cheney, [Libby's] immediate supervisor, expressed concerns to [Libby] regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife."

Two days after Wilson's column appeared, on July 8, 2003, Libby met with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Libby questioned Wilson's mission to Niger by telling Miller that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, according to Miller's federal grand jury testimony, and the indictment of Libby. Libby has claimed that he and Miller never discussed Plame that day -- a claim that prosecutors assert is a lie.

Four days later, on July 12, 2003, Libby told Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper that Plame worked for the CIA and that she might have had a role in her husband's selection for the Niger mission. Libby also spoke to Miller again that day and discussed Plame's work at the CIA, according to Miller's grand jury testimony and the Libby indictment.

Central to the criminal charges against Libby is Libby's grand jury testimony and his statements to the FBI that when he talked to Cooper and Miller about Plame, he was only repeating rumors that he had heard from other journalists. Libby has testified that one or two days before talking to Miller and Cooper about Plame, NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert told Libby that Plame worked for the CIA, and that other reporters had heard the same information.

According to Libby's indictment, Libby told the FBI that after Russert told him about Plame, Libby responded "that he did not know that, and Russert replied that all the reporters knew it. Libby was surprised by this statement because, while speaking with Russert, Libby did not recall that he previously had learned about Wilson's wife's employment from the Vice President."

Contradicting Libby, Russert testified to the grand jury that he never spoke about Plame to Libby. Prosecutors alleged that Libby lied about Russert, and the Libby indictment states that he learned about Plame from Cheney and also from State Department and CIA officials with either direct or indirect access to classified information.

A central focus of Fitzgerald's investigation has been why Libby would devise a cover story on how he learned of Plame's CIA work when prosecutors had obtained Libby's own notes showing that Libby had first gotten the information from Cheney. Libby told the FBI and testified to the grand jury that he had forgotten what Cheney had told him by the time that he made the Plame disclosure to reporters.

"I no longer remembered it," Libby testified to the grand jury regarding his June 12 conversation with Cheney. It was only after speaking to Russert, Libby testified, that he "learned" the information about Plame's CIA employment "anew."

Federal investigators have concluded that Libby's account is implausible. They have also questioned Libby's testimony that he does not believe he discussed the matter again with Cheney until at least July 14, 2003, the date of Novak's column that called Plame an "agency operative."

Federal investigators have a substantial amount of evidence that Cheney and Libby spoke about the matter in detail shortly after Wilson's column appeared on July 6. Cheney's handwritten notes in the margin of the Wilson column are one reason that prosecutors have believed that the two men spoke earlier than Libby has said they did.

Why -- if the criminal charges against Libby are correct -- would Libby lie to the FBI and the grand jury that he was only circulating rumors he had heard from reporters?

One obvious reason, prosecutors have believed, is that Libby did not want to admit that he was disseminating material gleaned from classified information. Even if Libby believed that he was unlikely to be charged with disclosing classified information, the investigators think that Libby could have feared the loss of his security clearance or his job. Or, perhaps most important of all, he worried about embarrassing Cheney and Bush.

Sources say investigators believe it is possible that Libby was trying to obscure Cheney's role in the Plame leak -- either by the vice president directing Libby to leak her CIA status, or through a general instruction from Cheney encouraging Libby to get the word out about Plame's role in sending Wilson to Niger. They say it is also possible that Libby lied to conceal the fact that he leaked Plame's identity to the press without Cheney's approval.

Another important reason that Cheney and Libby may have spoken about Plame shortly after July 6, rather than July 12, is that Libby testified that he and Cheney talked on a regular basis after July 6 about how to counteract Wilson's allegations. During grand jury testimony, a prosecutor asked Libby whether this was "a topic that was discussed on a daily basis?" Libby replied: "Yes, sir." When the prosecutor followed up by saying, "And it was discussed on multiple occasions each day, in fact?" Libby again responded: "Yes, sir."

Asked why the matter was so important to Cheney, Libby replied: "He wanted to get all the facts out about what he had or hadn't done-what the facts were or were not. He was very keen on that and said it repeatedly: Let's get everything out."

Libby further testified that Cheney was not referring to going public with information about Plame, but rather making available other classified information that both men believed would rebut Wilson's charges and discredit him.

Cheney encouraged Libby to disclose portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam's weapons-of-mass-destruction program, according to court records filed by Fitzgerald. One section of the report mentioned the Niger allegations as credible, and Cheney, Libby, and other senior administration officials wanted to demonstrate that the CIA's incorrect assessments were a reason why the administration was making its own claims about the Niger matter.

As National Journal first reported in April, Cheney directed Libby to leak portions of a highly classified March 2002 intelligence report on the CIA's Directorate of Operations debriefing of Wilson after he returned from Niger. Although the debriefing did not mention Plame, Cheney and Libby believed that portions of it would contradict Wilson's accounts.

During the same time that Cheney and Libby's effort to leak classified information to discredit Wilson was under way, other White House officials were working through a formal interagency declassification process to make public portions of one or both of the same documents. It is unclear why Cheney and Libby were apparently acting without the knowledge of other senior government officials who were working with Cheney and Libby to formally declassify much of the very same information.

Leading the effort to formally declassify some of the same information, according to legal and government sources, were presidential counselor Dan Bartlett, then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley, and then-CIA Director George Tenet.

A senior government official who has spoken to the president about the matter said that although Bush encouraged Cheney to get information out to rebut Wilson's charges, Bush was unaware that Cheney had directed Libby to leak classified information. The White House has pointed out that the president and vice president have broad executive powers to declassify whatever information they believe to be in the public interest. Meanwhile, court papers filed by Fitzgerald in April suggest that Libby was reluctant to leak any classified information to the press, and only did so after being assured that his actions were approved by both the president and vice president.

Regarding a meeting with Judith Miller that was scheduled for July 8, 2003, in which Cheney wanted Libby to leak her portions of the National Intelligence Estimate, Fitzgerald asserted in the court papers that Libby "testified that he was specifically authorized in advance of the meeting to disclose... [portions] of the classified NIE to Miller on that occasion."

"[Libby] further testified that he at first advised the Vice President that he could not have this conversation with reporter Miller because of the classified nature of the NIE. [Libby] testified that the Vice President later advised him that the President had authorized [Libby] to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE."

And Libby "testified that he spoke to David Addington, then Counsel to the Vice President, whom [Libby] considered to be an expert in national security law, and Mr. Addington opined that presidential Authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of a document."

A senior government official familiar with the matter said that in directing Libby to leak the classified information to Miller and other reporters, Cheney said words to the effect of, "The president wants this out," or "The president wants this done."



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Bush Defends War Amid Patriotic Scene

By Peter G. Gosselin, Times Staff Writer
July 5, 2006

WASHINGTON - President Bush used the patriotic setting of a Fourth of July appearance before U.S. troops Tuesday to mount a feisty defense of administration strategy in the war on terrorism and to assert that America was winning the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bush portrayed the United States' enemies as on the run, as he has repeatedly since last month's U.S. killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's top leader in Iraq. He also took a swipe at the recent efforts by congressional Democrats to set a timetable for withdrawal of American forces in Iraq.
"This moment, when the terrorists are suffering from the weight of successive blows, is not the time to call retreat," he told a cheering audience of 3,500 at Ft. Bragg, N.C.

"We will stay, we will fight, and we will prevail," he said.

The president made only a passing reference to recent reports that Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had drafted plans to sharply reduce troop numbers in the violence-plagued nation by the end of 2007. Bush said Casey was working with the new Iraqi government "on a path forward."

Praising U.S. forces for the bravery they have displayed, Bush repeatedly said that he would not set an "artificial timetable" for withdrawal.

"At this moment of vulnerability for the enemy," he said, "we will continue to strike their network. We will disrupt their operation, and we will bring their leaders to justice."

Events on the ground half a world away contrasted with the president's upbeat assessment of the conflicts.

On the outskirts of Baghdad, gunmen kidnapped Iraq's deputy electricity minister, Raad Hareth, and his 11 bodyguards as they traveled toward the city. He was released Tuesday evening with no official explanation.

Three days ago, Sunni legislator Taiseer Mashhadani and several of her bodyguards were seized in Baghdad. Their whereabouts remain unknown.

In Afghanistan this morning, a bystander was killed and dozens were injured by two bomb attacks in Kabul that were targeting Afghan soldiers or government workers. The attacks followed two bombs Tuesday that injured 11 people in the capital.

Part of Bush's speech seemed designed to respond to criticism that he had asked for little civilian sacrifice while emphasizing that the nation was waging a global war on terrorism.

The president devoted a substantial portion of his comments to describing the efforts of people who had raised money to assist military families and helped ensure that mail got to the troops.

"On this Fourth of July," he said, "I ask all Americans to take a moment and consider what you might do to support the men and women who wear our nation's uniform."

The president offered details about the U.S. airstrike that killed Zarqawi on June 7, confirming that the first allied forces to reach that Al Qaeda leader's "safe house" after its bombing by U.S. planes were special operations forces.

"And when this brutal terrorist took his final breath," Bush said, "one of the last things he saw was the face of an American soldier from Ft. Bragg, N.C.," a line greeted with a burst of cheers from his audience.

He also said that in the weeks since Zarqawi's death, U.S. and Iraqi forces had launched more than 190 raids against insurgents, captured more than 700 enemy operatives and killed about 60 others.

"We will never back down. We will never give in, and will never accept anything less than complete victory," he declared from a sun-baked stage.

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested in a television interview Tuesday that withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq might begin as early as September.

Appearing on NBC's "Today" show, he said September could be "a reasonable date" for a force reduction to start.

But Pace also said, "I think we need to be careful not to put specific timelines on troop turnover of responsibilities to the Iraqis."

Casey's plan, which one military official recently called "the most optimistic possibility," envisions a September start to troop withdrawal.

News of Casey's plan prompted accusations by some Democrats that Bush was trying to have it both ways - criticizing Democrats as weak on national security because they had called for a specific withdrawal plan even as the administration prepared to pull troops out.

After his speech, Bush had lunch with troops before returning to Washington. At the end of the meal, soldiers surprised the president with a red, white and blue birthday cake and a round of "Happy Birthday."

Bush turns 60 on Thursday.

Comment: How can Bush's stupidities go unchallenged by the media? By the public? By the Democrats?

To our American readers, did your families talk about what is really going on in your country yesterday when you celebrated Independence Day? How many people have a clue? Until tens of millions of you wake up and demand change, work for change, nothing is going to change.

What are you waiting for?

How bad will it have to get?


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Bush rejects timetable for withdrawing troops

www.chinaview.cn 2006-07-05 02:11:31

WASHINGTON, July 4 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President George W. Bush renewed on Tuesday his refusal to set a timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq, where over 2,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the war started in March 2003.

"But we're not going to set an artificial timetable for withdrawal. Setting an artificial timetable would be a terrible mistake," Bush said in speech at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on the occasion of the 230th anniversary of American independence.
Bush said terrorists in Iraq have suffered a series of significant blows, and setting an artificial timetable at this moment "would breathe new life into their cause."

Comment: What a load of horse hockey!


Such a timetable, he said, would also "undermine the new Iraqi government and send a signal to Iraq's enemies that if they wait just a little bit longer, America will just give up."

The president added that he would make decisions about troop levels in Iraq based on recommendations by American commanders.

The United States was engaged in a global war on terrorism, and victory in Iraq would not in itself end the war on terror, he said.

By achieving victory in Iraq, he said, the United States would deny the terrorists a safe haven from which to plot and plan new attacks on America and other free nations.



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Visit to Bush poses tricky task for Canada's PM

Wed Jul 5, 2006 01:22 AM ET
By David Ljunggren



OTTAWA (Reuters) - Cozying up to political ally George W. Bush could be a dangerous dance for Canada's fledgling prime minister when he visits Washington this week, as he seeks to improve ties with a long-term friend without appearing too close to a leader that many Canadians dislike.

Right-winger Stephen Harper, whose Conservatives won the January 23 election, shares many more of Bush's ideals than the previous Liberal government. But Harper only controls a minority of the seats in the Canadian parliament and the government needs backing from opposition parties to survive.
"It's like what happens to two porcupines when they're cold in winter. They get as close as possible to each other but not too close so they don't hurt each other," University of Ottawa politics professor Gilles Paquet told Reuters.

"Bush is the most unpopular person one can think of, so in a sense he (Harper) also has to reassert things. He will have to find a few unimportant irritants that he can raise there and leave pending, as a way to prove he's not a lap dog."

Opinion polls consistently give Bush a rock-bottom rating among Canadians, reflecting concern about the war in Iraq and dislike of conservative U.S. policies on issues like abortion and gay marriage.

The two leaders meet in Washington on Thursday -- Bush's 60th birthday -- in Harper's first trip to Washington since the Conservatives took power.

Harper wants to improve bilateral ties dented by a series of trade spats and a refusal by the Liberals to take part in the U.S.-led attack on Iraq -- a decision that still rankles some in the U.S. administration.

But being perceived to be too close to Bush could be dangerous politically, and officials play down opposition jibes that the prime minister is too heavily influenced by Bush.

"This isn't going to the United States and saying, 'Tell us to jump' and (then) we'll say, 'How high?"' said Michael Wilson, Canada's ambassador to Washington, adding that Bush had praised Harper's approach when the two met in Mexico in March.

"The president looked right at me and said, 'You know, your prime minister is a very direct man ... I like that because I know what he's saying. I don't like this nuance stuff,"' Wilson told CBC television on Sunday.

Opponents say Harper is already under Bush's sway and worry that he is airing doubts about the Kyoto treaty on climate change, which the United States abandoned. Some oppose Canada's military mission in Afghanistan, arguing that Ottawa should not be involved in what they see as a U.S. conflict.

"We've got a prime minister who goes on bended knee to say 'Happy birthday and please accept our warm wishes and our sell-out of Canadian sovereignty,"' said Alexa McDonough of the New Democrats, the most left-leaning party in Parliament.

There are few major problems between the two nations, especially after they initialed a deal on Saturday to end a long dispute over exports of Canadian softwood lumber.

But Harper will stress Canada's concern about U.S. plans to clamp down on people crossing the border from January 1, 2008, from which date travelers will have to carry passports or a secure document that has yet to be developed.

"The objective of the prime minister is to press the president on this to see whether there's more information, either that can be (passed on) at that meeting or ... that can be shared with us as soon as afterwards as possible," Wilson told a briefing last Friday.



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For Your Health


Forced Vaccination Of 11 and 12 Year-Old Girls

LA Times
June 30, 2006

Panel Wants Vaccine to Be Routine

All 11- and 12-year-old girls would get shots against cervical cancer. Some conservatives oppose a mandate; states will have to decide.

Federal health experts recommended Thursday that all 11- to 12-year-old girls routinely get a newly approved cervical cancer vaccine, paving the way for private insurers and the federal government to pay for shots that could save thousands of lives in the U.S. each year.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices also said females ages 9 to 26 could receive the vaccine on the advice of their doctors.

"This is a huge breakthrough for women's health," Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said after the unanimous vote by the expert committee.

The focus now moves to individual states, which must decide whether to mandate the vaccine for school attendance.

Women's health experts argue that requiring the vaccine is the most effective way to combat the disease.

"Unless you force people to get it, penetration is low," said Cosette Wheeler of the University of New Mexico, who conducted clinical trials of the vaccine.

But some educators and conservative groups say decisions about the vaccine should be left to parents.
"We think this is a matter of parental rights and parental control," said Peter Sprigg of the conservative Family Research Council. "Parents have the rights to make these decisions for their kids."

Called Gardasil, the vaccine blocks four types of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, two of which are believed to be responsible for 70% of the 15,000 cervical cancer cases diagnosed in the U.S. each year. Worldwide, 400,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer each year, and half die.

The four types of HPV blocked by Gardasil cause 90% of genital warts.

The vaccine is most effective when administered to girls before they become sexually active. According to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 26% of girls have had intercourse by age 15.

Health experts said the vaccine could go a long way toward reducing the 4,000 cervical cancer deaths that occur in the U.S. each year.

Manufactured by Merck & Co., the vaccine is among the most expensive ever produced. A full three-shot series costs $360.

Although private insurers and the federal Vaccines for Children program will cover the vast majority of females, Claire Hannan, director of the Assn. of Immunization Managers, said thousands still fall between the cracks. They include those whose insurance plans don't cover vaccines or have high deductibles. The federal program also does not cover people older than 18.

To provide the vaccine to everyone who should get it, the states would have to pay for those who could not afford it.

Dr. Leah Devlin, state health director for North Carolina and president of the Assn. of State and Territorial Health Officers, said most states did not have the money.

She said the cost of providing Gardasil to all 11- and 12-year-old girls would nearly double her state's vaccine budget, which already had trouble paying for required vaccines.

The federal committee's recommendation will become policy if it is accepted by the CDC, which normally follows the recommendations of its advisory panel.

The CDC's approval is expected in a matter of weeks.

Two national health insurers, Aetna and WellPoint, the parent of Blue Cross of California, said they would follow the committee's recommendations and begin reimbursing for the vaccine immediately.

Cost isn't the only obstacle to widespread adoption of the vaccine. In California, for example, legislation is required to mandate a shot.

Conservative groups have opposed requiring the vaccine, saying it might send young girls an implicit message condoning sex before marriage.

Some school officials also objected, noting that only three vaccines - those against polio, diphtheria and measles - were required in all 50 states.

"This is not a communicable disease that would keep kids out of school like mumps or rubella," said Gerald Tirozzi, executive director of the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals, whose members include middle school and high school administrators.

"To make this a condition to enter school - I think parents would become very upset, and many would see this as a signal to their daughters that they can become sexually active," Tirozzi said. "I think there would be a lot of push-back."

Comment: Don't people understand? Parents don't have any rights under "American Democracy". Bush is the decider, he and his administration know what's best for the population.

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High Tylenol doses linked to liver woes

By CARLA K. JOHNSON
Associated Press
Tue Jul 4, 2006

CHICAGO - Healthy adults taking maximum doses of Tylenol for two weeks had abnormal liver test results in a small study, researchers found, raising concerns that even recommended amounts of the popular painkiller might lead to liver damage.

In the study, 106 participants took four grams of Tylenol - equivalent to eight extra-strength Tylenol tablets - each day for two weeks. Some took Tylenol alone and some took it with an opioid painkiller. Dummy pills were given to 39 others.

There were no alarming liver test results among the people who took the placebos. But nearly 40 percent of people in all the other groups had abnormal test results that would signal liver damage, according to the study that appears in Wednesday's
Journal of the American Medical Association.
"I would urge the public not to exceed four grams a day. This is a drug that has a rather narrow safety window," said a study co-author, Dr. Neil Kaplowitz of the University of Southern California.

Heavy drinkers should take no more than two grams daily, Kaplowitz said.

Another co-author, Dr. Paul Watkins of the University of North Carolina, said he's less worried than Kaplowitz, noting that acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, has been used for 50 years and has a good safety record.

The maker of Tylenol, McNeil Consumer & Specialty Pharmaceuticals, said its own research found much lower rates of abnormal liver results. The company's studies tracked high-dose users over longer periods than did the new study.

"It doesn't lead to liver disease and it usually resolves as patients continue to take acetaminophen," said Dr. Edwin Kuffner, senior director of medical affairs at McNeil.

The researchers had been hired by the drug company Purdue Pharma LP, maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin, to find out why abnormal liver tests were showing up in people testing a combination drug containing the acetaminophen and the opiate hydrocodone.

Purdue Pharma stopped its hydrocodone study early because of the abnormal liver tests. Researchers Watkins and Kaplowitz thought they would find the culprit in hydrocodone's interaction with acetaminophen.

"Our jaws dropped when we got the data," Watkins said. "It doesn't have anything to do with the opiate. It's good ol', garden-variety acetaminophen."

Acetaminophen is more popular than aspirin or ibuprofen. Each week, one in five U.S. adults uses it for pain or fever, a 2002 survey found.

Acetaminophen is included in numerous over-the-counter and prescription medications, making overdose possible as people unwittingly combine drugs. Overdoses of acetaminophen are the leading cause of acute liver failure.

"A week doesn't go by when I don't have to talk to someone about how much they're taking," said Kathleen Besinque of the USC School of Pharmacy.

Watkins said people considering switching painkillers should know that others have their own side effects, such as internal bleeding and stomach irritation.

New research under way at the University of North Carolina may determine if acetaminophen's effect on the liver continues for long-term, high-dose users, or if the body adapts, Watkins said.



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Salmonella outbreaks kept secret by Cadbury in 2002

Felicity Lawrence
Wednesday July 5, 2006
The Guardian

Salmonella food poisoning bacteria were found in Cadbury's Dairy Milk and Brazil Caramel as long ago as 2002, but the company has kept the information from the authorities until now. The Food Standards Agency revealed yesterday that records just extracted from Cadbury show that its factories suffered outbreaks of the same rare Salmonella Montevideo strain in April and November that year.

Cadbury has told the food watchdog it destroyed its contaminated products at the time but failures identified by the FSA in the manufacturers' safety regime call into question how effective previous testing would have been. The FSA said it had still not received full details about the contamination. Cadbury told the Guardian it had been unable to identify the source of the salmonella four years ago.
Cadbury was forced to recall seven brands of chocolate 10 days ago after admitting that in January it found salmonella contamination in the crumb, or base ingredient, that goes into their manufacture. The company delayed six months before informing the FSA of its latest problem. The same contaminated crumb was delivered into silos at two Cadbury factories that make 30 of its other brands. The authorities and Cadbury are now testing samples from stocks of the other brands and of new products for salmonella.

The heads of food safety at Herefordshire and Birmingham councils, who are investigating the contamination, are focusing on why Cadbury's testing regime let tankers of contaminated crumb continue to be delivered when tests had come back positive for salmonella, and on what advice the company decided that a low level of salmonella was acceptable contamination. More than 30 people have become ill with the same rare strain of salmonella food poisoning since March.

The Guardian has learned that several tankers of crumb from Herefordshire tested positive for Salmonella Montevideo in a three-week period this year. However, Cadbury's just-in-time system of production meant tankers were dispatched and their contents mixed at other factories before test results were seen. Andrew Tector, Herefordshire's head of environmental health, said: "We are looking at why their testing [procedures] were such that results come too late. A tanker leaves every hour. Tests for faecal coliforms and salmonella come back after 27-29 hours. [It] renders the test meaningless."

A spokeswoman for Cadbury said: "Under the legislation, it is left to the manufacturer to determine their testing protocols. We did this based on sound independent science. At all times we have acted in good faith."



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Air pollution, cramped living in Athens breeding 'super mosquitoes'

AFP
Tue Jul 4, 2006

ATHENS - Cramped housing conditions and air pollution in Athens have given rise to a "super breed" of mosquito that is larger, faster and more adept at locating human prey, a Greek daily has reported.

Athens-based mosquitoes can detect humans at a distance of 25-30 metres (yards) and also distinguish colours, unlike their colour-blind counterparts elsewhere in the country that only smell blood at 15-20 metres, Ta Nea daily reported.
The "super mosquitoes" of the Greek capital also beat their wings up to 500 times a second -- compared to 350 beats for other variations -- and are larger by 0.3 microgrammes on average, the paper said, citing a study conducted by Aristotelio University in the northern city of Salonika.

According to the study, the mosquitoes of Athens have adapted to deal with air pollution and insect repellents, and overpopulation in the Greek capital of over four million has provided them with a healthy food supply.

"Mosquitoes can lay their eggs even inside the trays placed beneath thousands of balcony flowerpots," Athens University professor of zoology Anastassios Legakis told the daily.



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Anti-smoking drug backed by 3 studies

By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
July 5, 2006

Three studies released yesterday indicate that the newly approved drug varenicline is more effective than bupropion or a placebo in helping smokers overcome nicotine addiction.

"Varenicline was significantly more efficacious than placebo for smoking cessation at all time points and significantly more efficacious than bupropion SR at the end of 12 weeks of drug treatment and at 24 weeks," David Gonzales of the Smoking Cessation Center of the Oregon Health & Science University wrote in one of the peer-reviewed reports, published in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Although some anti-smoking specialists worry the publication of these positive findings will wrongly convince some smokers that Pfizer Inc.'s varenicline is a panacea, even the skeptics call it "promising."

Most smoking-cessation drugs are nicotine-replacement therapies. But Pfizer's varenicline, which is marketed as Chantix and was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in May, is a non-nicotine drug that is thought to be beneficial for curbing smoking by stimulating the release of dopamine in the brain to reduce craving and withdrawal.

In the experiment, it was compared with GlaxoSmithKline's sustained-release (SR) bupropion, an anti-smoking treatment without nicotine marketed as Zyban that has been on the market for nearly a decade.

When the FDA approved bupropion in 1997 as an anti-smoking aid, it was an antidepressant being sold as Wellbutrin. When the drug was approved for smoking cessation, its name became Zyban.

In the Oregon-led study, participants were randomly assigned to receive twice daily either varenicline, bupropion or a placebo for 12 weeks. They also underwent 40 weeks of nondrug follow-up.

The researchers found that continuous abstinence rate for weeks nine through 12 was 44 percent for those on varenicline, 29.5 percent for those on bupropion and 17.7 percent for those on placebo.

The abstinence rate for weeks nine to 24 was 29.5 percent for those on varenicline, 20.7 percent for those on bupropion and 10.5 percent for those on placebo.

For weeks nine through 52, the continuous abstinence rate was 2? times greater for those on varenicline than on placebo.

Mr. Gonzales and colleagues also said varenicline effectively reduced nicotine cravings and withdrawal. And those who smoked while receiving the drug said it reduced their smoking satisfaction.

A second large study by the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health found similar results.

"At the end of the treatment period, the odds of quitting smoking with varenicline were significantly greater than the odds of quitting with either placebo or bupropion SR," the authors said.

A third study in JAMA by Norwegian researchers evaluated the benefit of an additional 12 weeks of varenicline treatment compared with a placebo in relapse prevention among smokers who achieved abstinence after an initial 12 weeks of varenicline therapy.

"Extended use of varenicline helps recent ex-smokers to maintain their abstinence and prevent relapse. Varenicline is the first smoking-cessation treatment to demonstrate a significant long-term relapse prevention effect," investigators at Ulleval University Hospital in Oslo concluded.

The Oregon and Norway studies were supported by Pfizer. The data reported in the Wisconsin research were from a clinical trial sponsored by Pfizer.



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Blue Planet


Beware falling rocks

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

A planetary "all clear" sounded late Sun day night. A potentially hostile celestial visitor - a half-mile wide ball of primordial minerals named 2004 XP14 - whipped past our blue island on its way to what we all should hope is an eternal journey.

We should hope the journey is eternal, because if it stops here, so, most likely, would much of what we consider to be civilization.
Consider: Meteor Crater, the Arizona landmark many people visualize when they think of an asteroid impact, was the result of a relative interplanetary pebble. That chasm, nearly a mile across and more than 500 feet deep, was the result of impact by a space rock only about 80 feet in diameter.

But the Apollo-class asteroids - those whose solar orbits, like that of our most recent unwelcome guest, take them across the orbit of Earth - include far larger threats. Like the three-mile rock that blasted the 62-mile-wide Manicouagan impact structure in Quebec more than 200 million years ago - one of the largest impact craters still visible on the planet's surface. Or the six-mile space bomb believed to have eradicated the dinosaurs 100 million years later.

Scientists tell us that such truly catastrophic hits come every 100 million years or so, which makes us roughly due, the way such things are measured. But not to worry, they say; as far as they can observe and predict, nothing really nasty is headed our way. Of course, the length of that view is the cosmic equivalent of an eye's wink. We know of some 150 Apollo objects up to five miles across. It's likely that there are thousands we haven't tagged yet.

When the one with our name on it comes, they say, we'll know it - for a moment, at least. A land hit would obliterate thousands of square miles, followed by 13-magnitude earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and dust clouds that would blot out the sun for months. An ocean hit would produce mega-tsunamis up to three miles high, not only eradicating coastal life, but flooding the interiors of continents as well. The atmospheric steam cloud would alternatively turn Earth into an equatorial hothouse, then an icebox.

No, we would not survive as a civilization, most likely not as a species. That's why those who watch for and plot the orbits of these doomsday rocks are doing such important work. And why those who dream of thwarting the cataclysm dream such important dreams.



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Growing Acidity of Oceans May Kill Corals

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 5, 2006; Page A01

The escalating level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is making the world's oceans more acidic, government and independent scientists say. They warn that, by the end of the century, the trend could decimate coral reefs and creatures that underpin the sea's food web.

Although scientists and some politicians have just begun to focus on the question of ocean acidification, they describe it as one of the most pressing environmental threats facing Earth.
"It's just been an absolute time bomb that's gone off both in the scientific community and, ultimately, in our public policymaking," said Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), who received a two-hour briefing on the subject in May with five other House members. "It's another example of when you put gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, you have these results none of us would have predicted."

Thomas E. Lovejoy, president of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, has just rewritten the paperback edition of "Climate Change and Biodiversity," his latest book, to highlight the threat of ocean acidification. "It's the single most profound environmental change I've learned about in my entire career," he said last week.

A coalition of federal and university scientists is to issue a report today describing how carbon dioxide emissions are, in the words of a press release from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "dramatically altering ocean chemistry and threatening corals and other marine organisms that secrete skeletal structures."

For decades, scientists have viewed the oceans' absorption of carbon dioxide as an environmental plus, because it mitigates the effects of global warming. But by taking up one-third of the atmosphere's carbon dioxide -- much of which stems from exhaust from automobiles, power plants and other industrial sources -- oceans are transforming their pH level.

The pH level, measured in "units," is a calculation of the balance of a liquid's acidity and its alkalinity. The lower a liquid's pH number, the higher its acidity; the higher the number, the more alkaline it is. The ph level for the world's oceans was stable between 1000 and 1800, but has dropped one-tenth of a unit since the Industrial Revolution, according to Christopher Langdon, a University of Miami marine biology professor.

Scientists expect ocean pH levels to drop by another 0.3 units by 2100, which could seriously damage marine creatures that need calcium carbonate to build their shells and skeletons. Once absorbed in seawater, carbon dioxide forms carbonic acid and lowers ocean pH, making it harder for corals, plankton and tiny marine snails (called pteropods) to form their body parts.

Ken Caldeira, a chemical oceanographer at Stanford University who briefed lawmakers along with NCAR marine ecologist Joan Kleypas, said oceans are more acidic than they have has been for "many millions of years."

"What we're doing in the next decade will affect our oceans for millions of years," Caldeira said. "CO2 levels are going up extremely rapidly, and it's overwhelming our marine systems."

Some have questioned global-warming predictions based on computer models, but ocean acidification is less controversial because it involves basic chemistry. "You can duplicate this phenomenon by blowing into a straw in a glass of water and changing the water's pH level," Lovejoy said. "It's basically undeniable."

Hugo A. Lo?iciga, a geography professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is one of the few academics to question the phenomenon. A groundwater hydrologist, Lo?iciga published a paper in the May edition of the American Geophysical Union's journal that suggested the oceans may not become so acidic, because enough carbonate material will help restore equilibrium to them.

Lo?iciga wrote that although seawater in certain regions may become more acidic over time, "on a global scale and over the time scales considered (hundreds of years), there would not be accentuated changes in either seawater salinity or acidity from the rising concentration of atmospheric CO2."

Two dozen scientists have written a response questioning this assumption, since it would take thousands of years for such material to reach the oceans from land.

"The paper by Lo?iciga ignores decades of scholarship, presents inappropriate calculations and draws erroneous conclusions that simply do not apply to real ocean," they wrote. They added that, unless carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere stabilize soon, the seas will soon exceed the Environmental Protection Agency's recommended acidity limits.

Scientists have conducted a few ocean acidification experiments in recent years. All have shown that adding carbon dioxide to the water slows corals' growth rate and can dissolve pteropods' shells.

Langdon, who conducted an experiment between 1996 and 2003 in Columbia University's Biosphere 2 lab in Tucson, concluded that corals grew half as fast in aquariums when exposed to the level of carbon dioxide projected to exist by 2050. Coupled with the warmer sea temperatures that climate change produces, Langdon said, corals may not survive by the end of the century.

"It's going to be on a global scale and it's also chronic," Langdon said of ocean acidification. "Twenty-four/seven, it's going to be stressing these organisms. . . . These organisms probably don't have the adaptive ability to respond to this new onslaught."

Stanford University marine biologist Robert B. Dunbar has studied the effect of increased carbon dioxide on coral reefs in Israel and Australia's Great Barrier Reef. "What we found in Israel was the community is dissolving," Dunbar said.

Caldeira has mapped out where corals exist today and the pH levels of the water in which they thrive; by the end of the century, no seawater will be as alkaline as where they live now. If carbon dioxide emissions continue at their current levels, he said, "It's say goodbye' to coral reefs."

Although the fate of plankton and marine snails may not seem as compelling as vibrantly colored coral reefs, they are critical to sustaining marine species such as salmon, redfish, mackerel and baleen whales.

"These are groups everyone depends on, and if their numbers go down there are going to be reverberations throughout the food chain," said John Guinotte, a marine biologist at the Marine Conservation Biology Institute. "When I see marine snails' shells dissolving while they're alive, that's spooky to me."

Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a scientist by training, attended the congressional briefing on ocean acidification. He said these developments are "new to me, which was surprising because I usually keep up with things."

"The changes in our climate are severe and urgent even if it weren't for this, but this just adds impact and urgency to the situation," Holt said.



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Monsoon rains flood Mumbai homes, affect life

Reuters
July 5, 2006

MUMBAI - Thousands of people waded through knee-deep water in India's financial hub to reach work on Wednesday as monsoon rains continued to flood homes and disrupt transport in Mumbai.

"Our area has been under two feet water for two days," Sumit Tambhe, a resident of the western suburb of Andheri, said.

Municipal officials asked people to stay at home as much as possible.
Metropolitan trains in the teeming city of 17 million were running late as rain water submerged rail tracks.

India's monsoon flooding started on Tuesday in the western city and has killed at least 24 people in eastern India.

A year ago, two days of very heavy rain showed up the pathetic infrastructure and dismal emergency response in Mumbai, India's richest city.

The floods had killed hundreds of people then and closed down the city for nearly a week.

On Wednesday, traffic remained disrupted on several major roads and many flights to and from the city were running late.

Scores of people holding colorful umbrellas waded carefully through muddy water as emergency workers used dozens of water pumps overnight to reduce the flooding.

Schools and colleges were closed and waterlogging had affected life in crowded residential areas like Borivali, Santacruz, Andheri and Kurla.

In the past 24 hours, Mumbai, home to Bollywood, received 17.5 cm (7 inches) average rainfall.



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Minor earthquake rattles southern Vancouver Island

The Vancouver Sun Online.
Wednesday, July 5, 2006

A minor earthquake measuring 3.7 on the Richter scale rumbled through southern Vancouver Island Tuesday afternoon, bringing the usual flurry of calls to the Pacific Geoscience Centre and a glut of hits to its website.




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La France


Marseille office of French ruling party torched

AFP
July 3, 2006

MARSEILLE, France - An office belonging to France's ruling UMP party in Marseille was gutted by an arson attack overnight, police said Monday.

The premises, located in the centre of the southern city, were targeted by Molotov cocktails around 2:30 am (0030 GMT) by two people on a scooter who broke the front window.

The top representative of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Renaud Muselier, called the arson "an attack on liberty and democracy."




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Saudi crown prince to discuss defense links in Paris

AFP
Tue Jul 4, 2006

RIYADH - Saudi Crown Prince and Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz will visit France on July 20, a Saudi official source said, a visit Paris hopes will lead to the sealing of defense contracts.

The three-day official visit comes at the invitation of French
President Jacques Chirac, the Saudi source told AFP, requesting anonymity.

In addition to Chirac, Sultan will meet French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie "for talks that will cover ways of boosting bilateral cooperation, especially military cooperation," he said.
The trip will come in the wake of a visit to Paris by assistant defense minister for military affairs Prince Khaled bin Sultan, the crown prince's son, who held talks with Alliot-Marie on June 15.

Chirac visited Saudi Arabia in March without clinching a defense deal, but French sources said in Paris last month that Sultan's anticipated visit might lead to the signing of defense contracts.

According to a French source familiar with the issue, the Eurocopter division of European aerospace giant EADS is in talks with the oil-rich kingdom about the sale of some 60 Super Puma, Fennec and NH 90 helicopters.

Talks are also under way on the supply to Riyadh of Rafale fighters, refueling planes manufactured by Airbus, Leclerc tanks, frigates and submarines.

The source said that while the total value of these contracts could reach 40 billion euros (51 billion dollars), they are not all expected to go to France. A deal covering helicopters and refueling planes "would be worth three to four billion euros (3.8 to 5.1 billion dollars)," the source said.

EADS announced in May that it planned to bid in Saudi Arabia's tender for a border security radar system, a project worth an estimated seven billion euros (8.9 billion dollars).

The announcement followed a press report that the Saudis had ended negotiations on the project with the French electronics company Thales and thrown the contract open to competition.

The contract for the system, known as Miksa, would run for 12 years, and involves 225 radar installations as well as the supply of telecommunications equipment and aircraft.

French aerospace group Dassault Aviation confirmed in April 2005 that talks had taken place with Saudi Arabia on the purchase of the fourth-generation Rafale, a multi-role combat jet that can carry out interception and reconnaissance missions as well as nuclear strikes.

The French daily Les Echos said at the time the discussions focused on the purchase of 48 fighters with an option for 48 more in a deal valued at six billion euros (7.6 billion dollars).



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Paris wants wireless Internet access across city

Reuters
Tue Jul 4, 2006

PARIS - Paris wants blanket wireless Internet cover by the end of 2007, helping to make it the most connected capital city in the world, Mayor Bertrand Delanoe said on Tuesday.

Under a new plan, the city hopes to set up 400 free WiFi access points next year and allow Internet service providers to install antennae on strategically-located public property.
"We will act fast and firmly... to create the most favorable conditions for Paris," Delanoe told reporters at city hall. "It is a decisive tool for international competition and thus important for the city."

The plan also calls for slashing taxes on companies that lay down fiber optic cables in a drive to have 80 percent of all buildings within the city connected to so-called 'ultra-high speed' fiber optic networks by 2010.

"Sixty percent of Parisian households already have high-speed connections. ... Our goal will be not only to maintain this but also to move a step ahead," Delanoe said.

License fees for fiber optic cables already snaking through the city's sewer system would be cut by 25 percent, and the tax break would go up to 90 percent for the first 400 meters of new cables that branch out to connect buildings currently lacking the high-speed lines.

The free wireless access points -- to be located in parks, squares, libraries, and public areas -- will be set up by private firms that win contracts to be awarded in early 2007.

The project will also experiment with free WiFi access for an entire city quarter by the end of 2007.

Delanoe said he would be submit the plans for city council approval early next week.



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War of Terror


Bin Laden clout on rise?

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
July 5, 2006

WASHINGTON - The flurry of messages from Osama Bin Laden and his deputy this year suggests the pair is regaining control over Al Qaeda operations for the first time since the U.S. toppled the Taliban, two top experts told the Daily News.

"It means their command and control over Al Qaeda is probably stronger than we thought it was," said Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA's Osama Bin Laden unit and is the author of "Imperial Hubris."
Bin Laden has issued five audiotapes since he ended a 14-month silence in January. His deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri has released eight audio- or video-taped anti-Western speeches this year.

Few believe anymore that Al Qaeda tapes signal terror cells to strike, or otherwise foreshadow an impending attack.

But the messages do suggest Al Qaeda leaders are probably able to communicate as easily with henchmen plotting attacks as they are with operatives putting the tapes on the Internet, according to Scheuer and Peter Bergen, two of the foremost American experts on Bin Laden.

"It shows they're extremely unconcerned about releasing them" as a risk to their own security, said Bergen, author of "The Osama Bin Laden I Know" and one of the first Western journalists to interview the Al Qaeda founder in 1997.

"The heat is not on," Bergen said.

Al Qaeda's media wing, As Sahab ("The Cloud"), has posted recent tapes directly on Web sites instead of sending them to Arab TV channels to selectively edit. Plus, Bergen said, "It's hard for the CIA to watch every Internet cafe in Pakistan."

And Taliban commanders in Afghanistan have said they receive direct orders from Bin Laden and Zawahiri, who are believed to be hiding in the northern Afghan-Pakistan border area.

The Bush administration does not agree with that assessment. Two senior U.S. intelligence officials told The News they doubt Bin Laden and Zawahiri can oversee operations.

"It's obvious that [Bin Laden] exercises influence over Al Qaeda everywhere," one official said, but he doubted it included operational control.

Ambassador Henry Crumpton, the State Department's counter.terrorism adviser, told a Senate committee on June 13 that the two Al Qaeda leaders no longer have "effective global command and control." Crumpton added that the leaders "are frustrated by their lack of direct control" over Al Qaeda and its affiliate in Iraq.

Echoing Crumpton's statement that Bin Laden and Zawahiri are "on the run," another administration counterterrorism chief, Scott Redd, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the "plethora [of tapes] reflects Al Qaeda efforts to motivate other like-minded violent extremists."

Redd, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said that if Bin Laden was "taken out, [it] probably would not have a major effect on operations."

But Scheuer said all of the tapes this year make Al Qaeda "seem like a more confident organization."

"I'd be worried about claims that these guys are on the run and can't communicate," Scheuer said. "Clearly that's not the case."

Comment: Now that Zarqawi is dead, it is time to ressurrect Osama under the Bedladen....

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Putin steps up anti-terror drive

Tuesday, 4 July 2006, 16:07 GMT 17:07 UK

Russian President Vladimir Putin has asked parliament for permission to send military units outside the country to prevent terrorist activity.

The move follows Russia's offer of a $10m (£5.4m) reward for information leading to the killers of five Russian diplomats in Iraq last month.
President Putin has submitted the draft decree to parliament's upper house.

It would permit the deployment of military personnel outside Russia to prevent international terrorism.

The upper house, known as the Federation Council, is strongly supportive of the Russian president.

There seems little doubt that the draft decree will be approved.

The wording of the document, as quoted to news agencies by the Kremlin's press secretary, does not mention any country in particular.

But last week, President Putin ordered Russian agents to find and destroy the killers of the five diplomats in Iraq.

Russia was shocked by the deaths and called on the coalition forces occupying Iraq to provide better security for diplomatic missions working there.




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Malacca pirates increase raids

Singapore (dpa)

Three piracy attacks in a week off the coast of Indonesia's Aceh province have triggered sharp concerns over security in the northern Malacca Strait, authorities said on Wednesday.

A period of calm had reigned since April 2005, but the latest incidents prompted the London-based International Maritime Bureau (IMB) to urge Indonesian authorities to step up patrols.

"We are extremely concerned because the attacks took place in a hot spot, a danger area in the northern Malacca Strait," the Straits Times quoted Noel Choong, head of the IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre in Kuala Lumpur, as saying.

"We do not know if these attacks are isolated cases or if they indicate a resurgence," he said.

The Malacca strait is one of the world's busiest waterways, and its northern area has seen the bulk of pirate attacks in the past. The area is believed to harbour many hideouts.

The latest incident took place on Tuesday, the Straits Times reported, when pirates in a speedboat tried to board a Panamanian- flagged bulk carrier. The ship's crew of 20 men stopped the attackers by drenching them with water from fire hoses and blinding them with searchlights.

The failed attack took place 200 kilometres north of Medan.

Two UN-chartered ships were attacked hours apart on Sunday night, according to the IMB's log.

Both vessels were ferrying construction materials to Indonesia for the UN's World Food Programme. The first was hit as it was sailing to a town on the eastern coast of Aceh.

The pirates stole some items and damaged the ship's equipment, the report said. Three hours later, the second UN ship was attacked in the same area, with the pirates stealing cash and some construction materials.

The incident on Tuesday was the sixth pirate attack in the strait this year.



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Odds-n-Ends


Man kills four children before turning gun on himself

By OLIVIA MUNOZ
The Associated Press

GUSTINE, Calif. - A man who was seen arguing with his wife Tuesday later killed his four young children in their home with a hunting rifle before turning the gun on himself, officials said.

The children apparently died of gunshots to the head, and their father, Trevor Branscum, 38, died of a self-inflicted wound, Mayor Jim Bonta said.
Police Sgt. Vince Inaudi said the children appeared to be sleeping when they were shot. The evidence was consistent with a murder-suicide, but the department planned to conduct a full homicide investigation, he said.

Authorities identified the dead siblings as Aubrie, 12; Jacob, 10; and twins Taylor and Alyssa, both 5. The wife, Amanda Branscum, was uninjured, officials said.

The Branscums had lived in Gustine for three years, and there were no reports of domestic violence with the family, Inaudi said. Trevor and Amanda Branscum were married on Valentine's Day in 2003, Inaudi said. All four children were theirs.

Steven Morris, 18, who lived across the street from the Branscums, said he saw the family lighting fireworks on their front lawn Monday night.

"They always seemed really happy," Morris said. "I never heard any arguments from the house. It's sad because the kids didn't do anything. Kids don't deserve that."

The bloodshed came about an hour after a store owner called police to report that Trevor Branscum and his wife were arguing.

Amanda Branscum went in to buy a few things, and her husband followed her into the market, police said. The merchant said that as the woman drove away in a van, her husband dove through the window. The store owner declined to comment on the dispute that preceded the violence.

As officers searched for the van, police said, another call came in at 1:30 a.m. of shots fired at the Branscum home. Officers saw Amanda Branscum lying in the road uninjured; the bodies of Trevor Branscum and the children were inside the house.

Gustine, with a population of about 5,200, is about 90 miles northwest of Fresno in California's San Joaquin Valley. The deaths Tuesday were the community's first reported killings in nearly four decades.

"It's kind of shocking in this area," said 41-year-old neighbor Francisco Torres, whose daughter was friends with Aubrie. "You always hear about crime in other cities, but it's shocking because it's your own neighbors."



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Jackson, Mississippi State of Emergency to Continue

By Kelli Esters
ClarionLedger.com
July 3, 2006

Mayor Frank Melton has decided to extend the state of emergency in Jackson for the second time, Cmdr. Tyrone Lewis said Sunday.

Melton has said the emergency proclamation is the most effective way to fight crime, which has increased since he took office a year ago.

The order, which originally was signed on June 22 for a five-day period, will be extended through Friday.

Under the proclamation, minors are subject to a 9 p.m. curfew on weeknights and 10 p.m. on weekends.

Melton said it will continue until people in the community let him know they are "safe and secure."

When asked when that will be, Lewis answered, "until he (the mayor) is comfortable that the community is comfortable. He will make that decision."
Melton, who was out of town on vacation, could not be reached for comment on Sunday.

Lewis said Melton is receiving feedback from beat officers who are talking to people in the community and observing activities and juveniles in the neighborhoods.

After midnight Friday, Jackson saw its second homicide during the state-of-emergency period in a quintuple shooting outside a west Jackson nightclub.

Uriel Castillo, 22, of Pearl was shot and killed outside the Taqueria Mexicana in the Bel Air Shopping Center at 1999 U.S. 80 West. Castillo was shot once in the chest and once in the arm, Hinds County Coroner Sharon Grisham-Stewart said Saturday.

Police would not release the names of the other four men, but described them as all being in their 20s. One was in serious condition with a wound to his back. The other three were released from local hospitals.

JPD Cmdr. Lee Vance said Sunday that police had no other details to release in the shooting, and no arrests have been made.

On June 23, Terry Thomas, 39, of Jackson was shot to death in west Jackson. No arrests have been made in that case.

Some in the Lanier High School area were questioning Sunday what it would take for the mayor, whose campaign was based on crime-fighting, to end the emergency period.

Helen West, 58, who sat on her porch Sunday on Rondo Street with Bobbie Ramsey, 38, said she didn't feel a difference in her neighborhood since the state of emergency began. Her neighborhood remained quiet.

Ramsey, whose eldest child is 14 years old, said she didn't have to worry about her children missing curfew, because they were at home.

"If you have a 14-year-old, you should know where they are at 10 p.m.," she said.

The curfew, though, makes other parents accountable for the whereabouts of their children, she said. "It gives parents more responsibility to know where their children are at that time of night," Ramsey said. "I feel safer that he's (Melton) doing that."

She said it's hard to tell if the curfew is really working in keeping crime down, because the amount of crime being committed is not known. "We won't know if it's making a difference until crime has gone down," Ramsey said.

City officials have said that the number of minors arrested for curfew violations during the emergency period will not be made public until the state of emergency ends.

Geneva Tillman, 72, who was doing yardwork on Campbell Street, said she used to sit out on her porch, but is afraid to because of the crime she hears about in the area.

Although her street is "pretty quiet," she said it doesn't seem like crime is being reduced in the city because of the curfew. "You can't tell," she said. "There are things going on every night." But, Tillman said, the curfew has only been in effect for 10 days, and it's too early to tell if it's working. "We have to give it time," she said.



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Multiple blasts in Afghan capital kill one, wound 40

by Waheedullah Massoud
AFP
July 5, 2006

KABUL - Bombs ripped into two government buses in the Afghan capital Kabul during the morning rush hour Wednesday, killing one person and wounding more than 40 others, most of them army officers, officials said.

The blasts caused by explosives packed into carts were among around four detonations in the city, the NATO-led military force said, without providing immediate details of the other explosions.

It was the second day in a row that bombs have exploded in tightly-guarded Kabul, which is normally relatively immune from the Taliban-linked violence blighting the south of the country.
The extremist Islamic movement, which is waging an insurgency against the government, said it had planted the two cart bombs. It also claimed responsibility for a similar attack on Tuesday that injured four people.

An explosion at 8:00 am struck a bus taking commerce ministry office workers to work in the northern Khair Khana suburb, according to officials and NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) that patrols the city.

"One person was martyred and four wounded," interior ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanizai said.

About an hour earlier a similar blast struck a bus transporting Afghan National Army (ANA) army officers in a busy southcentral area of Kabul, police said.

"A bomb exploded on the side of the bus in which around 40 officers were wounded, many of them lightly wounded," defence ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi told AFP.

After the blast, the bus veered off the road and slammed into a shop selling gas. The bus was gutted in the blaze, and part of the shop was also destroyed.

"There were explosives in a cart on the road side and while the ANA bus was passing by, the explosion took place," Kabul police criminal investigation director Ali Shah Paktiawal said.

"The bus got out of control and went into a shop," he said.

Purported Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said the movement had carried out the blasts.

"It was a remote-controlled bomb," he told AFP. He said the target was a police vehicle and that six people had been killed, a toll which was not confirmed by authorities.

The blast on the army bus took place just a few hundred metres (yards) south of an area near the presidential compound and several government ministries where explosives packed into a wheelbarrow caused an explosion Tuesday that wounded around four people.

That was the second explosion in the city on Tuesday: a policeman was slightly wounded when a remote-controlled bomb hit a police vehicle in eastern Kabul.

Such bomb blasts have been rare in the capital although they occur regularly in other parts of insurgency-hit
Afghanistan.

They are usually blamed on the Taliban, which was removed from power by a US-led coalition and an alliance of Afghan warlords in late 2001.

Around 600 people have been killed since May in a spike in insurgency-linked violence. Most have been militants killed by Afghan and foreign security forces, who are conducting one of their biggest operations in Afghanistan.

Azimi, from the defence ministry, said militants were targeting the city because they had suffered heavy casualties in the south.

"This is the work of the enemies of Afghanistan who sustained heavy losses in the south and by suicide and bomb explosions they want to recompense," he told AFP.



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Weirdies


New Crop Circle in Italy

margheritacampaniolo.it
June 30, 2006

Italian Crop Circle


Click here for more images.




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Tahoe bear swills booze with pizza snack

AP
July 5, 2006

STATELINE, Nev. - A bear cub drew a crowd of spectators at a Lake Tahoe neighborhood as it munched on barbecue-chicken-and-jalapeno pizza in the back seat of a vintage red Buick convertible.

It also apparently washed it down with a swig of a Jack Daniel's mixer, an Absolut vodka and tonic, and a beer taken from a cooler, the vehicle's owner said.
About 30 people watched the cub lumber around a parking lot in upper Kingbury Grade on Sunday before it homed in on the Buick and the spicy pizza on the floor.

The bruin was unfazed by the car's horn the blew nonstop as the cub pressed the seat into the steering wheel.

"The bear was loping along in the parking lot and then decides to get inside the car," said resident Jerry Patterson.

"People were screaming at him, the horn was going off, but he was completely unaware. He did what he wanted to do and the people didn't matter."

The bear remained inside the 1964 Buick Skylark for about 20 minutes and at times put his paws on the dash as if he were holding on for a ride, Patterson said.

The owner of the car, David Ziello of South Lake Tahoe, said the bruin didn't cause any damage, but slopped cheese and jalapenos on the seats and floor.

Carl Lackey, a biologist with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, said up to two dozen bears live in the Kingsbury region near the south shore of Lake Tahoe.

The residential area sees more of them because the bears have found a primary source from Dumpsters and people who leave their food and trash in the open, said Lackey, who tracks and relocates bears on the Nevada side of the Tahoe basin.

Lackey warned visitors and residents against keeping food inside their vehicles.

"When you are in bear habitat, regardless of the time of year, you cannot leave any kind of food out - whether it's food inside the car, trash inside or outside your car, or pet food," Lackey said.

"Bears will find it and in doing so, it is increasing your chances of serious conflict."



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