- Signs of the Times for Tue, 11 Jul 2006 -


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Editorial: World Cup: Zidane - Materazzi : Italy's Shameful Win

Laura Knight-Jadczyk
11 July 2006

As a rule, I don't do football; never liked sitting around watching other people do stuff; would rather be doing stuff myself. That rule, naturally, extends to soccer which - to an American - is like "football lite." Just to illustrate the point, let me tell a little story.

Last year we had to run up to Paris for a business meeting. When we were on the way to the hotel where the meeting was to take place, we had to pass the Ritz at the Place de Vendome. At that precise moment, there was a gaggle of paparazzi out front waiting for something. Since we were early (planning for getting lost), we decided to stop and see what was going on. Everytime someone appeared at the door of the Ritz, the paparazzi started to buzz, but after the person would appear, not being the "right one" they were waiting for, the buzz died down. This happened several times and we watched from a position that was approximately 100 feet from the door.

Finally a young couple came out and all the flashbulbs started going off signalling to us that these were the folks that the paparazzi were waiting for. They ran up like a gaggle of geese going for a plump bug and surrounded this couple. I noticed the woman signing a couple of quick autographs before the Ritz doormen more or less pushed the little crowd back and helped the couple into the waiting car. They then sped away and all the paparazzi jumped onto little motoscooters and raced off down the street following the car.

We had no idea who we had just seen. But, there were a few people standing around in the square so I went up and asked them "who was that?" They told me "David Beckham." I said "Who's David Beckham?" They looked at me like I was from Mars and said, "You know, the soccer STAR!" I said "Well, that explains it. I don't do soccer..."

And so it was - until last Sunday.

Now, let me explain that my husband used to play soccer and is something of a fan, but for the most part, since I don't "do" ball games, he has mostly given it up. However, with the World Cup going on, there was no way he was going to miss it. So he - and the SOTT Team (all soccer fans) - faithfully gathered around the telly for every match. Alternating with our conversations about the world news we cover every day, there was the compelling subject of the World Cup. I would have had to have been a stone to not be affected.

And so, on Sunday night, when everyone went in to watch the game, they urged me to finally give in and give it a go; after all, it was a historic match: France vs. Italy!

As soon as it was established that France would play Italy, my husband predicted Italy would win. Why? I asked him. "Because they deserve a win after voting out Berlusconi" was his absolutely logical answer.

Of course, I wanted France to win. Sure, I was glad that Italy had the good sense to get rid of that pirate Berlusconi, but I am loyal to the country where I have made my home. I love France without reservation and find myself highly irritated when anyone criticizes the country they all want to visit. I mean, get this: the Brits constantly criticize France, but where do they all want to go on their holidays? Where do they all want to retire? France, of course! They have fouled their own country and have the nerve to criticize a people who have created a culture and lifestyle that THEY all want! I mean, what is UP with that? The French are what makes France what it is. Get it?!

Anyway, back to last Sunday and the World Cup. This was the very first soccer game I had ever watched in my entire life. I was proud of that record, but I willingly broke it to see France whip Italy's buns.

And that is what would have happened... of that, I am convinced.

Now, I think all readers will agree that I am not a soccer expert based on what I have written above. But I did raise 5 children and I know a little bit about human behavior and how to teach people to get along and play fair. As far as I could see, the game was basically fair though the Italian team did seem to be quite a bit more - well - aggressive. At one point, I even commented that they looked and acted like a swarm of bloodthirsty mosquitoes. Everyone in the room laughed and said, "yeah! you're right!" I also noticed that there was a lot more hair on the Italian team. Having visited Italy last fall, I noticed that then as well. Italian men seem to be kind of stuck in a 70s hairstyle time-warp. But maybe that's just "Retro" nowadays. I did wonder if they had all the hair so as to have a way to transport grease so they could wipe their hair and smear it on the ball, but I remembered that's baseball. In soccer, you aren't supposed to use your hands. If you want to get a really good idea of what I am talking about, and about Materazzi in particular, just watch these three video clips: One Two Three Four

Notice in video number Two, how Materazzi "pretends" to miss kicking the ball on more than one occasion. Anybody with eyes can see that he INTENDED to kick the other player. He didn't "miss." In another clip, he tries to act like he's just clumsy and deliberately drags his foot over the other player's privates. Over and over again you see Materazzi deliberately using his body as a weapon against other players, obviously intending to inflict as much damage as possible in order to remove them from the game. He plays soccer like a psychopath. The guy is a menace to the sport. Video number Three shows just what a dirty player Materazzi really is. He should be banned from soccer for life.

Well, anyway, there they were, acting like pesky mosquitos, climbing all over the French team, giving me the fidgets with their concept of personal physical space. The French team was holding up against this type of smarmy activity, keeping their mind on the game and doing as well as one can do in the face of what was clearly Attila the Hun style soccer playing. (They even had a guy with a pony tail who LOOKED like Attila!) And then, it happened: the incident that the whole world is buzzing about: Zizou butted one of the Italian players in the chest with his head, knocked the guy down, and that was all she wrote. Game over. Zidane was red carded, and the Italian team was assured their victory.

So, there I was, watching this live on TV and the instant they played the replay of the incident, showing Materazzi grabbing onto Zidane like a bloodsucking parasite, pinching his nipples (you'll have to replay it slowly to see this) Zidane brushing him off and trying to keep his focus on the business at hand, walking away, and Materazzi's mouth moving, I could see that whatever he said made Zidane snap.

It was a shame. Zidane should have known that the Italians would pull a trick like that just to try to get him out of the game. As all the soccer playing people in the room informed me, it's standard operating procedure to try to get your opponent to lose it by taunting them. Apparently, it happens all the time.

But in this case, I think the situation was just a little bit different.

With many conflicting versions of events circling on the internet and in the world’s media, The Times enlisted the help of an expert lip reader, Jessica Rees, to determine the precise nature of the dialogue that caused Zidane to react in such a manner.

After an exhaustive study of the match video, and with the help of an Italian translator, Rees claimed that Materazzi called Zidane “the son of a terrorist whore” before adding “so just f*** off” for good measure, supporting the natural assumption that the Frenchman must have been grievously insulted.

As the son of two Algerian immigrants, the 34-year-old is proud of his North African roots, dedicating France’s 1998 World Cup win to “all Algerians who are proud of their flag and all those who have made sacrifices for their family but who have never abandoned their own culture”, so such a slur would certainly explain, if not justify, his violent response.

When asked about the allegations on his return to Rome, Materazzi issued a vehement denial, while sources close to the player emphasised that he had not been accused of racism before, pointing to his close friendship with Obafemi Martins, the Nigeria and Inter Milan striker.

“It is absolutely not true,” Materazzi said. “I did not call him a terrorist. I’m ignorant. I don’t even know what the word means. The whole world saw what happened on live TV.” [...]

With the racial allegations particularly sensitive, the other speculative suggestions as to Materazzi’s offending words were no less offensive, also focusing on Zidane’s father, Smaïl. Zidane is close to both of his elderly parents, who live in a house he bought for them outside his native Marseilles, and is thought to have phoned his mother every day during the tournament.

Another explanation being widely circulated yesterday was that Materazzi had insulted the memory of one of Zidane’s closest confidants and former coaches, Jean Varraud. The former AS Cannes coach died of cancer shortly before the tournament.

With Materazzi denying all such charges, sources close to the Italy defender even claimed that he had been insulted. Several Italian newspapers claimed yesterday that Zidane had insulted the Inter Milan player’s mother, with Materazzi retorting that the Frenchman “made love to his sister”. [The Times]

Yes, the whole world saw what happened on TV. I saw it too. First of all, just by watching the incident as it happened, it was clear to me that Materazzi was deliberately trying to get under Zidane's skin and Zidane was making a mighty effort to not let it affect him. The very fact that Materazzi was grabbing onto him in the way he did showed such a stunning lack of consideration that I was appalled. After all, not too much earlier, Zidane had taken a bad fall and injured his shoulder. The medics had tended to him, but it was clear that he was in pain. So Materazzi pulling on his arm the way he did must have been physically painful, to which he added his insults.

Certainly, what Zidane did was against the rules and being taken off the field was the correct response. But, as a mother, I would have sent Materazzi to the corner for provocation and probably would have washed his mouth out with soap.

But there is more to this than just a little foul mouthed agitation. Notice that the Times said:

After an exhaustive study of the match video, and with the help of an Italian translator, Rees claimed that Materazzi called Zidane “the son of a terrorist whore”

The Times wasn't the only news organization that hired a lip reading expert.

Zidane's moment of madness may have been provoked by Materazzi calling his sister a prostitute, according to report on brazilian televeision chanel Globo.

Fantastico, a programme on globo, employed a lip-reading experts who said footage showed the Italian twice insulted Zidane' sister. The programme claimed materazzi made the same comment twice using a "coarse word" at the french player.

So we think that "whore" was probably used, and we notice that the Brazilian expert doesn't tell us what the "coarse word" was; must have been "terrorist."

Now, just think about this for a minute. In this day and time, when George Bush and the Neocons have made the word "Muslim" synonymous with "terrorist," when members of the Muslim faith have been subjected to treatment that is rapidly rivaling what Hitler did to Jews, to call someone of the Muslim faith a terrorist amounts to about the most racist and xenophobic a remark anyone could make. Can you imagine the uproar that would be raging around the globe if Zidane had been Jewish and Materazzi had made an anti-Semitic remark?

Notice Materazzi's disingenuous defense: "I did not call him a terrorist. I’m ignorant. I don’t even know what the word means. The whole world saw what happened on live TV."

Yeah, Materazzi, the whole world saw it and experts in lip reading say you called Zidane a terrorist. And if you don't know what the word means, then you better go back to primary school and learn to read and write. And while you are at it, take some classes in "how to act like a human being."

Speaking of acting like a human being, another commentator has written about the Zidane situation as follows:

The story of the 2006 World Cup has been the resurrection of France. After a lackluster performance in its first two games, the French team shocked the football watching world--otherwise known as "the world"--by upsetting Spain and then dethroning Brazil, the second time in three World Cups the French have knocked off the global kings of "the beautiful game."

While hundreds of thousands of people celebrated on the Champs-Elysées following France's stunning turn-around, not everyone was feeling the joy. Proud racist and leader of the ultra-right wing National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, could not resist defiling the moment. Le Pen decried France's multi-ethnic team as unrepresentative of French society, saying that France "cannot recognize itself in the national side," and "maybe the coach exaggerated the proportion of players of color and should have been a bit more careful."

Le Pen and others of his ilk do not recognize themselves in a team whose leader is of Algerian descent--Zinedine Zidane--and whose most feared striker is black--Thierry Henry. Le Pen used to torture Algerians for the French military in the 1950s and it turns his stomach that his team reflects France's (and Europe's) colonial past, with players from Cameroon, Guadalupe, Senegal, Congo, Algeria, and Benin among other countries.

Le Pen's efforts to use the pitch as a battleground for his Neanderthal views about immigration and Islam have not gone unanswered. After his latest comments, France midfielder Lilian Thuram said, "Clearly, he is unaware that there are Frenchmen who are black, Frenchmen who are white, Frenchmen who are brown. I think that reflects particularly badly on a man who has aspirations to be president of France but yet clearly doesn't know anything about French history or society.... That's pretty serious. He's the type of person who'd turn on the television and see the American basketball team and wonder: 'Hold on, there are black people playing for America? What's going on?'" [...]

Le Pen does not have the market cornered on racism in the sport. So-called fans, throwing banana peels and peanuts at star players of African descent, have plagued European soccer this past season. For much of the World Cup, such assaults did not occur. But before the June 27th game against Spain, the French coach, Raymond Domenech, said Spanish fans were "making monkey chants" as the French team left their bus. The incident evoked memories of an outrageous racist diatribe against Thierry Henry delivered by Spanish coach Luis Aragones to "inspire" his team before a match against France a couple years ago. When Franch defeated Spain last week, it was more just desserts for Aragones and another bitter pill for Le Pen. [...]

Anti-Arab and Moslem sentiment is by no means monopolized by Le Pen and his cronies on the far right.

No doubt about that.

So, Materazzi got rid of his rival and Italy won almost by default.

I'd be ashamed to have to win a game that way.

But then, what do I know about soccer?


Comment on this Editorial

Editorial: The Influence of Israel and it's American Lobby over US Middle East Policy

Presented by Jeffrey Blankfort at the Islamic Human Right Commission Conference, School of Oriental and African Studies, London
July 2, 2006

The apparent ability of Israel, one of the world's smallest countries, to shape the Middle East policies of the world's remaining superpower has been a source of puzzlement, conjecture, and constant frustration on the part of those fighting for justice for the Palestinians and for the peoples of the region, as a whole.

One of the roots of this unique historical phenomenon may be found in the interpretation of a 120-year-old US Supreme Court decision that afforded corporations the same rights as individual American citizens.

One of those rights is the freedom of speech that is guaranteed by the 1st amendment to the US Constitution.

Thanks to the extraordinary degree of corruption that was manifest in American society in the late 19th century, financial contributions to political candidates came to be seen by the court as expressions of political speech and thus under the court's protection.

This has resulted in the American political system becoming one of never-ending and ever more costly political campaigns, and, without question, the most corrupt among what are generally described as "advanced countries." The Supreme Court's decision, reaffirmed over the years, opened the door to well funded "special interests' and their lobbies and has allowed them, through what amounts to legal bribery, to shape the foreign and domestic policies of the United States.

By 1907, the American author, Mark Twain would write that there was only one "native criminal class in America-Congress" and a decade later, the humorist Will Rogers would joke, " America has the best Congress money can buy."

In the beginning it was the railroads and the steel companies who paid the going price and then came the lumber, oil and construction companies, the weapons and automobile manufacturers, the airplane and communications industries, and what are euphemistically known as the health providers--the doctors, the hospitals and the pharmaceutical manufacturers who have made sure that Americans would be the only citizens in a developed country that have no national health service.
In the arena of foreign policy, no lobby has proved more powerful than that of the organized American Jewish community in support of Israel; what is generally referred to as the Israel Lobby and in the halls of Congress, simply as "the lobby."
Its power is all the more impressive when one realizes the lobby represents no more than a third of America's six million Jews.

The dedication and single-mindedness of that one third, however, stands in stark contrast to the lack of involvement by the overwhelming majority of Americans in a system for which they long ago lost faith and respect. This has made the lobby's task much simpler than it might first appear. It is also why unconditional support for Israel will likely remain the only issue in which Democrats and Republicans submerge their hostilities and march in lock step together like trained circus animals. Not only do pro-Israel measures usually receive 400 votes of the 435 member House and up to 99 of a 100 in the Senate, but when it comes to foreign aid, Congress has frequently voted to grant Israel more money than a president has requested and to pass legislation favorable to the lobby over his opposition.

Since 1985 the amount of direct aid has fluctuated between $3 and $3.5 billion while unpublicized extras in the Pentagon budget have tended to raise that figure considerably higher.

The total today is estimated to be at least $108 billion.
This figure does not include the costs of $19 billion in loan guarantees to Israel since 1991, the billions of taxpayers dollars invested in Israeli government bonds by union pension funds, individual states and county and city governments, nor the billions in tax-exempt donations by American Jews to quasi governmental Israeli agencies and charities since Israel became a state.

The state of the US economy has never been a consideration. When funds have been unavailable for essential domestic programs, such as in 199l, when six out of ten U.S. cities were unable to meet their budgets and several states their payrolls, Israel received, over the first president Bush's wishes, an additional $650 million in cash as part of the Gulf War emergency spending bill. In September 1992, after stubbornly resisting for a year Israel's request for $10 billion in loan guarantees, but with a difficult election against Bill Clinton just two months away, Bush went along with Congress's demand that Israel's request be approved. It was too late to help him at the polls.

This is not only a tribute to the millions of dollars contributed to national political candidates by wealthy American Jews but a testament to the fear that AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel's officially registered lobby, has instilled in members of Congress who have neither a personal interest in supporting Israel nor a sizeable Jewish constituency.

"If there was a secret ballot, aid to Israel would be cut severely," a Congressman described as pro-Israel told the New Republic's Morton Kondracke in 1989. "It's not out of affection any more that Israel gets $3 billion a year. It's from fear you'll wake up one morning and find out than an opponent has $500,000 to run against you."

The lobby, however, is more than AIPAC, which, alone, would be unable to exert such power. There are, in fact, more than 60 organizations, from small to large, engaged single-mindedly, in promoting Israel's interests in the US while marginalizing, intimidating and silencing its critics. Its targets include Jews opposed either to Israel's existence as a Jewish state, such as myself and others who are simply outraged by Israel's continuing occupation and theft of Palestinian land, and the deadly means with which both are carried out, held in check only by the mild restraints of the international community.

Some 52 of these organizations belong to Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, which is supposed to the voice of American Jewry.

Along with AIPAC, the two largest and most influential of them are the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, and the American Jewish Committee, or AJC. Representatives of the major organizations meet every month to plan strategy for that month. Nothing can be left to chance.

The ADL began in 1914 as an offshoot of the nation's oldest Zionist organization, B'nai B'rith. Its mission was to defend Jews from anti-Jewish acts and words. It still does that, but anti-Jewish racism ceased to be a serious problem in the US years ago and the ADL's chief task today is gathering information on critics of Israel, what it calls the "new anti-Semites" and smearing them in the public media.

Fourteen years ago, its information gathering went too far. A raid by the San Francisco police on ADL's San Francisco office revealed that the organization was conducting a major private spying operation across the United States. In the San Francisco area alone, its agent had illegally compiled files on more than 600 organizations and 12,000 individuals, myself among them. These were not just Arab-American, Palestinian and Muslim groups, but Black, Latino, Asian, Irish, and trade unions, as well.

There was a special category for the anti-apartheid movement which given Israel's ties with apartheid South Africa, was not surprising, but the ADL spy was also passing that information on to a South African intelligence agent along with reports on black South African exiles living in the area.

Pressure from influential local Zionists convinced city officials not to bring the ADL while the organization promised it would stop its spying activities. There is no reason to believe it has done so. Today, it works very closely with police departments across the country, educating them on so-called "hate crimes" and routinely sends groups US police officials on free trips to Israel to learn how to respond to "terrorist attacks." This doesn't bode well for what is left of America's civil liberties.

The American Jewish Committee was founded by German Jews in 1906 and was firmly anti-Zionist until the events of the Second World War and the Jewish Holocaust led it to change its position. Today, it is the lobby's unofficial foreign office, and until recently was largely content to work behind the scenes pressuring foreign governments in behalf of Israel. It began flexing its muscles more publicly two years ago when it opened an office in Brussels to lobby the European Union.

The AJC now has weekly meetings with a high official if not the chief of state of a EU member government and one can already see the effect. Over the past year the EU has moved away from its relative support for the Palestinians and adopted one position after another that reflect Israeli demands

A number of other important components of the lobby will not be found in the President's conference, including 117 Jewish community relations councils, 155 Jewish federations, and several powerful "independent" Washington think tanks such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a creation of AIPAC; the American Enterprise Institute, and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, founded after the attack on the World Trade Center..

When one adds to what I have mentioned so far, the Jewish religious bodies that also lobby for Israel, it should be obvious that there is no other ethnic or religious group that comes close to being so intensely organized, except, perhaps, the Christian Zionists, but the scope of their activities is relatively limited. This is but one of several things that distinguish the Israel Lobby from other powerful US special interest lobbies, apart from the fact that it represents the interests of a foreign country. All are important to understanding its success.

The first, of course, is its money. It is impossible to know exactly how much of it Jews contribute to American politicians, but it is far more than any other group.

The difficulty occurs because groups monitoring the data categorize contributions according to the financial sector of the donor, which, in the case of Israel, tends to disguise the goal of the contributor. For example, the Communications industry in the US is dominated by Jews, most of whom are known supporters of Israel. When they contribute to the Democrats or Republicans, however, that money is not attributed to the Israel Lobby, but to the Communications industry. This applies to the Banking and Wall Street Financial houses that are also largely Jewish, as well as to other sectors of the business world.

Haim Saban exemplifies this problem. An Egyptian-born Israeli-American billionaire and media owner, Saban, in 2002 gave the Democratic Party $12.3 million, $7.5 in one chunk. This was two million dollars more than the Exxon corporation gave the Republican Party over a 10-year period but rated no more than a few inches in the NY Times. Saban, a good friend of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, has also made large contributions to AIPAC.

He also established the Saban Center on the Middle East at the Brookings Institute, turning that once independent think tank into another component of the lobby. Saban's $12.3 million, however, was not considered to be Israel lobby funding.

What is considered as pro-Israel money is largely restricted to funds from some three dozen pro-Israel PACs or political action committees and their members. PACs are groups that are licensed to collect donations and pass them on to politicians supportive of the particular interests of the industry, trade union, or non-profit organization that formed the PAC. What distinguishes the pro-Israel PACs from the others is that they disguise their identity to avoid the prying eyes of the media and the public. They do this simply by not mentioning Israel in their name. Thus we have the Northern Californians for Good Government, St. Louisans for Good Government, the Desert Caucus, Hudson Valley PAC, and NATPAC, etc. This has led to them being referred to as "stealth PACs" by a former State Department official.

Moreover, unlike other PACs, they only contribute to candidates in other states.

For example, the Desert Caucus will send money to congressional candidates or an incumbent Senate or House members in Illinois or New Jersey, based solely on their positions on Israel. This has led critics of the lobby to portray them as Israel Firsters. That is meant to indicate that they are more concerned with the welfare of Israel than they are with that of their fellow Americans.

The way I measured pro-Israel political contributions was to go to the web site of Mother Jones magazine, a pro-Israel liberal monthly. In 1996 and 2000, it compiled lists of the top 400 individual donors to both political parties. What I found was that in 2000, 7 of the top 10 donors, 12 of the top 20, and at least, 125 of the top 250 were Jewish, most of which went to the Democrats. In other words, at least 50% and even higher among the larger contributors. It is an extraordinary figure you realize that Jews make up but 2.3 % of the American population.

The 50% overall figure corresponds to estimates from within the Democratic Party as well as Jewish organizations although some speculate the figure is as high as 70%.

The extent of these contributions, coupled with those from trade unions that are strongly pro-Israel at the leadership level and which have invested at least
$5 billion in Israeli government bonds, have made the Democratic Party, into what American law professor Francis Boyle recently called, "a front for AIPAC."

While maintaining a formidable presence in the nation's capitol, so much so that it is referred to in Congress simply as "the lobby," AIPAC gathers its strength from its grass roots cadres and that of other Jewish organizations with which it networks in every state and major city in the United States. Its operations are carried out by a staff of 165, a healthy $47 million annual budget, and offices across the country. What affords it a special advantage is that it is considered a domestic lobby and not required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

This gives its lobbyists access such registration would prohibit, such as taking part in Congressional committee hearings, drafting or vetting legislation that concerns Israel or the Middle East, and placing its interns as volunteers in the offices of members of Congress where they serve as AIPAC's eyes or, if you prefer it, spies.

Few AIPAC staff members actually lobby. Most provide research materials, talking points, and speeches for members of Congress or help prepare AIPAC's Near East Report, a four-page bi-weekly that is essential reading on Capitol Hill. At a local level, in addition to contributing money, AIPAC members voluntarily provide their expertise to competing candidates in congressional elections, so whoever wins, Israel is assured of a supporter.

AIPAC's annual conference in Washington each Spring is a major event of the political season. In 2005, 4,000 of its members attended along with 1000 student guests. The keynote address is usually given by the President, the Vice-President or the Secretary of State. This year it was Vice President Dick Cheney who was greeted with may rounds of applause and a standing ovation. As a tribute to the lobby's power, approximately half the members of Congress attend, including the Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate and the House. Predictably, their speeches reflect their personal loyalty and of America's unbreakable commitment to Israel. The names of the congress members who show up are publicized on AIPAC's web site, which enhances their status among major Jewish donors.

As important but rarely publicized are regional lunches and dinners that AIPAC holds across the country, to which local political leaders-- mayors, supervisors, city council members, police chiefs, district attorneys, school superintendents, etc, are invited. The speakers at these events will usually be a US Senator or a governor from another state. What is interesting is that the media is never invited nor informed of their appearance, neither where the event takes place nor in the speaker's state.

As a follow-up, those favored public officials will soon find themselves invited on all-expense paid trips to Israel provided by local Jewish community relations councils, federations or other community organizations. There they meet the prime minister, defense minister and the IDF Chief of Staff, tour Israel and a West Bank settlement, and visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. It is from such so-called "civil servants" that new members of Congress invariably emerge and so the personal relations established between them and influential Jewish community activists through these trips are mutually beneficial.

Politicians, from Congressional candidates to the president, frequently travel to Israel to gain the support of Jewish voters back home.

George W. Bush made his only trip to Israel before deciding to run for President in what was widely viewed as an effort to win pro-Israel voters' support. California Governor Arnold Shwarznegger and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a non-practicing Jew, did the same.

Once in Congress, members can be assured of more free trips to Israel arranged through the American Israel Education Fund, a foundation set up by AIPAC for that purpose. In 2005 alone, more than 100 members of Congress visited Israel, some several times.

It should be noted that few politicians think it necessary to make such a political trip to Mexico prior to or even after an election, despite the fact that Mexico is far more vital to the US economy and is the genuine homeland of many more millions of Americans. But then, there is no Mexican lobby with similar political or financial clout.

AIPAC does not contribute directly to congressional or presidential campaigns but it does advise its members and the pro-Israel community as to where their money can be the most effective, whether through individual contributions or through one of the PACs.

An important hallmark of AIPAC's power is its ability to get the signatures of at least 70 U.S. senators on any letter it wishes to send to a U.S. president when they believe he is not acting in Israel's best interests. One of the most notable was the letter of 76 of them addressed to President Gerald Ford on May 21, 1975 after Ford had suspended aid to Israel and was about to make a major speech re-assessing the US-Israel relationship and calling on Israel to return to the 1967 borders. The letter warned Ford against making any changes in the strong US-Israel relationship. Ford never gave the speech and no president has dared to make such a threat again.

Mitchell Bard, a former editor of AIPAC's Near East Report, explains that the source of the lobby's power is that "Jews have devoted themselves to politics with almost religious fervor." Though the Jewish population in the United States is roughly six million, or a little over 2 % of the U.S. population, almost 90 percent live in twelve key electoral college states.

"These states alone," writes Bard, "are worth enough electoral votes to elect the president. If you add the non-Jews shown by opinion polls to be as pro-Israel as Jews, it is clear Israel has the support of one of the largest veto groups in the country."

Bard points out what has been obvious to political observers for years. Jewish political activism obliges members of Congress to consider what a mixed voting record on Israel-related issues may mean to their political future. There are no benefits for those who openly criticize Israel and "considerable costs in both loss of money and votes from Jews and non-Jews alike." For a member of Congress, even to call for even-handedness towards both the Israelis and Palestinians is enough to be targeted for defeat.

Consequently, politicians at every level of government tend to be more responsive to the concerns of Jewish voters than to the larger segments of their constituencies who pay more attention to "reality" TV, soap operas, professional sports, and their mobile phones than they do to electoral politics.

While the fact "that the campaign contribution is a major key to Jewish power...[is] one of the worst-kept secrets in American Jewish politics," as JJ Goldberg, noted in his book, "Jewish Power, it was not considered enough by Israel's supporters in the years immediately following Israel's establishment. What was thought necessary was for Jewish groups to create a supra-organizational structure that would work to ensure that no sector of American life would be immune from its influence.

Although this structure has evolved over time and while the scope of its activities have expanded and become more sophisticated, its modus operandi has remained largely unchanged.

This was revealed in a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing in 1963, a time when U.S. financial assistance and political support for Israel was minimal compared to what it would become, and it was still possible for at least one elected legislator to publicly criticize Israel on the floor of Congress. The retaliation would come later. Thus, in May 1963, Sen. J.W. Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations initiated a series of hearings concerning the activities of foreign agents in the US to determine if more restrictive laws needed to be put in place.

Among the groups under investigation were those of the young Israel lobby, including the supra-organizational structure or umbrella group, the American Zionist Council (AZC), and AIPAC that at the time was little more than a one man organization.

At the time, the AZC was comprised of eight other groups; only two are major players today, the extreme right-wing Zionist Organization of America, and the Women's Zionist Organization of America, better known as Hadassah. As the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs, AIPAC had been launched in 1951 as the lobbying arm of the American Zionist Council, but separated itself from the AZC in 1954 so as not to jeopardize the tax-exempt status of the other organizations by its lobbying efforts. It dropped "Zionist" from its name and became AIPAC in 1959. The separation was largely cosmetic. While AIPAC would focus its efforts on Congress, the other groups would take their lobbying for Israel along the length and breadth of American society.
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This became clear from the program of a single committee of the AZC that was presented at the Senate hearing. It should be noted that at the time Israel was under no external danger and the Palestine Liberation Organization did not exist.

The Americam Zionist Council's Committee on Information and Public Relations would carry "on a major part of its work through highly specialized subcommittees composed of professionals in specific areas of activity who volunteer their services..." Its targets for the 1962/63 budgetary year were magazines, and their editors; TV, radio and films;

Christian religious groups; academia, at every level; the daily press; book publishing and promotion; expanding its already active speakers bureau; liaison with organizations, both on the national and local levels, especially those with an international relations programs with special attention to "the Negro community;" "issuance of special material and guidance on controversial issues such as Arab refugees, Syrian-Israeli situation, etc.," subsidizing trips to Israel for "individual public opinion molders to help provide them with an experience in Israel...and organizing tours "in which public opinion molders will participate [and] provide suitable arrangements in Israel for handling American visitors;... counteracting the opposition" (which was minimal at the time but they were taking no chances), "the monitoring and counteraction of all activities carried out here by the Arabs, American Friends of the Middle East and other hostile groups" and finally number twelve labeled "Miscellaneous," which included "Answering requests for information and providing suitable literature for the many thousands of requests annually received."

Those were their targets 44 years ago. Let's see how far they have come,

The first item was magazines and cultivating their editors.

While a several of the most important magazines of that day are no longer published, those that exist today such as Newsweek, Time, US News & World Report, and the Weekly Standard are either Jewish owned or managed with Jews furnishing a substantial portion of their editorial staffs. While the fact that someone is Jewish does not necessarily mean he or she is an active Zionist, my observations, over the years, indicate that most are sympathetic to Israel and, at the very least, for their own self-interest, will know how to spin a story.

Television, Radio and Films were dominated by Jews then, but are more strongly in support Israel now, from ownership, to management, to news direction. This is a prime source of pro-Israel propaganda and influence.

Christian religious groups have been a challenge for the lobby as various denominations have, over the years, sought to take a balanced position on the Israel-Palestine conflict. This, for Zionists, is an act of "anti-Semitism." By and large, however, the Zionists have made sure their relations to the most of the Christian denominations is one in which Christian guilt for centuries of Jewish persecution is never far from the table. Their biggest success has been with the addition of the Christian evangelicals to the ranks of the Zionist movement, which provides massive voter support in rural America where few Jews live.

Among the more liberal denominations, the Zionists have had to work overtime recently to keep the Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists, from approving or implementing plans that would have them divest from US companies profiting from the occupation.

Academia has long been a major battle ground between the Zionists and supporters of Palestine. In recent years, the battle over divestment and what can or cannot be taught about the Israel-Palestine conflict have been the main issues. The Zionists had already been extremely active before the present intifada but shortly after Israel was widely criticized for its attack on, Jenin in April 2002, 26 of the campus groups led by Hillel and off-campus organizations, led by AIPAC, the ADL and the AJC formed the Israel Campus Coalition. They have so far been able to turn back all attempts at divestment on the universirt campuses as they have in the churches.

In the battle over teaching content, the ADL had a head start. In the early Eighties, it became the first organization to publish a list of pro-Arab professors and activists and distribute it to their members and to the media. The most recent group, Campus Watch, went so far as to put their addresses on its web site until obliged to remove them.

In the academic arena, the AJC and Campus Watch have been pushing Congress to pass legislation that would require monitoring of Middle East studies in the universities to make sure that professors are not indoctrinating their students with anti-Israel or anti-US "propaganda." Since this would clearly violate the 1st amendment and curtail the free speech of professors in the classroom, the legislation is stalled in the Senate.

Most recently, the lobby scored an important victory when it was able to prevent Yale university, the nation's oldest, from hiring University of Michigan professor and Middle East expert, Juan Cole, even though Cole had been recommended by the university's hiring committees. His crime? He is critical of Israel and of the lobby and a supporter of the Palestinians.

Conquering the daily press has been at times a contest, but the lobby has emerged a clear winner. With ownership of the two most influential papers in the country, the New York Times and the Washington Post historically in Jewish hands, with pro-Israel columnists for both of those papers syndicated in hundreds of other papers across the country, the pro-Israel position is the only one that America reads on both its editorial and op-ed pages.

The news, as well, is given a pro-Israel slant but this is not enough for the Zionist media monitoring groups, CAMERA and Honest Reporting. They accuse both papers of having an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian bias. This, of course, is nonsense, but it serves to keep them in line.

Any survey of book titles will reveal yet another success of the lobby. While there have been a plethora of books about Israel and Jewish culture, nothing has been more successful than promoting books about the Jewish holocaust and the output appears to be never-ending. Moreover, it is the rare American child that can go through public school without an intense study of the holocaust through the diary of Ann Frank. For them, that is the story of the Second World War. More time, in fact, is spent by American school children studying the holocaust than the genocide of the Native Americans and the three and a half centuries of slavery and the decades of racism that followed. Before they get out of college students will also have read and experienced the maudlin recriminations of Eli Wiesel against the non-Jewish world for not coming to the aid of the Jews. Wiesel is now a permanent fixture on the American cultural scene.

I'll not go through all the rest of AZC's program except to point out that its liaisons with the African-American community, and more recently with the emerging Latin-American population, have been of major importance to the lobby's leadership. While left-wing Jews played important roles in America's civil rights struggles, controlling the black political agenda and determining its leadership have long been major goals of the lobby. It has succeeded in achieving both. Contributions from wealthy pro-Israel Jewish businessmen provide key financial support for black churches and keeps their pastors quiet, while providing campaign funding and key data bases for aspiring black politicians insures their loyalty to their donors, if not to Israel. Those who refuse to genuflect to the lobby, which required their withholding of criticism when Israel was providing arms to apartheid South Africa, find themselves accused of "anti-Semitism" and targeted for political extinction.

What remains today is what I have called "the invisible plantation." The only member of Congress not on that plantation at the moment is Cynthia McKinney from Atlanta, Georgia. They defeated her in 2002 for criticizing Israel and the war on Iraq but she battled back to regain her seat in 2004, much to the unhappiness of not only the lobby but also the Democratic Party.

They are gunning for her again in Georgia's July 18 primary.

Finally, and what is most disturbing, what distinguishes the Israel Lobby from all the others is that it has no significant opposition.

In fact, it was only this spring, with the publication of a paper entitled The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy in the London Review of Books by Professors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Steven Walt, of Harvard, that the subject of the lobby's power and influence over US Middle East policy became an acceptable subject for public debate.

In their paper, the professors asserted, with considerable evidence, that US support for Israel over the years has not been in America's national interest and the present war in Iraq was essentially initiated in Israel's behalf and argued, effectively, against the notion of Israel serving as "strategic asset" of the US at the present time.

That the article had to come to light in London, after being rejected by the Atlantic magazine in the US, is a telling commentary on the degree to which discussion of the lobby has been a taboo subject in American political circles.

Those circles include not just the supporters of Israel and the politicians and the media over which they maintain their influence, but the American left and its leading icon, Prof. Noam Chomsky. While praising the two professors for having raised the issue, he proceeded to casually dismiss their thesis without addressing its key points.

This was no surprise. For more than 30 years, in countless books, speeches, and interviews, Professor Chomsky has maintained that Israel is a "strategic asset" of the US, that it serves as Washington's "cop on the beat" in the Middle East, and that the lobby is not really a factor in Washington's foreign policy deliberations. It only seems so, he insists, because its positions tend to agree with those of America's ruling elites. It is also important to note that he strongly opposes any form of economic pressure being brought against Israel, be it, boycott, divestment, or South African type sanctions.

With so much invested in his position Professor Chomsky is not about to change his mind at this point. Nor, apparently, will other professors such as Stephen Zunes who have rigidly adopted his viewpoint.

But what is more important and unfortunate, that has also been the position taken by the anti-war and Palestine solidarity movements. Rather than welcoming the opportunity to criticize or even discuss the lobby's role that has been afforded by the Mearsheimer-Walt paper, they have either ignored it or, like Chomsky and Zunes, insisted that the problem is not the lobby, but US imperialism (as if the two were mutually exclusive) which is an easy target but provides little foundation for concrete political action. The fact that the Palestine support movement in the United States has been an utter failure to this point in time, I believe, can be traced, in a large part, to its refusal to acknowledge the power of the Israel lobby and to challenge that power either locally and nationally.

It is interesting to note that in 1971, three years before Chomsky published his first book on the subject, Roger Hilsman, who had been a State Department official in charge of intelligence under the Kennedy administration wrote :

"It is obvious to even the most casual observer, for example, that United States foreign policy in the Middle East, where oil reigns supreme, has been more responsive to the pressures of the American Jewish community and their natural desire to support Israel than it has to American oil interests."

Stephen Green, whose ground-breaking research into State Department documents, was incorporated in his superb book, Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with Militant Israel," put it in a more nuanced way:

"Since 1953," he wrote, "Israel, and friends of Israel in America, have determined the broad outlines of US policy in the region. It has been left to American presidents to implement that policy, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and to deal with tactical issues."

The late Professor Edward Said did not mince words on the issue. In 2001, in his contribution to The New Intifada, entitled, appropriately, "America's Last Taboo," he rhetorically asked: "What explains this [present] state of affairs? The answer lies in the power of Zionist organizations in American politics, whose role throughout the "peace process" has never been sufficiently addressed-a neglect that is absolutely astonishing, given the policy of the PLO has been in essence to throw our fate as a people into the lap of the United States, without any strategic awareness of how American policy is dominated by a small minority whose views about the Middle East are in some ways more extreme than those of Likud itself.

And on the subject of AIPAC, Said wrote:

" [T]he American Israel Public Affairs Committee-AIPAC-has for years been the most powerful single lobby in Washington. Drawing on a well-organized, well-connected, highly visible and wealthy Jewish population, AIPAC inspires an awed fear and respect across the political spectrum. Who is going to stand up to this Moloch in behalf of the Palestinians, when they can offer nothing, and AIPAC can destroy a professional career at the drop of a checkbook? In the past, one or two members of Congress did resist AIPAC openly, but the many political action committees controlled by AIPAC made sure they were never re-elected... If such is the material of the legislature, what can be expected of the executive?"

Professor Said's opinion, like the others, fell on largely deaf ears.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that in the absence of any organized public opposition and the abject default to it by those purporting to support the Palestinian cause, the Israel Lobby has had no trouble maintaining its control over the US Congress, and essentially US Middle East policy while making the political costs of any president that opposed it, a predictable defeat at the polls on election day.

Every president beginning with Richard Nixon has made at least a half-hearted effort to get Israel to leave the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, not for the benefit of the Palestinians, but to improve America's regional interests and each has been thwarted by the lobby.

The exception was Jimmy Carter, a political outsider, who forced Menachem Begin to evacuate the Sinai in exchange for the Camp David peace treaty with Egypt and in 1978, to rub it in, ordered him to withdraw his troops from Lebanon after Israel's first invasion of its northern neighbor.

The lobby was not pleased with Camp David and with Carter's other efforts to pressure Israel and he paid for it at the polls in 1980 when he received only 48% of the Jewish vote, the lowest for any Democrat since they started keeping count.

Given the situation, I have described, the outlook for changing American policy in terms of providing even a modicum of justice to the Palestinians is not bright.

What is left for us to do is explain why and to challenge those on our side who stubbornly control the message to face the truth or get out of the way.
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Editorial: War crimes: Israel's offensive against peace

By Alain Gresh
Le Mondo Diplo

The 1949 Geneva Conventions state, in article 54 of their additional protocol: "Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited". It is also "prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population". That means that the Israeli army's latest offensive in the occupied territories amounts to war crimes; it includes the blockade of the civilian population and their collective punishment, the bombing of Gaza's $150m power station, depriving 750,000 Palestinians of electricity in the intense summer heat, and the kidnapping on the West Bank of 64 members of the political wing of Hamas, including eight cabinet ministers and 22 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. On 5 July the Israeli government said it would expand its military operation in Gaza.

Israel has violated another principle of international law in this offensive: proportionality. Article 51 of the protocol forbids "an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated." Can saving one soldier's life justify destruction on this scale?

The Israeli government has negotiated prisoner exchanges several times: in 1985 Israel freed 1,150 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for three of its soldiers captured by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). Negotiations are more likely to obtain the release of Gilad Shalit than military attacks which, on the contrary, risk bringing about his death. Israel know this: Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Dan Halutz has told the cabinet that military action alone will not secure the release of Shalit (Haaretz, 3 July 2006).

An editorial in Haaretz on 30 June 2006 said: "Bombing bridges that can be circumvented both by car and on foot; seizing an airport that has been in ruins for years; destroying a power station, plunging large parts of the Gaza Strip into darkness; distributing flyers suggesting that people be concerned about their fate; a menacing flight over Bashar Assad's palace; and arresting elected Hamas officials: The government wishes to convince us that all these actions are intended only to release the soldier Gilad Shalit." The editorial concludes: "As one who knows that all the Hamas activists deported by Yitzhak Rabin returned to leadership and command positions in the organisation, Olmert should know that arresting leaders only strengthens them and their supporters. But this is not merely faulty reasoning; arresting people to use as bargaining chips is the act of a gang, not of a state." (1)

In reality, as the Israeli media has revealed, this offensive was planned a long time ago; that includes the arrest of leading Hamas officials, starting with ministers and legislators. The purpose was not just to get rid the Hamas government elected in January but all form of Palestinian authority. That was the thinking behind the disengagement plan devised by Ariel Sharon, then Israel's prime minister, and continued by his successor, Ehud Olmert: in order to draw Israel's borders unilaterally it was necessary to tell the world that there was no Palestinian interlocutor.

This strategy started well before Hamas' electoral victory: throughout 2005, when Mahmoud Abbas was governing the Palestinian Authority (PA) with a Fatah majority, Sharon systematically refused to negotiate with him and went ahead with the construction of the separation wall - flouting the ruling of the International Court of Justice. His policy of unilateralism flew in the face of the core achievement of the Oslo accords. This was the conviction that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in bilateral negotiation between the Palestine Liberation Organistion (PLO) and Israel; the agreement signed on 9 September 1993 by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat confirmed that belief, affirming mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO.

The Hamas victory in the January elections made it easy for the Israeli government to hot up its propaganda war on the familiar "there is no Palestinian interlocutor" theme. The United States and the European Union put three conditions on the new Palestinian government: to recognise Israel, stop all armed attacks and accept the agreements reached between previous Palestinian governments and Israel. They then suspended their direct aid, greatly increasing the sufferings of the Palestinian population who had foolishly voted the wrong way. They show limitless tolerance towards the Israeli government, which refuses to recognise the right of the Palestinians to an independent state on the territories occupied in 1967, uses state terrorism against civilians and failed to fulfil its undertakings under the Oslo accords. Benita Ferrero-Waldner, European commissioner for foreign affairs, even hailed the Israeli government's unilateral policy as a brave decision.

It is surely no coincidence that the present offensive came just as all the Palestinian movements (except for Islamic Jihad) signed a joint declaration (2) accepting the establishment of a Palestinian state on all the territories occupied in 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital - an implicit recognition of Israel. The Israeli government wanted to stamp out any new Palestinian opening towards peace. It had done the same in 2002, when an Arab summit in Beirut endorsed a plan that proposed recognition of Israel in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state; the Sharon government responded, on the pretext of a suicide attack, with a generalised offensive against the occupied territories.

But Operation Summer Rain, the poetic name of the present Israeli offensive, shows the failure of its unilateral policy. The withdrawal of the Israeli army from the West Bank and Gaza without negotiations with the Palestinians cannot lead to peace. And in the West Bank, where Israeli settlements and Palestinian population are inextricably linked, any unilateral evacuation can only lead to further violence.

Translated by Wendy Kristianasen

(1) «The government is losing its reason», Haaretz, 30 June 2006.
(2) «The Prisoners' National Conciliation Document», Palestine Center, 28 June 2006.


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Editorial: The Age of Irony

Reem Al Faisal, Arab News

It is tragic to witness the transformation of a victim into the worst perpetrator of that which he suffered from in the past. But this is what is unfolding before our eyes.

This statement is evidently clear in its meaning and intent. The entire world knows that what I have in my mind is the Israelis and their loss of all sense of morality and reason. They have descended, without any inhibitions, into unprecedented savagery directed against the defenseless Palestinians.

Rarely have a people suffered under such brutality that they are denied the very essence of their humanity.

Seen through the prism of the Israelis and the Western press and the elite, the Palestinians never die or are maimed. Their homes are never destroyed nor their infrastructure is decimated. Their leaders are never assassinated or abducted. No, the Palestinians can't suffer or feel pain or bear the weight of oppression; they simply fade away and are never heard of again.

It is truly ironic that the words of Shylock are far more apt today to describe the Arab than the Jew and it is even more ironic that the hand which kills, destroys and tortures is that of a Jew and that its victim is the Arab who has been the Jew's cousin, friend, neighbor and colleague not for decades but centuries. Arabs are the one people who never committed pogroms at any time in history against Jews or built gas chambers to cast the Jews into or ghettos to imprison them in.

Instead the Arab has received the Jew and honored the Jew in his land and protected him from the predatory West and this not for decades but centuries and, hopefully, this will continue.

There can be no age more ironic than the one we live in whereby the victim has turned into the criminal and the innocent are condemned for being victims and nothing more.

Today, any Arab who stands up for the right of the Palestinians to exist as human beings (whether he does it verbally, physically or financially) is branded and condemned as a terrorist or as encouraging terrorism by the West, Israel and even some Arab governments. Our own people have turned into jailers and torturers in the employ of the West. Censoring our media, restricting all kinds of demonstrations condemning the actions of the Israelis against our Palestinian brothers.

The absurdity of the Arab world has reached such heights that certain people in our region refuse to meet the legally elected representative of the Palestinian people but rush to hold meetings and shake hands with the Israeli leaders.

Now, at this moment what is the reaction of the Arab leaders and the Arab League to the ethnic cleansing going on in Palestine? Their answer is one of defiant inaction, an aggressive surrender to the inevitable massacre of the Palestinians. The Palestinians are the first people to be exterminated live on TV. We could call it the Big Brother Holocaust, the reality TV of ethnic cleansing.

However, the greatest criminals are not the Israelis, for they are only following the natural instincts of a colonizing and thieving nation at any given moment in history or place. No, the real responsibility for the depth of depredation which the Palestinians suffer today lies at the door of every Arab. They might not bear the direct criminal responsibility for what is happening in Palestine but they surely bear the moral responsibility.

They know they can stop the tragedy; yet, they take no action and opt simply to change the TV channel and watch the World Cup.

- Reem Al Faisal is a Saudi photographer. She is based in Jeddah.

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Editorial: Fascism: An American reality

By Larry Pinkney
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jul 6, 2006, 01:07

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word fascism as "a philosophy or system of government that is marked by stringent social and economic control, a strong centralized government usually headed by a dictator, and often a policy of belligerent nationalism." Moreover, and most importantly, it also defines fascism clearly and succinctly as "oppressive or dictatorial control." There are those who will sarcastically say that the political/social situation in and with America is not "that bad," when in fact things are far, far worse.

Whether or not one chooses to define this increasingly all-encompassing suppression of people in America as authoritarian, totalitarian or fascist is a ridiculously moot point for the overwhelming majority of people who have lost or are losing their already limited freedoms, their livelihoods and their very lives to the organized repression of this hypocritical, cynically racist and genocidal American state apparatus. The organized and sustained political, economic, social and cultural repression being waged by the American state against its own citizens and persons globally is nothing short of fascism.

At this precarious period in history, with repression intensifying on all levels, quibbling about whether or not America is technically fascist amounts to intellectual masturbation. The fact is that the internal and external repressive policies of the United States of America have already destroyed -- and continue to decimate -- millions of people inside America and throughout the world. Especially is this true with respect to the vast majority of people of color in the ghettos, reservations and barrios of the U.S., as well as in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, the Caribbean and elsewhere.

Contrary to the well perpetuated myth, fascism is not limited to storm troopers blatantly goose-stepping down streets and alleyways, engaging in bloody search and destroy missions. Germany's fascism under Adolf Hitler differed from Italy's fascism under Benito Mussolini, but they were both fascist nation states. Fascism has different forms, all of which are equally deadly, all of which must be identified, seriously resisted and stopped.

Complacently insisting that the organized state repressive apparatus of, in and by the United States must not be defined as fascism is incredibly dangerous, especially at this point in history. It's a bit like quibbling with a person who is in the death throes of drowning that he is not actually drowning but merely suffocating! No matter how it is defined, the person is dying, and immediate action is needed to save his or her life!

Whether it is defined as blatant fascism, benign fascism or so-called creeping fascism, it is still fascism; and if left unchecked, the end result is precisely the same: total and utter disenfranchisement under an authoritarian, repressive state apparatus. The urgency of this reality in America cannot be overstated.

The enormous internal and external destruction of peoples and cultures around the world caused by the fascistic policies of the United States -- cloaked in a mythical democracy -- have wreaked more havoc, misery and destruction upon peoples nationally and around the world than the blatantly fascist regimes of World War II Germany and Italy combined. Notwithstanding the over 100 million Black people who had previously been murdered as victims of Europe and America's African "legalized" slave trafficking, it should be remembered that many years subsequent, Adolf Hitler, in his published book "Mein Kampf," made it quite clear that the idea for waging the horrible genocide against Jews and other so-called "undesirables" had been borrowed from none other than the earlier genocide waged by the United States against the indigenous -- so called "Indian" -- peoples of America.

Ironically, many pundits of that 1930s era confidently and incorrectly argued that due to Germany's achievements in culture, politics, the arts and technology of that period, the unthinkable could never happen there. Obviously, they were wrong. Nevertheless, the enormous horrors inflicted by fascist Germany and Italy upon the world pale by comparison to those carried out by the much larger, deadlier and far more sophisticated United States of America, whose internal and external "news" and information propaganda machine would make the former fascist German and Italian propaganda machines green with envy.

Thus, to compare the contemporary United States, or any of its leaders, to the former fascist leaders Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini is utterly missing the point, as the U.S. is much, much worse, and its global power is far more encompassing and devastating.

It is important not to be fooled by the feigned surprise on the part of some at the limited, tip-of-the-iceberg revelations about U.S. torture, internal spying by the U.S. government and corporations, the militarization of the judicial process, massive national voter disenfranchisement and the demonstrated de facto contempt by the U.S. government and corporations for the Black victims of Hurricane Katrina, etc. Substantively, virtually none of these systemic practices are new but now are integrally part and parcel of an increasingly blatant form of American fascism.

No matter what individual may be the nominal "leader" of the United States, or what political party -- Republican or Democratic -- is in power, fascism has undeniably become an American reality. No matter what name or under what guise America cloaks its fascist policies, the undeniable fact is: America's own style of fascism is a reality here and now.

It is no wonder that Austrian born Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrated no compunction or inhibition whatsoever in repeatedly and openly expressing his "admiration" for German fascist leader Adolf Hitler before going on later to become the Republican Party's governor of the state of California (see "Events Related to Schwarzenegger.")

Moreover, there is no sustained and overwhelming outrage and incensed repudiation of Schwarzenegger from the leadership of either the Democratic or Republican parties regarding his arrogant and chilling admiration for a fascist leader who was directly responsible for the dehumanization and murder of millions of people. A distinctly American version of fascism has taken root in this nation, and has created a political climate wherein politicians can openly embrace with admiration past fascist leaders without seriously jeopardizing their own political careers.

Furthermore, other than as an increasingly obvious propaganda tool to further its global hegemonic objectives, America's cynical racism and hypocrisy has made a meaningless mockery of words and phrases such as democracy, legality, freedom, fair judicial process and justice. This is a reality which most of the peoples of the world outside of the United States have already acknowledged.

Attempting to minimize the precariousness of the political situation in this nation by denying the reality of fascism in America does not change or stop it. Maintaining, like ostriches, the denial of fascism's active, significant existence and role in the American body politic, actually strengthens its stranglehold on the people of this nation and world. Only by removing our heads from the sand, facing up to, organizing against, resisting and struggling for systemic change here and now is there the real hope, for ourselves and for people around the world, of stopping and dismantling this fascist onslaught. Indeed, we can ill afford to do otherwise.

Larry Pinkney is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil/political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Email him at Lecconsult@aol.com.

[ Original ]
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Editorial: Inequality and Plutocracy in America

by Rodrigue TremblayJuly 10, 2006

"Democracy [is] when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers."

Aristotle, (384-322 BC)

"Money becomes evil not when it is used to buy goods but when it is used to buy power... economic inequalities become evil when they are translated into political inequalities."

Samuel Huntington

One of the greatest benefits of a well functioning democracy is its capacity to bring about change: change of government, change of policies, change in the distribution of income and wealth, etc., and to avoid stagnation and immobilization. In any society, the tendency is for a few to concentrate power and wealth in their hands, leaving the many in a situation of dependence and despondency. The right to vote and to engage in political activity changes the balance of power in a country and opens the door for the establishment of a government, in Lincoln's words, "of the people, by the people, and for the people." However, too great a concentration of wealth inevitably brings forth corruption in government and a concentration of the tools of propaganda, both of which constitute the greatest threats to democracy.

The United States is technically a democratic republic, its leaders being elected at certain intervals. Economically, it is also a wealthy country, being endowed with a large and freely functioning domestic market. However, this is also a country where income and wealth inequalities are on the rise and where there is still a lot of poverty.

Some socio-economic indicators show that income and wealth inequalities are rising in the U. S. -For example, in 2005, chief executive officers (CEOs) in the United States earned 262 times the pay of an average worker, the second-highest level in the 40 years for which there is data. In other words, a CEO earned more in one workday than an average worker earned in the entire year. This was not always the case: In 1980, a CEO earned 42 times the average worker's pay, and the ratio was 85 times in 1990. Wealth concentration and poverty follow income inequality. Today, the richest one percent of Americans owns 40 percent of the nation's household wealth. On the other hand, one in five American children lives in deep poverty, while economic opportunity and the chances for social mobility are reduced for an ever-growing proportion of children.

The likelihood that a child born into a poor family will make it into the top five percent of income earners is just one percent, according to "Understanding Mobility in America", a study by economist Tom Hertz from American University. By contrast, a child born in a rich family had a 22 percent chance of also being rich as an adult. In other words, the chances of getting rich are about 20 times higher if one is born rich than if one is born into a low-income family. Even for children born in middle-class families (family incomes of $42,000 to $54,300), their chances of one day attaining the top five percent of income earners are only 1.8 percent. This is lower than in most other democratic countries. For example, intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

One of the main reasons for poverty in the USA is the high proportion of American families, even among those who have at least one member who is working, who have no health plan whatsoever. A study by the Commonwealth Fund indicates that, in 2005, 41 percent of American workers did not have health insurance coverage. This amounts to an estimated 48 million American adults who spent any time uninsured in the past year. As a consequence, more than half of uninsured Americans either had problems paying their medical bills or had to go into debt to pay them. This is in a country where health care spending is climbing by more than 7 percent per year.

Another reason for increased income inequality in the future is the shift taking place in pensions for workers. An established trend in many companies is to reduce, freeze or eliminate pensions for ordinary workers, while increasing the pensions reserved for executives.

There are social and political consequences when income and wealth disparities become too great. A wealth aristocracy can appear that will demand special privileges in controlling various institutions, not the least of them being the government.

Presently, ultra right-wing politicians, with the support of ultra conservative media, are busy building a wealth aristocracy in the United States. They are busy cutting taxes for the very wealthy and for large corporations, while reducing assistance, pensions and social services to the very poor. They are content tilting the tax code in favor of the very rich and against the working poor, while freezing the minimum wage and lowering-and even abolishing-the tax on large fortunes. Meanwhile, middle- and working-class families are being priced out of college education for their children, because of cuts in government grant aid and the failure to extend the college tuition tax deduction. The end result will be a work force badly prepared for the 21st century. That may be what the conservatives really want, i.e. an uneducated work force which can be more easily manipulated.

The move toward an obscene concentration of wealth was reinforced, on June 22, 2006, when the House of Representatives, supposedly there to represent the people, passed a law to substantially cut the estate tax, by an estimated $750 billion for the first 10 years of implementation, after 2010. President George W. Bush has sought the complete repeal of the tax on large inherited fortunes, even though his administration has built up public deficits and the public debt by $1.3 trillion, between 2002 and 2005.

As a consequence of rising income and wealth inequalities in the U. S., politics has become more and more a rich man's game, supported by an army of lobbyists and their campaign cash, and a concentrated media spin machine. For example, in the 435-member House of Representatives, 123 elected officials earned at least one million dollars in 2005, according to released financial records made public each year. In the U. S. Senate, one third of them are millionaire income earners. By comparison, less than one percent of Americans make seven-figure incomes.

In conclusion, the United States seems to be moving more and more away from a government "of the people, by the people and for the people", towards a government of and for the rich and influential.

Rodrigue Tremblay lives in Montreal and can be reached at  rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com

Also visit his blog site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.

Author's Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/


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Editorial: Democracy, Mexican Style - Part II

by Stephen Lendman

There's much happening in Mexico in the aftermath of the nation's most contentious election ever, but it began many months before the first vote was cast. The popularity of leftist opposition candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) scared the ruling National Action Party (PAN) enough to get them to try to deny him the right to run for president in the election just concluded. In April, 2005, a commission of four members of the Chamber of Deputies (Mexico's Congress) held there was sufficient cause to suspect Obrador committed a crime when he ordered the construction of a service road to a hospital ignoring a judge's order against doing it. Obrador said he was just widening the road and stopped when he learned of the court order. The full Chamber ignored his explanation and then voted to strip him of his government immunity from prosecution so he could be indicted, have to stand trial and be constitutionally barred from holding or running for high office. The transparent scheme didn't work because the people of Mexico wouldn't tolerate it and turned out in mass street protests to support him.

That mass support succeeded in getting the ruling PAN to back down from its attempt to keep Obrador off the ballot but not in the shoddy campaign tactics they decided to use against him. Because of his popularity, Obrador was a serious candidate who would likely win easily in a fair election. But there's nothing fair about Mexican politics where the notions of dirty tricks and hardball tactics could have been invented. From early on in the campaign, the Mexican corporate media and ruling business-friendly right wing parties attacked Obrador viciously as an evil twin of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, falsely accusing him of receiving campaign funds from the Venezuelan President and being guilty of corruption during his time as mayor of Mexico City. The ads also accused him of being a "danger" for Mexico. In addition, government instigated street violence in an attempt to break a teachers strike in Oaxaca and to disrupt events in San Salvador Atenco created tension, stoked fear and were effectively used as political and PR tools to turn enough of the public against Lopez Obrador to erase his once insurmountable lead in the polls to a slim one on election day - an advantage easily overcome with the shenanigans the ruling party had in mind to use to assure its candidate won.

But Lopez Obrador was lucky PAN officials and their conspiratorial Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) allies didn't intend for him what state officials plotted and pulled off against two other noted state adversaries in the past who paid dearly. General Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican peasant rebel leader who supported agrarian reform and land redistribution in the battles of the Mexican Revolution (a Mexican Simon Bolivar), was assassinated by government troops in 1919. Then in March, 1994, leading opposition candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio met the same fate on the campaign trail in Tijuana. Obrador survived the shabby scheme to keep him off the ballot, was able to run as the opposition candidate, and only paid the price of a defeat at the polls (so far) in an election clearly stolen from him.

At this point Lopez Obrador is not going gentley "into that good night." Given the clear election irregularities, he's demanded the ballot boxes be opened and all votes be recounted manually. He has every right to ask for that and more with what already is known about the fraud committed against him. The preliminary vote totals were manipulated to show PAN candidate Felipe Calderon would be the winner, initially 3 million votes were never counted and only in hindsight 2.5 million of them were added to the totals, 900,000 supposedly void, blank and annulled ballots were declared null, discarded and never included in the official totals, 700,000 additional votes disappeared from missing precincts, thousands of voters were denied their franchise in strong Obrador precincts and much more.

In addition, it was learned that Felipe Calderon's brother-in-law Diego Hildebrando Zavala wrote the vote-counting software, and it's already been hacked. This new discovery is especially disturbing as whoever controls the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) computer systems can manipulate the vote process, control which votes get counted, which ones don't, and what the final vote tally will be. The opportunity and temptation for fraud was therefore in the hands of the declared winner's close family member and ally with every reason to believe he'd take full advantage. Why wouldn't he and the ruling party as well given the history of Mexican elections and the underhanded and hardball tactics the country's entrenched power interests are known to use. They'd never be willing to give up what they've always had an iron grip on and won't if they can get away with their scheme. But the way to stop them is with a full, vote-by-vote independently supervised manual recount and do it before any cast, counted or discared votes are manipulated or destroyed. That's the only antidote for computer fraud as well as to be able to salvage and include in the total as many of the known uncounted and valid discarded votes as possible. It all sounds like Florida, 2000 deja vu all over again, but we know how that one turned out.

Still, Lopez Obrador said he'll contest the election and demand a full recount. If he follows through on his challenge, he'll have to await a ruling by the Electoral Tribunal, known as Trife, which has until September 6 to consider his case. The new president takes office on December 1 so it's possible the electoral challenge will succeed. In the past, Trife has reversed some local elections including one in Obrador's home district of Tabasco in 2000, but it's very unlikely to reverse this one given the overwhelming pressure against it which in Mexico may include real and intimidating physical threats officials take very seriously.

The people of Mexico may have other ideas though. As many as 500,000 Obrador supporters (the corporate media lied and reported 100,000) held a mass protest demonstration against the announced election outcome in Mexico City's huge Zocalo plaza on July 8 to demand a full recount. The huge crowd chanted "No to fraud," and "You're not alone," as Lopez Obrador announced plans for a "national march for democracy" to begin on July 12 in each of Mexico's 300 election districts, converging in Mexico City on July 16, again in the Zocalo. He also accused President Fox of violating Mexican law that stipulates a president can't endorse or campaign for a candidate which the PAN did by running government sponsored advertisements touting its achievements. He went on to call President Fox a "traitor to democracy" and said the "stability of the nation" is at risk if a full vote recount isn't taken. Mr. Obrador also told an assembled news conference "I am going to defend our victory. This isn't over." The people of Mexico who support him certainly hope so.

The July 2 elections were also to elect members of Mexico's Chamber of Deputies. According to the official IFE count on July 7, the PAN won 206 of the 500 seats, followed by For the Good of All coalition consisting of the PRD and smaller Workers Party (PT) and Convergence Party with 160 seats. The Alliance for Mexico comprised of the PRI and small Green Ecological Party of Mexico (PVEM) won 121 seats. An incomplete final count in the Senate projected the PAN with 53 seats, 38 for the PRI coalition, 36 for the PRD coalition and 1 for PANAL.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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Israel - Nazi Germany Revisited


The Wahbas' last meal

Haaretz
11/07/2006

It's a direct hit by the second missile fired by the excellent Israel Air Force pilot, and it comes right into the dining room through the ceiling. Fatma, three months pregnant, is killed on the spot by the shrapnel that hits her spine. Her brother, Dr. Ahmed, is also killed. His daughter-in-law miscarries her child, the little girl Farah is moderately injured and the baby of the family, Khaled, is critically injured in the head.

A puddle of blood collects on the floor.
They'd all sat down to have lunch at home: The mother Fatma, her daughter Farah, 2; her son Khaled, 1; Fatma's brother, Dr. Zakariya Ahmed; his daughter-in-law Shayma, who was nine months pregnant; and the 78-year-old grandmother. A family gathering in Khan Yunis in honor of the uncle, who'd arrived home six days earlier from Saudi Arabia.

A big boom is heard outside. Fatma hurriedly scoops up the littlest one and tries to escape into an inner room. But another boom follows immediately. This time it's a direct hit by the second missile fired by the excellent Israel Air Force pilot, and it comes right into the dining room through the ceiling. Fatma, three months pregnant, is killed on the spot by the shrapnel that hits her spine. Her brother, Dr. Ahmed, is also killed. His daughter-in-law miscarries her child, the little girl Farah is moderately injured and the baby of the family, Khaled, is critically injured in the head. A puddle of blood collects on the floor. Only the grandmother is unhurt. It will be many minutes before the ambulance arrives. This was the last meal of the Wahba family.

In neighboring Rafah, taxi driver Mohammed Wahba is transporting a family of vacationers to the beach. He hears about the disaster on the radio. His cell phone rings and on the line is his brother Nidal, the father of the family that was hit. "Come quick to get me," the father shouts. The two brothers rush to the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, where they see the horror.

Before he became a cab driver, Mohammed worked for nine years at Tel Aviv University as the maintenance man for the Faculty of the Arts, and later for the Faculty of Law. He lived on Einstein Street in Ramat Aviv, and knew many professors by name. It's been 10 years now since he was permitted to enter his second city, Tel Aviv. Now he's here, having sat for 10 days in a row at the bedside of his toddler nephew, who is in grave condition in the intensive care unit at Dana Children's Hospital next to Ichilov.

Little Khaled is unconscious, paralyzed and on a respirator, wounded in the head by shrapnel from the missile. "I don't know who to blame. If it's the pilot, or whoever gave the order to attack. Who bears the responsibility?," he asks in his excellent Hebrew. The targeted assassination, which was aimed at a vehicle carrying members of the Popular Resistance Committees that was driving down the street, and fell instead right on the family in the middle of its lunch, he calls "an accident."

His brother Nidal, now a widower, calls all the time from Khan Yunis to ask how his unconscious son is doing. The Coordination and Liaison Office has already called to say the child will have to be brought back to Gaza, due to lack of funds to keep him hospitalized in Israel. The father and uncle are terribly worried about what that would mean. This week, Ibrahim Habib of Physicians for Human Rights tried to prevent the child from being returned to Gaza.

The Wahbas tried for years to have a child. They underwent fertility treatment in Gaza and finally, two and a half years ago, their daughter Farah was born. Khaled was born a year later. Nidal is a metallurgical engineer who studied in Germany and works as a supervisor in the professional schools in Gaza, and Fatma was a teacher. He is 40, she was 36. Their house is located under the "Welcome to Khan Yunis" sign at the northern entrance to the city, on the highway between Gaza and Rafah. Israeli tanks will probably be rolling down the road before long, but two weeks ago Wednesday, all was quiet in the city as the family sat down to a special lunch to celebrate the uncle's return from Saudi Arabia.

Mohammed was driving his cab through the streets of Rafah. Thirty-five years old, he was born in Rafah's Yavneh refugee camp and at the age of 14 came to Tel Aviv University, where he worked in the Student Association cafeteria. When he grew up, he became the maintenance man for the Faculty of the Arts. He lived in a rented room in the apartment of an elderly man named Yaakov Kleiner, on Einstein Street. He remembers the cigars favored by faculty dean Arnon Zuckerman and the times of the classes given by guest lecturers Haim Yavin (Thursday afternoon) and Rafik Halabi; he remembers student Zvika Hadar and theater professors David Zinder, Tom Levy and Hana Taragan. He especially enjoyed the international student film festival the department held every year. "It was so nice there," he says. He remembers the security people there, too, though not their names. And Livio Carmeli and his film archive.

From the Gilman Building, he remembers Prof. Israel Gershoni, and from the Faculty of Law, he remembers professors Eliezer Lederman, the late Menashe Shava, Kenneth Mann and Shlomo Shoham. All were very friendly to him. It was the best time of his life. In 1994, when entry to Israel was limited to married men with families, and he was still single, this nice period of his life came to an end. There was just one more time that he was able to enter Israel, and then he went directly to the Ramat Aviv campus. It was in 1997, right after his marriage, and he enjoyed a day full of memories. He hadn't been back since, until now, when he finds himself waiting by the door of the pediatric intensive care unit. Prof. Lederman has promised to come visit him.

It was the longest day of the year, June 21. At about 4:30 in the afternoon Mohammed Wahba was driving a family to the Rafah beach, not far from the ruins of Rafiah Yam, when a report came on the radio about another targeted assassination attempt. At first, the announcer said it was the "Barbawi family" that was hurt, and Mohammed was somewhat relieved. He didn't know them. But later, on his way back from the sea, the report was that a pregnant 36-year-old teacher named Fatma had been killed.

His heart skipped a beat. There was only one pregnant teacher named Fatma in Khan Yunis he thought - his sister-in-law. And then his brother Nidal called: "Did you listen to the news?" "No, I didn't hear it," he lied, to avoid scaring his brother. A brother-in-law who works at Nasser Hospital also called and confirmed Mohammed's worst fears. It was his brother's family that had been hurt by the missile. He picked up Nidal from the center of Rafah and together they drove to the hospital in Khan Yunis. Khaled was in critical condition, with extensive bleeding in the brain. Fatma and Dr. Ahmed were already dead. Farah was wounded in the back by shrapnel. Khaled was immediately taken to Shifa Hospital in Gaza, where surgeons operated on his head. The grandmother told them afterward that she'd tried to lift Khaled off the floor, and that's when she'd seen that her daughter and son had been killed.

The intervention of a family friend, an American who lived for years in the Shabura camp in Rafah and called from America, led to Khaled being transferred to the hospital in Tel Aviv. The Light to the Nations organization, an American foundation, promised to pay for the treatment. Not the IDF, not the air force, not the Defense Ministry.

On Sunday, three days after the event, Khaled was transferred to hospital in Israel, accompanied by his uncle Mohammed. This week his condition was described as close to hopeless and the family was told he'd have to be taken back to Gaza. The doctors told Mohammed that "the situation is out of our hands." A spokeswoman for Ichilov Hospital said his condition is critical as a result of the injury to his head. At the beginning of the week, the defense minister's adviser had not replied to the request from Physicians for Human Rights that Khaled not be returned to Gaza. The boy's uncle, Mohammed, is convinced that bringing the child back to Gaza will seal his fate.

The IDF Spokesman, this week: "The IDF attack on June 21 was directed against a terror cell that was on its way to perpetrate a terror attack. The attack was carried out shortly after two previous aerial assaults in which, for various reasons, uninvolved Palestinian civilians were hurt. In this assault, lessons learned from previous assaults were already implemented, as far as going to greater lengths to ensure that no civilians are within the risk area.

However, for reasons that are not yet entirely clear, one of the two missiles that were fired deviated from the target at which it was directed. The result of this deviation was a strike on a residential building located dozens of meters from the target, a building occupied by the Palestinian civilians who were harmed.

"It should be noted that the method used by the IDF in performing such missions has been proven over the years as accurate and cautious, and in the majority of cases enables the IDF to act against terror organizations and activists who deliberately take shelter among and act from within a civilian population, under the cover of a population that is not involved in its activities.

"It should be emphasized that in a situation in which it is clearly seen that there is a risk to the population that is located near the target, the planned assault is then canceled, even when it is clearly known that the object of the attack constitutes a serious threat. Unfortunately, in ongoing combat of this sort, accidents happen and innocent civilians are harmed. We regret this, yet the responsibility lies entirely with the terror organizations and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority which does nothing to stop them.

"When the investigation of the incident is completed, the findings will be presented to the chief of staff."

"They always said the helicopters were the smartest weapons. Suddenly, it's the dumbest weapon," says Mohammed, bleary-eyed. "It's happened to other families, too. I don't know when it will stop. If it keeps on like this, I don't know how it will end. Who can put a stop to it? Only the two peoples. They're the ones with the pain and the suffering. Not the governments or the leaders. Only the peoples can put an end to this business. The Israelis and the Palestinians. Olmert's son doesn't serve in the army and Haniyeh's son doesn't go around with a rifle opposing the occupation."

How does it feel to be back in Tel Aviv?

"It feels quiet and safe here. Not like in Gaza. There, you feel unsafe all the time. Don't forget I'm a cab driver. Maybe they'll attack the car in front of me or behind me? It's like how I heard it was for you during the time of all the terror attacks."

His brother Nidal is in a bad state. He lives on coffee and cigarettes and suffers attacks of fury and anxiety. "What happened, happened, and who's gone is gone, but what about this boy?" he said to his brother this week on the phone. Every half-hour Mohammed enters the intensive care room to check on his nephew's condition. Khaled lies there unconscious, stitches criss-crossing his tiny head and tubes sticking out of his mouth and body. Mohammed says Khaled has actually moved a little bit in the past couple of days.



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UN warns of Gazans' struggle to survive

Conal Urquhart in Gaza City
Monday July 10, 2006
The Guardian

- Israeli forces destroy water tanks and mains
- Operation will continue indefinitely, says Olmert

The population of the Gaza Strip is "struggling to survive" as a result of Israel's two-week assault, according to the UN, with water and electricity shortages and the breakdown of the sewerage system leading to the pumping of raw sewage into the sea.

"Daily life is a misery. Ordinary people are struggling. We are running around trying to put plasters on everything," said John Ging, the head of operations of the UN agency which looks after Palestinian refugees. "It's a dangerous and desperate situation and it's a myth that there is no humanitarian crisis."

He said in the north of Gaza Israeli forces had shot and destroyed rooftop water tanks and mains, while in the south more than 1,000 people had been forced to leave their homes. Rafah had no electricity because the army would not allow the UN to fix a minor fault, while the rest of Gaza had electricity for six hours a day.
Israeli forces began attacking Gaza after Palestinians captured Corporal Gilad Shalit in a raid on June 25. They have bombed a power station and roads, and killed more than 40 people, including civilians, in an attempt to secure his release and suppress rocket fire at Israel.

Yesterday Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, rejected criticism and said the operation would continue indefinitely. "We're talking about a war that will continue for a long time and it is complicated," he was quoted as saying during a cabinet meeting. "This is a war for which we cannot set down a timetable and we can't say how long it will continue."

An Israeli aircraft fired a missile at militants in Rafah yesterday but missed, killing a bystander and injuring four others.

Meanwhile, Ayman Hajaj buried his mother, brother and sister after they were killed by an Israeli missile that hit their garden as they drank tea outside on Saturday. Mr Hajaj, 28, said he had walked into the garden to see a flash of light and hear a deafening bang. He looked down and saw his mother and sister lying dead, then caught sight of his brother, whose arms were almost hanging off his body. "I was in a daze and my ears were ringing. I walked through the bodies for 10 metres before I realised what had happened. Four of my brothers were lying injured. I lifted one and carried him outside and an ambulance was already there."

Mr Hajaj's family live close to Karni crossing, where goods enter and leave Gaza. Israeli forces entered the area on Saturday and there has been sporadic fighting. Mr Hajaj said the family had stayed inside when it seemed dangerous but went to the walled garden at around 7.30pm to roast corn and drink tea. Witnesses believe that an Israeli unmanned aircraft fired the missile.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli army said the air force had fired a missile at a group of gunmen and it had hit them.



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Palestinian official says Gaza in humanitarian crisis

www.chinaview.cn 2006-07-11 17:43:47

RAMALLAH, July 11 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said on Tuesday that the Gaza Strip was in a humanitarian crisis against the backdrop of an ongoing massive Israeli offensive.

Terming the situation in Gaza as "a true humanitarian crisis", Erekat said, "We confirm to the world that there is a hard and complicated humanitarian crisis for 1.4 million Gazans who suffer sharp shortages of food, medicine and electricity."
The senior Palestinian official also urged international aid organizations to beef up their activities in Gaza.

"We have to work on all levels (to solve the crisis)," said Erekat, adding that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had flown to Jordan on late Monday for talks with Jordanian King Abdullah IIon Tuesday.

Abbas will urge Jordan to exercise its influence on Israel to end the military operation in Gaza, said Erekat.

"The president is making contacts with Arab and foreign countries in a bid to solve Gaza's plight in peaceful and diplomatic ways," he added.

Israel has shut down crossings on the Gaza borders as its forces pressed ahead a massive ground and air offensive in the Gaza Strip to free an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Palestinian militants and prevent Palestinian militants from firing rockets onto Israel.

Israeli airstrikes have damaged the only power plant in Gaza and key infrastructure including roads, bridges and main water and electricity supply lines.

Aid agencies have warned of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza if the Israeli offensive and sealing of Gaza continue.



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Israel 'terrorizing' entire Palestinian nation, say British Jews

July 7, 2006
IRNA

Some 300 prominent British Jews Friday condemned Israel for its brutal invasion of Gaza and urged the UK government to achieve an immediate ceasefire.

The Zionist regime is "using its enormously superior military might to terrorize an entire people," they said in a full-page petition published in the Times newspaper.

"Bombing power stations and cutting off fuel supplies deprives people of electricity, refrigeration, pumped drinking water and sewage disposal services. It holds hostage hospital patients on life support systems, or undergoing dialysis," the petition said.

The well-known British figures, describing themselves as Jews for Justice for Palestinians (Jfjfp), included playwright Harold Pinter, film director Mike Leigh, historian Professor Eric Hobsbawn, and actor Miriam Margoyles as well as a large number of academics.

They said that Israel was trying to present an isolated incident regarding the capture of a soldier, while ignoring their "regular snatching of Palestinians from their home."
There were "thousands" of Palestinians held without trial, including women and children.
Jfjfp spokesman Dan Judelson said the prominent Jews "simply do not see how Israel can defend attacking civilian targets such as water works and power supply."

"There are those in the community who say that Jews should not criticize Israel. But Israel is damaging itself through this kind of action," Judelson said.

He told the BBC that many people believed the attacks on Palestinian infrastructure "were less about liberating Cpl Shalit and more about seeking a pretext to over-throw Hamas."

Their petition criticized the response by the US and its allies in calling for restraint as "desperately inadequate."
It was a situation that requires "determined action by the international community," it warned.

"We watch with horror the collective punishment of the people of Gaza. Everything reasonable must be done to secure Corporal Gilad Shalit's safe release but nothing Israel is doing contributes to that aim," it warned.

The Jewish leaders called on the British public to write to their MPs to demand that the UK government breaks its silence and acts "to achieve an immediate ceasefire."
Their community leaders were also urged to write to the Israeli Embassy to "make them understand their actions are wrong, their explanations unconvincing."

Comment: As we noted in yesterday's editorial, "Zionist Israel, The True Enemy Of The Israeli People", the Zionist Israeli government is not acting on the will of the Israeli Jewish people, it is acting on its own agenda which is putting the lives of ordinary Jews in serious peril.

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Israel batters Gaza with airstrikes, death toll hits 52

Adel Zaanoun
AFP
July 11, 2006

GAZA CITY, Gaza -- Israel battered the Gaza Strip with fresh airstrikes on Tuesday as troops stood poised to launch more incursions in a deadly offensive that has killed more than 50 Palestinians in a week.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert defended the operation, aimed at securing the release of an abducted teenage soldier and halting rocket attacks, despite widespread international criticism that the assault has been disproportionate.

A Palestinian security officer was killed and six people were wounded in the latest Israeli airstrikes hitting northern Gaza, medical sources said, as the punishing aerial campaign moved into a third week since the soldier's capture.

The raids - which the Israeli military said targeted rockets and a "cell about to launch them" - came just one day after nine Palestinians died from Israeli fire around the impoverished and radicalized Gaza Strip.

The dead man was named as Ahmed Shahid. Medics said that he was struck by a missile fired toward a car. The army said that the attack targeted a vehicle used to reach a rocket-launch site and loaded with rockets in the Beit Hanun area.

The local head of Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Abu Ghazal, was in the targeted vehicle but managed to escape unharmed, said a spokesman for the group, an offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement.

A 12-year-old boy who was wounded in an airstrike on July 6 died of his wounds, bringing to 52 the number of Palestinians killed in the operation, on top of one Israeli soldier who was killed by friendly fire during clashes.

Despite the mounting death toll, defense sources said that the government had given the military authority to continue, and if necessary, intensify the offensive, with infantry and armor poised to carry out "in-depth" incursions.
Approval was granted during consultations late on Monday between Olmert and defense minister Amir Peretz.

Troops are still massed on the eastern and northern borders of the densely-populated Gaza Strip, as well as stationed east of Gaza City and in the south near a defunct airport.

Olmert was on Tuesday to confer again with military commanders to discuss the offensive, the largest operation since Israel pulled out of Gaza last September.

The prime minister has refused to negotiate with Hamas or free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 19-year-old Corporal Gilad Shalit, vowing that the assault will continue "in places, in time, in measures" at Israel's convenience.

Khaled Meshaal, the exiled political chief of Hamas, which formed a Palestinian government last March, insists that the captured soldier at the heart of the crisis will not be freed without a swap for prisoners jailed in Israel.

"I think that once the Qassam [rocket] shooting will be stopped and the terrorist actions against innocent civilians will be halted altogether, there will be no need for any Israeli action in Gaza," Olmert said.

Aid groups have expressed concern about the difficulties of providing assistance to 1.4 million people living in Gaza following months of financial crisis and the suspension of direct Western aid to the Hamas-led government.

The European Commission announced on Tuesday that it was sending emergency fuel supplies to Gaza through an international mechanism set up to meet basic Palestinian needs after the West cut direct aid to the Hamas-led government.

The fuel, the first aid to flow through the mechanism, was sent to public hospitals for use in generators after the Israeli air force last week destroyed electricity transformers at the only power plant in the territory.

Israel has said that its troops are likely to be in for the long haul, but denied that the offensive aimed to topple the Hamas-led government, boycotted by the West and whose offices have been directly targeted in the operation.

Hamas' armed wing claims to be holding the soldier, along with two other militant groups, the Popular Resistance Committees and the Army of Islam, since the conscript was abducted during an attack on an army post on June 25.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was due to arrive in the region on Tuesday for separate talks with Olmert and Abbas on a trip that he hopes will help calm tensions.

Comment: 52 Palestinians dead! Many of them civilians! Allegedly for ONE Israeli soldier??! Who will stop Israel from committing Genocide as the world sits and watches?!

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'Apartheid Israel' worse than apartheid SA

Mail and Guardian Online
10 July 2006

Johannesburg, South Africa - The "apartheid Israel state" is worse than the apartheid that was conducted in South Africa, Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) president Willie Madisha said on Monday.

He said Palestinians were being attacked with heavy machinery and tanks used in war, which had never happened in South Africa.

Cosatu and other organisations supporting Palestine have called on government to end diplomatic relations with Israel and establish boycotts and sanctions such as those against apartheid South Africa.
Israel has launched several attacks on Gaza, bombing its main university and firing missiles that have killed Palestinian bystanders.

This follows the capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinians.

"We see no justification for this attack," said Palestinian ambassador to South Africa Ali Hamileh.

He said while the whole world was talking about one Israeli soldier, more than 10 000 Palestinians were being kept in Israeli jails.

"My leadership made it clear ... the soldier can be released immediately if Israel responds to mediation. The demand for exchange of prisoners is justified by international law. We are not demanding something unacceptable," he said.

Professor of political science Virginia Tilley said South Africa was one of the only places where a vision had been brought forward to address collective punishment of perceived inferiority.

"I can't imagine a better beacon in that struggle than this country and it has stood back. If there is any moral authority in South Africa, it must come into play now," she said.

Madisha said Israel should be seen as an apartheid state and the same sanctions must be applied that were established against South Africa.



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Big Papers Spin Coverage Of Palestine

Znet
Patrick O Conner
5/7/2006

One element fueling the current crisis in Gaza is the ongoing failure of US corporate media coverage of Israel/Palestine. US policy, public opinion and mainstream media coverage of Israel/Palestine are all dangerously biased towards Israel. Media coverage both reflects and influences policy and public opinion. Media coverage of events in Gaza again illustrates how the US mainstream media privileges the Israeli narrative, and frequently ignores both Palestinian experiences and international law, providing the US public and policymakers with only part of the story.

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admitted that he intended to commit war crimes in Gaza, telling his cabinet that he wanted "no one to be able to sleep tonight in Gaza". Olmert thus officially acknowledged Israel's policy of collectively punishing 1.4 million Palestinians, a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. But none of the US' three leading newspapers - The New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times - reported Olmert's statement, even though it was widely quoted around the world.
In the last week, these three leading US papers all also published editorials strongly supporting Israel's right to "retaliate" after the capture of an Israeli soldier. Their editorials never mentioned a single element of Israel's brutal 10 month siege on Gaza. In a reminder of The Washington Post's editorial advocacy of the Iraq war, The Post took the most belligerent position, applauding Israeli "restraint" and approving an Israeli overthrow of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. Although the major newspapers have published some good articles reporting Palestinians' views in the last days, their overall bias towards Israel has been glaring.

On July 2 Ehud Olmert told his cabinet that, "I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza. I want them to know what it's like" in Israel's communities near Gaza that have been hit by Palestinian Qassam rockets. His statement referred directly to Israel's practices of waking Palestinians in the middle of the night by repeatedly flying jets overhead that create sonic booms, and of shelling Gaza at night. Additionally, Israel keeps Gazans awake at night with worry about poverty, siege, imminent attack, and lack of electricity, water, fuel and food. Olmert's statement was widely reported in the Israeli media, and by the Associated Press, The Chicago Tribune, The International Herald Tribune, and the UK's Guardian, among others. A google news search for his quote yields 279 articles, mostly from newspaper websites around the US. Some of these papers undoubtedly printed this story.

Yet there was no hint of Olmert's words in LA Times or Washington Post. The New York Times' coverage is more interesting. New York Times' correspondents Steven Erlanger and Ian Fisher reported the quote in an on-line article that was also published in the International Herald Tribune. However, the quote never appeared in the Times' print edition. The Times' editors seem to have decided that Olmert's words were not "fit to print," and deleted them from their journalists' report. The conspicuous absence of such a widely reported and telling quote raises the possibility that the leading US papers actively avoid printing information that makes Israel look too obviously bad.

What is certain is that the leading US papers generally omit the frameworks of human rights and international law as well as related concepts like collective punishment, and proportionality, all of which have been consistently violated by Israel. On July 3, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem specifically criticized Olmert's statement, saying that, "The use of sonic booms flagrantly breaches a number of provisions of international humanitarian law. The most significant provision is the prohibition on collective punishment. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention... categorically states that "Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited." In addition to criticizing sonic booms, Human Rights Watch noted on June 29 that "The laws of war prohibit attacks on "objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population." Israel's attack on Gaza's only power plant is in violation of its obligation to safeguard such objects from attack."

Though collective punishment of Palestinians has historically been a cornerstone of Israeli policy, and characterizes Israel's siege of Gaza, the US' three leading papers have used the phrase "collective punishment" just four times since heightened crisis began on June 25. Each paper cited the same statement by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas once, and The New York Times also quoted a Palestinian grocery store owner. These same newspapers printed the phrase "collective punishment" a combined total of only six other times this year in their reporting on Israel/Palestine. Since June 25 those papers used the words "terrorism" or "terrorist" 28 times to describe Palestinians, while using "occupation" only six times to describe Israeli actions. Citations of the illegality of Israeli settlements, the Wall, home demolitions, detention of Palestinians, and many other measures are similarly rare. While these newspapers do document the humanitarian crises that Palestinians endure, they generally avoid suggesting that Palestinians have rights like Israelis, or that there is an accepted body of law that should be applied not just to Palestinian attacks, but also to Israeli actions.

Similarly, in taking positions on the current crisis, these newspapers' editorial boards completely erased Israel's most recent human rights violations. All three papers blamed only Hamas. The New York Times June 29 editorial noted "reckless Hamas provocations," and The Washington Post's July 1 editorial "Hamas's War" highlighted Hamas' "acts of terrorism and war." Writing as if history began with the June 25 capture of the Israeli soldier and the Palestinian attack materialized from thin air, none of their editorials even hints at Israel's disproportionate violence - Israel's 39 year military occupation; the 176 Palestinians killed in 2006, many of them civilians and children, compared to 16 Israelis killed; 8300 Israeli shells launched into Gaza this year compared with 840 Palestinian rockets launched towards Israel; on-going Israeli land seizure; or Israel's tightening siege of Gaza. Only The New York Times mentioned that Hamas was now breaking a unilateral 16 month truce. Israeli newspaper editorials have been more nuanced and balanced than these US editorials.

None of the editorials noted that Palestinians killed and captured Israeli soldiers implementing a siege of Gaza. None noted the irony that Palestinians were holding a single Israeli soldier prisoner, while Israel is holding 9,000 Palestinian prisoners, many civilians held without due process, and some enduring torture. In a sentence that could have been drafted by an Israeli government PR firm, The Post's editors wrote that "the militants' demand that Israel release Palestinian prisoners it has legally arrested in exchange for a soldier who was attacked while guarding Israeli territory."

After rationalizing Israel's arrest of 60 Hamas leaders, many of them Palestinian Authority Ministers and elected members of the Palestinian parliament, The Post's editors then downplayed Israel's destruction of an electric plant that provides half of Gaza's power. In a final outrage that combined both blindness towards Israeli violence and complete disregard for international law, The Post's July 1 editorial recommended that the Arab States and the UN stop "fulminating about supposed Israeli war crimes."

Once again, Israeli government spin overpowers the Palestinian narrative, and human rights and international law are belittled. These examples illustrate how the US corporate media is actively shaping the information reported to the US public to Israel's advantage, and promoting the view that Hamas and Palestinian terrorism are the sole problem in Israel/Palestine. Without more balanced reporting from establishment media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, US policy and public opinion on Israel/Palestine are also unlikely to become much more balanced. The need for media activism on Israel/Palestine is more vital than ever.



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Israeli PM orders intensified Gaza offensive

www.chinaview.cn 2006-07-11 17:39:11

JERUSALEM, July 11 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has decided to continue and if necessary intensify the army offensive in the Gaza Strip, local newspaper Ha'aretz reported Tuesday.

The report said that Olmert made the decision late Monday after consultations with Defense Minister Amir Peretz and senior armyand intelligence officials.
On early Tuesday, the Israel Air Force targeted a group of Palestinian militants near the Karni crossing between Israel and northern Gaza, seriously wounding two militants in farmland close to the town of Beit Hanun.

Meanwhile, Israeli warplane fired a missile at a bridge near Beit Hanun in a bid to prevent Palestinian militants from transporting rockets into areas where they are launched at Israel.

Over 50 Palestinians including civilians have been killed since the start of the offensive on June 28 in a bid to free an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Palestinian militants and halt Palestinian rocket attacks.



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Olmert shrugs off criticism

www.chinaview.cn 2006-07-11 14:43:33

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been defending his country's offensive in Gaza, amid international complaints of excessive force. The Jewish state continued its military actions in the Gaza strip for the thirteenth day on Monday.

Omert said Israel has no policy of trying to topple the Hamas-led Palestinian government despite its arrest of dozens of Hamas officials and its latest military offensive.

But, he said whoever is involved in inflicting terror on the Israeli people would have to pay for it.
He also rejected international criticism, especially from the European Union, of Israel's offensive in Gaza.

Ehud Olmert said: "I don't know any democratic government in the world- one, one-those who support us and those who preach to us, that would have sat and done nothing when a thousand missiles are shot at their innocent civilians in the heart of the country."

Israeli forces launched their offensive after Palestinian gunmen abducted Corporal Gilad Shalit in a raid into Israel on June 25.

Israel has rejected calls for a prisoners swap for the release of the captured soldier.

On Sunday, Olmert also rebuffed the possibility of a truce raised by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

A Fatah official said the military attacks undermine efforts to end the standoff peacefully, and civilians are paying the price.

Saeb Erekat, Fatah Official & Chief Negotiator said: "Gaza is without food, without fuel, without water, without electricity-Gaza is going down the drain with 1.3 million people towards a human catastrophe that may include the spread of diseases."

The latest violence in the Gaza Strip has so far killed about 50 people, including 20 Palestinian civilians.



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Olmert Defends Israel's Position - Rejects Mounting Criticism

by Yechiel Spira
Arutz Sheva
July 11, 2006

Speaking to members of the foreign press on Monday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came out strongly in defense of Israel's ongoing counter-terrorism offensive in Gaza.

The prime minister rejected mounting criticism from the European Union and the United Nations, stating Israel has a right and an obligation to defend her citizens against unprovoked attacks.

Speaking in English, the prime minister made his position very clear regarding Operation Summer Rains, stating, "I will stop when I will feel that I can provide security for the people of Israel."
Referring to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) administration, Olmert added, "This is the first time in modern history that there is a whole government that is a terrorist government."

The prime minister made it very clear - Israel will not negotiate with the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) administration. Olmert's position enjoys the support of his cabinet, rejecting critics who are demanding he enter into talks towards obtaining the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit. Olmert explained to his ministers at the Sunday morning weekly cabinet meeting that entering into talks with Hamas will only serve to encourage additional kidnappings in the future. He announced that the ongoing military operation will stop after Shalit is released, without precondition, and after the Kassam rocket fire into southern Israel is halted, rejecting any attempt to justify the unprovoked attacks against Israeli population centers.

Regarding strong anti-Israel statements released by the European Union (EU), the prime minister questioned how one can measure fear and trepidation, anxiety and panic, referring to Sderot and area residents who live with the constant fear of rocket attacks.

"When was the last time that the European community condemned this shooting, the rockets, and suggested effective measures to stop it?" he questioned, also rejecting United Nations accusations that Israel is trampling the human rights of Palestinian Authority (PA) residents.

Senior IDF officials stated earlier in the week that Gazan-based terrorists are intentionally operating from within civilian areas, well-aware Israeli retaliatory actions will result in civilian casualties.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz earlier in the week stated Israel's military operation is a moral one; one that followed Israel's exhausting all other possibilities to bring an end to rocket attacks. Peretz too rejected accusations of human rights violations, declaring the IDF operates on a standard of morality that is unique, one that is higher than other armies of the world.

Olmert continues to release statements that his administration will not negotiate with terrorists, calling on Hamas leaders in Syria to order the immediate and unconditional release of the captive soldier, and the halt of rocket attacks or face the consequences.

In northern Gaza, the IDF operation continues, with daily air force strikes against terror cells and infrastructure, as efforts continue to create a buffer zone in the area, seeking to place southern Israeli communities out of range of the Kassam rockets.

Further complicating the operation are new improved rockets, with a range of over 10 kilometers (6 miles), with terrorists already succeeding in striking targets as far north as Ashkelon.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt-General Dan Halutz and other members of the General Staff have already announced the operation is open-ended, and it will continue until the objectives are achieved.

Efforts to elicit UN Security Council condemnations against Israel have been foiled, as the US has indicated any such resolution would be vetoed. The UN Human Rights Organization however was less sympathetic, condemning Israel's ongoing counter-terror operation.

In the meantime, there is no new information regarding Shalit, who has been in terrorist captivity since June 25. He was taken hostage during the Kerem Shalom terror attack which claimed the lives of an officer and a soldier. Reports state that Shalit, who was wounded during the terror attack, has received medical treatment. Hamas and other terror organizations involved announced there would be no further statements on the soldier's condition until such time Israel agrees to enter into negotiations towards a prisoner release deal.



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Israeli soldier a PoW: Hamas leader

Last Updated Mon, 10 Jul 2006 08:41:14 EDT
CBC News

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert repeated his refusal to negotiate for the release of an abducted soldier, who the leader of Hamas said Monday would be kept alive as a prisoner of war.
Olmert repeated his stance on Monday while speaking to foreign reporters for the first time since Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Hamas-led militants on June 25.

"To negotiate with Hamas today, to surrender to their demands and to trade off prisoners with Cpl. Shalit means that you don't need more moderate guys like Abou Mazen [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] who is opposed to terror, because at the end of the day the upper hand will always be that of the terrorists and the killers and those who support violence," said Olmert.

At a press conference in Damascus, Syria, on Monday, Hamas' exiled leader Khaled Mashaal said Shalit would be kept alive and treated as a prisoner of war until Palestinian prisoners currently detained in Israel were freed.

"The solution is simple: swap," Mashaal said. "But Israel rejects this. The mediators in Europe know this, but they are incapable. Israel thinks it will bring the soldier back by escalation, but it is [deluded]."

Abbas, who has condemned the abduction, had sent envoys to meet with Mashaal on the weekend to try to come up with a solution to the crisis.

While the public declarations continued, Israeli air strikes killed four militants and at least three civilians on Monday. The Israeli army said most of the air strikes were aimed at rocket launchers in northern Gaza.

'Absolutely determined'

Olmert said Israel is not interested in toppling the Palestinian government and still plans to withdraw from most of the West Bank by 2010.

"I haven't changed my basic commitment to the realignment plan," he said. "I am absolutely determined to carry out the separation from the Palestinians and establish secure borders."

Since the abduction, Israel has arrested Hamas cabinet ministers and threatened to assassinate top officials.

More than 60 Palestinians have been killed since an Israeli air and ground offensive was launched in response to the abduction.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said in statements made Friday and Saturday that Israel should stop its military operations in Gaza for humanitarian reasons, pointing to air strikes that affected Palestinian hospitals, as well as water and sanitation plants.

Olmert maintained Monday that 70 per cent of people in Gaza still have power and that a power station had been targeted to prevent Shalit's abductors from moving him through the crossing out of Gaza.



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A Thankyou To All Starbucks Customers

Written by Howard Schultz
Tuesday, 11 July 2006

Dear Starbucks Customer,

First and foremost I want to thank you for making Starbucks the $6.4 billion global company it is today, with more than 90,000 employees, 9,700 stores, and 33 million weekly customers. Every latte and macchiato you drink at Starbucks is a contribution to the close alliance between the United States and Israel, in fact it is - as I was assured when being honoured with the "Israel 50th Anniversary Friend of Zion Tribute Award" - key to Israel's long-term PR success. Your daily chocolate chips frappucino helps paying for student projects in North America and Israel, presenting them with the badly needed Israeli perspective of the Intifada.
Starbucks, through the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah, an international network of Jewish education centres, sponsors Israeli military arms fairs in an effort to strengthen the special connection between the American, European and Israeli defense industries and to showcase the newest Israeli innovations in defense. As my contribution to the fight against the global rise of anti-Semitism, the reason behind the current conflict in the Middle-East, I help Aish HaTorah sponsoring the website "honestreporting.com" and produce material informing of Israel's side of the story.

Without you, my valued customer, I wouldn't be able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars each year to support Israeli citizens from terrorist attacks and keep reminding every Jew in America, to defend Israel at any cost. $5 billion per year from the US government are no way near enough to pay for all the weaponry, bulldozers and security fences needed to protect innocent Israeli citizens from anti-Semitic Muslim terrorism. Corporate sponsorships are essential.

Having the bigger picture in mind, Starbucks have donated a store to the US army to help in the "War on Terror". I cannot emphasise enough, how vital the "War on Terror" is for the continued viability and prospering of the Jewish State.

So next time you feel like chilling out at a Starbucks store, please remember that with every cup you drink at Starbucks you are helping with a noble cause.

Howard Schultz
Chairman & Chief Global Strategist
Starbucks Coffee Stores



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US Stormtroopers in Action


Documents proving alleged Iraqi rape-murder victim was 14, not 20 as the military says

By Alastair Macdonald
Reuters UK
Sun Jul 9, 2006

BAGHDAD - Five U.S. soldiers were charged in a rape and multiple murder case that has outraged Iraqis, as documents obtained by Reuters on Sunday showed the rape victim was a minor aged just 14, and not over 20 as U.S. officials say.
Days after former private Steven Green was charged as a civilian in a U.S. court with rape and four murders, four serving soldiers were charged with the same offences, the U.S. military said in statement that did not name the troops.

Another soldier, apparently a sixth member of Green's former unit in the 502nd Infantry Regiment, was charged on Saturday with dereliction of duty for not reporting the crime in March.

All five were charged with conspiring with Green, who is accused by U.S. prosecutors of going with three others to a house near the checkpoint they were manning outside Mahmudiya, near Baghdad, and of killing a couple and their two daughters.

Those court documents gave the raped daughter's estimated age as 25, though U.S. military officials in Iraq say their documents have her as 20.

Her identity card and a copy of her death certificate, however, show she was just 14.

Local officials and relatives had said she was 15 or 16.

Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi was born on August 19, 1991 in Baghdad, according to the identity card, provided to Reuters by a relative. Issued in 1993, it features a photograph of her at 18 months, wide-eyed and with a lick of dark hair over her brow.

A copy of her death certificate, dated March 13, gives the same birth date. She was found at home by a relative on March 12 and had died from "gunshot wounds to the head, with burns", that document, signed by doctor Wael Habib and a registrar, asserts.

With five Americans now facing the death penalty in the case, the fact the rape victim was a minor could be a factor in sentencing in the event of any convictions. Abeer's sister Hadeel was just six when she died of "several gunshot wounds".

The killers tried to burn the bodies and house to cover their tracks, relatives and local officials have said.

GOVERNMENT ANGER

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, balancing a dependence on U.S. firepower with a need to show Iraqis he is in charge, has voiced frustration with a mounting number of cases against Americans and wants a review of their immunity from Iraqi law.

Since revelations in March of a U.S. probe into whether Marines killed 24 people at Haditha, Mahmudiya is the fifth case of serious crime being investigated by the military. In all, 16 troops have been charged with murder in the past month or so -- as many as in the previous three years of the war.

Officers say generals are cracking down to try to curb harm to civilians that have turned Iraqis against the troops. One said a report submitted on Friday to the top general in Iraq should see action against Marine commanders who failed to act on evidence troops may have killed civilians at Haditha on November 19.

Green, 21, has since been discharged from the army due to a "personality disorder". The case came to light during stress counselling for a soldier last month following the kidnap and killing of two other men from the same unit near Mahmudiya.

A soldier cited in U.S. court documents as the first witness told investigators that Green and three others drank alcohol and discussed rape. They then told the soldier to keep watch on the radio as they set off for the house, some in civilian clothes.

Two soldiers who said they went to the house accused Green of killing the parents and child before he and the other soldier in the home raped the woman. Green then shot her too, they said.

A sixth unidentified soldier is mentioned in court papers as discussing the case later with the first witness at their base.

The military said: "The five soldiers were charged in connection with their alleged participation in the rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman and three members of her family.

"The fifth soldier was charged with dereliction of duty for his failure to report the rape and murder ... but is not alleged to have been a direct participant in the rape and killings."



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All Iraq is Abu Ghraib

By Haifa Zangana
07/06/06 "The Guardian"

A'beer Qassim al-Janaby, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, was with her family in Mahmudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, when US troops raided the house. A group of soldiers have been charged with her rape and the murder of her father, mother, and nine-year-old sister. They are also accused of setting A'beer's body on fire.

The al-Janaby family lived near a US checkpoint, and the killings happened at 2pm on March 11. As usual, a US spokesman ascribed the killings to "Sunni Arab insurgents active in the area", contrary to local eyewitnesses.

A'beer's rape and murder is neither incidental nor the product of a US soldier's "personality disorder": it is part of a pattern that includes Abu Ghraib, as well as the Haditha, Ishaqi and Qaiem massacres. And we see this pattern as serving a strategic function beyond indiscriminate revenge: to couple collective humiliation with intimidation and terror.
Today, four years into the Anglo-American occupation, the whole of Iraq has become Abu Ghraib, with our streets as prison corridors and homes as cells. Iraqis are attacked in detention, on the streets and in their homes.

It took almost a year, and published photographs of horrific torture in Abu Ghraib, before the world began to heed the voices of the detainees and those trying to defend them. The same is happening to women victims.

Abuses, torture and the rape of Iraqi women have been reported for three years now by independent Iraqi organisations. But the racist logic of occupation means that occupied people are not to be trusted, and truth is the private ownership of the occupiers.

Families of the abused, raped, and killed Iraqi civilians have to wait for months, if not years, until a US soldier comes forward to admit responsibility and the US military begins an investigation. (For the US military to investigate a US soldier's crime has been seen by Iraqis as the killers investigating their own technical skills.)

On the October 19 2005, Freedom Voice, an Iraqi Human Rights society, reported the rape of three women from the "Saad Bin Abi Waqqas neighbourhood" in Tell Afar after a US raid.

The alleged rape took place by soldiers inside the women's own house after the arrest of their male relatives. Medical sources in the town said one of the women died. A US commander ordered some soldiers detained, and no more was heard of this.

Immunity from prosecution under Iraqi or international law is the main fact of the occupation and renders laughable any claims of sovereignty. It is based on UN security council resolution 1546 and the accompanying exchange of letters between Iraqi and American authorities. This immunity applies equally to the marine units accused of roaming our streets high on drugs and to advisers running ministries, to prison guards, security guards, multinational forces and corporate contractors of all kinds.

The Iraqi women's ordeal began the moment occupation forces descended upon them. Most arrests and raids take place after midnight. In some neighborhoods, women now sleep fully dressed so as not to be caught in their nightgowns. Armoured cars and helicopters are sometimes deployed in raids, in a variant on "shock and awe". Troops force women and children to watch as they deliberately humiliate their husbands, sons or fathers, and sometimes order them to take pictures with US soldiers' cameras. Money and jewellery are taken. Are these "terrorist assets confiscated" or spoils of war?

Random arrests, rapes and killings by the occupation forces continue under the so-called "national unity government", which renewed their mandate and immunity while at the same time talking of a "national reconciliation initiative".

Despite all the rhetoric, a female minister for human rights and dozens of US-funded Iraqi women's organisations, the only outcry we have heard condemning the rape of A' beer and the plight of Iraqi women under occupation is from the anti-occupation Islamist movement.

Occupation authorities and their puppet regime share the denial of violence against women. After the sexual abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, the authorities talked about respecting local traditions, and the need to avoid provoking anger and give the Iraqi people the sense that the occupation recognises the sensitive status of women.

On occasion, Iraqi collaborators joined in. On April 18 2004, the ministry of interior chief, Ahmed Youssef, issued a statement denying maltreatment of female detainees. He said: "We are Muslims. We know very well how to treat our female detainees." As if violence against women were not a universal crime.

The abuses continue also in the puppet regime's prisons. On October 20 2005, officials of the Kazemiya women's prison reported an instance of rape. The UN was refused permission to investigate. According to a report of the UN assistance mission to Iraq, Iraqi police tortured a woman who had been detained in Diwaniya police station since March 2005. The victim recounted that electric shocks were applied to her heels. She was reportedly told her teenage daughter would be raped if she did not supply the information her interrogators wanted.

A report published by the Iraqi National Association for Human Rights on October 29 2005 found that women held in interior ministry detention centres are subject to numerous human rights violations, including "systematic rape by the investigators and ... other forms of bodily harm in order to coerce them into making confessions". The report added that prisons fail to meet even the most basic standards of hygiene, and that the women were deprived of facilities as fundamental as toilets. The ministry of justice has confirmed the accuracy of the report.

The wall of denial is cracking. On June 12, al-Jazeera showed footage of Mohammed al-Diaeny, a member of parliament, going to a prison in Baquba, near Baghdad, where men showed evidence of torture and talked of being raped. Seven women detainees were shown but refused to talk. "Too ashamed", whispered one of them. In response, Jawad al-Bolani, minister of the interior, promised investigation. He later vowed to release all women prisoners and negotiate with the multinational forces to release theirs.

There will be no end to these violations as long as Iraq remains occupied by forces that enjoy immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law and as long as the occupation authorities continue to treat Iraqi citizens with racist contempt in order to feel better about plundering the nation's wealth and depriving its people of their most fundamental rights under international law and human rights conventions.

The Iraqi puppet regime's promises and US investigations of the "personality disorders" of their soldiers and the "few bad apples" are irrelevant for Iraqis: for them, the Anglo-American occupation means destruction, rape and pillage.

Haifa Zangana is a novelist and former prisoner of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime.



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Canadian teen abused at Guantanamo Bay: report

Last Updated Mon, 10 Jul 2006 20:20:36 EDT
The Canadian Press

A new report describes Canadian teen Omar Khadr being carried into Guantanamo Bay interrogations on a stretcher, dangling from a door frame for hours and used as a human floor mop to clean his own urine.

The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York released the first major overview Monday of alleged abuses and torture at the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects, including rape, sexual harassment and vicious beatings.
Muneer Ahmad, one of Khadr's lawyers, has already publicly outlined in some detail claims of abuse from the 19-year-old, who faces life in prison on a charge of murdering a U.S. medic in Afghanistan in July 2002.

"It has a different effect when you see it in the context of broad and pervasive conduct at Guantanamo," Ahmad said Monday.

"The cumulative impact of the reports of abuse of so many of the detainees is quite shocking and it should be. It shows again why Guantanamo is beyond repair. There's no way to fix it."

American officials have always denied they torture prisoners at the U.S. naval base in southeastern Cuba.

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that U.S. President George W. Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military tribunals at Guantanamo for war crimes.

Only 10 prisoners, including Khadr, have been charged and faced pre-trial hearings as enemy combatants.

Bush wants Congress to give him the authority to go forward with the tribunals. But legal experts say they'd have to be completely revised to comply with the rule of law and Geneva Conventions. The issue is sharply dividing Capitol Hill, where legislators will continue to grapple with it this summer.

"Before Congress rushes to give the president cover with unnecessary new legislation, I hope it will review the record and provide real oversight, beginning with an independent investigation of the base," said Bill Goodman, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

"This report tells a story of abuse and betrayal of our laws at the highest levels of government, which is why the Supreme Court had to step in and order the president to treat detainees humanely and provide due process."

U.S. officials have said many prisoners will be sent back to their home countries while others like Khadr appear headed for some kind of trial at some point.

Canada hasn't moved to seek Khadr's extradition and has been silent amid world condemnation of the prison camp.

"We are not going to move them into places on American soil and to the civil justice system," White House spokesman Tony Snow said Monday.

"What we do not want is what amounts to a catch-and-release program for terrorists."

Based on declassified accounts

The 51-page report is based on declassified accounts from some of the 450 prisoners and their American lawyers.

It says Khadr, who was 15 and seriously wounded when he was picked up by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, was often interrogated with a bag over his head and barking dogs in the room.

When he was able to walk, interrogators made him pick up trash, then emptied the bag and made him do it again. He wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom for long periods.

Khadr claims that an interrogator told him on one occasion in March 2003 that one of his older brothers was at Guantanamo and that he should get ready for a "miserable life."

The interrogator became enraged when Khadr said he would answer questions if he could see his brother, the report said.

Khadr was cuffed to the floor for a long period and then dragged back and forth in a mixture of his urine and pine oil. He wasn't given a change of clothes for two days.

Other examples of abuse at Guantanamo detailed in the report:

* Solitary confinement for periods exceeding a year.
* Sleep deprivation for days, weeks and, in at least one case, months.
* Threats of transfer to a foreign country for torture.
* Deprivation of medical treatment for serious conditions.

Several prisoners reported assailants stomped on their backs or shoved their heads into hard surfaces while they were incapacitated. Others said objects were inserted into their anuses during strip searches.

"This is a facility at which there is extreme care taken to try not only to bring them to justice, but also to treat them humanely," Snow told a briefing.

"Many of you have been down there. You see the extraordinary measures that are taken not only to deal with their physical needs, but also their spiritual needs.



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Group Claims 3 GIs Killed Over Rape-Murders

By ROBERT H. REID
Associated Press
July 10, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq - An al-Qaida-linked group claims it killed three U.S. soldiers last month and mutilated two of their bodies to avenge the rape-slaying of a young Iraqi woman by troops of the same unit, an institute which monitors extremists Web sites said Tuesday.

The Mujahedeen Shura Council made the claim in a 4:39 minute video posted on the Internet which included the mutilated bodies of two of the soldiers attacked June 16 near Youssifiyah southwest of Baghdad, according to a statement by the SITE Institute. Their remains were found three days later.

The institute released still pictures from the video showing two of the American dead, one of whom had been decapitated.
According to the institute, the statement by the insurgent group said the video was released as "revenge for our sister who was dishonored by a soldier of the same brigade."

Two sergeants are among five American soldiers charged in the March 12 alleged rape-murder and the killing her parents and a younger sister. The U.S. military released the identities of the suspects Monday.

A previously discharged soldier had been arrested in the case last month and charged with rape and murder.

According to the SITE Institute, the statement by the insurgents said that as soon as fighters heard of the rape-slaying, "they kept their anger to themselves and didn't spread the news."

"They decided to take revenge for their sister's honor," the statement said. "With Allah's help, they captured two soldiers of the same brigade as this dirty crusader."

The Mujahedeen Shura Council is an umbrella organization of several Islamic extremist groups, including al-Qaida in Iraq. It claimed responsibility for shooting down a U.S. Apache helicopter in the Youssifiyah area in April.

U.S. investigators had said there was no evidence linking the deaths of the three soldiers last month to the alleged rape-slaying.

Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, Spc. James P. Barker, Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard are accused of rape and murder and several other charges as alleged participants. They could face the death penalty if convicted.

A fifth, Sgt. Anthony W. Yribe, is charged with failing to report the attack but is not alleged to have been a direct participant.

The five will face an Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury proceeding, to determine if they should stand trial.

They are charged with conspiring with former soldier Steven D. Green, who was arrested in the case last month in North Carolina. Green has pleaded not guilty to one count of rape and four counts of murder and is being held without bond.

The U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, declined to comment further on details about the attack, saying the investigation continues.

"But they obviously had enough information in the initial investigation to go ahead and charge those four soldiers all with alleged rape, rape, obstruction of justice, housebreaking, arson and the other offenses," he told reporters in Baghdad.

Spielman, of Chambersburg, Pa., is a 2002 graduate of Chambersburg Area Senior High School.

His mother, Nancy Hess, told WGAL-TV in Lancaster, Pa., on Monday: "I don't believe the charges and I'm still proud of him." She said her son always wanted to be a soldier.

According to an FBI affidavit filed in Green's case, he and at least two others targeted the young woman and her family for a week before the attack, which was not revealed until witnesses came forward in late June.

The soldiers drank alcohol, abandoned their checkpoint, changed clothes to avoid detection and headed to the victims' house, about 200 meters (yards) from a U.S. checkpoint in the "Triangle of Death," a Sunni Arab area south of Baghdad known for its violence, the affidavit said.

The affidavit estimated the rape victim was about 25. But a doctor at the Mahmoudiya hospital gave her age as 14. He refused to be identified for fear of reprisals.

Green is accused of raping the woman and killing her and the three other family members, including a girl estimated to be 5 years old. An official familiar with the investigation told The Associated Press that Green set fire to the rape victim's body in an apparent cover-up attempt.

Iraqi authorities identified the rape victim as Abeer Qassim Hamza. The other victims were her father, Qassim Hamza; her mother, Fikhriya Taha; and her sister, Hadeel Qassim Hamza.

The March 12 attack was among the worst in a series of cases of U.S. troops accused of killing and abusing Iraqi civilians.

U.S. officials are concerned the case will strain relations with Iraq's new government and increase calls for changes in an agreement that exempts American soldiers from prosecution in Iraqi courts.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has demanded an independent investigation into the case, which comes after a series of allegations that U.S. troops killed and mistreated Iraqi civilians.



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Baghdad to get 11 hours of power by end summer: US general

AFP
Mon July 10, 2006

BAGHDAD - Electricity supplies in the Iraqi capital should reach 11 hours a day, almost double the current amount, by the end of this summer, a US military official involved in reconstruction said.

"We think we can get Baghdad to about 11 hours of reliable power a day by the end of summer," said Major General William McCoy of the Army Corps of Engineers, involved in Iraq's reconstruction.

According to him, Baghdad currently receives six to eight hours of power a day, though residents of some neighborhoods insist the amount is much less.
The shortage of electricity supplies, especially in the blistering heat of Iraq's summer, has remained a major complaint of Baghdad residents since the April 2003 fall of the old regime.

During the time of Saddam Hussein, Baghdad had between 18 and 24 hours of reliable power a day, admitted McCoy, adding this came at the expense of the rest of the country which only had a few hours a day.

The ratio has since been reversed, with the provinces on average now receiving 12 to 14 hours of power, said McCoy.

More than four billion dollars have been spent by the United States to restore Iraq's ageing power insfrastructure, but sabotage, disrepair, some waste and mismanagement have slowed down results.

Comment: Don't forget the effect that America's bombs had on the electrical infrastructure.


In the next couple of months, said McCoy, the plan for Baghdad is to refurbish several power substations, implement a number of distribution projects and install some new turbines in plants.

An automated control system to direct the flow of power and deal with power cuts will be in place by March 2007 and in partial operation by this autumn.

Electricity has been a sensitive subject since the US-led invasion and for many in Baghdad one of the most glaring indications of the failure of reconstruction efforts.

Comment: How many times has the Bush administration claimed that the situation in Iraq - including the supply of electricity - wasn't as bad as many were claiming? Now, all of a sudden, the mainstream media is quoting a US general who says that Bush was basically dead wrong...

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Iraq says to ask U.N. to end US immunity

By Mariam Karouny
Mon Jul 10, 2006 5:07pm ET172

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq will ask the United Nations to end immunity from local law for U.S. troops, the government said on Monday, as the U.S. military named five soldiers charged in a rape-murder case that has outraged Iraqis.

In an interview a week after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki demanded a review of foreign troops' immunity, Human Rights Minister Wigdan Michael said work on it was now under way and a request could be ready by next month to go to the U.N. Security Council, under whose mandate U.S.-led forces operate in Iraq.
"We're very serious about this," she said, adding a lack of enforcement of U.S. military law in the past had encouraged soldiers to commit crimes against Iraqi civilians.

"We formed a committee last week to prepare reports and put it before the cabinet in three weeks. After that, Maliki will present it to the Security Council. We will ask them to lift the immunity," Michael said.

"If we don't get that, then we'll ask for an effective role in the investigations that are going on. The Iraqi government must have a role."

Analysts say it is improbable the United States would ever make its troops answerable to Iraq's chaotic judicial system.

Asked to respond to Michael's remarks, White House spokesman Tony Snow dismissed that as a "hypothetical game".

But Snow said: "We also understand Prime Minister Maliki's concerns and we want to make sure he's fully informed and also that he is satisfied, regardless of what the treaty situation may be on these issues, that justice truly is being done, and that he can make that demonstration to his people as well."

IMMUNITY DECREE

The day before handing formal sovereignty back to Iraqis in June 2004, the U.S. occupation authority issued a decree giving its troops immunity from Iraqi law. That remains in force and is confirmed by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546 on Iraq.

Many Iraqis have complained for the past three years about hundreds of civilians killed by U.S. troops and abuses such as those highlighted in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal of 2004.

But a handful of new U.S. investigations into incidents, including the killing of 24 people at Haditha and the quadruple murder and rape case at Mahmudiya, have caused an outcry that prompted the newly formed national unity government to speak out.

Michael said commanders' failure to hold soldiers to account had fostered a climate of impunity: "One of the reasons for this is the U.N. resolution, which gives the multinational force soldiers immunity. Without punishment, you get violations."

U.S. commanders say troops are not immune from justice and must answer to U.S. military law. But officials concede a flurry of cases reflect a crackdown aimed at restoring credibility with Iraqis. Sixteen troops were charged with murder in Iraq in recent weeks, as many as in the previous three years.

Four soldiers were charged on Saturday with rape and murder in the Mahmudiya case, dating from March. A military official named them on Monday as Privates First Class Jesse Spielman and Bryan Howard, Sergeant James Barker and Specialist Paul Cortez.

All are accused of conspiring with Steven Green, then a private in the 502nd Infantry Regiment, who was charged as a civilian with rape and murder in a U.S. court last week.

Prosecutors say four soldiers went to the home after drinking, intending to rape 14-year-old Abeer al-Janabi and left a fifth manning their nearby checkpoint. They say Green shot Janabi's parents and 6-year-old sister, before he and one other raped the teenager and Green also then shot her dead.

Sergeant Anthony Yribe was charged with dereliction of duty for failing to report what he knew of the case.

U.S. official documents say Janabi was raped.

U.S. officials have said Janabi was aged 20 or 25. But documents obtained by Reuters put her age at 14.



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Civil War


Illegal immigration bills passed in Colo.

By STEVEN K. PAULSON and JON SARCHE
Associated Press
Tue Jul 11, 2006

DENVER - State lawmakers approved a measure late Monday that would force a million people receiving state or federal aid to verify their citizenship, part of a package of bills dealing with illegal immigration that Democrats called the toughest in the nation.

The measure would deny most non-emergency state benefits to illegal immigrants 18 years old and older - forcing people to prove legal residency when applying for benefits or renewing their eligibility. The measure passed the state Senate 22-13 and the House 48-15. Both are controlled by Democrats.
"At the end of the day, everybody who serves in this building as senators or representatives knows we're making Colorado history," said the bill's sponsor, Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald. "We want to be able to look in the mirror and say we did legislation that is tough, enforceable and humane."

Republicans said the bill didn't go far enough, and left glaring loopholes, including allowing benefits for minors and denying voters the chance to have a direct say on the issue.

The bill would apply to Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, energy assistance programs and aging and adult services. Republican Gov. Bill Owens said an estimated 50,000 illegal immigrants could be thrown out of those programs.

"It simply puts teeth into existing federal regulations," Owens said.

Sen. Dan Grossman was one of the four Democrats to vote against the measure.

"I don't think the poor people of the state of Colorado or businesses of the state of Colorado should have to pay because we want to play politics with immigration," Grossman said.



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Judge: FBI Raid on Lawmaker's Office Legal

By TONI LOCY
Associated Press
July 10, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A federal judge on Monday upheld the FBI's unprecedented raid of a congressional office, saying that barring searches of lawmakers' offices would turn Capitol Hill into "a taxpayer-subsidized sanctuary for crime."

Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan rejected requests from lawmakers and Rep. William Jefferson to return material seized by the FBI in a May 20-21 search of Jefferson's office.

The overnight search was part of a 17-month bribery investigation of Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat.
In a 28-page opinion, Hogan dismissed arguments by Jefferson and a bipartisan group of House leaders that the raid violated the Constitution's protections against intimidation of elected officials.

Hogan acknowledged the "unprecedented" nature of the case. But he said the lawmakers' "sweeping" theory of legislative privilege "would have the effect of converting every congressional office into a taxpayer-subsidized sanctuary for crime."

A member of Congress is bound by the same laws as ordinary citizens, said the judge, who had approved the FBI's request to conduct the overnight search of Jefferson's office.

Jefferson had sought the return of several computer hard drives, floppy disks and two boxes of paper documents that FBI agents seized during the 18-hour search of his Rayburn Building office.

Hogan said the Justice Department can retake custody of the materials, which President Bush ordered held by the solicitor general until Congress and the agency could work out procedures for future raids on congressional offices.

Jefferson's lawyer, Robert Trout, said he was not surprised by the ruling and would appeal as soon as possible. Trout is expected to ask Hogan to stay his ruling to keep the materials away from investigators until an appeals court looks at the case.

"While a congressman is not above the law, the executive branch must also follow the law," Trout said. "We appreciate the consideration the judge accorded our motion for the return of the seized property, but we respectfully disagree with his conclusion."

Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the department was pleased with the judge's decision and said prosecutors would continue discussions with Congress to work out procedures for future raids.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California also said Congress will continue to work with the Justice Department on procedures for searches.

Still, "This particular search could have been conducted in a manner that fully protected the ability of the prosecutors to obtain the evidence needed to do their job while preserving constitutional principles," she said.

At issue was a constitutional provision known as the speech or debate clause, which protects elected officials from being questioned by the president, a prosecutor or a plaintiff in a lawsuit about their legislative work.

The raid on Jefferson's office angered members of Congress, some of whom threatened to retaliate by tinkering with the FBI and Justice Department budgets.

Bush stepped in and ordered the solicitor general to take custody for a 45-day "cooling off period," which ended Sunday.

Jefferson has been under investigation since March 2005 for allegedly using his position to promote the sale of telecommunications equipment and services offered by iGate, a Louisville-based firm, that sought contracts with Nigeria, Ghana and other African nations.

In return for his help, Jefferson allegedly demanded stock and cash payments. Jefferson has not been charged and has denied wrongdoing.

An affidavit filed with Hogan to justify the May search says the FBI videotaped Jefferson in August 2005 accepting $100,000 from a business executive, who actually was a government informant. The FBI said it subsequently recovered $90,000 from a freezer at Jefferson's home.

The House leaders told Hogan in a court filing that the Justice Department had overstepped its authority by prohibiting Jefferson's private lawyer, House counsel and the Capitol Police from observing the search of Jefferson's office.

They also complained that agents showed up at the Rayburn Office Building unannounced and demanded that the Capitol Police chief let them into Jefferson's office immediately or they would "pick the office door lock."

Hogan said investigators do not need approval from elected officials or their lawyers to seize possible proof of a crime.

"The power to determine the scope of one's own privilege is not available to any other person, including members of the coequal branches of government: federal judges ... or the President of the United States," the judge said.

He also said judges have a legitimate role to play in ensuring prosecutors don't overstep their authority in investigating legislators.

"A federal judge is not a mere rubber stamp in the warrant process," Hogan wrote, "but rather an independent and neutral official sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution."

Comment:
"A member of Congress is bound by the same laws as ordinary citizens, said the judge, who had approved the FBI's request to conduct the overnight search of Jefferson's office."
In other words, members of Congress have no rights in Bush's America, just like the people they are supposed to represent.

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Bush's Stunning Admission to Larry King: "I Do It All Over Again"

By MISSY COMLEY BEATTIE
July10, 2006

Have I missed an article about this or did nobody tune to "Larry King Live" for King's "exclusive" and "candid" conversation with George and Laura Bush last Thursday night? I couldn't watch because everything about the residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue makes me want to hibernate until they are sent packing. I did, however, read the transcript of the show.

King talked with the First Couple in the Blue Room of the White House on the president's 60th birthday, opening the interview with a question about Bush's age: "What does it feel like?"

George said, "I feel pretty good, you know. Feel real good, as a matter of fact, really."

I kept reading because I wanted to see what the president would say about the Iraq war, a disaster now opposed by the majority of Americans.
It was no big surprise that King would only probe Bush's epidermis about the occupation: "Concerning Iraq, do you ever have doubts about it?" And when both Bushes agreed that they haven't lost resolve and that the war in Iraq is making the United States more secure, Larry missed an opportunity to dig a little with a reference to a recent study showing that American terrorism experts say the opposite-that the incursion in Iraq has made us far less safe.

George, then, went on to assert that "it's important to deal with problems before they become acute." This was an opportunity for Larry to ask why Bush split for Crawford after papers crossed his desk, warning that terrorists wanted to hijack planes within the United States and fly them into buildings, killing thousands of Americans. Maybe, just maybe, 9/11 wasn't quite "acute" enough. At the least, King should have reminded Bush that Iraq had nothing to do with September 11.

After a commercial break, King asked Bush about the war again. "Do you ever go to the funerals?"

"No, I don't," Bush replied. When Larry wanted to know why, George continued, "Because it's hard ... I want to honor those who sacrificed. I think the best way for me to honor them is to complete the mission"

No confrontation from King that it makes no sense to honor the fallen by sending more to fall.

And, then, one of the most illuminating moments-Larry asked Bush, "So there is no doubt, if you had it to do over again, knowing the WMDs weren't there, you'd still go in?"

And Bush said, "Yes, This is-we removed a tyrant, who was a weapon-he was an enemy of the United States who harbored terrorists and who had the capacity, at the very minimum, to make weapons of mass destruction. And he was a true threat. Yes, I would have done the same thing."

This is an astonishing revelation. After all, the original premise to invade Iraq was to find the WMD and eliminate their threat to Americans. Most assuredly, if Congress had not been convinced by Bush's fabricated intelligence that weapons existed, its members would never have voted to give George Bush the authority to wage a preemptive war with Iraq. Surely, the American public would not have endorsed Bush's actions either.

So, here we have George Bush, saying on national television that if he'd known then what he knows now, he'd still have waged this war that's sent almost 2, 550 American troops to their deaths and thousands to be wounded (some with severe brain injuries and others with multiple amputations) to take down a tyrant who didn't possess WMD.

Where is the outrage over this? Where is the call for justice?

I remember watching Larry King when he interviewed Mark Lunsford a couple of days after nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford's body was discovered. King asked the grieving father if he'd done anything to change his murdered daughter's room. I shook my head in disbelief and said, "Yeah, Larry, I boxed up all the stuffed animals, removed everything pink, and put in a pool table and decorated the walls with sports posters."

King's questionable and anemic interviewing skills are reason enough that more isn't being made of Bush's startling disclosure-an admission that is characteristically Bushian in its righteous certitude. But there's the added truth that George Bush is painful to watch and hear. Had more Americans listened, there would be a louder, stronger demand for the impeachment of a president who has betrayed the trust of our military, the American people, and the citizens of Iraq.

Missy Beattie lives in New York City. She's written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. An outspoken critic of the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq, she's a member of Gold Star Families for Peace. She completed a novel last year, but since the death of her nephew, Marine Lance Cpl. Chase J. Comley, in Iraq on August 6,'05, she has been writing political articles. She can be reached at: Missybeat@aol.com



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Gulf war veteran charged with family murders

By Rod Minchin
The Independent
11 July 2006

A 41-year-old Gulf War veteran was tonight charged with the murders of four members of his own family.

David Bradley, a former Royal Artillery private, was charged with killing Peter Purcell, 70, Josie Purcell, 70, Keith, 44, and Glen, 41, who were all shot dead at their home in the West End of Newcastle.

Bradley, of Benwell Grove, Newcastle, will appear before Newcastle Magistrates' Court tomorrow morning.
Bradley was arrested on Sunday morning when he walked into his local police station on Westgate Road at 6.15am and said there were four dead bodies at his home.

He had served for eight years with the Royal Artillery and had seen active duty in the first Gulf War, Bosnia and Northern Ireland, Northumbria Police said.

Detectives said the four family members - Mr and Mrs Purcell and two of their sons - had all died during a five hour period between 9pm on Saturday and 2.15am on Sunday.

Mr and Mrs Purcell, who were both retired, had lived at the end-terrace house in Benwell Grove for 22 years.

They shared their home with their disabled son Keith and nephew Bradley. Glen, a glass fitter, was visiting his parents for the weekend from his home in Wales.

As well as Keith and Glen, they had three other children: Peter, 49, Michael, 47, and Jacqueline, 46.

A second daughter, Lorraine, died of cancer two years ago at the age of 41.

Mr Purcell ran a family roofing business with his two sons Keith and Glen before retiring around 10 years ago.

"They have always lived in the West End of Newcastle and were extremely popular and well-known among the local community," said Superintendent Steve Wade at a news conference at Etal Lane police station.

"Peter was a popular man and well-known in the clubs in the West End and had an active social life.

"Josie, as well as raising a family, worked as home help. Keith suffered an accident at work, which left him disabled and recent ill-health left him needing crutches.

"Glen, after working for his father, had settled in Wales and worked as a glass fitter and visited Benwell Grove from time to time."

Many floral tributes were left outside the family house, including those from Keith's daughter, Bianca.



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Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?

By Jan Frel
AlterNet
July 10, 2006

The extent to which American exceptionalism is embedded in the national psyche is awesome to behold.

While the United States is a country like any other, its citizens no more special than any others on the planet, Americans still react with surprise at the suggestion that their country could be held responsible for something as heinous as a war crime.

From the massacre of more than 100,000 people in the Philippines to the first nuclear attack ever at Hiroshima to the unprovoked invasion of Baghdad, U.S.-sponsored violence doesn't feel as wrong and worthy of prosecution in internationally sanctioned criminal courts as the gory, bload-soaked atrocities of Congo, Darfur, Rwanda, and most certainly not the Nazis -- most certainly not. Howard Zinn recently described this as our "inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior."
Most Americans firmly believe there is nothing the United States or its political leadership could possibly do that could equate to the crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. The Nazis are our "gold standard of evil," as author John Dolan once put it.

But the truth is that we can, and we have -- most recently and significantly in Iraq. Perhaps no person on the planet is better equipped to identify and describe our crimes in Iraq than Benjamin Ferenccz, a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials who successfully convicted 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating death squads that killed more than one million people in the famous Einsatzgruppen Case. Ferencz, now 87, has gone on to become a founding father of the basis behind international law regarding war crimes, and his essays and legal work drawing from the Nuremberg trials and later the commission that established the International Criminal Court remain a lasting influence in that realm.

Ferencz's biggest contribution to the war crimes field is his assertion that an unprovoked or "aggressive" war is the highest crime against mankind. It was the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that made possible the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the destruction of Fallouja and Ramadi, the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, civilian massacres like Haditha, and on and on. Ferencz believes that a "prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation."

Interviewed from his home in New York, Ferencz laid out a simple summary of the case:

"The United Nations charter has a provision which was agreed to by the United States formulated by the United States in fact, after World War II. Its says that from now on, no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council. They can use force in connection with self-defense, but a country can't use force in anticipation of self-defense. Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, 'Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they've found -- then we'll figure out what we're going to do. The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq -- which was all pre-arranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter."

It's that simple. Ferencz called the invasion a "clear breach of law," and dismissed the Bush administration's legal defense that previous U.N. Security Council resolutions dating back to the first Gulf War justified an invasion in 2003. Ferencz notes that the first Bush president believed that the United States didn't have a U.N. mandate to go into Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein; that authorization was simply to eject Hussein from Kuwait. Ferencz asked, "So how do we get authorization more than a decade later to finish the job? The arguments made to defend this are not persuasive."

Writing for the United Kingdom's Guardian, shortly before the 2003 invasion, international law expert Mark Littman echoed Ferencz: "The threatened war against Iraq will be a breach of the United Nations Charter and hence of international law unless it is authorized by a new and unambiguous resolution of the Security Council. The Charter is clear. No such war is permitted unless it is in self-defense or authorized by the Security Council."

Challenges to the legality of this war can also be found at the ground level. First Lt. Ehren Watada, the first U.S. commissioned officer to refuse to serve in Iraq, cites the rules of the U.N. Charter as a principle reason for his dissent.

Ferencz isn't using the invasion of Iraq as a convenient prop to exercise his longstanding American hatred: he has a decades-old paper trail of calls for every suspect of war crimes to be brought to international justice. When the United States captured Saddam Hussein in December 2003, Ferencz wrote that Hussein's offenses included "the supreme international crime of aggression, to a wide variety of crimes against humanity, and a long list of atrocities condemned by both international and national laws."

Ferencz isn't the first to make the suggestion that the United States has committed state-sponsored war crimes against another nation -- not only have leading war critics made this argument, but so had legal experts in the British government before the 2003 invasion. In a short essay in 2005, Ferencz lays out the inner deliberations of British and American officials as the preparations for the war were made:

U.K. military leaders had been calling for clear assurances that the war was legal under international law. They were very mindful that the treaty creating a new International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague had entered into force on July 1, 2002, with full support of the British government. Gen. Sir Mike Jackson, chief of the defense staff, was quoted as saying "I spent a good deal of time recently in the Balkans making sure Milosevic was put behind bars. I have no intention of ending up in the next cell to him in The Hague."

Ferencz quotes the British deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry who, in the lead-up to the invasion, quit abruptly and wrote in her resignation letter: "I regret that I cannot agree that it is lawful to use force against Iraq without a second Security Council resolution ... [A]n unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression; nor can I agree with such action in circumstances that are so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law."

While the United Kingdom is a signatory of the ICC, and therefore under jurisdiction of that court, the United States is not, thanks to a Republican majority in Congress that has "attacks on America's sovereignty" and "manipulation by the United Nations" in its pantheon of knee-jerk neuroses. Ferencz concedes that even though Britain and its leadership could be prosecuted, the international legal climate isn't at a place where justice is blind enough to try it -- or as Ferencz put it, humanity isn't yet "civilized enough to prevent this type of illegal behavior." And Ferencz said that while he believes the United States is guilty of war crimes, "the international community is not sufficiently organized to prosecute such a case. ... There is no court at the moment that is competent to try that crime."

As Ferencz said, the world is still a long way away from establishing norms that put all nations under the rule of law, but the battle to do so is a worthy one: "There's no such thing as a war without atrocities, but war-making is the biggest atrocity of all."

The suggestion that the Bush administration's conduct in the "war on terror" amounts to a string of war crimes and human rights abuses is gaining credence in even the most ossified establishment circles of Washington. Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling by the Supreme Court suggests that Bush's attempt to ignore the Geneva Conventions in his approved treatment of terror suspects may leave him open to prosecution for war crimes. As Sidney Blumenthal points out, the court rejected Bush's attempt to ignore Common Article 3, which bans "cruel treatment and torture [and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."

And since Congress enacted the Geneva Conventions, making them the law of the United States, any violations that Bush or any other American commits "are considered 'war crimes' punishable as federal offenses," as Justice Kennedy wrote.

George W. Bush in the dock facing a charge of war crimes? That's well beyond the scope of possibility ... or is it?

Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.



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9/11 'revisionist' allowed to teach

Tuesday 11 July 2006, 10:58 Makka Time, 7:58 GMT

An instructor at the University of Wisconsin who has said he believes US officials orchestrated the September 11, 2001 attacks, will be allowed to teach a course on Islam.
Some state politicians had called for the University of Wisconsin-Madison to fire Kevin Barrett, a part-time instructor, after he spoke about his theories on a radio talk show last month.

The university provost, Patrick Farrell, said in a statement late on Monday: "We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas.

"To the extent that his views are discussed, Mr Barrett has assured me that students will be free and encouraged to challenge his viewpoint."

Barrett can present his view as one of many perspectives on the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington DC when he teaches Islam: Religion and Culture this fall, Farrell said.

Farrell began a review after Barrett said he believed the attacks were the result of a conspiracy designed to cause war in the Middle East.

Barrett said he was happy the school "did the right thing".

"This university is a pretty professional organisation that is not going to buckle from political pressure from politicians," he said.

Criticism

Politicians who had called for Barrett's dismissal criticised the decision.

Matt Canter, a spokesman for the governor, Jim Doyle, said: "The governor would have come to a different conclusion about this."

Steve Nass, a state representative, said he would push next year for cuts to the university's budget.

The university does not endorse Barrett's theories, Farrell said, noting that they are widely believed in parts of the Muslim world.



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The Asian Desk


U.N. Postpones Vote On North Korea Sanctions

CBS3.com
July 10, 2006

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Supporters of a resolution that would impose limited sanctions on North Korea agreed to delay a vote in the hope that China can pressure Pyongyang to return to six-party talks on its nuclear program and halt missile tests, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said Monday.

Ambassadors from the five veto-wielding nations on the Security Council - who are divided over sanctions - met with Japan, which sponsored the resolution, as a Chinese delegation arrived in North Korea pledging friendship and deeper ties.

Bolton told reporters after the meeting that the resolution's supporters - including the U.S., Britain, France and other European council members - decided not to press for a vote Monday "while the diplomacy in Pyongyang proceeds."
"We think it's important to keep the focus on Pyongyang, which after all is the source of this problem, and to provide maximum support for, and leverage on the Chinese mission to Pyongyang," he said.

On July 5, North Korea test-fired seven missiles, apparently including a long-range one that potentially could reach the United States.

The United States wants North Korea to return to the moratorium on ballistic missile launches from the Korean peninsula and to not only return to the six-party talks but implement the joint statement agreed to by the six parties in September, he said.

In that statement, North Korea made a commitment to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and returning at an early date" to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The six parties - the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia - also reaffirmed that the goal of the talks "is the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner."

According to a Japanese news report, Japan and the United States suggested to China that a vote on the sanctions resolution could be avoided if North Korea renewed the moratorium on missile testing and returned to six-party talks.

Asked about the Kyodo News agency report, which cited unidentified Japanese officials, Bolton replied, "Well I think that's basically what I've stated somewhat differently. The point is, we want to keep the spotlight on Chinese diplomacy in Pyongyang, which is the source of this problem."

But when pressed, he refused to say whether the United States would agree to drop the sanctions resolution if North Korea returned to talks, agreed to implement the September agreement, and reimposed the moratorium. He said there were "a lot of ifs" and Washington wants to wait to see what comes out of the Chinese meetings in Pyongyang.

That's why the sponsors of the resolution "will reevaluate on a daily basis whether to proceed" with a vote on the Japanese draft, Bolton said.

The Chinese delegation, which is led by Vice Premier Hui Liangyu and includes China's main nuclear negotiator, Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei, arrived in Pyongyang on a six-day visit to celebrate the 45th anniversary of a friendship treaty between the neighbors. A North Korean delegation was also expected in China on Tuesday to mark the treaty anniversary.

China's U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya told reporters after Monday morning's meeting with envoys from Russia, the United States, Britain, France and Japan that "the members have different views so we agreed that we will continue consultations about that."

China and Russia oppose sanctions and have been pressing for a weaker Security Council presidential statement, which is not legally binding. But Wang indicated for the first time that China might be prepared to consider a weaker resolution.

"If they wish to have a resolution, they should have a modified one, not this one," Wang said.

Bolton said Washington would look at any Chinese suggestions for changes in the Japanese draft.

The Japanese draft, under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter which allows military enforcement, demands that North Korea immediately stop developing, testing, deploying and selling ballistic missiles.

It would ban all U.N. member states from acquiring North Korean missiles or weapons of mass destruction - or the parts or technology to produce them - and order all countries to take steps to prevent any material, technology or money for missile or weapons programs from reaching the North.

The draft resolution also urges North Korea to immediately return to six-party talks, which have been stalled since September.

Japanese officials also said Monday that negotiations may not be enough, using rhetoric unprecedented in the country that adopted a pacifist constitution after its defeat in World War II.

"If we accept that there is no other option to prevent an attack ... there is the view that attacking the launch base of the guided missiles is within the constitutional right of self-defense. We need to deepen discussion," Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe said.

"It's irresponsible to do nothing when we know North Korea could riddle us with missiles," echoed Tsutomu Takebe, secretary general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. "We should consider measures, including legal changes" required for such an attack, he said.

Japan's constitution foreswears the use of war to settle international disputes, but the government has interpreted that to allow defensive forces. The question is whether such a pre-emptive strike could be defined as self-defense.

Even if Japan resolves the constitutionality issue, its military capability to launch such a strike is another issue. The Defense Agency has said Japan does not own weapons such as ballistic missiles that could reach North Korea, only defensive ground-to-air and ground-to-vessel missiles.



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China To Complete Four Strategic Oil Reserve Facilities This Year

AFP
July 10, 2006

Beijing - China will complete construction of four strategic oil reserve facilities this year, boosting its storage capacity by up to 12 million tons, state media reported Monday. Ma Kai, minister of the National Development and Reform Commission and director of the National Energy Office, said four petroleum bases with a total storage capacity of between 10 and 12 million tons will be completed this year, Xinhua news agency reported.
Two oil reserve bases will be located in the eastern province of Zhejiang while another two will be located in Shandong and Liaoning provinces respectively, the report said.

Last month, China Daily said one of the stores in Zhejiang, located in the coastal city of Zhenhai, would be completed in August.

The four strategic oil reserve bases are expected to hold supplies for at least 30 days, it said.

Ma said the construction of oil reserve facilities will accelerate between now and 2010, with a second and third phase -- each with a capacity of 28 million tons -- already in the pipeline, according to the report.

Ma also said overseas cooperation in crude oil production will be strengthened in future.

China, the world's second-biggest oil consumer after the United States, used about 318 million tons of oil last year, of which 40 percent, or about 127 tons were imported, according to earlier reports.



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Satellite photos detect activity at NKorea missile bases: report

AFP
Tuesday July 11, 2006

TOKYO - North Korea could be preparing for new launches of mid-range missiles following last week's tests, with activity detected at its bases, a report has said citing Japanese government sources.

US and Japanese satellite photos show that mid-range Rodong missiles had been set up on launch pads at a base in southeastern North Korea, but were later removed, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported.
Fuel tanks could be seen near the launch pads, the report said.

The report said the satellite photos were taken after last week's tests of seven missiles, but did not give a specific date.

"We think North Korea can launch missiles whenever it wishes," the top-selling daily quoted a government source as saying.

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso on Sunday suggested Tokyo would have the right to launch a pre-emptive strike to protect its citizens from a missile launch by Pyongyang.

He said there were "visible signs" of activity at a North Korean missile base from which North Korea launched a Rodong missile last week.

Japan submitted a draft binding resolution in the United Nations Security Council that would impose sanctions on North Korea over the missile tests.

But on Monday, the Security Council put off a vote on the resolution to allow more time for Chinese diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis.



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At least 22 killed in Bangladesh crash

AFP
July 11, 2006

DHAKA - At least 22 people have been killed and 30 injured when a train rammed into a packed bus as it crossed a railway line in northwestern Bangladesh.
"We know that 22 people died when a mail train hit a bus," superintendent of Joypurhat district police Abdullah al Azad told AFP on Tuesday.

The bus with around 50 passengers on board was broken in two after hitting the train and shunted down the track for more than 300 meters (yards).

Bangladesh Railway spokesman Shafiqul Alam said the accident happened at an "unauthorised level crossing" used as a short cut by bus and truck drivers.

An investigation has been launched.

"The bus was going across the level crossing when it was hit by the front of the train," said al Azad, adding that all of the dead were on the bus.

Firefighters using heavy equipment cut some 30 injured people from the crushed bus.

Seven were in a critical condition in Joypurhat central hospital, said resident medical officer Saidur Rahman.

No-one on board the train was hurt.



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China again rejects UN resolution on North Korea

by Cindy Sui
AFP
July 11, 2006

BEIJING - China has repeated its rejection of a proposed UN resolution on possible sanctions against North Korea, dashing US and Japanese hopes for quick action over Pyongyang's missile tests.

A foreign ministry announcement that the draft Security Council resolution was an "overreaction" came amid another flurry of shuttle diplomacy to address the crisis in the wake of last Wednesday's missile launches.
Separate talks between North and South Korea, and China and the United States, were held a day after a vote on the resolution was postponed by the Council -- where China holds the veto power to block it.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu did not mention any veto but said such a legally binding Council resolution would "undermine the progress" on North Korean disarmament talks and needed to be thoroughly re-worked.

"China believes this draft resolution represents an overreaction and, if adopted, it will cause a further escalation of the problem," Jiang said Tuesday.

The resolution could "undermine the progress made in the six-party talks. There should be a substantial revision of the draft," she said, referring to stalled talks on persuading Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear program.

President Hu Jintao said China was seriously concerned about tensions over North Korea and called on all parties to refrain from any actions that could inflame the situation.

The secretive state test-launched seven missiles last week in the direction of Japan, which has since pressed for a Council resolution that would clear the way for sanctions and in theory even military action.

North Korea in response said sanctions would be an "act of war". But late Tuesday it appealed for cooperation from South Korea over the issue.

"Calamities do not stem only from within. They also come from the outside... We need to make best efforts to prevent calamities that may come from the outside," North Korea's chief delegate Kwon Ho-Ung said as he met his South Korean counterpart for talks.

South Korea, maintaining its policy of engaging its communist neighbor while condemning the launches, agreed to the high-level talks in the port city of Busan. But it ruled out discussing North Korea's requests for further fertilizer and rice aid, saying it will instead tackle the missile issue.

The volleys of rhetoric have been accompanied by intensive diplomatic efforts to resolve the standoff with Pyongyang, which has boycotted the six-nation disarmament talks since November.

At the Security Council on Monday, Japan said it had decided to postpone a vote and instead await word from a high-level Chinese delegation currently holding six days of negotiations in the North Korean capital.

China, the North's main ally, countered with a so-called presidential statement -- a Council document that carries no legal force -- that was rejected.

"It did not respond sufficiently robustly to actually what the present threat is," said Britain's ambassador to the
United Nations, Emyr Jones Parry. "Indeed it did not recognize that there was a threat."

Meanwhile the top US envoy on North Korea, Christopher Hill, returned to Beijing on Tuesday for the second time in a week, making another stop on a busy tour trying to muster diplomatic consensus.

"Obviously we are in a rather crucial period," Hill told reporters on arrival.

"The Chinese government has an important diplomatic mission going on, so we want to be in close consultation with the Chinese government," he said.

State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan told US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice on Monday that China still placed its hopes in the six-party talks, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

North Korea has announced it has nuclear weapons and the talks were intended to get the North, one of the most isolated and impoverished nations in the world, to abandon its atomic programmes.

But an agreement in September to do that in exchange for energy and security guarantees was never implemented before the North began boycotting the talks less two months later to protest US financial sanctions.

Japan's push for further sanctions over the missiles has also run into opposition from South Korea -- which, like China, often criticises what it sees as a Japanese failure to apologise for its wartime behaviour in the 20th century.

Top Japanese spokesman Shinzo Abe on Monday suggested a possible pre-emptive strike on North Korea, drawing more criticism on Tuesday.

"It is a serious development that Japanese cabinet ministers have made a series of comments that justify a possible pre-emptive strike and the use of military power against the Korean peninsula," said a spokesman for South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun.

South Korea in 2000 launched a "sunshine policy" of reconciling with its longtime Northern adversary.



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Blasts hit Mumbai rail network

Tuesday 11 July 2006, 17:38 Makka Time, 14:38 GMT

Dozens of people are feared dead after seven explosions destroyed trains on the railway system in Mumbai, India's financial centre.
The blasts hit trains and stations in the Matunga, Khar, Santa Cruz, Jogeshwari, Borivali and Bhayendar areas of Mumbai during rush hour.

Police said the blasts were in the first-class carriages of the commuter trains.

"The blasts happened when the trains were most crowded," said DK Shankaran, chief secretary of the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital.

All trains have been suspended and railway officials appealed to the public to stay away from the city's stations.

"It is a sad day," VK Duggal, the Indian home minister told reporters before a meeting with the prime minister. "Security has been definitely put on high alert."

Mumbai has been hit by a series of bomb blasts in the past decade. More than 250 people died in a series of bomb explosions in the city in 1993 which authorities blamed on criminal gangs.

Police in New Delhi said they were prepared for violence in the Indian capital.

"We have mobilised our entire forces who are conducting checks in all areas such as buses, bus stops, train stations and religious institutions," Anil Shukla, deputy commissioner of police for South Delhi, told Reuters.



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Look! Up in the sky!


Tobacco death toll could reach 1 billion this century, study finds

Last Updated Mon, 10 Jul 2006 16:41:08 EDT
CBC News

Tobacco is on course to kill a billion people this century - 10 times the toll it exacted in the 20th century - if current trends continue, public health officials said Monday.

Worldwide, tobacco causes one in five cancer deaths, or 1.4 million deaths each year. An estimated 1.25 billion men and women around the globe smoke cigarettes.
The staggering statistics, detailed in the new Cancer Atlas and updated Tobacco Atlas, were released at the International Union Against Cancer conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday.

Health officials said that reducing tobacco use, improving nutrition and decreasing infection by cancer-causing viruses could cut global cancer rates sharply.

"We know with cancer, if we take action now, we can save two million lives a year by 2020 and 6.5 million by 2040," said Dr. Judith Mackay, a World Health Organization senior policy adviser.

The numbers in Canada are similarly sobering with tobacco use accounting for almost 30 per cent of all fatal cancers. Health Canada projects 153,100 new cases of cancer and 70,400 cancer deaths for 2006.

According to Statistics Canada, 22 per cent of Canadians aged 12 or older were smokers in 2005, down from 23 per cent in 2003. The cancer and tobacco atlases were published by the American Cancer Society with assistance from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Comment: Horse hockey! Yeah, they have plans to kill off more than 1 billion people, but it isn't going to happen by cigarettes.

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Rogue Waves at Sea

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
The New York Times
July 11, 2006

Summary: Enormous waves that sweep the ocean are traditionally called rogue waves, implying that they have a kind of freakish rarity. Over the decades, skeptical oceanographers have doubted their existence and tended to lump them together with sightings of mermaids and sea monsters.

But scientists are now finding that these giants of the sea are far more common and destructive than once imagined, prompting a rush of new studies and research projects. The goals are to better tally them, understand why they form, explore the possibility of forecasts, and learn how to better protect ships, oil platforms and people.
The storm was nothing special. Its waves rocked the Norwegian Dawn just enough so that bartenders on the cruise ship turned to the usual palliative - free drinks.

Then, off the coast of Georgia, early on Saturday, April 16, 2005, a giant, seven-story wave appeared out of nowhere. It crashed into the bow, sent deck chairs flying, smashed windows, raced as high as the 10th deck, flooded 62 cabins, injured 4 passengers and sowed widespread fear and panic.

"The ship was like a cork in a bathtub," recalled Celestine Mcelhatton, a passenger who, along with 2,000 others, eventually made it back to Pier 88 on the Hudson River in Manhattan. Some vowed never to sail again.

Enormous waves that sweep the ocean are traditionally called rogue waves, implying that they have a kind of freakish rarity. Over the decades, skeptical oceanographers have doubted their existence and tended to lump them together with sightings of mermaids and sea monsters.

But scientists are now finding that these giants of the sea are far more common and destructive than once imagined, prompting a rush of new studies and research projects. The goals are to better tally them, understand why they form, explore the possibility of forecasts, and learn how to better protect ships, oil platforms and people.

The stakes are high. In the past two decades, freak waves are suspected of sinking dozens of big ships and taking hundreds of lives. The upshot is that the scientists feel a sense of urgency about the work and growing awe at their subjects.

"I never met, and hope I never will meet, such a monster," said Wolfgang Rosenthal, a German scientist who helped the European Space Agency pioneer the study of rogue waves by radar satellite. "They are more frequent than we expected."

Drawing on recent tallies and making tentative extrapolations, Dr. Rosenthal estimated that at any given moment 10 of the giants are churning through the world's oceans.

In size and reach these waves are quite different from earthquake-induced tsunamis, which form low, almost invisible mounds at sea before gaining height while crashing ashore. Rogue waves seldom, if ever, prowl close to land.

"We know these big waves cannot get into shallow water," said David W. Wang of the Naval Research Laboratory, the science arm of the Navy and Marine Corps. "That's a physical limitation."

By one definition, the titans of the sea rise to heights of at least 25 meters, or 82 feet, about the size of an eight-story building. Scientists have calculated their theoretical maximum at 198 feet - higher than the Statue of Liberty or the Capitol rotunda in Washington. So far, however, they have documented nothing that big. Large rogues seem to average around 100 feet.

Most waves, big and small alike, form when the wind blows across open water. The wind's force, duration and sweep determine the size of the swells, with big storms building their height. Waves of about 6 feet are common, though ones up to 30 or even 50 feet are considered unexceptional (though terrifying to people in even fairly large boats). As waves gain energy from the wind, they become steeper and the crests can break into whitecaps.

The trough preceding a rogue wave can be quite deep, what nautical lore calls a "hole in the sea." For anyone on a ship, it is a roller coaster plunge that can be disastrous.

Over the centuries, many accounts have told of monster waves that battered and sank ships. In 1933 in the North Pacific, the Navy oiler Ramapo encountered a huge wave. The crew, calm enough to triangulate from the ship's superstructure, estimated its height at 112 feet.

In 1966, the Italian cruise ship Michelangelo was steaming toward New York when a giant wave tore a hole in its superstructure, smashed heavy glass 80 feet above the waterline, and killed a crewman and two passengers. In 1978, the München, a German barge carrier, sank in the Atlantic. Surviving bits of twisted wreckage suggested that it surrendered to a wave of great force.

Despite such accounts, many oceanographers were skeptical. The human imagination tended to embellish, they said.

Moreover, bobbing ships were terrible reference points for trying to determine the size of onrushing objects with any kind of accuracy. Their mathematical models predicted that giant waves were statistical improbabilities that should arise once every 10,000 years or so.

That began to change on New Year's Day in 1995, when a rock-steady oil platform in the North Sea produced what was considered the first hard evidence of a rogue wave. The platform bore a laser designed to measure wave height.

During a furious storm, it registered an 84-foot giant.

Then, in February 2000, a British oceanographic research vessel fighting its way through a gale west of Scotland measured titans of up to 95 feet, "the largest waves ever recorded by scientific instruments," seven researchers wrote in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Once-skeptical scientists were soon holding conferences to discuss the findings and to design research strategies. A large meeting in Brest, France, in November 2000 attracted researchers from around the world.

It quickly became apparent that the big waves formed with some regularity in regions swept by powerful currents: the Agulhas off South Africa, the Kuroshio off Japan, and the Gulf Stream off the eastern United States, where the Norwegian Dawn got into trouble off Georgia. The Gulf Stream also flows through the Bermuda Triangle, famous for allegedly devouring large numbers of ships.

Dr. Bengt Fornberg, a mathematician at the University of Colorado who studies the giants, said the strong ocean currents appeared to focus waves "like a magnifying glass concentrates sunlight."

"It's the same idea," he said. "There are a few places in the world where there is a regular current, like a steady magnifying glass. In other places, the eddies come and go, and that makes the waves less predictable."

One way that rogue waves apparently form is when the strong currents meet winds and waves moving in the opposite direction, he said. The currents focus and concentrate sets of waves, shortening the distance between them and sending individual peaks higher. "That," Dr. Fornberg said in an interview, "makes for hot spots in a fairly predictable area."

A particularly threatening spot, he said, turned out to be where big oil tankers coming from the Middle East ride the Agulhas current around South Africa. There, the westward-flowing current meets prevailing easterly winds, at times disastrously.

"Three or four tankers a year there get badly damaged," Dr. Fornberg said. "That's one of the few places in the world where the phenomena is regular."

"With a big storm, you get lots of big waves," he added. "You have regular waves and then one or two giants. Then it's back to regular again."

The scientists who met at Brest in 2000, eager to track the phenomenon globally, laid plans to use radar satellites to conduct a census, calling it MaxWave.

They worked with the European Space Agency, which had lofted radar satellites in 1991 and 1995, as well as the German Aerospace Center and several other European research bodies. The radar beams were seen as potentially ideal for measuring the height of individual waves, based on the time it took the beams to bounce from orbit to the sea and back to space.

The MaxWave team, led by Dr. Rosenthal, examined three weeks of radar data and to its amazement discovered 10 giants, each at least 82 feet high. "We were quite successful," he said.

The team even tracked monster waves in a region of the South Atlantic where two cruise ships, the Bremen and the Caledonian Star, had come under assault.

Further confirmation with a different set of instruments came in September 2004 when Hurricane Ivan swept through the Gulf of Mexico.

It passed directly over six wave-tide gauges that the Naval Research Laboratory had deployed about 50 miles east of the Mississippi Delta. Dr. Wang and his colleagues analyzed the data and found to their surprise waves measuring more than 90 feet from trough to crest.

"We had no idea," Dr. Wang recalled. "It was the right time and the right place."

Already, the scientists said, naval architects and shipbuilders are discussing precautions. Some of the easiest are seen as increasing the strength of windows and hatch covers. But even the best physical protections may fail under assault by tons of roiling water, so the best precaution of all will be learning how to avoid the monsters in the first place.

Increasingly, scientists are focusing on better understanding how the big waves form and whether that knowledge can lead to accurate forecasts - a feat that, if achieved, may save hundreds of lives and many billions of dollars in lost commerce.

A suspected culprit, in addition to wind-current interactions, is the amplification that occurs when disparate trains of waves (perhaps emanating from different storms) come together. Such intersections are seen as sometimes canceling out waves, and other times making them higher and steeper.

Another birth ground is seen as choppy seas where several waves moving independently merge by chance. But scientists say a giant of that sort would live for no more than a few seconds or minutes, whereas some are suspected of lasting for hours and traveling long distances.

As for forecasts, oceanographers are focusing on the interplay of exceptionally strong winds and currents, especially in the Agulhas off South Africa.

Dr. Fornberg said that several years ago South African authorities began issuing predictions. "That's the only place the theory has succeeded," he said.

Dr. Rosenthal said that in the future the continued proliferation of radar satellites should create an opportunity to better understand not only the habitats of the giants but in theory also individual threats, bringing about a safer relationship between people and the sea.

"There will be warnings, maybe in 10 years," he said. "It should be possible."



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Ellison Bay visitors awaken to explosions, devastation

By Paige Funkhouser
Gannett Wisconsin Newspapers
July 11, 2006

ELLISON BAY - A whistling noise and two "booms," like a bomb, woke Jim Quan out of sound sleep early Monday morning.

He got up and looked out the window of Linden Gallery and across Wisconsin 42 to see one building burning and two severely damaged.

"It sounded like bombs going off," said Quan.

He was visiting from his home in Burlingame, Calif., and was staying with his daughter, Jeanee, and her husband, Brian Linden, who own the Asian art gallery.

The blast broke windows at the gallery and at several other businesses and homes in Ellison Bay, an unincorporated hamlet in Liberty Grove at the tip of the Door County peninsula.

Across the highway, three girls - ages 12, 15 and 16 - awoke at the Cedar Grove Resort to find the building collapsing around them. The girls were up to their shoulders in burning insulation. Their story was interrupted by an adult who did not want them talking to the news media.


The girls were among 49 guests at the resort. All the guests were accounted for during the investigation of the incident.

Two people died in the explosion and fire that remain under investigation by the Wisconsin State Fire Marshal, Door County Sheriff's Department and Sister Bay/Liberty Grove Fire Department. The fire department was dispatched to the scene at 2:35 a.m. Monday.

The focus of the investigation was the condominiums at Cedar Grove and the adjacent Pioneer Store, a landmark Ellison Bay building flattened by the explosion.

The identities of the dead were not released pending notification of relatives.

Both bodies were recovered by mid-morning Monday and taken to the Brown County Medical Examiner's office in Green Bay for autopsies.

The girls and other people displaced by the explosion and fire were given food and shelter at the Ellison Bay fire station, one of two operated by the Sister Bay/Liberty Grove Fire Department.

Comment: CNN reports:

Jonathan Bastian, a bartender at the Mink River Basin Supper Club in Ellison Bay, said he was finishing up for the night when he heard explosions and called 911. "I told them I think half the ... town blew up," he said. Four people were hospitalized in Green Bay and three others were released, Hecht said. Five others refused treatment or sought medical help on their own, he said.
Post Crescent Reports:
Witnesses reported up to three blasts. Investigators were trying to determine whether one explosion or multiple blasts occurred, Hecht said. “The first one woke me up,” said Laura Capp, 19, of Beach Park, Ill., who was sleeping in her family’s summer home about a quarter-mile away. “The second one was really loud. The third one was quieter, really small,” she said, indicating the explosions happened a second or two apart. The explosions traveled like shock waves for almost a city block, neighboring residents said
Star Tribune Reports:
Bill and Helen Teuber, of Dunnellon, Fla., were sleeping at Hotel Disgarden when the explosions woke them. "We heard two tremendous booms. BOOM! Twice," said Bill Teuber, 89. "I thought it was my building." His wife ran outside, smelling smoke and seeing the sky filled with sparks, Teuber said. "It was like fireworks," he said as his son moved the couple from the hotel. "It was too close for comfort."


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Flare Ends Solar Quiet Spell

SPX
July 11, 2006

Pasadena CA - After a long quiet spell without any strong solar storms, the sun unleashed a flare (M-class, which means moderate) and a fairly substantial coronal mass ejection on July 7... [A] bright cloud of particles was blasted into space.
Its source was the large sunspot at active region 898. These storms carry billions of tons of matter at millions of miles per hour. These coronal mass ejections clouds of energized particles may reach the Earth in two to three days, creating the possibility of some brilliant aurora displays further down from the North and South Polar regions than usual.

Sometimes they can also create communication, navigation and satellite problems. However, in this case, due to its sharp angle off to the right, it is quite unlikely that we will experience any strong effects from this storm.

In coronagraph images, an occulting disk blocks out the sun and some of the area beyond it creating something like an artificial solar eclipse. The size of the sun is represented by the white circle.



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Second meteorite in a month hits Norway

Jul 10, 2006
UPI


STAVANGER, Norway -- A meteorite weighing about 4 pounds landed in western Norway during the weekend -- the second meteoritic impact in Norway within a month.

The meteorite, creating a crater about 10 inches deep, landed Sunday in the yard of a home, but caused no injuries or damage.
University of Stavanger Professor Per Amund Amundsen, a member of the Stavanger Astronomy Society, told Aftenposten meteorites land in Norway as often as every month, but most are never found. He called the incident 'extremely exciting.'

The meteorite might a valuable sales object, Aftenposten said, noting prices on the Internet for other meteorites ranged to more than $100,000.



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Sleep helps the brain remember facts better: study

Last Updated Tue, 11 Jul 2006 08:39:06 EDT
CBC News

Sleep seems to help the human brain consolidate memories such as the ability to recall recently learned facts, researchers say.

The benefits of sleep for non-declarative memories, such as the steps of learning to tap numeric sequences on a keyboard, are well established. The new experiment focused on declarative memory - such as recalling facts for a test - in which the brain's hippocampus is involved.
Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen of Harvard Medical School in Boston and his colleagues studied 48 healthy adults aged 18 to 39 who had no sleep problems.

The experiment was designed to test whether sleep helps build and maintain memory and overcome interference, the tendency to forget something else when learning a new piece of information.

In the lab, participants tried to memorize 20 pairs of words and were later tested on their recall.

Participants were divided into four groups:

* Sleep before testing.
* Wake before testing.
* Sleep before testing with interference.
* Wake before testing with interference.

Brain active during sleep

In this case, the interference or distraction was a second list of word pairs that participants were supposed to try to ignore during testing.

Those who slept between learning and testing were able to recall more of the original words compared with those who didn't get to sleep.

The beneficial effect was even starker between the sleep-interference group, with an average recall of 76 per cent, and the the wake-interference group at 32 per cent, the team reports in Tuesday's online issue of the journal Current Biology. "This is the first study to demonstrate that sleep protects declarative memories from associative interference in the subsequent day," the researchers wrote, adding that sleep "plays an active role in declarative-memory consolidation."

The results add to the evidence supporting the role sleep plays in declarative memory, based on studies on animals and brain imaging, the researchers said.



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World in Chaos


EU court says former French PM guilty of favouritism

AFP
July 11, 2006

LUXEMBOURG - The European Court of Justice has ruled that former French prime minister Edith Cresson was guilty of favouritism while she was a European commissioner, but did not levy any financial penalty.

Cresson, who served as research and education commissioner in Brussels from 1995 to 1999, was notably accused of hiring a dentist from her home town as an advisor, despite being warned the move was not possible.

The scandal surrounding Cresson, who was also French prime minister in 1991 and 1992, helped spark the collective resignation in March 1999 of the entire European Commission under then president Jacques Santer.




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French Soccer and the Future of Europe

By DAVE ZIRIN and JOHN COX
July 8 / 9, 2006
CounterPunch

The story of the 2006 World Cup has been the resurrection of France. After a lackluster performance in its first two games, the French team shocked the football watching world--otherwise known as "the world"--by upsetting Spain and then dethroning Brazil, the second time in three World Cups the French have knocked off the global kings of "the beautiful game."

While hundreds of thousands of people celebrated on the Champs-Elysées following France's stunning turn-around, not everyone was feeling the joy. Proud racist and leader of the ultra-right wing National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, could not resist defiling the moment. Le Pen decried France's multi-ethnic team as unrepresentative of French society, saying that France "cannot recognize itself in the national side," and "maybe the coach exaggerated the proportion of players of color and should have been a bit more careful."
Le Pen and others of his ilk do not recognize themselves in a team whose leader is of Algerian descent--Zinedine Zidane--and whose most feared striker is black--Thierry Henry. Le Pen used to torture Algerians for the French military in the 1950s and it turns his stomach that his team reflects France's (and Europe's) colonial past, with players from Cameroon, Guadalupe, Senegal, Congo, Algeria, and Benin among other countries.

Le Pen's efforts to use the pitch as a battleground for his Neanderthal views about immigration and Islam have not gone unanswered. After his latest comments, France midfielder Lilian Thuram said, "Clearly, he is unaware that there are Frenchmen who are black, Frenchmen who are white, Frenchmen who are brown. I think that reflects particularly badly on a man who has aspirations to be president of France but yet clearly doesn't know anything about French history or society.... That's pretty serious. He's the type of person who'd turn on the television and see the American basketball team and wonder: 'Hold on, there are black people playing for America? What's going on?'"

Thuram went on to say, "When we take to the field, we do so as Frenchmen. All of us. When people were celebrating our win, they were celebrating us as Frenchmen, not black men or white men. It doesn't matter if we're black or not, because we're French. I've just got one thing to say to Jean Marie Le Pen. The French team are all very, very proud to be French. If he's got a problem with us, that's down to him but we are proud to represent this country. So Vive la France, but the true France. Not the France that he wants." In addition, the immensely talented Henry has started an antiracist campaign called Stand Up Speak Up. Henry pushed his sponsor Nike to produce black and white intertwined armbands that demonstrate a commitment against racism. So far, they have sold more than five million. "That's important in making the very real point that racism is a problem for everyone, a collective ailment," Henry said to Time Magazine. "It shows that people of all colors, even adversaries on the pitch, are banding together in this, because we're all suffering from it together."

Henry's campaign has resonance because Le Pen does not have the market cornered on racism in the sport. So-called fans, throwing banana peels and peanuts at star players of African descent, have plagued European soccer this past season. For much of the World Cup, such assaults did not occur. But before the June 27th game against Spain, the French coach, Raymond Domenech, said Spanish fans were "making monkey chants" as the French team left their bus. The incident evoked memories of an outrageous racist diatribe against Thierry Henry delivered by Spanish coach Luis Aragones to "inspire" his team before a match against France a couple years ago. When Franch defeated Spain last week, it was more just desserts for Aragones and another bitter pill for Le Pen.

Thuram and Henry are continuing a proud tradition of recent years, as players from "Les Bleus," as the national team is called, have consistently spoken out against those like Le Pen who cannot countenance a non-white French team. Le Pen made headlines before the 1998 World Cup for saying that France's multi-ethnic team was "artificial," and was mortified when Zidane and Henry did something no previous Frenchmen had accomplished-won the World Cup, a triumph that was widely celebrated as a victory for multiculturalism. While Le Pen was campaigning in the presidential elections of 2002, the French team issued a statement denouncing the politics of the National Front. Delivered by Ghanaian-born captain Marcel Desailly, the statement read: "The players in the French team, from diverse origins . . . are unanimous in condemning resurgent ideas of racism and exclusion." Desailly's statement further condemned "attitudes that endanger democracy and freedom as intolerable and indefensible, particularly in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural France." Zidane amplified this message, calling for a huge vote against Le Pen.

It is paradoxical that a victory by France, a country with as grisly a colonial past as any European power, could be a cause for celebration by immigrants and fighters for social justice. But as last year's "suburb" riots and mass youth demonstrations have shown, there is a battle over the future of French politics and by extension, the future of Europe. Anti-Arab and Moslem sentiment is by no means monopolized by Le Pen and his cronies on the far right. Whether or not they defeat Italy for the title, the astonishing success of France's multi-ethnic team presents another vision for the future of the continent.

Dave Zirin is the author of "'What's My name Fool?': Sports and Resistance in the United States." Contact him at whatsmynamefool2005@yahoo.com.

John Cox is an assistant History professor at Florida Gulf Coast University.



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Africa Aid Eaten Up By Consultants

AllAfrica.com
06/07/2006

No less than a quarter of annual development aid -- about 20 billion dollars -- is being used by donor countries to fund technical assistance of sometimes dubious worth, says ActionAid International in a new report.

The study, titled 'Real Aid 2', was launched Wednesday by the Johannesburg-based non-governmental organisation (NGO). As with last year's 'Real Aid', it examines how development funding is spent.

The term "technical assistance" refers to research, training, and the services rendered by consultants -- some of whom command fees that ActionAid finds excessive.

According to the report, based on 2004 data, it typically costs about 200,000 dollars a year to keep an expatriate consultant on staff. School fees and child allowances account for more than a third of this expense, which could be reduced with greater use of local advisors.

"Money is being spent on consultants who are earning up to 1,000 dollars a day," Caroline Sande Mukulira, South Africa country director for ActionAid International, told IPS Wednesday.

Notes the report, "High salaries paid to expatriate advisors can also cause significant resentment among counterparts and the public in the south."

"In the Ghana education service headquarters, government officials receive about 300 dollars a month, what a relatively inexperienced Ghanaian consultant could expect to earn in a day, and a foreign consultant in a few hours," it adds.

The report also mentions a former UK-funded consultant's claim that their daily take-home pay in Sierra Leone was the same as the monthly salary of the auditor general.

Perhaps more alarmingly, however, these high-priced advisors may fail to deliver lasting benefits.

'Real Aid 2' cites the case of the Bagamoyo irrigation project undertaken in Tanzania with Japanese support, where farmers were trained in the use of pumps supplied by the Japanese, in the 1990s. As a result of the rising cost of diesel and the lack of local expertise to maintain the machinery, the project's success has been limited.

In addition, says ActionAid, technical assistance is often far less neutral than the term would imply.

"They (donors) continue to use technical assistance to police and direct the policy agendas of developing country governments, or to create ownership of the kinds of reforms donors deem suitable," notes the report.

"Donor funded advisors have even been brought in to draft supposedly 'country owned' poverty reduction strategies."

Technical assistance that is too expensive, or ineffective, amounts to "phantom aid," observes ActionAid -- as opposed to the "real aid" of the report's title, which leads to discernible improvements in poor nations.

The report also identifies other trends that turn real aid into phantom aid; these include counting debt cancellation as aid, requiring aid to be spent on goods and services from donor countries irrespective of whether these offer the best value for money -- and poor donor co-ordination of aid.

"Between 2005 and 2006 80 percent of all contracts awarded by DfID (Britain's Department for International Development) went to UK (United Kingdom)-based firms. In their rhetoric, they will say the money went to aid. In reality, the money remained in the UK," said Mukulira, who also took issue with refugee-related domestic costs that certain rich countries catalogue as aid.

"Switzerland and Austria are particularly notorious. When you see figures from their aid budget, 15 percent of it is spent on refugees living in their countries."

All in all, ActionAid estimates just under half of all aid to be phantom aid.

According to 'Real Aid 2', the inefficiency of technical assistance is "an open secret within the development community." Still, says Moreblessings Chidaushe of the Harare-based African Forum & Network on Debt & Development, an NGO, poor nations are struggling to change the way funding is administered.

"It is difficult for poor countries to negotiate the type of aid they get; it's lack of resources. Either you take it or you leave it. If you take it, you take it with conditions. If you don't, you end up with nothing," she told IPS Wednesday.

ActionAid proposes a number of solutions for this situation, notably that developing nations make their own determinations of what technical assistance they need.

Recommendations to donors include a call for them to make as much use as possible of the resources in poor countries targeted for assistance, rather than looking abroad.

As the report's author, Romilly Greenhill, notes in a statement, "Aid needs to help the poorest, not line the pockets of western consultants."

"Too much aid continues to be designed and managed by donors. It is tied to their countries' own firms, is poorly coordinated and is based on a set of assumptions about expatriate expertise and recipient ignorance."



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Bush Defends Putin Against Criticism on Backsliding From Democracy

Created: 11.07.2006 17:32 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 17:32 MSK
MosNews

President Bush is toning down his administration's criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin's steps to restrict political and economic freedoms as Russia prepares to host an annual G8 summit of economic powers, the Associated Press reports.

Bush cited a "good friendship" with the Russian president, said he hoped to put the finishing touches on a deal to bring Russia into the World Trade Organization, and remarked that it was for others - not the United States - to say whether Russia was intent on blackmailing its neighbors on energy.

"That's not an issue we worry about here at home. That's an issue that the European leaders are going to have to work through," Bush said in an interview with foreign reporters ahead of this week's trip to Germany and to St. Petersburg, Russia.

Bush defended Putin against criticism from some at home and overseas that Russia should not be a member of the Group of Eight industrial democracies, let alone the host, because of antidemocratic activities.

"As far as that G-8 goes, from my perspective, Russia is an active participant. President Putin has been there, he speaks, he talks, he acts, he interfaces, plus, he's hosting it," Bush said.

"We've got a good friendship with the Putins. We're comfortable around them," Bush said in an interview in the White House on Monday with reporters from Russia, Germany, Italy and Japan. The White House released a transcript of the session on Tuesday.

While he noted that "there are problems that are surfacing" in the U.S.-Russian relationship, Bush's words were far milder than those of Vice President Dick Cheney.

In a speech in Lithuania in May, Cheney accused the Putin government of backsliding from democracy and exerting more state control over the economy, particularly the energy industry.



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US Demo


Emotional General Speaks of Immigrant Father

By Glenn Frankel and Daniela Deane
Washington Post
Tuesday, July 11, 2006

MIAMI -- A congressional hearing on immigration came to a dramatic pause Monday when Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, choked up as he talked about his Italian immigrant father and the opportunities that America had given to his family.

A hush fell over the auditorium at Miami Dade College as Pace, a Marine who was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up in Teaneck, N.J., was overcome with emotion and struggled to continue reading from his statement as the opening witness at the field hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Pace was explaining his family's origins to the committee and the opportunities he and his three siblings enjoyed in America when he lost his composure, much to the surprise of the 150 people gathered in the hearing room and to the five senators, who sat riveted as the general paused.
After he composed himself, Pace described his older sister, who went to law school, and his older brother, who, like himself, attended the Naval Academy and was a Marine.

"There is no other country on the planet that affords that kind of opportunity to those who come here," Pace concluded. The audience burst into applause.

Pace's father was born in Italy in 1914, immigrated to the United States and became an electrician in New York City, raising four children there. The first Marine to be named chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Pace has been chairman since September 2005 after serving as vice chairman for four years.

Pace, whose last name means "peace" in Italian, is a 1967 graduate of the Naval Academy and has served in Thailand, Korea and Japan.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who was at the hearing, said Pace made an "enormously moving comment and statement" and added: "We just hope our colleagues in the Congress can hear it."

Field hearings are being held around the country on the separate House and Senate immigration bills currently before Congress. The subject of the Miami hearing, chaired by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.), was the contributions immigrants have made to the armed forces.

The House bill calls for tighter border controls, 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border and funding for local law enforcement agencies along the border. It also calls for tougher deportation standards and stringent enforcement of rules governing employers who hire undocumented workers.

The Senate's immigration bill, co-sponsored by Kennedy and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), includes similar provisions. But it also outlines a method for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants to become U.S. citizens and calls for a guest-worker program that would provide legal residency status for as long as six years.

In recent weeks, the White House and Senate Republicans have indicated a willingness to tackle border security first, but only if the action later triggers some or all of the Senate bill's residency-related provisions.

House GOP leaders have dismissed such features as the guest-worker program as an unacceptable "amnesty" for lawbreakers. They were the first to call for field hearings as a means of showcasing popular support for their approach while also delaying negotiations with senators on a final bill.

After Pace's emotional testimony, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) asked the general whether his parents were still living. Pace replied that his mother was still alive.

"When you have Italian blood in you, sometimes it wells up and grabs your heart," he told Graham.

Graham said, "It takes a strong Marine to cry."



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WMDs in slow motion

Mary Robinson
Tuesday July 11, 2006
The Guardian

The US and other states have scuppered a deal to control the deadly trade in small arms

Last week, Pyongyang test-fired seven missiles in defiance of international opposition. The response has been justifiably high, but far less attention has been given to an equally dangerous threat to security around the world - the spread of small arms.

The UN small arms review conference, which ended last Friday, was aimed at advancing international efforts to control the small arms trade. Small arms may get less press attention than other weapons, but they are no less deadly. Kofi Annan has described them as weapons of mass destruction in slow motion, and with good reason: small arms kill more people every year than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together.
The small arms trade is not subject to a comprehensive global agreement. Instead, there is a patchwork of national export laws, which unscrupulous arms dealers can easily circumvent. As a result, small arms fall into the wrong hands every day. During the two-week conference most governments said that they supported an agreement to control sales, but instead of fighting to secure a deal that would protect the millions of people worldwide living in daily fear of armed violence, they stood by while the conference was scuppered. It collapsed without agreement after a small number of countries, most prominently the US, blocked key issues.

In the first week of the conference, a group of countries led by Kenya and Britain proposed a set of guidelines for small arms sales based on international human rights and humanitarian law. These principles would have prevented weapons from being sold if there was a risk they could be used to kill or terrorise innocent people. The proposal was not a radical one. Five years ago, governments met for the first time to address the problem of small arms violence and agreed they should regulate sales in line with their existing responsibilities under international law. This proposal merely elaborated what those responsibilities were under human rights and humanitarian law.

Because the conference agreement had to be approved by all 192 countries attending, any government was able to veto any part of it. Cuba, India, Iran, Israel and Pakistan all opposed global controls. And while the US had said at the beginning of the conference that it would consider controls, it objected to so many parts of the draft that it in effect blocked agreement of the entire document.

Even before the final collapse, a handful of states succeeded in blocking the crucial proposal for controls and in removing references to human rights and humanitarian law. They made it clear they saw small arms control solely as a national security issue.

The link between the uncontrolled small arms trade and human rights abuses could not be clearer on the ground. I have seen it myself many times - for example when I visited Rwanda just after the 1994 genocide. There, supplies of small arms allowed the Hutu militia to take an estimated 800,000 lives while the world stood by.

A resolution is likely to be put forward at the UN general assembly in October for governments to start negotiations on an international arms trade treaty, which could be based on states' existing responsibilities under human rights and humanitarian law. Several governments have indicated they want a resolution to start work on such a legally binding instrument. Governments must not let the setback of the review conference stop them winning the battle against the unregulated trade of small arms.

- Mary Robinson, a former UN high commissioner for human rights, is president of Realising Rights: The Ethical Globalisation Initiative and honorary president of Oxfam International



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New York unveils bird flu emergency plan

AFP
Mon July 10, 2006

NEW YORK - New York officials unveiled an emergency response plan to limit the havoc a global flu pandemic might wreak on one of the world's densest, busiest cities.

The plan, drawn up by the Department of Health with input from all the main city agencies, covers critical health areas involved in a pandemic, including disease monitoring, laboratory capacity, vaccine and medicine delivery, as well as hospital preparedness.

"We have to be ready for the possibility -- no matter how remote," said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The contingency blueprint addresses how the city would implement infection control, address surge capacity in hospitals and enact disease containment measures like closing schools or limiting public gatherings.

Health Commissioner Thomas Friedman said even the best-laid plans could not prevent the social and economic chaos a pandemic would bring, but they could help lessen the impact.

"Without a vaccine, and with medications of limited supply and effectiveness, traditional measures of reducing disease spread -- such as covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze, or staying home from work or school if you have fever -- would be crucial," Friedman said.

The plan envisages a worst-case scenario of widespread, serious illness that significantly impacts all sectors of society for at least several months.

The health care system would be overburdened and there could be dramatic reductions in workforce availability in all sectors as employees become ill or remain home to care for sick family members

Some of the measures included in the blueprint have been worked out from large-scale emergency response exercises to a simulated biological attack on the city.

The new plan is essentially a response to the spread of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus which has been found in 60 countries in the past two and a half years.

Although the H5N1 virus does not spread easily between people, those who come in contact with sick birds can contract it, and scientists fear a pandemic if it mutates into a disease transmissible between humans.

The virus has so far infected 229 people. More than half -- 131 -- have died.



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US in $80m 'Cuba democracy' plan

BBC
Tuesday, 11 July 2006

US President George W Bush has approved an $80m (£43m) fund which he says will go towards boosting democracy in Cuba.

Mr Bush said the fund would help the Cuban people in their "transition from repressive control to freedom".

The fund is part of proposals by a commission analysing US policy towards Cuba after the eventual death of Fidel Castro, who turns 80 next month.

The Cuban government said the plan was an act of aggression, violating Cuba's sovereignty and international law.
The president of Cuba's National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, said the world should be outraged by the actions of the US.

"They will not destroy the nation. They will not succeed in doing that. But they will cause harm and deprivation and suffering of individuals," he said.

The US announcement comes as President Castro, in power since 1959, prepares to celebrates his birthday in August and amid moves by the Cuban government to give a higher profile to his designated successor, his 75-year-old brother Raul Castro.

In a statement, President Bush said he had approved a "compact" with the Cuban people which outlined how the US would support them "as they transition from the repressive control of the Castro regime to freedom and a genuine democracy.

"The report demonstrates that we are actively working for change in Cuba, not simply waiting for change," Mr Bush said.

Dissident concern

The report, drawn up by the US Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, also includes other measures such as enforcing sanctions already in place against the communist regime and "providing uncensored information" for Cubans who want change.

US President George W Bush President Bush says the US will not wait for change

The commission's members include US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.

Ms Rice said the funding and report's recommendations aimed to help "Cuba's brave opposition leaders and to encourage those Cubans still silent out of fear but free in their hearts and minds to dream of a better future."

However, dissidents in Havana voiced concern that the new funding could serve as a pretext for the Cuban authorities to step up the pressure on them.

"I really appreciate the solidarity of the United States government and people, but I think that this report is counterproductive," dissident journalist Oscar Espinosa Chepe told foreign news agencies.

"I believe Cubans have to be the ones who solve our problems and any interference serves to complicate the situation."

Since the fall of the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Cuba has been a one-party state led by Mr Castro.

Since 1961, the US has maintained a strict economic embargo against Cuba.

Comment: International law has never stopped the US from overthrowing the governments of other nations before.

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Thanks, Rummy


Rumsfeld says U.S. committed to Afghanistan

Last Updated Tue, 11 Jul 2006 05:41:42 EDT
CBC News

Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday from Kabul that the U.S. will remain committed to the rebuilding of Afghanistan even as it prepares to cede leadership of coalition forces serving there.

Rumsfeld met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, with a key issue in their discussions being the increasing role NATO will take in the coming weeks in providing security in the southern part of the country.
Afterward, as the pair met with reporters, Rumsfeld said the U.S. would maintain an active interest in the effort after the handover.

There are currently 23,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and Rumsfeld told reporters before arriving in Kabul from Tajikistan that top U.S. commander Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry would be discussing with the Kabul government whether more troops may be required.

On Monday, Britain announced it would be sending an additional 900 troops to Afghanistan.

Recent weeks have seen a resurgence in Taliban violence, and Rumsfeld said before arriving for his 11th trip to Afghanistan that there are concerns that drug trafficking is helping bankroll the militants.

30 militants killed in coalition raid

Meanwhile, the military said an estimated 30 extremists were killed by coalition and Afghan forces Tuesday in a raid in southern Afghanistan. A coalition helicopter made an emergency landing during the operation and had to be destroyed.

The raid took place in Sangin village in the volatile Helmand province, where more than 3,000 NATO-led British troops have been deploying to take over security control from U.S. forces.

The raid was conducted as part of Operation Mountain Thrust, the large-scale anti-Taliban offensive across southern Afghanistan involving more than 10,000 troops that began last month.




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Air raids kill 60 civilians in Afghanistan

www.chinaview.cn 2006-07-11 14:18:54

KABUL, July 11 (Xinhua) -- Air raids conducted by the U.S.-led coalition forces in the southern Uruzgan province of Afghanistan have left at least 60 civilians dead, a lawmaker from the restive province said Tuesday.

"The aircraft pounded three villages namely Deh Jauze, Sarosah and Kakrak, 12 km away from Trinkot, the provincial capital of Uruzgan, Monday morning which lasted from 1:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m.," Abdul Khaliq told Xinhua.
About 30 more civilians were wounded in the air strikes, he added.

On the other hand, the U.S. military rejected the claim as baseless.

"No, there was no civilian injured, and we have no report to support the claim," spokesperson of the coalition Tamara Lawrence told Xinhua.

The U.S. military in a press released issued on Monday said that the coalition attacks had left more than 40 extremists dead in villages 10 km away from Trinkot.

More than 1,000 people mostly Taliban-linked militants have been killed in the ongoing insurgency since the beginning of this year.



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Britain sends 900 soldiers to Afghanistan

AP
7/10/2006

LONDON - Britain said Monday it was sending 900 more soldiers to southern Afghanistan to combat resistance from a resurgent Taliban.

Britain has around 5,000 troops in Afghanistan - about 3,600 in volatile Helmand province, 1,200 in the Afghan capital Kabul and the remainder in the southern city of Kandahar.

The additional British soldiers will be sent to Helmand, a hub of the Afghan opium trade, Defense Secretary Des Browne said. Some 200 would deploy in the next few weeks and the rest by October, he said.
Six Britons have been killed in Helmand since the beginning of June, nearly half the military's 13 deaths in Afghanistan since 2001.

Afghanistan has been gripped in recent months by the worst violence since a U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban regime after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Browne told the House of Commons that commanders decided recently to move troops into northern Helmand to stabilize the province, creating the need for more soldiers.

"We have taken casualties, but we have overmatched the opposing forces every single time we have faced them," Browne said. "They have tried to block our mission and failed."

Critics have said British troops lack needed equipment, particularly helicopters, and were ill-prepared for the intensity of the violence they have faced.

In Washington, visiting British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett denied the NATO-led force had underestimated the degree to which Taliban insurgents would be able to create havoc five years after being driven from power.

U.S. STRIKE: 40 suspected Taliban killed

But she acknowledged there had been "perhaps a slightly stronger reaction" from the Taliban than had been anticipated. Beckett spoke during a joint news briefing with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after a meeting at the State Department.

Rice conceded that Afghanistan still has determined enemies but said she would take "this Afghanistan any day over the Afghanistan which we found when we, the British and others, liberated the Afghan people from one of the worst regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries."

Beckett said most of the additional British forces being sent will work on infrastructure and other projects designed to improve the daily lives of Afghans.

Many of the additional troops will remain for at least six months as NATO takes charge of the peacekeeping mission across southern Afghanistan at the end of the month, officials said.

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer welcomed the new deployment.

"This decision reflects NATO's firm resolve to continue to support Afghanistan's reconstruction and its democratic development," he said in Brussels.

NATO is increasing its force in Afghanistan from 9,700 to 16,000, with the expansion into the south to be completed by the end of July.

The alliance hopes eventually to take on eastern Afghanistan by November, completing its expansion across the country and increasing its total numbers to 21,000.

The United States has at least 21,000 troops in Afghanistan, but there has been talk of a cut of up to 20%. Many of those that remain will be incorporated into the NATO force. However, the U.S. will also maintain a combat force independent of NATO to hunt down Taliban and al-Qaeda militants.

Comment: Guess which world leader is still Bush's lapdog??

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Lapdogland


MI5 has secret dossiers on one in 160 adults

By Martin Delgado
The Mail
Sunday 9th July 2006

The Government was accused last night of hoarding information about people who pose no danger to this country, after it emerged that MI5 holds secret files on 272,000 individuals - a staggering one in 160 adults.

MPs and civil-rights campaigners said resources should be concentrated on combating genuine threats - such as Islamic terrorism - rather than storing personal and political data about innocent citizens.

Figures released by the Home Office last week reveal that another 53,000 files are held about organisations, but 110,000 files have been destroyed since Labour came to power in 1997.
The information was obtained by Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who believes he was the target of MI5 surveillance in the Eighties because of his activities as an environmental protester.

Five years ago he won a High Court ruling giving him access to his file, which ended the security services' blanket exemption from the Data Protection Act.

Last night, Mr Baker said: 'I don't believe there are 272,000 people in this country who are subversive or potentially subversive. It suggests to me that there are files being held for not very good reasons.

'We want the security services to be effective. We don't want them going down blind alleys and wasting their resources on people who are no threat to the country.'

Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights group Liberty, said: 'We need to be sure that MI5 officers are not keeping files just for the sake of it.

'Resources should be concentrated on gathering information on those who pose a real threat to this country.'

But intelligence expert Rupert Allason believes information should never be thrown away.

He said: 'A security agency is only as good as its files and it should never give up a personal file - even when somebody dies.

'It is enormously important for agents running a current operation to be able to look back 40 or 50 years and see links and connections.'

A Home Office spokesman said: 'We are not prepared to comment any further than the information given in the answers to the parliamentary questions.'



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Rebel MPs to be given 'yellow card'

By David Charter
The Times
July 10, 2006

LABOUR party chiefs are to introduce a "yellow card" for dissident MPs in an effort to rein in the party's increasingly unruly rebels under plans expected to be agreed tonight.

The new disciplinary measure, amounting to a short-term suspension from party activity, was drawn up after vitriolic attacks by Labour MPs on senior figures including Tony Blair.

Maverick Labour backbenchers are deeply suspicious of the move, which they see as an attempt by a bruised leadership to stifle debate in the party.
Some fear that it will be used to tarnish their record so that their constituencies de-select them unless they fall into line on government policy. A rebellion by 69 MPs forced Labour to rely on Conservative votes to pass legislation to bring in self-governing trust schools.

Jacqui Smith, the Chief Whip appointed in May, will ask MPs at their weekly meeting tonight to approve the new powers to help her assert her authority.

Ms Smith was understood to be particularly angered at comments made by Alan Simpson, the MP for Nottingham South, who said that Gordon Brown taking over from Tony Blair was like replacing "Saddam Hussein with Uday".

She had only two disciplinary options: withdrawing the whip, which is tantamount to expulsion; or a reprimand, a verbal ticking off, which Mr Simpson received. A Labour source said: "At the moment there is no 'yellow card' in the middle of a ticking off or a sending off, so that is the aim."

Comment: So now the UK government has degenerated into a football match. Will Alan Simpson headbutt Jacqui Smith?? We'll keep you posted.

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Britain Unveils Terrorism Alert System

By DAVID STRINGER
Associated Press
July 10, 2006

LONDON - Britain faces a severe risk of another terrorist attack, a Cabinet minister said Monday as he unveiled a system for sharing threat assessments with the public for the first time.

The new terror alert status system is based on a U.S. Department of Homeland Security model. It will take effect Aug. 1, British Home Secretary John Reid said in a speech to the House of Commons.

The system will rate the threat as low, moderate, substantial, severe or critical.
"Critical" would indicate strong intelligence of an expected imminent attack. The threat assessment was for the country as a whole and would not indicate the threat to any locality.

"This is not an exact science. It involves human judgment," Reid said days after the first anniversary of the attacks on London's transport system in which 52 commuters and four bombers died.

The U.S. alert system uses a color-coded five-point scale to gauge the threat level ranging from green for low to red for severe.

The previous British system was strongly criticized by Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee in a report issued in May. It found that Britain's threat level had been reduced from "severe general" to "substantial" immediately before the attack, but said the decision was "not unreasonable" based on the intelligence available.

The report called for better public access to information about Britain's alert status.

"There is a growing recognition among ministers and within the Home Office that the public have a right to know about we are doing, even more so since July 7," a Home Office spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity, in line with department policy.

Also on Monday, the government dropped an idea Prime Minister Tony Blair said officials would consider shortly after the London bombings last year - limiting how long extradition proceedings could continue for terror suspects sought by other countries.

The Home Office said experts had decided such a limit was not feasible, since it could give suspects grounds for challenging their extradition.

Blair had said cases in which extradition hearings drag on for years were completely unacceptable.



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