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Editorial: Wall Street Journal Rhapsodizes Over Sham UN Resolution to End Lebanon War
by Stephen Lendman
18 August 2006
On its editorial page at least the Wall Street Journal is consistent. It never fails to disappoint or miss an opportunity to misinform its readers. The August 16 article by the right wing Hoover Institution George Shultz Senior Fellow and former US State Department legal advisor in the 1980s Abraham Sofaer is just the latest example. The article is a typical Journal litany of propaganda, distortion, and deliberate misstatement of facts. It's what we've come to expect from an editorial page only hard right supporters and proponents of empire would love. It's not what we should expect from a former Columbia University School of Law professor who surely knows the law well and shouldn't twist it to misinform his readers when he writes about it.
The article is titled "Solution and Resolution" so before even reading it it's clear Mr. Sofaer is mis-portraying truth and reality. He begins by saying UN Resolution 1701 "contains the bases upon which a lasting peace could be established along the Lebanon/Israel border, and true sovereign authority transferred to Lebanon's government. But these objectives will succeed only if the resolution's demands are met." With that opening salvo, it's hard not being breathless and needing to pause before reading on.
First off, what on earth does Mr. Sofaer mean by "true sovereign authority transferred to Lebanon's government." Doesn't this distinguished Fellow know Lebanon is a sovereign state and the issue at hand is not about a transference of anything except the right of the Lebanese government to "transfer" the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) back to Israel. As for the Security Council action on August 11, Resolution 1701 was a revised version of the original one jointly proposed by the US and France and with all provisions in it agreed to in advance by Israel before being put to a vote. Neither Lebanon nor Hezbollah were afforded the same right, and it showed in what passed unanimously as the demands of Israel and the US were met but not those of the country and its people the IDF attacked preemptively.
By having passed this resolution, the Security Council once again showed the world the UN is little more than a servile agent of US imperial foreign policy and that of its allies. As it did so often in the past, this international body failed in the primary mission it was set up for as stated in its Charter: "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, to maintain international peace and security, (and to suppress) acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace." By its vote on August 11, the Security Council, in fact, did the opposite. In effect, it sanctioned an illegal war of aggression and in doing so violated the most fundamental principle of its own Charter. It's clear the distinguished law professor and author of this article wholeheartedly approves.
He no doubt also approves and certainly understands that the one thing this resolution will never guarantee is peace in the region, justifiable retribution and justice for the victims or any possible outcome other than continued conflict. It's also likely it was designed with that in mind as a "lasting peace" would undermine Israel's hardened position to oppose any political solution and is only able to avoid one in a state of conflict against an adversary it portrays as terrorists even though it and its members are not. Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir explained it in the 1980s (which Mr. Sofaer surely must know) when he admitted his country went to war with Lebanon in 1982 because there was "a terrible danger....not so much a military one as a political one." But Israel couldn't invade the country without good reason to do it. It found none so it invented one after the terrorist Abu Nidal organization attempted to assassinate the Israeli Ambassador to the UK in London. The Israelis blamed it on the PLO and Yassar Arafat based in Lebanon that had nothing to do with it, falsely claimed it was acting to protect its citizens from PLO attacks when there were none, went to war based on a lie and killed 18,000 mostly civilian Lebanese and Palestinians before it ended - and all to avoid a political solution.
Mr. Sofaer goes on to state successful implementation of the resolution "depends on convincing Syria to end its policy of allowing Hezbollah to be used by Iran to destabilize Israel's security." Once again one must pause for breath-catching as Mr. Sofaer has inverted reality. He seems not to understand that Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and oppressive occupation gave birth to Hezbollah. It was formed as a legitimate resistance to it and is now part of the democratically elected Lebanese government. But Hezbollah is also determined to free its country from a foreign occupier. To do so it became a formidable adversary and finally succeeded in forcing the IDF to withdraw mostly from the country in May, 2000, only remaining in the 25 square kilometer Shebaa Farms area in the South. Ever since Hezbollah has been a bulwark of defense serving and protecting its people in South Lebanon against the Israelis that since withdrawing have made near-daily illegal cross-border incursions, repeated violations of the country's airspace, and have forcibly abducted and now hold in indefinite detention over 10,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, many administratively without charge.
Hizbollah has every right to seek and receive aid from other countries willing to supply it just as Israel receives billions of dollars of military and economic aid annually from the US and with it built the world's fourth most powerful military with nearly every modern weapon including a large nuclear arsenal. But there's a difference in Hezbollah's purpose and that of the Israelis. For Hezbollah it's for self-defense, but for Israel it's for intimidation, occupation and preemptive illegal aggression. Mr. Sofaer seems not to know or admit that Hezbollah never first attacked Israel after the IDF mostly withdrew from Lebanon. And it only ever claims the legitimate right to do so in response to the IDF's illegal occupation of sovereign Lebanese territory. Otherwise, it only responds to Israeli attacks against its forces or the people of Lebanon which Israel has a long history of provocatively making while falsely claiming it only does so in retaliation for what Hezbollah or the Palestinians initiate.
Mr. Sofaer then goes on to make one misstatement after another. He stresses that the IDF must withdraw from Lebanon only after "the Lebanese Army and an expanded United Nations force assume control." He fails to note the resolution only asks Israel to stop "all offensive military operations" without defining what that means and sets no fixed timetable for the IDF withdrawal. This was the language Israel wanted and now has stated its forces may remain in the country for many months. If they do, this will be a deliberate provocation to reignite the conflict after which the IDF will claim it has the right to strike back.
The resolution also calls on Hezbollah to cease "all attacks" immediately but only implies without explicitly stating it must disarm. Mr. Sofaer falsely claims it calls for "Hezbollah's disarmament" and an "end to the importation of weapons." False on both counts as just stated on count one and in the resolution's language on count two that says "no weapons (are allowed) without the consent of the government of Lebanon and no authority other than that of the government of Lebanon." Someone should inform Mr. Sofaer that Hezbollah is a legitimate part of that government, its members comprise a large portion of the Lebanese Army, and thus according to the resolution may have weapons and certainly according to the UN Charter can use them in self-defense. It only must refrain from using them offensively as Israel does all the time under the fraudulent cover of self-defense.
Mr. Sofaer also falsely accuses Hezbollah by implication of initiating the attack on Israel on July 12 and abducting its soldiers. It did neither. Hezbollah responded to repeated IDF attacks on its territory and people and captured (not "abducted") two IDF soldiers. It's believed they illegally crossed the UN-monitored "blue line" into Lebanon as the IDF has routinely done almost daily since withdrawing from the country in May, 2000. Further, Mr. Sofaer is incorrect in saying the resolution will not "allow Israel to act in its reasonable self-defense." In fact, it gives Israel every right to do it by permitting the IDF the right to initiate further assaults any time it believes, true or not and with no corroborating evidence, an imminent threat against the Jewish state exists. In so doing, this provision violates the UN Charter that only allows a nation to use force under two conditions: when authorized to do it by the Security Council or under Article 51 that allows a nation to respond to an attack by another nation. Does this distinguished former law professor not understand this?
Mr. Sofaer also claims Hezbollah has no right to seek arms from allies like Syria and Iran or any other legitimate supplier for its self-defense or to protect the people of Lebanon as it was formed to do. He makes no similar demand of Israel, which is far more heavily armed by the US and replenished as needed, that has a long history of deliberate provocation and belligerence against its neighbors including the Palestinians for nearly six decades. It's done it as well against the Lebanese since 1968 when the IDF conducted terror raids and military aggression against the country that included attacking the Beirut airport and destroying 13 civilian planes on the ground claiming, without evidence, it was in retaliation for an attack by Lebanese trained Palestinians targeting an Israeli airliner in Athens.
Mr. Sofaer also disingenuously accuses Syria of "using Hezbollah to create instability" and in mentioning what he calls Israel's "legitimate concerns in surrendering the Golan Heights," never explaining that Israel wanted that Syrian territory in the first place for its water resources and having seized it almost 40 years ago never intends to negotiate seriously to relinquish it. He shamelessly goes on to say Israel only will withdraw from "non-Israeli territory (if it can be done) without causing increased insecurity and danger for its people......(and) the Israeli people......have shown a willingness to return territory for peace" as it did when signing peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. By this statement Mr. Sofaer inverts history again by failing to acknowledge that Israel has been expansionist throughout its short existence and that Arab attacks against it only occurred in response to IDF first-strike aggressive assaults or after considerable IDF provocation. He never even considers the possibility that if Israel really wanted to live in peace with its neighbors all it need do is to stop attacking them and invading their territory. The fact that it hasn't through the years shows it won't and doesn't want to because, as explained earlier, it won't tolerate a political solution to conflict in the region that could not be avoided in an atmosphere of peace, security and stability.
Mr. Sofaer continues to go from bad to worse by claiming former Prime Minister Aerial Sharon established a policy of withdrawing from Gaza and "building a fence to separate Israelis from Palestinian areas" because "it became clear....the Palestinians were determined to make war on Israel." This is an utter absurdity on its face, Mr. Sofaer must know it with his distinguished credentials, but nonetheless puts this outrageous misstatement of fact in his column. As he surely understands well, the IDF never withdrew from Gaza but only redeployed to new occupation positions from which it could and has reentered the territory at will. He also knows the "separation" wall is being built not for security but as a land-grab policy to seize additional areas from the Palestinians for Israeli settlements. In so doing, Israel is in violation of UN Resolutions 465 and 476 that condemned Israel's policy of "settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories (and said doing so constituted) a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war and also constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East." It called on the government of Israel to "dismantle the existing settlements and in particular to cease....the establishment, construction and planning of (new) settlements in the Arab territories since 1967, including Jerusalem."
Mr. Sofaer also ignores the World Court decision in July, 2004 that the so-called "separation wall" is "contrary to international law (because it) destroyed and confiscated property, greatly restricts Palestinian movement, and severely impedes the exercise by the Palestinian people of (the) right to self-determination." The Court ruled 14 - 1 that construction must end at once, the existing portion already built must be taken down, and affected Palestinians must be compensated for their losses. In its ruling the Court cited binding international law codified in the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention cited above. It went on to rule that Israel was required to comply with the international humanitarian law in the Regulation and Article 49 of the Convention. Israel ignored the ruling and the UN General Assembly that voted 150 - 6 calling on the Jewish state to obey the World Court decision. Surely a distinguished former law professor understands this.
Mr. Sofaer never once mentions in his one-sided pro-Israel article that it was not Hezbollah but Israel that intiated the attack on July 12 using the capture of two of its soldiers as the pretext to do it - hardly a justifiable reason to go to war (a word missing from UN Resolution 1701). He thus fails to acknowledge that under the provisions of the UN Charter cited above, Israel undertook a war of illegal aggression against Lebanon and in so doing is guilty of the "supreme international crime" according to the Nuremberg Charter. It's that crime that convicted Nazis after WW II were hanged for. He further fails to admit or understand that by its actions Israel is guilty of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity not just against the Lebanese but also against the Palestinians who aren't even mentioned in UN Resolution 1701. That conflict is unresolved and continues to rage daily.
The resolution also fails to state in its text that what Israel has done is an act of war or that post-July 12 Hezbollah acted justifiably in self-defense. Mr. Sofaer concludes quite the opposite claiming Hezbollah is the enemy in the (fraudulent) "war on terror" meaning it has no right of self-defense or likely any other rights as well. Resolution 1701 affirms that view granting all rights to the aggressor and none to its victims. As a result, it's little more than an outrageous and illegal expression of victor's justice. But that's quite acceptable to Mr. Sofaer and why wouldn't it be. He's paid to represent the interests of the far right Hoover Institution that never met an aggressive imperial policy it didn't love because those policies are good for business when they work as intended. In the case of Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq for the US, it looks so far like Israel and the US are big losers as their victims have thus far prevailed.
At this stage it's still early in the game for Israel, further along for their close US ally, partner, paymaster and benefactor and too soon to predict or know the final outcome for either country. But at least one thing's for sure. Mr. Sofaer and the empire builders he represents are on the defensive, are facing two humiliating defeats for their mighty military machines against determined guerilla resistance, and are relying on the power of their disingenuous message to convince people otherwise. So far, from what we're learning from the streets, it doesn't seem to be working as planned.
Stephen Lendman can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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Editorial: Why Do We Hate Them?
Jason Miller
17/08/2006
Fear and Loathing in the Occident
Islamophobia is a mental and spiritual affliction. And our Western ruling elites bear the responsibility for inflicting it upon the psyches of the masses.
Now that the Stalinist/Maoist regimes have collapsed or evolved toward capitalism and no fascist states with imperial ambitions exist (besides the United States and its few allies), the American Empire needed to find a new "enemy" to replace Stalinists and Nazis. Much of the soft power employed by the leaders of America's "top down democracy" stems from psychological manipulation of "the mob". Mobilization of the masses against a common enemy "threatening the very existence of the American Way" has long been a staple in the United States' ruling elites' ongoing push to monopolize the world's wealth, power, and prestige.
And who better to vilify than Islamic people? Many are dark-skinned and live in developing nations, meaning their lives are inconsequential in the prevailing moral calculus of the West. The Middle East is predominately Islamic, its sands are oozing with crude oil, and it is home to Israel. From the perspective of the Empire, what better region to target than the Middle East?
And whether one believes that 9/11 was a false flag operation perpetrated by the US government or the work of radical Islamic Fundamentalists, the members of the Bush Regime obviously shed their crocodile tears publicly while privately celebrating the event as their Pearl Harbor. 3,000 civilian deaths and the demolition of a powerful symbol of the Western "value" of avaricious Capitalism whipped the American public into a furor against the "evil Muslims" who "hate our freedoms".
Never mind the fact that the United States and Israel have undertaken a nearly unparalleled program of military aggression and ethnic cleansing throughout the Middle East since the formation of the illegitimate colonial nation in Palestine. Given the premises for founding Israel, someone needs to remind Great Britain and the United States that it is incumbent upon them to create a homeland for homosexuals and Romani people. After all, they were also Holocaust victims and are people without a nation. And like the Palestinians, the other inhabitants of the Middle East are more akin to animals than human beings. So why not establish two more colonies on their land?
On August 13, Sixty Minutes aired a segment that revealed a great deal about Islamophobia and the role the corporate media plays in its proliferation.
In his recent open letter to Mike Wallace, Michael K. Smith declared:
Your interview with Iranian Prime Minister Ahmadinejad was a disgrace to the journalistic profession. You began with the condescending manner of a school principal lecturing the class clown for immature behavior and squandered the entire interview on hypocritically accusatory questions. If gall were an Olympic sport, you'd take the Gold Medal.
Michael made some fine points throughout his letter. However, I opine that he was too generous when he called Wallace's vituperative verbal assault an interview. What I witnessed was Mike Wallace, the Ugly American. Brimming with contempt, impatience, hubris, and belligerence, he more closely resembled the Grand Inquisitor than a journalist.
Did Wallace truly fail to grasp that he was acting as an apologist and cheerleader for bellicose, heartless, and ruthless perpetrators of war crimes on behalf of Israel, and thus is a Zionist (as Ahmadinejad suggested)? Through its grossly biased coverage of the "War on Terrorism" and mindless perpetuation of the inane myth that Israel has the right to annihilate an unlimited number of civilians to protect its "right to exist", CBS News has joined the squad of corporate media cheerleaders which has been shamelessly complicit in the Empire's egregious crimes against humanity. I submit that one can be a Zionist and a journalist. Mike Wallace is living proof.
Yet in spite of Wallace's tenacious efforts, the "devil incarnate", Ahmadinejad, remained composed. At times Ahmadinejad seemed to thoroughly enjoy Wallace's obvious "flustration" in attacking him from what has become an absurdly untenable position, both morally and logically. For those of us who don't believe the Western media fairy tale that the United States is a force for good engaged in a noble struggle in its bid to rid the world of the evil of Islam and defend Israel's "right to exist", Wallace's ill-fated attempt to expose the malevolence of the "enemy" was quite entertaining.
Just as Wallace scrambled madly in a hopeless attempt to prevail intellectually in his interrogation of Ahmadinejad, the debt-ridden, aging American Empire and its allies are flailing wildly in a desperate attempt to claim military victory in the Middle East. And like Ahmadinejad, those who comprise the resistance to occupation and exploitation in the Middle East are facing down their occupiers with a deft persistence, filled with a confidence born from the knowledge that recent history has not been kind to imperial invaders facing a people determined to expel them (i.e. Vietnam, Lebanon, and Iraq).
In the perverse worldview of the Neocons, Israel, and AIPAC, Iran is considered to be a part of the "Axis of Evil". Since Wallace championed the cause of the "benevolent" United States in his Sixty Minutes interrogation of the leader of one of the members of the "Axis", it is instructive to consider the "evils" Iran and resistance groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have perpetrated.
While various resistance groups in the Middle East have certainly committed war crimes by killing civilians, the "leader of the free world" and its counterpart in Palestine have annihilated hundreds of thousands more civilians than have the so-called "terrorists".
Yes, militant Fundamentalist Islamic individuals wield much of the power in Iran. But let's put on our thinking caps to discern how that situation evolved. In 1979 hard-line anti-American Islamic clerics assumed control of the Iranian government when they ousted the Shah (the corrupt US puppet who tortured and killed tens of thousands of Iranian "dissidents" during his reign of terror). Ironically, the Iranian government the United States loves to hate exists because the CIA and MI6 facilitated the Shah taking power from Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. The significance? Mossadegh was a democratically-elected secular prime minister who had had the audacity to nationalize the oil industry because the British oil companies were grossly exploiting the Iranian people. By acting in typical fashion (by taking out a populist leader and replacing him with a vicious tyrant), the United States provided an incubator for powerful anti-American sentiment. Thus the United States and Great Britain are responsible for the theocracy in Iran which they fear and despise.
Corporate media pundits like Michelle Malkin and Anne Coulter are the vanguards in spreading pernicious distortions which fan the rapidly spreading emotional flames of fear, prejudice, and hatred comprising Islamophobia. Two of the most disturbing and inflammatory perversions of the truth the Western media entities disseminate are that all adherents of the Islamic faith are radical fundamentalists and that Sharia Law is universally harsh and grossly inferior to the Empire's system (which provides "liberty and justice for all").
Just as Christianity encompasses a broad spectrum of people with varying ways of practicing and expressing their faith, the Islamic world is filled with human beings who have diverse ways of expressing their religious beliefs. There are liberal, moderate, and Fundamentalist Muslims. And surprising as it may seem, most practitioners of Fundamentalist Islam, like most Fundamentalist Christians, are essentially peaceful individuals. In fact, a Muslim truly following the tenets of Islam practices moderation and tolerance. Many Muslims are no more willing to strap plastic explosives to their belts for a suicide mission than most Christians would be to bomb an abortion clinic. There are radicals from both religions, but they are very much in the minority.
Another lie deeply embedded in the barrage of communications we receive from the Western corporate media is that the United States and its allies are morally superior to the "evil Muslims". One aspect of Islam they offer as "proof" of this faulty conclusion is that many Islamic nations incorporate Sharia into their legal systems. While Sharia can involve harsh and rigid forms of justice, it exists to varying degrees in the many Muslim nations around the globe. Judiciaries in Islamic nations manifest the influence of Sharia in ways that span the spectrum from extremely dogmatic to highly secular and liberal.
While the Western media's blistering criticism of the more draconian actions of some Islamic nations (i.e. Iran's execution of teenagers) is definitely warranted, the Empire has a great deal of house-cleaning to do before it is in a position to preach to other nations on human rights issues.
Here are but a few recent examples of the United States' own flagrant human rights abuses:
1. carrying out quite a number of its own executions in a manner recently discovered to inflict a great deal of suffering on the victim
2. routinely torturing and suspending justice for suspected "enemy combatants"
3. funding the Israeli Apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians
4. occupying a nation where it has killed over a million Iraqi civilians since the Gulf War invasion (through brutal economic sanctions and military actions).
5. funding the Israeli devastation of Lebanon
6. supporting numerous ruthless and murderous regimes (as long as they are friendly to US corporations)
7. having cynically embraced Saddam Hussein as an ally (knowing of his crimes against humanity) when it furthered US interests and invading Iraq preemptively to topple him when he ceased to be useful.
8. having kept the House of Saud in power for years despite its harsh practice of Sharia (i.e. thieves' hands are severed and adulterers are stoned).
9. maintaining the largest prison population in the world through a legal system so unjust that 50% of those incarcerated are Black when Blacks comprise 14% of the general population.
10. engaging in numerous outright massacres of civilians (i.e. Haditha, Fallujah)
In light of the above, how long will it be before a significant portion of the Muslim population falls prey to an extreme prejudice against all Westerners called Anglo-Christophobia? Let's hope it does not happen any time soon.
Speaking of Christians (at least the Fundamentalist ones), their demonization of Islam is actually rather amusing. Christian Fundamentalists share more common ground with the extreme members of the Islamic faith than they perhaps realize. Some Muslim nations treat homosexuality as a crime. Abortion is illegal in virtually every circumstance throughout much of the Middle East. Separation of church and state does not exist in nations like Iran. Implementation of the death penalty is common in the Middle East. How can men like John Hagee reconcile their cognitive dissonance in advocating war against Iran, a model of the theocracy they strive to implement in the United States?
CBS, Mike Wallace and the rest of the United States' corporate media can continue to do the Empire's bidding from now until the world comes to an end (which may not be as far away as I make it sound if sanity and humanity do not prevail over greed, ignorance, and hatred). However, their nearly endless bombardment of intelligently crafted lies readily distributed to nearly every corner of the globe are powerless to alter the truth.
In truth, Israeli and American lives are no more precious than those of the Arab and Persian human beings populating the Middle East. And neither the United States/Israel/Great Britain nor the nations and groups comprising the resistance in the Middle East are innocent of the deep transgression of murdering innocents. Each nation or group also commits human rights abuses against its own people in some fashion. However, Western exploiters and invaders are culpable of far more frequent and grievous war crimes than the Middle Easterners who are defending themselves, their resources, and their people.
If the majority of the human beings controlling the corporate media had a shred of moral decency they would focus their efforts on informing their viewers, listeners, and readers of the vast number of war crimes committed by Israel and the United States. They would start portraying the "terrorists" as the resistors of oppression they truly are. They would make a distinction between the various Middle Eastern resistance groups' legitimate attacks on their occupiers' militaries and the war crimes they commit against civilians. And they would devote most of their remaining substantial resources to the inundation of news consumers with stories, photos and video footage depicting the tragic and gruesome civilian suffering and death.
As it is, the Western corporate media shamelessly serve the Neocons by perpetuating a virtually endless cycle of hatred and violence. They incite and feed Islamophobia and they fabricate a plethora of false justifications for the malevolent actions of Israel and the United States. But then in a fascist nation, corporations are wedded with the state, militarism is the state's primary focus, scapegoats and enemies are essential, and the function of the Fourth Estate is to provide the propaganda to control the masses.
Just imagine if the mainstream media in the United States actually began fulfilling its role (in what is ostensibly a free society) and acted as a check on our government rather than its accomplice. If more Americans knew more truth, instead of hating Islamic people and pushing to intensify the war in the Middle East, the masses would be demanding that reason, justice, and peace prevail. They would demand that the United States completely withdraw its military from the Middle East and leave Israel to stand on its own, which would force the Israelis to finally settle the Palestinian issue in a just manner and to cooperate with their neighbors as equals.
If the major media entities of the West were living up to their responsibilities as members of the Fourth Estate, perhaps 3 year old Ali Ahmad Hashim of Qana would not have been bombed to death, the members of the Ghalia family would not have been obliterated on a Gaza beach, 76 year old wheel-chair bound amputee Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali would not have been massacred at Haditha, Cindy Sheehan would not be grieving for a son lost to a war of imperial aggression, and Reuven Levy of Haifa would not have been annihilated by a rocket attack as he was doing his job for Israel Railways.
I am not holding my breath waiting for money-driven enablers of war like Rupert Murdoch to start heeding the advice of Jiminy Cricket. However, I will not succumb to their assault of malicious distortions. I refuse to fear, hate, or consider myself at war with 20% of the world's population simply because they choose to follow the teachings of the Qur'an.
Islamophobia is an intellectual and spiritual malignancy. Reason and humanity are the cures.
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Editorial: The UK Terror Plot: What's Really Going On?
Craig Mrray
14/08/2006
I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.
So this, I believe, is the true story.
None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.
In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.
The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.
We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.
We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.
For those who don't know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party's "Enforcer", (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students' Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.
We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner" profile you would expect - a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity - that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.
In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.
Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.
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They Hate Us Because of Our Freedoms
Prescott lets slip that some suspects won't face serious charges
16/08/2006
Telegraph
John Prescott let slip yesterday that some of the 24 people arrested last week over the alleged transatlantic terror plot will not face serious charges.
The Deputy Prime Minister made the admission during talks with Labour's Muslim MPs on how best to tackle Islamic extremism. During the 90-minute meeting, Mr Prescott briefed the MPs that the police only had enough evidence to bring serious charges against some suspects but not others.
His comments are likely to infuriate officers involved in the huge investigation into the alleged plans to detonate bombs on flights. They came as the police made a further arrest in the Thames Valley area under the Terrorism Act 2000. Concern had already been voiced about Government interference after the Treasury last week published the names of 19 suspects whose assets had been frozen after the arrests.
John Reid, the Home Secretary, was also accused of jeopardising a future trial by claiming that the police were confident that the "main players" were in custody.
Mr Prescott's comments came as the Muslim MPs told him that it could take a generation to tackle extremism.
They urged the Government to do more to win the "hearts and minds" of disaffected young British Muslims.
Khalid Mahmood, the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, said Mr Prescott had briefed the MPs about the police investigation in the wake of last week's arrests. "The assessment was that there will be some people who would face reasonable charges, they have sufficient information to do that," said Mr Mahmood. "Some may face serious charges but some will not."
Neil Gerrard, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, who also attended yesterday's meeting, confirmed that Mr Prescott had briefed them about the investigation. "I would be surprised if everyone arrested was charged," he said. A huge operation is still under way in connection with the investigation. Anti-terrorism police officers have so far raided 46 residential and business premises in London, the West Midlands and Thames Valley.
Police executed two search warrants in Slough yesterday. Officers have also made an extensive search of King's Wood in High Wycombe, Bucks. Police will need to seek a court extension today to detain the suspects for a further period up to a maximum of 28 days, after which they must be charged or released.
A spokesman for Mr Prescott denied that he had discussed the investigation into the alleged terror plot.
"He did take the MPs through some general police procedures but he would not comment on an ongoing investigation," she said.
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'People are definitely sceptical'
August 16, 2006
The Guardian
When the government announced last Thursday that it had foiled a massive terror plot, broadcasters and newspapers were barraged with a wave of sceptical views from listeners and readers. Nearly a week on, are people still so distrustful? Patrick Barkham takes to the streets to find out.
It was not in horror or panic that thousands of ordinary people contacted the BBC or posted points on the Guardian's Comment is Free website in the hours after last week's terror plot. The mood of many seemed to be one of profound caution, even scepticism, over the allegations of a murderous scheme in which 50 people would try to bring down up to 20 planes between Britain and America.
Almost a week later, and after a downgrading of the terrorist threat, what do ordinary voters now think of those excitable early briefings by John Reid, the home secretary, and Scotland Yard's dramatically voiced belief that it had foiled "mass murder on an unimaginable scale"? Are people still sceptical?
As it turns out, the prime minister would be heartened by the views of the individuals on his doorstep. Unfortunately, the largely sympathetic crowds outside Downing Street are overwhelmingly made up of non-voter tourists. A Brazilian who has lived in London for five years mentions his innocent countryman, Jean Charles de Menezes, shot dead after botched intelligence following 7/7 last year, but says that, relatively speaking, he trusts the authorities more here than in his home city of Sao Paulo. Similarly, American visitors to the capital say they are impressed with the "very British, very discreet" security and the post-alert calm of the population. But they are bewildered by the sceptical reaction of some Britons to what they see as a war.
"We've been looking at your museums," says John LeClaire, from Boston, holidaying with family and friends. "In the first world war there's this blindly patriotic joining of this war that is in a sense pointless. In the second world war there is uniform support for the government once Chamberlain is got rid of. Now you have, what, about 20% of the people who think terror plots are a conspiracy? That's an extraordinary evolution."
"It didn't cross my mind that this was a conspiracy," says Dogan Arthur, also from Boston. "It would show that terrorism is working if people think it's a conspiracy." He adds: "It's remarkable how international a city London is. It's interesting what a presence the Middle East has in London. I don't remember that 10 years ago. There's nowhere in the US where you would get that sense of being in a sea of Muslims."
Thirty five miles north of Downing Street and the average American tourist really would be startled by Bury Park in Luton, a quintessential 1920s English suburb now predominantly populated by British Muslim families. Halal butchers, grocers selling piles of fresh watermelons and fashion stores offering "wedding sarees, langhas and fabrics" line the main street.
"In my opinion it is a cover-up because of what's going on in Lebanon," says Munir Khan. "When you turn on the TV you see innocent people getting killed. This [plot] distracts from that."
A moderate Muslim who has been a member of the Labour party for nearly 20 years, Khan quit about eight months ago to join the Lib Dems. He does not trust the evidence coming out of Pakistan in relation to this latest alleged terror plot. "The Pakistan government will say anything for money," he says. "If the UK government gives them money to say something, they will say it."
Suspicion and (often internet-fuelled) talk of conspiracies is no longer the prerogative of the young, it seems. According to Khan, it has been noticeable that older Muslims, traditionally engaged in mainstream politics in a way that their children are not, have talked openly of their anger and distrust of the government in recent months.
Scepticism about the plot is shared by many in the area and not just by Muslims, says Qurban Hussain, a local resident and the deputy leader of Luton borough council. "People are definitely sceptical. They are not sure whether these claims are just to clamp down on British Muslims. Is it scaremongering tactics by the government or another reason to harass more innocent people?
"It's a perception held by a lot of my constituents of all backgrounds. When you look back on the WMD, the information was wrong. Then we have the case of Jean Charles de Menezes. We picked up the wrong person altogether. Then the raid in Forest Gate in which a man was shot. There are so many cases people can refer to. It makes them feel they cannot trust the government."
Reassuringly for Labour, the overwhelming majority of people of all faiths I speak to in London, Luton and further up the M1, give a pragmatic, sensible-sounding "wait and see" response to questions about whether they believe that this alleged terror plot is a genuine threat.
"It is in the government's best interests to look after the people of this country. If they hear of a threat, they have every right to close things down," says Usman Hussain, 21, inside a barber's in Bury Park. On the window is a poster advertising a talk on the "crisis in Lebanon". The star guest speaker is billed as a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamist group. Does Usman believe there was a terrorist plot to blow up planes? "I don't really know. We've been given no evidence yet. It could go either way."
But this general pragmatism is heavily steeped in scepticism everywhere I go, and not just among British Muslims. Jerry Thornton, from Wiltshire, is with the tourists outside Downing Street. "There is so much we don't know. It [the government] is such a secretive organisation. They are all colluding together. Some of it's for our own protection, but I believe a lot of it is spin. I accept during the investigation they can't tell the whole truth but we'd like to know exactly what happened and how it was foiled."
Stopping at the motorway services just north of Luton, John Jeffreys is unsure whether he trusts the government's line. "It's difficult to know. A lot of these terror alerts seem to coincide with an announcement about ID cards for instance. This time there obviously was some sort of plot but we don't know how significant it was. I don't trust the government at all. There's no doubt that Blair lied about the weapons of mass destruction before Iraq."
"It's propaganda, isn't it?" chips in his mate, Mick Perrone, 31. "It gets the whole nation on alert."
What can the government do to restore trust? In a time of endlessly slippery conspiracy theories, how can it show that the terror plot was genuine? "They must come up with the proof," says Khan. Other Muslim voters argue that the first step the government must take to restore levels of trust is to reform its foreign policy. Again and again, Muslim voters point to what they see as the government's "double standards" in dealing with other Islamic countries and disputes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Kashmir and now Lebanon.
Muslim voters say they are also angered by the government's - and George Bush's - use of the term "Islamic terrorism". "Why Islamic? Look at Northern Ireland. Who was saying 'Christians' there?" says Khan.
By chance an Irish family on holiday from Belfast pull into the services on the M1 while I'm there. "This [plot] could be make-believe, so the government can say, 'Look what we're doing to fight the terrorists,'" says Joanne Burrows. "There must have been something to arrest 23 people, but plenty of people have done time in Northern Ireland for doing nothing".
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Ditch US in terror war, say 80pc of Britons
Telegraph
17/08/2006
A majority of British people wants the Government to adopt an even more "aggressive" foreign policy to combat international terrorism, according to an opinion poll conducted after the arrests of 24 terrorism suspects last week.
However - by a margin of more than five to one - the public wants Tony Blair to split from President George W Bush and either go it alone in the "war on terror", or work more closely with Europe.
Only eight per cent of those questioned by YouGov said Mr Bush and Mr Blair were winning the battle against Muslim fundamentalism.
A majority also wants tougher domestic legislation that would allow police more time to detain suspects while they investigate complex terrorism plots.
Some 69 per cent said that the police should be able to hold suspects for up to 90 days without charge, rather than be bound by the current 28-day limit.
The poll findings will encourage John Reid, the Home Secretary, who has warned the British public that they will have to forgo many of the freedoms and liberties they have grown used to in order to ensure the maximum level of security.
Yesterday Mr Reid highlighted the benefit of European co-operation in the battle against terrorism.
He told a mini-summit of European Union home ministers in London that Europe faced a "very real and persistent threat from a form of terrorism that is unconstrained in its evil. . . and its ability to cause immense harm, death and destruction".
The meeting was "symbolic" of a Europe standing together against the most serious threat faced by modern governments, Mr Reid said.
He contrasted what he called the common EU values of "human rights, democratic freedoms and justice for all" with an "intolerant, violent totalitarianism that seeks to destroy those values, ironically by subverting a religion whose very name stands for peace".
Several of Europe's leading politicians, including Nicholas Sarkozy, the French interior minister, and Wolfgang Schauble, his German counterpart, attended. They agreed that airport checks across Europe had to be harmonised to ensure consistency and prevent terrorists exploiting security gaps.
The survey, carried out for The Spectator magazine, shows that a majority of people now recognises everyday lives will change fundamentally. Seventy three per cent agreed that "the West is in a global war against Islamic terrorists who threaten our way of life".
When asked whether Britain should change its foreign policy in response to terrorism only 12 per cent said it should be more conciliatory, compared with 53 per cent who thought it should become more "aggressive" and 24 per who wanted no change.
People were divided about the Muslim community in Britain. Fifty per cent said "most British Muslims are moderate" while 28 per cent disagreed with the statement and 22 per cent did not know.
While there was strong support for a hard line on terrorism at home, the survey exposed deep-seated distrust of the foreign policies championed by Mr Bush since September 11, 2001. Only 14 per cent believed Britain should continue to align itself with America.
On a recent five-day visit to the United States Mr Blair did nothing to distance himself from Mr Bush - despite pressure to do so from Labour MPs. In the White House he stood shoulder to shoulder with the President, stressing the struggle the West faced against an "arc of extremism" stretching from Afghanistan to the Lebanon.
Some 60 per cent of people thought the war on terrorism would continue for at least 10 years, with 44 per cent of these thinking it would still be going on in 20 years' time.
Fifty per cent of people believed Mr Blair should have broken his holiday to deal with the crisis caused by the arrest of suspects in last week's alleged plot to blow up transatlantic aircraft. Forty three per cent thought he could do the job as well by telephone and e-mail.
Stressing the need for European co-operation, Mr Reid said: "It's very important that the measures that are taken in one country are reflected in other countries because we want equal security for all our countries. We must not have a position where terrorists feel if it is difficult to get through security checks in London, they might be able to go to Paris or Frankfurt or Berlin".
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Met chief lashes 'crime to be Asian' crackdown
16/08/2006
Scotsman
A RACE row erupted yesterday after a senior police officer claimed controversial passenger profiling at airports would create a new offence of "travelling whilst Asian" and Muslim community leaders accused politicians of fuelling racism.
As police announced another arrest had been made in connection with the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic flights to the US, Muslim groups condemned Labour and Conservative politicians alike for using phrases such as "Islamic fascism" and comparing the war on terror to the fight against Hitler.
The 25th arrest in the investigation was made at lunchtime yesterday in the Thames Valley force area on "suspicion of being involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism".
Police declined to give any further details but they revealed that detectives had now searched 46 homes and businesses in London, Thames Valley and the West Midlands and that 22 searches were on-going. A total of 20 vehicles have also been examined.
A total of 24 people are now in custody although police will need to seek an extension to detain them beyond today.
The chaos at airports caused by increased security is understood to have prompted government officials to consider a system of passenger profiling that would select people behaving suspiciously, who have an unusual travel pattern or have a certain ethnic or religious background.
But Chief Superintendent Ali Dizaei, of the Metropolitan Police, one of Britain's most senior Muslim officers, hit out against the move, saying: "It [profiling] becomes hugely problematic when it's based on ethnicity, religion and country of origin. I don't think there's a stereotypical image of a terrorist.
"What you are suggesting is that we should have a new offence in this country called 'travelling whilst Asian'.
"That's unpalatable to everyone. It is communities that defeat terrorism, and what we don't want to do is actually alienate the very communities who are going to help us catch terrorists.
"Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, would have certainly gone through the security system because he was a white male."
Abdul Ahman, vice-chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain's legal affairs committee, described passenger profiling as a "crowd pleaser".
"You cannot help but think 'Wow, we have got to do it... all the people who have done it so far have been brown or Muslim'. The idea that a minority is expendable when the majority is under threat, that has very deep resonance," he said.
"It is the kind of idea that really does lead to a slippery slope where we become the monster that we are supposed to be fighting against.
"We need to have a calm, measured and well thought-out approach. I don't think that this [profiling] falls into that category."
Mr Ahman criticised the Conservative leader, David Cameron and John Reid, the Home Secretary, in particular.
"Cameron's statement that we should be doing more to target Islamic extremism. John Reid saying this is the greatest threat since Hitler... the way it plays out in the public mind is that we have a problem with Muslims because they follow a religion of hatred and violence," he said.
"I think these are the unequivocal messages given out by a lot of the tabloid newspapers. The whole debate becomes very simplistic with these meaningless words like 'Islamic fascism'.
"This is our religion. We thought crimes are supposed to be crimes. You cannot talk about a whole religion or a whole race of people [in this way]. I thought we had left that kind of approach behind 20 years ago.
"There was a 500 per cent increase in hate crimes in the UK after 7/7. I fear for the long-term future. As a Muslim who loves his own country, Britain, I feel very despondent about where this is leading us."
Osama Saeed, Scottish spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, said he believed passenger profiling was already happening. "I don't think this is a new policy. I think it's pretty clear there has been profiling going on for some time. It's annoying, it's embarrassing, but it's not new," he said.
Paddy Tomkins, Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders, said there had already been two racist incidents in his force's area - one where a member of a mosque in Livingston was abused and another where graffiti was daubed on an Edinburgh mosque.
"We will not tolerate racism and will pursue racists as a priority, using all the resources we have, and prosecute them through the courts using the full force of the laws available to us," he said.
A Department of Transport spokesman would not confirm or deny that passenger profiling was to be introduced. "In due course we expect to issue new security requirements but we are working out what they are going to say," he said.
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Terror: EU plan for vetting of air passengers
Alan Travis and Alexi Mostrous
Thursday August 17, 2006
The Guardian
A system for the "positive profiling" of European airline passengers is to be urgently explored in response to last week's alleged airline terror plot, European interior ministers meeting in London agreed yesterday.
The home secretary, John Reid, insisted that the new system, which would affect all domestic and international flights in and out of Europe, would not involve screening by religion or ethnic background but would be carried out well in advance of flights based on biometric checks - electronic eye or facial scans.
The European Commission vice-president, Franco Frattini, said he wanted to see a system of advanced screening of passenger name records - similar to that demanded by the Americans and Australians - brought forward urgently.
The EU's plan on terrorism envisages a directive being drawn up this autumn to implement the scheme, which would enable both regular cleared passengers to get through security checks quicker and enable the security services to check passenger names against warning lists of terror suspects.
The scheme is part of a package of measures agreed yesterday at the meeting called as an act of solidarity in response to last week's arrests in connection to the alleged airline plot.
The ministers were briefed by the director general of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, and the head of special operations at Scotland Yard, assistant commissioner Andy Hayman.
The measures also include:
- An urgent £237,000 research project into how to detect liquid explosives, which were at the centre of last week's alleged plot;
- New moves against internet sites that incite terrorism and detail bomb-making techniques;
- The adoption across Europe of the new British regime of hand luggage checks at airports;
- Further measures to curb radicalisation and recruitment among Europe's Muslim communities;
- A Euro-summit of security services later this month to "pre-empt the terrorists' next plot".
Mr Reid said after the meeting: "What's clear to all of us is that we face a persistent and very real threat across Europe. It is a threat we face here in Britain as individuals and as communities, but it's not unique to the UK. It affects us all across the European Union."
Mr Reid said in considering the use of advanced passenger data it was important to distinguish between "positive profiling" and "ethnic or racial profiling". It was not clear last night how far Britain was prepared to go in signing up to the use of such advanced passenger data but the Home Office has two pilot schemes running, Project Iris and Project Semaphore. The latter involves screening 10 million passengers a year on selected international routes.
The recent Home Office plan to turn the immigration service around also includes proposals for a "trusted traveller" scheme which would allow 40,000 passengers to fast-track through airport security checks by the end of this year with rapid expansion to follow. More stringent security checks however are to be carried out on travellers from "high-risk" countries or routes creating a two-tier system of passengers.
A Spectator/YouGov poll published this morning suggests that a majority - 55% - would be happy to see passenger profiling at airports.
But ministers acknowledged yesterday that some EU countries, particularly France and the Netherlands, want to go much further and introduce explicit checks on Muslim travellers. Claude Moraes, an Asian Labour MEP, said yesterday the random checks he faced travelling around Europe had increased in recent years and warned that assuming that race or religion was a predictor of terrorism was a "recipe for disaster".
Professor Takis Takimidis of Matrix Chambers said yesterday that positive profiling could be a disguised way of racial profiling.
"For instance if the authorities only profile those who have Asian names. But if they profile everybody who is a passenger, I can't see what could be wrong with this. But it's very hard to say whether 'positive profiling' would be problematic without knowing exactly what it is.
"Even if the comparison contains an ethnic element then that might be justified on grounds of national security. On the other hand, if anyone who has a criminal record is stopped that may well be a violation of a person's free movement within the EU. That has nothing to do with discrimination but it may be disproportionate interference. Basically it depends on the circumstances."
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Reid looks at blocking websites in battle against terrorism
Yorkshire Today
17/08/2006
Websites that incite acts of terrorism or carry bomb-making instructions could be blocked under proposals being considered by European Ministers.
Home Secretary John Reid, hosting an informal meeting of European Union interior Ministers in London, said the terror threat was Europe-wide and needed to be tackled on an international level.
"What's clear to all of us is that we face a persistent and very real threat across Europe," he said.
The meeting was held as a mid-air "passenger disturbance" on a Washington-bound flight from Heathrow forced the pilot to declare a security emergency.
The United Airlines flight was escorted into Boston by two F15 fighter jets, amid claims of a confrontation between a female passenger and flight crew.
Reports that she had been carrying matches, Vaseline, a screwdriver and a note about al Qaida were later denied, but the incident started a major security alert.
Later an FBI spokeswoman in Boston said the woman was in police custody for allegedly "interfering with a flight crew".
Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney said the 59-year-old, from the state of Vermont, became so claustrophobic and upset that she needed to be restrained.
In London, Mr Reid refused to be drawn on reported comments by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott that some of the 24 suspects being held in connection with the alleged plot to bomb airliners could face only minor charges.
But he said police appeared to believe that there was material of a "substantial nature" emerging from inquiries.
Among the measures discussed at the meeting were proposals to make the Internet a "hostile environment" for terrorists.
Other proposals included a requirement to provide similar data on airline passengers on flights in Europe, to that required by the United States and Canadian authorities for passengers travelling to their countries.
Ministers considered "positive profiling" of passengers, carried out before flights, based on "biometric identifiers" such as iris scans or fingerprints.
The ministers also freed up 350,000 euros (£237,000) from the EU budget for research into detecting liquid explosives which the alleged plotters were said to be planning to use.
In closed court hearings last night, anti-terror detectives applied for more time to question 23 of the 24 suspects in custody over the alleged plot.
In each case, officers were presenting evidence to a district judge for him to decide whether it was sufficient to warrant their further detention.
Last night specialist officers were searching woodland in High Wycombe, Bucks, for traces of explosives or explosive tests.
There were claims yesterday that Britain was seeking the fast-track extradition of another suspect in the case, who is being held in Pakistan.
Rashid Rauf, a British citizen and brother of one of those held in the UK, is alleged by the Pakistani authorities to have been a key player in the plot.
Rauf's relatives in Pakistan were reported to have insisted he was harmless. The Home Office refused to say whether it had requested his extradition.
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US to have behaviour officers at airports
PTI
August 17, 2006
Taking a page from Israeli airport security, the US transportation agency is experimenting with new squads whose members do not look for bombs, guns or knives but keep an eye on anyone with evil intent.
These specially trained officers are working in about a dozen airports nationwide and they represent just a tiny percentage of the transportation agency's 43,000 screeners.
But the New York Times quoted agency officials as saying that after the reported liquid bomb plot in Britain, they want to have hundreds of behaviour detection officers trained by the end of next year and deployed at most of the nation's biggest airports.
"The observation of human behavior is probably the hardest thing to detect," Waverly Cousin, a former police officer and checkpoint screener who is now the supervisor of the behavior detection unit at one of the airports was quoted as saying.
"You just don't know what I am going to see. Even in its infancy, the paper said, the programme has elicited some protests.
At one airport, passengers singled out solely because of their behavior have at times been threatened with detention if they did not cooperate, raising constitutional issues that are already being argued in court.
Some civil liberties experts were quoted as saying that the programme, if not run properly, could turn into another version of racial profiling.
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Faces, Too, Are Searched at U.S. Airports
NY Times
18/08/2006
DULLES, Va., Aug. 16 - As the man approached the airport security checkpoint here on Wednesday, he kept picking up and putting down his backpack, touching his fingers to his chin, rubbing some object in his hands and finally reaching for his pack of cigarettes, even though smoking was not allowed.
Two Transportation Security Administration officers stood nearby, nearly motionless and silent, gazing straight at him. Then, with a nod, they moved in, chatting briefly with the man, and then swiftly pulled him aside for an intense search.
Another airline passenger had just made the acquaintance of the transportation agency's "behavior detection officers."
Taking a page from Israeli airport security, the transportation agency has been experimenting with this new squad, whose members do not look for bombs, guns or knives. Instead, the assignment is to find anyone with evil intent.
So far, these specially trained officers are working in only about a dozen airports nationwide, including Dulles International Airport here outside Washington, and they represent just a tiny percentage of the transportation agency's 43,000 screeners.
But after the reported liquid bomb plot in Britain, agency officials say they want to have hundreds of behavior detection officers trained by the end of next year and deployed at most of the nation's biggest airports.
"The observation of human behavior is probably the hardest thing to defeat," said Waverly Cousin, a former police officer and checkpoint screener who is now the supervisor of the behavior detection unit at Dulles. "You just don't know what I am going to see."
Even in its infancy, the program has elicited some protests.
At one airport, passengers singled out solely because of their behavior have at times been threatened with detention if they did not cooperate, raising constitutional issues that are already being argued in court. Some civil liberties experts said that the program, if not run properly, could turn into another version of racial profiling.
Other concerns were raised this week by two of the foremost proponents of the techniques, a former Israeli security official and a behavioral psychologist who developed the system of observing involuntarily muscular reactions to gauge a person's state of mind.
They said in interviews that the agency's approach puts too little emphasis on the follow-up interview and relies on a behavior-scoring system that is not necessarily applicable to airports.
"It may be the best that can be done now, but it is not nearly good enough," said Paul Ekman, a retired psychology professor from the University of California, San Francisco, who specializes in detecting lies and deceit, and has helped the T.S.A. set up its program. "We could do much better, and we should because it could save lives."
Agency officials said they recognize that the program, which they call Screening Passengers by Observation Technique, or SPOT, may not yet be perfect. But they added that they were constantly making adjustments and that they were convinced that it was a valuable addition to their security tool chest.
"There are infinite ways to find things to use as a weapon and infinite ways to hide them," said the director of the T.S.A., Kip Hawley, in an interview this week. "But if you can identify the individual, it is by far the better way to find the threat."
The American version of the airport behavior observation program got its start in Boston, said Thomas G. Robbins, former commander of the Logan International Airport police.
After the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, he said, state police officers there wondered whether a technique they had long used to try to identify drug couriers at the airport might also work for terrorists. The officers observed travelers' facial expressions, body and eye movements, changes in vocal pitch and other indicators of stress or disorientation. If the officers' suspicions were aroused, they began a casual conversation with the person, asking questions like "What did you see in Boston?" followed perhaps by "Oh, you've been sightseeing. What did you like best?"
The questions themselves are not significant, Mr. Robbins said. It is the way the person answers, particularly whether the person shows any sign of trying to conceal the truth.
The Transportation Security Administration, starting last December, decided to try out the approach at about a dozen airports, including Logan. At each airport, it used six officers who had once been routine screeners, had received an extra four days of classroom training in observation and questioning techniques, and had three days of field practice.
T.S.A. officers do not have law enforcement powers, so if they observe someone suspicious, they can chat with the person but cannot conduct a more formal interrogation. That leaves them with the option of requiring the passenger to go through a more intense checkpoint search, as they did with the man at Dulles on Wednesday. Or if the suspicion is serious enough, they call the local police assigned to the airport to take over the inquiry.
In nine months - a period in which about seven million people have flown out of Dulles - several hundred people have been referred for intense screening, and about 50 have been turned over to the police for follow-up questioning, said John F. Lenihan, the transportation agency's security director at Dulles.
Of those, half a dozen have faced charges or other law enforcement follow-up, he said, because the behavior detection officials succeeded in picking out people who had a reason to be nervous, generally because of immigration matters, outstanding warrants or forged documents.
"It is an extra layer of security that is on top of what we have," Mr. Hawley said of the program.
But Rafi Ron, the former director of security at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, who was a consultant who helped train the officers at Logan Airport, said that the agency's system, while a welcome improvement to airport security, was still flawed. Most importantly, he said, too few of the passengers pulled aside were more formally questioned as in the Israeli system, and when questioning was done, it was handled by local police officers who might not have had the necessary behavioral analysis skills.
He cited the case of Richard Reid, known as the shoe bomber, who aroused suspicion when he arrived at Charles de Gaulle International Airport outside Paris, but was ultimately allowed to board after the police had questioned him.
"If you don't do the interviews properly, you are missing what is probably the most important and powerful part of the procedure," he said.
Another concern was raised by Mr. Ekman, who developed some of the facial analysis tools that the T.S.A. screeners were being trained to use - for example, fear is manifested by eyebrows raised and drawn together, a raised upper eyelid and lips drawn back toward the ears. He said the point system that the T.S.A. had set up was based on facial reactions that occurred in sit-down interviews, not while people were standing in line at the airport.
"We have no basis other than the seat of our pants to know how many points should be given to any one thing," he said.
The technique has already produced at least one lawsuit, filed in Boston. The state police at Logan Airport there happened to pick out, based on behavior observations, the national coordinator of the American Civil Liberties Union's Campaign Against Racial Profiling.
The coordinator, King Downing, who is black, had just left a flight when he stopped to make a phone call and noticed that a police officer was listening in, the lawsuit says. When the call ended, the officer demanded Mr. Downing's identification, asking again as he approached a taxi and then telling him he would be "going downtown" unless he provided it. Mr. Downing was let go after he showed his identification, but the encounter led to the lawsuit.
"There is a significant prospect this security method is going to be applied in a discriminatory manner," said John Reinstein, an A.C.L.U. lawyer handling Mr. Downing's case. "It introduces into the screening system a number of highly subjective elements left to the discretion of the individual officer."
T.S.A. officials, who were not involved in the incident with Mr. Downing, said they recognized that people at airports were often agitated - they may be late for flights, taking an emergency trip or simply scared of flying.
They said they were committed to ensuring the program was not discriminatory and would be monitoring the work of the SPOT teams to ensure that the officers were acting upon the established indicators and not any racial or ethnic bias.
But they acknowledged that some entirely innocent parties, like the man at Dulles on Wednesday, would probably be pulled aside. That passenger, whom officials would not identify, was allowed to catch his flight after a thorough search.
"It is like throwing a big fishing net over the side of the boat: You catch what you catch," said Carl Maccario, an agency official helping manage the SPOT teams. "But hopefully within that net is a terrorist."
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Flight passengers describe hours of bizarre behavior
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
August 18, 2006
A self-described peace activist responsible for the diversion of a London-to-Washington flight Wednesday acted bizarrely for hours, made references to al Qaeda and hijack training flights, and was restrained by two passengers after she urinated in the aisle.
Catherine C. Mayo, 59, a Vermont woman who also lives part time in Pakistan, was charged yesterday in federal court with interfering with a flight crew.
United Flight 923 was forced to make an emergency landing at Boston's Logan International Airport under escort by two military jets.
"She's got some very serious mental health problems," said Page Kelley, Mrs. Mayo's attorney, who described her client as "just barely lucid."
According to an affidavit and passenger accounts, Mrs. Mayo began pacing the plane from the front to aft lavatory and asked a flight attendant, "Is this a training flight for United Flight 93?" -- the flight hijacked on September 11, 2001, that crashed into a Pennsylvania farm field.
Mrs. Mayo demanded to speak with an air marshal, saying the contents of her bag would be of interest. Her bag contained a screwdriver, body lotion, several cigarette lighters and a bottle of water. The affidavit did not say how she smuggled the items on board, despite being screened twice at London's Heathrow Airport.
When confronted by the captain, Mrs. Mayo made a reference to bomb assembly, saying, "There are six steps to building some unspecified thing."
"She made reference to being with people associated with two words," the affidavit said. "She stated that she could not say what the two words were because the last time that she had said the two words she had been kicked off a flight in the United Arab Emirates."
The captain ordered her restrained, and the passengers and a flight attendant tackled her and placed her hands in plastic cuffs.
Officials in the United Kingdom and the U.S. are on heightened alert after dozens of British citizens were arrested last week, accused of plotting to smuggle liquid explosives aboard trans-Atlantic flights.
Mrs. Mayo told passengers she was an undercover reporter testing security to see whether she could sneak restricted items on board.
As a columnist for the Daily Times of Pakistan, Mrs. Mayo criticized President Bush -- calling him "a president not elected by the people" -- and the war in Iraq. "The folksongs of the 1960s will never be written again because of President George Bush. He has hampered the liberties of my country in the name of September 11. Songs now can only talk of patriotism they cannot mention peace," she wrote.
Passengers initially assumed the men who restrained Mrs. Mayo were federal air marshals but yesterday said they were passengers recruited by flight attendants who provided them with handcuffs.
"They were asked to be on the alert in case we need you," said Joan Bartko, a passenger who was traveling with her family.
Mrs. Mayo "took down her slacks and started taking down her underwear, and that's when they got her. They were just passengers on the plane who immediately helped," Mrs. Bartko said.
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"Suspicious liquid" found at W.Va. airport is yet another false alarm
By SHAYA TAYEFE MOHAJER
Associated Press
Fri Aug 18, 2006
CEREDO, W.Va. - A West Virginia airport terminal was evacuated Thursday after two bottles of liquid found in a woman's carry-on luggage twice tested positive for explosives residue, a Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman said.
Chemical tests later Thursday turned up no explosives in the bottles, said Capt. Jack Chambers, head of the State Police Special Operations unit. The airport was reopened after nearly 10 hours.
"It looks like there were four items containing liquids," said TSA spokeswoman Amy von Walter. A machine that security checkpoint screeners use to test for explosives registered positive results for two containers, and a canine team also got a positive hit, she said.
The TSA screening looks for a range of explosives residue, some of which can be found on common household items, said TSA spokesman Darrin Kayser.
Airport manager Larry Salyers said he was told the woman was a 28-year-old of Pakistani descent who had moved to West Virginia from Jackson, Mich.
No charges were filed against the woman, who was taken from the airport by federal authorities at 5 p.m., Salyers said.
The woman was cooperative, officials said.
The woman's mother told the Associated Press that her daughter, who is four months pregnant and lives in Barboursville, W.Va., was targeted because of her nationality and Islamic headcover.
"It was not only a false alarm, it was racial discrimination because there was nothing," Mian Qayyum said, refusing to name her daughter.
"She just had water to drink because she is pregnant and she had a face wash that had a drop of bleach on it," Qayyum said from her home in Jackson.
The FBI did not immediately return messages Thursday night seeking comment on the racial profiling allegations.
A screener noticed a bottle in a woman's carry-on bag as she was going through security before her 9:15 a.m. flight to Charlotte, N.C., said Tri-State Airport Authority President Jim Booton.
One bottle contained a gel-type facial cleanser, FBI spokesman Jeff Killeen said.
"Anytime a prohibited item is brought to a checkpoint, then you are going to be immediately more interested in that bag," Kayser said.
The woman had purchased a one-way ticket to Detroit by way of Charlotte on Wednesday, Salyers said.
The flight was allowed to leave for Charlotte, and the terminal was evacuated at 11:25 a.m., officials said.
Commercial airline service was suspended, and about 100 passengers and airport employees were ordered to leave the terminal, Booton said.
Two airlines - Comair and US Airways Express - serve the airport.
After the evacuation, many passengers decided to stay and wait it out.
"We bought them pizza, soft drinks ... tried to make them comfortable as could be in this situation," Salyers said. "We had them in the parking lot, under trees, in conference rooms, the firehouse."
U.S. authorities banned the carrying of liquids onto flights last week after British officials made arrests in an alleged plot to blow up U.S.-bound planes using explosives disguised as drinks and other common products.
Joy and John Cloutre of Ulysses, Ky., were waiting to begin the first leg of their trip to the southeast Asian country of Brunei when the evacuation order came.
Joy Cloutre told the Herald Dispatch of Huntington that her family didn't want her to leave because of terrorism in the region. "And then we don't even get out of Huntington without something like this happening."
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Attorney General: Terrorists are in our neighborhoods
RAW STORY
Wednesday August 16, 2006
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in Pittsburgh to address the World Affairs Council, recalled memories of Sep. 11 while referring ominously to a stateless enemy hidden in American towns.
"The most dramatic change," said Gonzales, "is the nature of the enemy our country today faces -- a stateless enemy sometimes hidden and nurtured here in our neighborhoods, taking advantage of the very laws they mock with their killing and destruction, as a shield from detection and prosecution."
Gonzales, further emphasizing the perceived domestic danger, stated, "The threat of homegrown terrorist cells may be as dangerous as groups like al Qaeda, if not more so.
"It is therefore essential that we continue to develop the tools we need to investigate their actions and intentions with the help of our partners, and prosecute those who travel down the road of radicalization."
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USSA
Majority of Americans Support Increased Surveillance, Poll Shows
The Wall Street Journal
August 17, 2006
A majority of Americans favor increasing surveillance of suspected terrorists through cameras, banking records and cellphones, a new Harris Interactive poll shows. But many say such actions should require authorization by Congress.
Surveillance techniques have, for the most part, inched up in public approval, according to the telephone poll of 1,000 U.S. adults. In July, 70% of Americans said they favor "expanded camera surveillance on streets and in public places," up from 59% in June 2005 and 63% shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. Support for police monitoring of chat rooms and other online forums has also risen. In the latest poll, 62% of respondents said they favor such monitoring, up from 50% in February 2004 and 57% a year earlier.
While Americans are largely divided as to whether the government should be able to monitor cellphones and email to intercept communications, support rose to 52% in the latest poll, up substantially from 37% in June 2005.
However, nearly six in 10 respondents said these techniques should be done only with authorization by Congress, compared with 38% who wouldn't require Congressional approval.
The poll -- conducted July 21-24, 2006, before news of a terrorist plot to blow up trans-Atlantic flights from London -- also shows that public opinion of the Bush Administration's efforts at fighting terrorism is falling: 45% said it has done an excellent or pretty good job, down from 57% in June 2005 and 70% in February 2004. Nearly a third of Americans in the latest poll said the White House has done a poor job of fighting terrorism.
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Judge orders halt to NSA wiretap program
Reuters
17/08/06
DETROIT (Reuters) - A federal judge in Detroit on Thursday ordered the Bush administration to halt the National Security Agency's program of domestic eavesdropping, saying it violated the U.S. Constitution.
Judge Anna Diggs Taylor said the controversial practice of warrantless wiretapping known as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" violated free speech rights, protections against unreasonable searches and the constitutional check on the power of the presidency.
The ruling marked a setback for the Bush administration, which had asked for the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union to be thrown out, arguing that any court action on the case would jeopardize secrets in an ongoing war on terrorism.
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Post-9/11 detainee returns to his life
By TOM HAYS
Associated Press
Thu Aug 17, 2006
TORONTO - The date was Sept. 12, 2001, but Benemar "Ben" Benatta was clueless about the death and destruction that had unfolded a day earlier.
About a week before, Canadian officials had stopped Benatta as he entered the country from Buffalo to seek political asylum. On that Sept. 11, he was quietly transferred to a U.S. immigration lockup where a day passed before sullen
FBI agents told him what the rest of the world already knew: Terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center and
Pentagon.
It slowly dawned on Benatta that his pedigree - a Muslim man with a military background - made him a target in the frenzied national dragnet that soon followed. The FBI didn't accuse him of being a terrorist - at least not outright.
But agents kept asking if he could fly an airplane.
No, he said.
It made no difference.
"They gave me a feeling that I was Suspect No. 1," he said in a recent interview.
The veiled accusations and vehement denials would continue for nearly five years - despite official findings in 2001 that he had no terrorist links and in 2003 that authorities had violated his rights by colluding to keep him in custody.
Of the estimated 1,200 mostly Arab and Muslim men detained nationwide as potential suspects or witnesses in the Sept. 11 investigation, Benatta would earn a dubious distinction: Human rights groups say the former Algerian air force lieutenant was locked up the longest.
His journey through the American justice system concluded July 20 when a deal was finalized for his return to Canada. In the words of his lawyer, the idea was to "turn back the clock" to when he first crossed the border.
But time did not stand still for Benatta. The clock ran for 1,780 days. The man detained at 27 was now 32.
"I say to myself from time to time, maybe what happened ... it was some kind of dream," he said. "I never believed things like that could happen in the United States."
In a nation reeling from unthinkable horrors inflicted by an unconventional enemy, it could.
And it did.
___
Sporting a gray T-shirt and cargo shorts on a sizzling summer day, Benatta eased his muscular frame into a white plastic chair in the backyard of a Toronto halfway house for immigrant asylum-seekers. He sipped lemonade, then paused to taste freedom.
"You start to look around and take in everything - the wind in your face, the breeze - everything," he said.
The youngest of 10 children in a middle-class family, Benatta recalled always wanting to be military man like his father. But after he joined the air force, he grew disillusioned. Algerian soldiers, he said, were abusive toward civilians. And militant Muslims were out for blood.
"I was in harm's way in my country," he said.
In December 2000, Benatta entered a six-month training program for foreign air force engineers in Virginia, plotting from the start to desert and flee to Canada. In June 2001, the night before his scheduled flight back to Algeria, he stole out of a hotel. He lived briefly in New York before arriving Sept. 5 on Canada's doorstep.
A week later, Canadian authorities escorted him back over the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, where they turned him over to U.S. immigration officers. On Sept. 16, U.S. marshals took him into custody, put him on a small jet and flew him to a federal jail in Brooklyn that became a clearing house for detainees who were labeled "of interest" to the FBI following the Sept. 11 attacks.
One marshal's remark stuck in his head: "Where you're going, you won't need shoes anymore."
In Brooklyn, he was locked down - minus his shoes - 24 hours a day between FBI interrogations. When he continued to deny any involvement in the attacks, agents threatened to send him back to Algeria. As a deserter, he was certain he would be tortured.
"That was all my thinking all of the time - they were signing my execution warrant," he said.
Prison guards, he said, dispensed humiliation in steady doses - rapping on his cell door every half hour to interrupt his sleep, stepping on his leg shackles hard enough to scar his ankles, locking him in an outdoor exercise cage despite freezing temperatures, conducting arbitrary strip searches.
The alleged abuses would have been bad enough. But as a judge eventually pointed out, something else was amiss: Benatta was never charged with a crime.
The FBI grillings stopped sometime in November 2001, when an internal report was prepared saying he was cleared. On paper, he was no longer a terror suspect.
No one bothered to tell him.
___
December turned to March with Benatta still under lockdown in Brooklyn, without any contact with the outside world. "Each day, with that kind of conditions, is like a year," he said.
Finally, in April, he received word that he would be transferred to Buffalo to face federal charges of carrying a phony ID when first detained. Benatta was denied bail while he fought the case. But for the first time he was allowed into the general population of federal defendants housed at an immigration detention center.
He also had access to the news, and was shocked by the images accompanying anniversary stories about the Sept. 11 attacks.
"It was the first time I'd really seen what happened," he said.
It wasn't until the second anniversary of the attacks that U.S. Magistrate H. Kenneth Schroeder Jr. found that Benatta's detainment for a deportation hearing was "a charade."
Though terrible, the Sept. 11 attacks "do not constitute an acceptable basis for abandoning our constitutional principles and rule of law by adopting an 'end justifies the means' philosophy," Schroeder wrote. Based on that decision, another judge tossed out the case on Oct. 3, 2003.
"That gave me so much hope," Benatta said. "For me, it's like (the judge) had so much nerves. He gave me some kind of hope in the judicial system all over again."
His hopes were dashed by an ensuing standoff: Benatta demanded asylum. Immigration authorities wanted him deported for overstaying his visa.
An immigration court first set bail at $25,000, then ruled he should stay behind bars indefinitely - a situation a United Nations human rights group decried as a "de facto prison sentence." Most asylum seekers are released pending the outcome of their cases.
It took another two years before a Manhattan attorney, Catherine M. Amirfar, found a solution: She persuaded Canadian authorities to let her client apply for asylum there without jailing him.
"Canada was willing to take him back and turn back the clock five years," she said. "Of course, Benemar will never get those five years back."
The last detainee was deported in his prison smock without an apology. He remembers cold stares when he ate his first meal at Wendy's and went to a mall to buy clothes.
Today, there's no more soul-numbing confinement. But he's still caught in waiting game, this time to see whether Canada will grant him asylum - a decision at least six months away. He also wonders if he can regain enough spirit to start a new life.
"Now I'm not the same person," he said. "When I came to the United States, I was optimistic. I had so much energy. That's not the case now."
Comment: "I say to myself from time to time, maybe what happened ... it was some kind of dream," he said. "I never believed things like that could happen in the United States."
Detaining an innocent man for five years without charge DOES happen in the USA under the guise of "fighting terrorism". It will continue to happen until enough people take a stand and fight for true freedom instead of simply believing that what happened to Benemar will never happen to them. The facts are that even US citizens have been detained for years and abused and tortured without being charged with a crime.
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Marines May Have Excised Evidence on 24 Iraqi Deaths
By DAVID S. CLOUD
The New York Times
August 18, 2006
WASHINGTON - A high-level military investigation into the killings of 24 Iraqis in Haditha last November has uncovered instances in which American marines involved in the episode appear to have destroyed or withheld evidence, according to two Defense Department officials briefed on the case.
The investigation found that an official company logbook of the unit involved had been tampered with and that an incriminating video taken by an aerial drone the day of the killings was not given to investigators until Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the second-ranking commander in Iraq, intervened, the officials said.
Those findings, contained in a long report that was completed last month but not made public, go beyond what has been previously reported about the case. It has been known that marines who carried out the killings made misleading statements to investigators and that senior officers were criticized for not being more aggressive in investigating the case, in which most or all of the Iraqis who were killed were civilians. But this is the first time details about possible concealment or destruction of evidence have been disclosed.
The report's findings have been sent to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which is investigating members of the unit involved in the killings, as well as higher-ranking officers in the Second Marine Division. No charges have been brought yet.
The report, based on an investigation by Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell of the Army, does not directly accuse marines of attempting a cover-up, but it does describe several suspicious incidents, according to the Defense Department officials.
It says that the logbook, which was meant to be a daily record of major incidents the marines' company encountered, had all the pages missing for Nov. 19, the day of the killings, and that those portions had not been found, the officials said.
No conclusions are drawn about who may have tampered with the log. But the report says that Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the leader of the squad involved in the killings, was on duty at the unit's operations center, where the logbook was kept, shortly after the killings occurred, the officials said.
Neal A. Puckett, a lawyer for Sergeant Wuterich, was unavailable to comment.
Investigators were also initially told by Marine officers that videotape taken by the drone was not available, one of the officials said. The officials added that the marines produced the tape only after General Bargewell had completed his inquiry and they had been asked again to produce it by General Chiarelli.
The report has been closely held within the Defense Department, and the officials who agreed to discuss it did so because they said they thought it should receive wider public attention. They agreed to speak only if their names were not published because they had not been authorized by superiors to discuss its contents.
The deaths occurred outside the town of Haditha after a three-vehicle convoy of marines was hit by a roadside bomb, killing a lance corporal. The squad then began going through houses nearby, killing Iraqis found inside in what defense lawyers have said was a justifiable use of lethal force by marines who believed they were under concerted attack by insurgents.
The Marine Corps issued a press release the next day saying that 15 of the civilian deaths had been caused by the bomb explosion. But several officers in the unit have said they knew even then that marines had killed all 24 of the dead Iraqis, 9 of whom were suspected insurgents.
Since then, the idea that any of the victims were insurgents has been challenged, both by Iraqi survivors and by some American military officials familiar with the case, noting that the victims included 10 women and children and an elderly man in a wheelchair. They have said that evidence suggests that the marines overreacted after the death of their fellow marine and shot the civilians in cold blood.
Marines have told investigators that at least one Iraqi who was shot was brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle. But no records were found that such a weapon was recovered at the scene and turned in to the unit's headquarters, as regulations require, the officials said.
Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a Marine Corps spokesman, said: "The Marine Corps is committed to a full and thorough investigation of the events that occurred at Haditha on Nov. 19, and the actions that followed that may have contributed to any improper reporting. If allegations of wrongdoing are substantiated, the Marine Corps will pursue appropriate legal and administrative actions."
The decision about whether to take disciplinary action will be made by Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, the commander of Marine Corps units in the Middle East, based on his review of both the Bargewell report and the results of the criminal investigation still under way.
In addition to faulting officers in the Second Marine Division for not aggressively investigating the Haditha killings, the Bargewell report said the commanders had created a climate that minimized the importance of Iraqi lives, particularly in Haditha, where insurgent attacks were rampant, the officials said.
"In their eyes, they didn't believe anyone was innocent," said one of the officials, describing the attitude of the marines in the unit toward Iraqis. "Either you were an active participant, or you were complicit."
Two days after the Haditha killings, Maj. Gen. Richard A. Huck, then the division commander, asked his staff for a briefing on what had happened, the officials said. General Huck later told investigators that he had ordered the briefing because he was concerned about the reports of civilian casualties, one of the officials said.
But the briefing provided to General Huck contained no mention of the civilian casualties, the investigators learned. Instead, according to one of the officials, it dealt almost entirely with the roadside bomb attack and other insurgent attacks on marines in Haditha throughout the day.
General Huck and other officers from the Second Marine Division have been ordered not to talk about the case, and a telephone call to the unit was referred to Colonel Gibson, the Marine spokesman. But some senior officers have previously defended their response to the killings, saying there was no reason to doubt the account provided by enlisted marines at the time, contending that civilian killings were an unfortunate but accidental byproduct of their pursuit of insurgents.
The involved marines' battalion commander, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, and their company commander, Capt. Lucas McConnell, told investigators that they had not reviewed the scene within the houses after the killings, despite the high number of civilian casualties, one of the officials said. Colonel Chessani was relieved of his command in April; Marine officials would not say whether the Haditha case was involved in the decision but said there were several reasons.
The video taken by the overhead drone was very limited, according to one of the officials. The aircraft was not flying over the site until after the bomb attack, so it only captured the aftermath. Even so, the video appears to contradict statements by marines about what occurred, the officials said.
In particular, it has raised doubts about a claim by enlisted marines that five Iraqis were shot as they were running away after the roadside bombing.
The officials said the video showed the bodies of the five Iraqis on the ground close to the car that they had been riding in, the officials said. In one case, the video appears to show one body stacked on top of another, which the officials said was inconsistent with the account that the men had been shot while fleeing.
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Reservists: Officers stopped us from attending anti-war protest
Haaretz.com
By Nir Hasson
18/08/06
Some 160 infantry reserve soldiers are accusing their commanders of preventing them from participating in a demonstration against the war in Lebanon, which they called a "debacle." The soldiers said they had been used as "sitting ducks."
"I've been in the army and reserves for 26 years and what happened this time was not merely a fiasco, it was a complete debacle. We felt like tin soldiers in a game of Olmert and Peretz's assistants and spin masters," said Avi, a soldier in the brigade.
At noon Thursday 160 brigade soldiers signed a request to take part in the demonstration that would call on the resignation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz. However, their release was put off until Friday, preventing them from reaching the protest.
They wanted to protest not only the army's moves in Lebanon but the decisions of their commanders, whom they accuse of sending them needlessly to their death.
"They sent us into a village they knew 15 Hezbollah fighters were holed up in at mid-day, we were like sitting ducks, it was total insanity. Two of our comrades were killed because of that. We are being used as though we were in the Chinese army, where it doesn't matter how many are killed," he said.
A few dozen demonstrators arrived at Rabin Square Thursday to take part in the protest that had been organized on Internet sites.
They called for Olmert's resignation and blasted halting the war before its goals were achieved.
Ariella Miller, one of the protest's initiators, said she was not acting on behalf of any political body. "We are family people who used the Internet to form a group. When we went to war they promised us to bring back the soldiers and restore Israel's deterrent force."
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Will America Assassinate General Musharraf?
By ABID ULLAH JAN
July 20, 2006
General Musharraf wants to remain president-in-uniform till 2012. America wants to keep Pakistan occupied by its armed forces for as long as possible. It seems that with these complimentary objectives, Musharraf and Washington are getting along well. The reality, however, is totally different.
The United States extracted all concessions from General Musharraf through sheer blackmail. Musharraf would never have surrendered Pakistan's sovereignty and independence merely on a phone call from Collin Powell or George W. Bush if he were not blackmailed for the ISI's role in Operation 9/11.
Of course, the ISI was used to frame Arabs for the 9/11 attacks. But in the process, ISI's guilt was established as an agency supporting and financing the so-declared hijackers. There are ample reasons to believe that evidence about ISI's involvement in 9/11 was used to blackmail General Musharraf into the quickest surrender of our age.
Washington knows that the general did not concede much by choice. With elections for the next parliament due in 2007, General Musharraf is desperately building a political base in the country to get a re-election from the new parliament for the next term or to get a change in the constitution to a presidential democracy to be able to shed the uniform and also to retain the political and executive powers as president. If he succeeds in this plan, this will go in favour of Washington. But Washington sees some serious problems, which would derail Musharraf's bid to remain the most powerful man in Pakistan. This may lead Washington to settle General Musharraf's issue the way it dealt with General Zia. The following factors show that assassinating Musharraf might become one of the best options for the United States in the present circumstances.
General Musharraf has not outlived his utility for Washington as yet. However, it is not possible for General Musharraf to remain the army chief forever. The best way Washington believes its interest could be served is to make General Musharraf's autocratic rule look more democratic. For that, instead of crafting new webs and making another leader to fully submit, Washington would like to see Musharraf become another Hosnie Mubarak in Islamabad. Washington now wants him to shed his uniform and become a civilian president in the present setup.
The dilemma before Washington, however, is that no civilian ruler can use the military in the service of the United States as effectively as General Musharraf is doing as the military chief. At the same time, the U.S. efforts to create an alternate political leadership in the country to increase pressure on Musharraf also seem to be getting nowhere.
General Musharraf's present political allies are more of a liability than asset for him now. The main political allies, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML Quid-e-Azam group), are most corrupt, inefficient and ineffective, with no hope of securing required seats in the next elections. There is also serious internal dissent within the PML (Q).
General Musharraf's other ally, Mutahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), is also considered a corrupt, blackmailing, sub-nationalist-minded, mafia-styled gang, which is fully exploiting the weaknesses of the general. MQM is the most unreliable, even treacherous, political ally for him.
<> Musharraf propped up the religious alliance of Muthahida majlis-e-Amal (MMA) and then used it for constitutional changes in his favour. Musharraf reneged on public promises to MMA to relinquish the post of chief of army staff as part of the process of restoring democracy in Pakistan. Islamabad's suspension from commonwealth was lifted on the condition that General Musharraf would give up his military uniform by the end of 2004 as a proof of his commitment to democratic reform. Now the religious alliance is sensing his weaknesses and is gearing up its barrage against him.
There is a very strong perception within the religious parties that the MQM was behind the Karachi blast in April 2006. Scores of people, including prominent MMA leader Haji Hanif Billo, were killed when a bomb went off at a religious gathering in Karachi. Since then, the government has contemplated no action against the MQM, a factor that will agitate more public anger.
Former prime ministers Nawaz, Sharif and Benazir are now flexing their muscles to challenge him in the coming days. There are talks of joint efforts to remove Musharraf and even the MQM is signaling that it is willing to join such a campaign. If Benazir and Nawaz decided to return before the elections, even their arrest would make them political heroes, creating more embarrassment for the general.
The entire governance and economy is in a big mess. Musharraf relied on Shaukat Aziz, who has miserably failed on all counts. Inflation is wrecking the life of the common man - the vote bank in any elections. That vote bank is not impressed with Shaukat Aziz blowing smoke in their face with economic jargon. For a common man, for example, it is enough to know that the sugar crisis is still haunting the country. The prices have almost doubled in recent months to record levels. Still, there are no imports and all the national demands are being met in abundant supply from local stocks. The price hike gave windfall profits of billions of rupees to a few select sugar cartel mafias within a few months. The much-vaunted National Accountability Bureau was forced to drop the probe immediately after it started. The common man knows that corruption is at an all-time high within the state machinery. Abuse of power and authority are daily headlines. Police and the judiciary system remain most corrupt as well.
Thus, General Musharraf and Washington are now left with extremely limited, difficult and almost impossible options.
1. Even if the military is still behind him, it is highly unlikely that he may decide to confront the Americans, forget about democracy, stop taking international pressures, and take absolute power in his own hands once again as he had when he took power in October 1999. It does not seem possible that Musharraf would once more abolish the assemblies, defer the constitution, draft his own constitution, and declare a presidential system or even martial law. In the past, he formed a team of so-considered honest, selfless and efficient professionals to rectify the damages done in the past few years and tried to bring back control in the economy, security, governance, judiciary and social welfare of the country. He has clearly failed. Of course, the suffering masses are not interested in democracy or martial law. They want security, dignity, cheap food and energy, as well as economic development. It does not matter to them who delivers this. Nevertheless, it will be a huge task to fool them twice with the same mantra. On the part of General Musharraf, it would amount to saying, "I am redoing the eight-year experiment."
2. Another option is renegotiating with the Americans. It is not a problem for him to bend backwards even more. He would send Pakistani forces to Iraq, recognize Israel, commit more troops to Miranshah, take responsibility for finishing off the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Madrassas in Pakistan, and allow more unrestricted access to the United States into Pakistan's security and intelligence, as well as nuke apparatus. Nevertheless, for sustaining all this he has to remain the chief of armed forces. With these measures, he can immediately become the blue-eyed boy of the Americans once again and there will be no further chatter in Washington about democracy. But Musharraf will have a revolt on hand in the home front and perhaps even a rebellion in the army.
3. The third option is to contest elections with whatever support base the general has so far and keep Benazir, Nawaz and Sharif out of the electoral process to weaken their collective nuisance. Some heavy-duty management will be required to "arrange" the required results and to neutralize the MMA and PPP/Nawaz factor. The general has done this with the help of ISI before and can do the same again. Consequently, MQM will continue to exploit the situation and basically nothing will improve in the country in terms of economy and governance or law and order; likewise, the same team of suspects will reappear to exploit him even further for the next four years. Things can get mismanaged if Nawaz and Benazir decided to come back before the elections and launch a street protest calling their court cases politically motivated. The MMA would also join them and a bit of "hidden hand" support could start an unexpected but very real inferno. Even if everything goes well, the general will have to give up his position as the military chief. Losing his military position will make the general lose all attractiveness to Washington, which is mainly concerned with sustaining Pakistan's occupation with the Pakistani armed forces and using the Pakistani army in the interest of the United States.
4. The fourth option is that the general reads the writing on the wall and decides to quit, handing over power to the next army chief who would promise the elections or would decide to stay in power depending upon what he wants to do. Musharraf will have to leave the country with his family and may settle in some friendly or neutral country like Turkey or a country in Europe. This option suits Washington, but General Musharraf is addicted to power to an extent that it is highly unlikely that he will hang his boots up so easily.
5. The last option is assassination. He may be assassinated either by his army men, any local resistance groups, Baluchistan Liberation army assassins, or someone sent by the Americans to blame "religious extremists" and pave the way for another general to take over and continue Pakistan's occupation for another decade or so. Being in charge of the general's personal security in many ways, it is only the Americans who can successfully carry out the assassination operation against him. His departure in a violent manner will serve many of the U.S.'s objectives.
In the next few weeks or months, events would basically unfold in one of the many options discussed above. Right now, both Musharraf and Washington are confused and have not clearly decided on any of the options.
The assassination option carries the most weight. We know from experience that leaders in the Muslim world who associated themselves with Washington unconditionally are doomed. The Shah of Iran, General Zia and Saddam Hussein are prominent examples. General Musharraf may continue to rule by force and power, but would not have any grassroots support and hence would remain on shaky ground within his own country.
Washington is now giving General Musharraf a very tough time. He is not finding the courage to stand up to Washington or to face the nation. He has gone silent these days and is not defending U.S. actions, nor is he making supportive statements about the U.S. strategy in the Muslim world. He was under the misconception that Washington would appreciate his concessions, which it was obtaining from the general through blackmail, as his favors. This, however, was not the case. Washington didn't appreciate the "sincerity" and "sacrifice" of the entrapped general. Now, the disillusioned general is annoyed and offended by the American rebuffs to his demands and is feeling ditched and betrayed. That is a sick feeling for a man who had put all his eggs in one big American basket and is now left alone and abandoned to be replaced with another strongman, who could keep himself in uniform for a longer period than the burnt out General Musharraf. A more docile and cooperative political leadership would be the last option considered in Washington.
General Musharraf is in the middle of nowhere at the moment. His only option is to come out clean on his relations with the Americans and to give voice to what he has been hiding from his people and the whole world. He might be portrayed as insane as a result, but to save Pakistan and the world from the scourge of a greater war, he must tell the truth and the whole story of his entrapment to grab the initiative back and restore the confidence of his nation in his words and deeds. Unless General Musharraf restores the confidence of his people in his policies at home by telling the whole truth about the way the ISI was used in 9/11 and how Pakistan has been blackmailed, he is doomed.
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Bush's popularity unchanged by foiled bombing plot
AFP
Thu Aug 17, 2006
WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush's popularity was not given a boost by the foiling of an alleged plot to bomb planes flying from Britain to the United States, according to a poll.
The Pew Research Center poll found that 37 percent of Americans approved of Bush's overall performance, virtually unchanged from a July survey.
Fifty percent approved of Bush's handling of terrorist threats, compared to 47 percent in June. The poll was largely conducted after the alleged airline bombing plot was revealed on August 10.
"The severity of the president's image problem is reflected in the fact that while many Americans (49 percent) feel the level of US involvement in resolving the Lebanon crisis has been appropriate, far fewer (36 percent) say they approve of Bush's handling of the issue," Pew said.
Meanwhile, the alleged airline bombing plot did not have a high impact on Americans' concerns about another terrorist attack.
A quarter of people surveyed by Pew expressed "high concern" about an attack against the United States, up from 17 percent in 2004.
The small rise in US public concern is similar to the one seen after the public transportation bombings in London in 2005 and Madrid in 2004, Pew said.
The poll was conducted between August 9-13 among 1,506 people. It has a plus or minus four percentage point margin of error.
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Retired US generals, diplomats criticize Bush Middle East policy
by Jerome Bernard
AFP
Fri Aug 18, 2006
WASHINGTON - A group of former diplomats and retired generals called on President George W. Bush to open negotiations with Iran, warning that the use of military force would have catastrophic consequences for the region.
The open letter signed by 21 former senior officials comes amid growing criticism of US refusal to deal directly with Iran and Syria despite crises in Iraq and Lebanon.
"As former military leaders and foreign policy officials, we call on the Bush administration to engage immediately in direct talks with the government of Iran without preconditions to help resolve the current crisis in the Middle East and settle differences over the Iranian nuclear program," the letter said.
"We strongly caution against any consideration of the use of military force against Iran. The current crises must be resolved through diplomacy, not military action," it said.
It warned that an attack on Iran would have disastrous consequences for the region and for US forces in Iraq, further inflaming Muslim hatred and violence.
Among the signers were retired general Joseph Hoar, a former commander of US forces in the Middle East, and Morton Halperin, a former State Department director of policy planning.
Halperin accused the Bush administration of stifling debate on Middle East policy "by accusing anybody that disagrees with it of being disloyal or somehow helping the terrorists."
"This administration by refusing to talk to the Syrians, to the Iranians, to the North Koreans has in my view jeopardized our national security," he said in a teleconference with reporters.
The letter comes on top of a chorus of recent criticism by other former officials, Democrats and Republicans, of the administration's Middle East strategy.
Last week, former US ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke called for more active Middle East diplomacy and talks with Iran and Syria in a opinion piece published by the Washington Post.
Warning of merging crises in Lebanon and Iraq, he emphasized the need to prevent "a chain reaction (that) could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Mumbai."
"The only beneficiaries of this chaos are Iran, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who last week held the largest anti-American, anti-
Israel demonstration in the world in the very heart of Baghdad, even as 6,000 additional U.S. troops were rushing into the city to 'prevent' a civil war that has already begun," he said.
"This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history's only nuclear superpower confrontation," he said.
Holbrooke, a Democrat, also called for sending more US troops to Afghanistan while redeploying some US troops in Iraq to the Kurdish zones in the north, then proceed with a phased drawdown of the remaining force.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier this month brushed off critics of the administration policies as short-sighted.
Richard Haas, a former State Department official, found irony in the government use of the word "opportunity" to describe the crisis in the Middle East, and Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, said Washington's irrational fear of talks was a sign of weakness.
But Rice has continued to defend Washington's refusal to hold high level talks with Syria about Lebanon, and says the crisis in the region is evidence of the emergence of a "new Middle East."
"The problem isn't talking to Syria, the problem is that Syria doesn't act when people talk to them," she said.
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Yet Another Bomb-Them-Now, Christo-Facist Fox Guest Says Iran Wants to "Wipe Out the United States"
News Hounds
18/08/2006
Fox gave airtime again today (August 16, 2006) on Your World w/Cavuto to a guest who represents the Christian version of the mullahs and clerics and Socialists and "new Fox gave airtime again today (August 16, 2006) on Your World w/Cavuto to a guest who represents the Christian version of the mullahs and clerics and Socialists and "new Hitlers" Fox constantly reminds us of who lurk in dark corners of the world waiting to destroy us. Today's Armageddon-based Rapturist was Joel Rosenberg, who Fox benignly identified as a "Middle East Analyst" and the author of "The Copper Scroll."
Yesterday's guest, John Hagee was vehement but Rosenberg was practically foaming at the mouth. And he was good. R-e-a-l good. He no doubt scared the bejesus out of Fox's already terrified audience but he also found time to bash the "liberal media," wimpy, soft-on-terror Democrats and, with Fox's help, draw a link between Iran, Syria and Venezuela.
The pretense for Rosenberg's appearance was to discuss an exhibit now showing in Iran featuring cartoons mocking the Holocaust. As happens so frequently on Fox, that topic was quickly dispensed with and Cavuto and Rosenberg got down to business.
Rosenberg said the cartoons "the Danes and others have done to mock Mohammed were wrong," but,
"The Iranians are trying to not just mock, but deny a Holocaust while simultaneously preparing to launch another. The President of Iran is talking about genocide, wiping Israel, and frankly, the United States off the map so this is part of the propaganda campaign they are waging to rile up radical Muslims into a holocaust against Israel and ultimately against the United States.
This is a regime in Iran that is trying to bring about a new holocaust. Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler. Too many Americans, particularly on the left, don't see that. They don't see the threat. Ahmadinejad is saying to people in Iran that the end of the world is rapidly approaching and that it's his mission to bring it about by destroying Israel and then the United States and that's the threat.
At this point in the segment Fox went to a split screen showing video of Ahmadinejad hugging Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, and video of Ahmadinejad standing next to Bashar Al-Assad, the President of Syria.
Rosenberg continued:
He is building the arsenal and the alliances to destroy Israel and to wipe out the United States and that's what so dangerous. People don't appreciate, yet, particularly in the media, Mike Wallace for sure, don't appreciate, don't understand the evil that is rising in Iran and that's what I'm trying to write about in novels. That's what I'm trying to talk about is the religious, end of the world apocalyptic mindset that Ahmadinejad has. You can't negotiate with someone, ultimately, who believes it's his mission to end the world.
Comment: The hypocrisy in what Rosenberg says is mind-boggling. Speaking on the Bush News Channel, he talks about Ahmadinejad and the "propaganda campaign" he's waging to "rile up radical Muslims" while Fox does the same. He says Ahmadinejad is "saying to people in Iran that the end of the world is rapidly approaching," yet Rosenberg too believes (or hopes for) that. He talks about the "evil that is rising in Iran," yet he fails to see the evil that is rising in the United States, aimed mostly (right now, anyway) at Iran, Syria, and Venezuela and the extraordinary role Fox News plays in spreading that evil.
In the end though, the most frightening aspect of Rosenberg's appearance is knowing that he has boasted of being invited to the White House, Capitol Hill, and the CIA to discuss the Rapture and the Middle East.
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More questions arise in JonBenet case
By CATHERINE TSAI and JON SARCHE
Associated Press
August 18, 2006
BOULDER, Colo. - If the stunning confession in JonBenet Ramsey's slaying has made the decade-old case any easier to solve, prosecutors aren't saying. And it may have made it more puzzling. Hours after John Mark Karr told reporters in Thailand he was with JonBenet when she died, questions arose about his claims - including whether he sexually assaulted the 6-year-old beauty queen or was even in Colorado at the time of the slaying.
"It's clear to me that he's somewhat interested or maybe even obsessed by the case and the real question is whether he's inserting himself into it for some obscure psychological reason," said author Carlton Smith, who wrote 1997's "Death of a Little Princess: The Tragic Story of the Murder of JonBenet Ramsey."
District Attorney Mary Lacy refused to say whether authorities have evidence linking Karr to JonBenet's death at her Boulder home on Dec. 26, 1996.
"We should all heed the poignant advice of John Ramsey," said Lacy, quoting the girl's father. "Do not jump to conclusions, do not rush to judgment, do not speculate. Let the justice system take its course."
Lt. Gen. Suwat Tumrongsiskul of the Thai immigration police changed some details Friday of the account he had given of what Karr told investigators. In a telephone interview Thursday with The Associated Press, Suwat quoted Karr as saying he had sexually assaulted the girl and given her drugs. He also told reporters before a news conference Thursday that Karr had claimed to have picked up JonBenet at her school.
On Friday, Suwat confirmed to the AP his account of the sexual assault. But asked Friday if Karr gave the girl drugs, Suwat said the suspect described the encounter with JonBenet Ramsey as "a blur."
"It may have been drugs, or it may have been something else because (Karr said) it was a blur, blur," Suwat said.
Suwat also said Friday that his statement about the girl being picked from school was based on a documentary he had seen and not the interrogation.
JonBenet's autopsy report found no evidence of drugs, saying her death was caused by strangulation after a beating that included a fractured skull. While it describes vaginal injuries, it makes no conclusions about whether she was raped. Investigators later concluded there was no semen on JonBenet's body.
Karr's ex-wife, Lara Knutson, told reporters she cannot defend him, then insisted he was with her in Alabama that Christmas.
"She cannot think of a Christmas while they were together when he was away from the family on Christmas day or immediately thereafter," said her attorney, Michael Rains, though he added she could not specifically recall Christmas 1996.
Authorities have not said whether Karr could have written the ransom note demanding $118,000 found in the Ramsey home. And the professor who swapped four years' worth of e-mails with Karr and brought him to the attention of prosecutors in May refused to characterize the suspect either as killer or kook.
"I don't know that he's guilty," said Michael Tracey, who teaches journalism at the University of Colorado. "Obviously, I went to the district attorney for a reason, but let him have his day in court and let JonBenet have her day in court and let's see how it plays out."
Any previous relationship between Karr and the Ramseys remained a mystery, though both have ties to suburban Atlanta.
Karr's background includes an arrest in Petaluma, Calif., in 2001 on five misdemeanor counts of possession of child pornography, to which he pleaded not guilty.
He began teaching at Bangkok Christian College, an elite private school with about 5,500 male students in 12 grades, in early June, school officials said. He worked there for about two weeks before being dismissed.
"He was qualified to be a teacher. He had a diploma and has experience in teaching in Bangkok for some time," said Banchong Chompowong, assistant director of the English immersion program at Bangkok Christian. "John Karr came to us with a good resume and with credentials, but then we allowed him a trial (period) with students, we found he was too strict."
Banchong said Karr gave the students "time outs" and another teacher said he had a reputation for yelling at students.
Karr was arrested at a Bangkok apartment Wednesday. Hours later, Thai authorities sat him before a room of journalists, where he admitted: "I was with JonBenet when she died. Her death was an accident."
"I am so very sorry for what happened to JonBenet," Karr told the AP.
Suwat said Karr wants to return to the United States to fight the case. He said U.S. authorities were preparing documents and plane tickets for the return journey. The departure could take place at any time, he said.
Thai police said Karr told them the slaying was second-degree murder. One expert suggested his confession was geared to spare him a first-degree murder charge.
"He seemed convinced that what he said would make him guilty of a lesser crime," said Sharon Davies, a former prosecutor at the Ohio State University law school.
Legal experts said DNA evidence will likely be key: DNA was found beneath JonBenet's fingernails and inside her underwear, and authorities have never said whether it matches anyone in an
FBI database.
Karr was given a mouth-swab DNA test in Bangkok, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. The results of that test were not known. Karr will be given another DNA test when he returns to the United States in the next several days, the official said.
Asked if authorities could tell whether Karr had firsthand knowledge of the murder or had just picked up information from news accounts, Lin Wood, the Ramseys' longtime attorney, said: "There is information about the murder that has never been publicly disclosed." He did not elaborate.
Wood said he believes there is more to the case than correspondence.
"I feel like there must be something more here than some e-mail confession," the attorney said.
Karr's description of the case as an accident also rang false to experts.
"It's hard to imagine a more intentional, deliberate murder," said Craig Silverman, a former Denver prosecutor, referring to JonBenet's skull fracture and strangulation. "This has always been a case of deliberate murder."
Comment: Gosh, it sounds like this story will be making headlines for a long time! Are you distracted enough?
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Big Mama Ain't Happy
Volcano showers villages with rocks and lava
Associated Press in Quito
Friday August 18, 2006
The Guardian
An eruption of Ecuador's Tungurahua volcano showered rock and lava on nearby villages, killing at least one person, leaving 60 missing and burying homes, a local mayor said yesterday.
Authorities ordered the evacuation of three Andean villages on Tungurahua's slopes on Wednesday after the volcano's crater filled with lava, but many residents were reluctant to leave their homes, said Juan Salazar, mayor of the village of Penipe, 85 miles (135km) south of the capital, Quito.
Rescuers have recovered one body in Penipe and four others are believed to be trapped under the rubble, he said.
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Lightning bolt strikes Cape with force of 'bomb'
By Rachel Myers
rmyers@news-press.com
Originally posted on August 16, 2006
When Vietnam veteran Richard Foley heard the boom Monday night, it brought back a lot of memories.
"The last time I heard something like that, I was overseas at war," the Cape Coral resident said. "It literally sounded like a bomb."
In reality, lightning struck a dead tree, located at 624 S.W. 9th Ave., about 9 p.m., causing an unusual explosion that shattered windows, lifted roofs, caved ceilings, dented cars, bent fences and caused an estimated $114,350 in damage to 16 homes on the avenue.
Two of those homes were determined to be unsafe to live in because of roof and wall damage.
One man was treated for minor injuries on the scene, but no one was seriously injured.
The white-hot bolt slammed into a towering 40-foot pine tree that had been decaying since Hurricane Charley pummeled it in 2004.
The charge zapped through the root system, and that, combined with pockets of water inside the trunk, caused the tree and roots to explode, carving a 14-foot long trench about 5 inches deep near the tree.
Cape Coral Fire Chief Bill Van Helden said that in his 27 years in fire service, he had "never seen anything like it.
"Here in Florida, we're used to storms and lightning, but it was a very significant event," he said.
"It looked like someone had detonated a bomb in the middle of the neighborhood."
Branches and bark spewed outward in a 500-foot radius, according to city spokeswoman Connie Barron.
"I don't think there was anyone nearby that didn't hear it," she said.
With a terrorist plot in London foiled less than a week ago, several of the residents said they wondered at first whether it might be an attack on native soil.
"The thought crossed my mind," Korean war veteran Richard Charleville said. His home sustained $2,000 worth of damage, mainly to windows and carpeting, which had to be removed when the blast scattered shards of glass across his living room floor.
"It knocked me clear out of bed," he said. "It sounded like somebody tossed a grenade in the house."
The blast could even be heard indoors by those attending the City Council meeting Monday evening at City Hall, 4 miles away.
"We heard it, but we assumed it was just thunder-related," Mayor Eric Feichthaler said. "It wasn't until later we found out it was much more serious."
About 50 fire, police and emergency medical service personnel responded after a 911 call was made at 8:56 p.m. Personnel remained there the entire night.
The department responded to two other lightning strikes Monday night - one on Pine Island Road and another right in the parking lot of City Hall, where an antenna on a news van attracted a lightning bolt. No one was seriously injured in either of those strikes.
According to Vaisala's National Lightning Detection Network, a total of 4,862 strikes were reported in Lee County Monday night.
"It was a very intense lightning storm," Van Helden said. "I think it's just amazing that more people weren't hurt."
He said the main reason people were unharmed was most were indoors at the time.
Emergency crews at Southwest 9th Avenue used the police department's new incident command bus as a headquarters during the aftermath.
From there, emergency workers were able to connect easily with one another and direct aid to the houses that needed it the most.
Three volunteers from the American Red Cross were dispatched too, according to Heidi Ruster, executive director in Lee County. Water and food were served to both residents and emergency workers. They also offered shelter to the residents of two homes that were severely damaged, but both said they had local friends and family who would take them in.
"We respond to some fires that are caused by lightning," Ruster said. "But I think it's safe to say that something like this is pretty rare."
Karen Ryan, spokeswoman for the Lee County Electric Cooperative, said power was restored to most residents in the area almost immediately.
Several city officials, including Feichthaler and Councilwoman Dolores Bertolini, came out to survey the damage Monday evening and Tuesday morning.
"It just frightens me because this could happen to anybody," Bertolini said. "I think the victims are grateful to know that people are there to help them, but I think most of the difficulties lie ahead of them."
Van Helden said the strike highlights the need for residents to cut down dead or dying trees because they can not stand up to storms and lightning as well as live trees.
"Last night is a prime example of why it's necessary," he said.
Thomas Becker of Florida Yards and Neighborhoods agreed, but said residents should never attempt to do it themselves.
"Call a certified arborist," Becker said. "You don't want to compound one tragedy with another."
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Vietnam evacuates thousands as floods kill 19
Reuters
Fri Aug 18, 2006
HANOI - Vietnam ordered the evacuation of thousands of people on Friday in the central and northern regions to avoid flash floods and landslides triggered by prolonged rains that have killed at least 19 people.
Floods after torrential rains since last Friday hit the Central Highlands' key coffee-growing region and four central coastal provinces, killing at least eight people in Binh Thuan province and four in Nghe An province, a government report said.
Six others drowned in four provinces and one died in the Mekong delta province of Dong Thap. The floods also displaced thousands of people, inundated 5,000 houses, submerged nearly 40,000 hectares (100,000 acres) of mainly rice and corn crops and also blocked traffic.
"The rains, which in the past weeks have triggered landslides and floods causing human deaths and property damage, are expected to continue in the coming days in the country's north and central north," the National Flood and Storm Prevention Center said in a message on Friday.
The center ordered provincial authorities to move people out of low-lying areas.
More than 1,600 households in the central highland provinces of Dak Nong, Daklak and Lam Dong have been evacuated, the center said. Rice and instant noodles have been sent to the Central Highlands that produces 80 percent of Vietnam's coffee.
Natural disasters, especially floods and storms, kill several hundred people in Vietnam each year, mainly during the storm season between May and October.
This year's rains and floods did not damage the region's coffee crop as coffee trees are planted on higher ground. But rains have delayed several deliveries to Saigon Port as exporters temporarily stopped processing, traders said.
Further to the south, seasonal floods are forecast to rise quickly in the next five days in the Mekong delta rice basket, which generates half of Vietnam's grain output. However, most of the summer-autumn rice crop has been harvested in key growing provinces bordering Cambodia.
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China denies cover-up as typhoon toll hits 330
Reuters
Fri Aug 18, 2006
BEIJING - China has denied covering up casualties from natural disasters as the official death toll from the strongest typhoon to strike the country in half a century rose to 330, a number residents says is greatly understated.
Saomai, graded a "super typhoon" with winds exceeding 216 km (134 miles) per hour, barreled into China's southeast coast last Thursday, flattening tens of thousands of houses, overturning ships and damaging infrastructure.
The hardest hit was the coastal town of Shacheng in Fujian province, where about 1,000 of the more than 10,000 ships which returned harbor before Saomai's arrival capsized and hundreds of fishermen died or went missing.
A total of 186 bodies had been recovered from waters off Shacheng and dozens were still missing by Thursday, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.
But angry residents claimed the death toll could be as high as 1,000 and accused the government of failing to offer adequate warning before the typhoon struck, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported.
Afraid of punishment from superiors, local officials in China have a record of covering up or underplaying bad news on disasters, accidents and epidemics.
But Wang Zhenyao, disaster relief chief under China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, denied any attempts to cover up the scale of the damage.
"Local officials don't have to lie about death tolls from natural disasters as they don't bring them liabilities like coal mine accidents do," Xinhua quoted him as saying on Thursday.
China has the world's most dangerous coal-mining industry and local officials have been accused of colluding with mine owners to conceal fatal accidents which happen on an almost daily basis.
Wang cited China's declassification of natural disaster death tolls as state secrets last year and other "institutional checks" against cover-ups, Xinhua said.
"And given the supervision from relatives of the victims, residents and media, it is also impossible to cover up (death tolls)," Wang was quoted as saying.
"Covering up would be even a graver mistake."
He said poor communications and a growing migrant population hampered an accurate account of disaster casualties.
The overall death toll for Fujian now stood at 241, bringing the total number of people killed by Saomai in China to 330, Xinhua said.
Much of south China has been repeatedly battered by typhoons and tropical storms this year, with nearly 1,000 killed by rainstorms, landslides and other disasters they brought even before Saomai hit.
Local officials in a county in the central province of Hunan, where almost 200 people died in floods triggered by tropical storm Bilis last month, were accused of initially understating the death toll by several times.
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Pakistani flood toll at least 15
Reuters
Fri Aug 18, 2006
KARACHI - Pakistan's biggest city declared a public holiday on Friday as it cleaned up from heavy flooding that killed at least 15 people and more rain was expected, officials said.
Banks and the stock market in Karachi would remain open despite the holiday declared by the provincial government.
Most of the 15 people killed in the floods on Thursday were electrocuted while some were killed in traffic accidents during heavy downpours, an emergency service official said.
"I can confirm 15 casualties in the last 24 hours but the number could be higher as many cases go unreported," said Rizwan Edhi, a senior official of the Edhi Trust, which runs the country's largest ambulance service.
Thunder storms and heavy rain hit across Sindh province but a provincial government spokesman said there were no reports of damage to crops.
"The flood situation is also under control so far," the spokesman said.
Weather officials said more rain was expected in Karachi and across southern Sindh province by Friday evening.
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Japan heat wave to continue in many areas next week
Reuters
Fri Aug 18, 2006
TOKYO - The current heat wave will continue in many areas of Japan for at least another week from Saturday, and then start cooling down, the official forecaster said on Friday.
The Japan Meteorological Agency forecast that all regions will have hot weather next week similar to this week, with temperatures rising above 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit).
Temperatures will then ease in line with the seasonal average for August recorded from 1971 to 2000.
The weather has been warmer than normal in most areas of Japan recently. In particular, the northernmost main island of Hokkaido has seen average temperatures in the past two weeks 2.9 degrees higher than the normal 22 degrees Celsius for August, boosting daily peak electricity demand to record levels in the area.
Temperatures in Hokkaido have risen to almost 33 Celsius (91.4 F), almost matching temperatures in the southernmost main island of Kyushu.
Kyushu's local daily electricity demand has also hit record levels this month, with temperatures rising as high as 35 Celsius (95 F). The average temperature in the past week was 2 degrees higher than the area's average of 27.6 Celsius for August.
The average temperatures in the capital Tokyo, in eastern Japan, was 0.6 degrees higher than the area's normal at 27.1 Celsius (80.8 F) in the past week.
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Guard unable to deal with 2 hurricanes
By LOLITA C. BALDOR
Associated Press
Thu Aug 17, 2006
WASHINGTON - Strapped by war and equipment shortages, the National Guard will find it difficult to deal with two or more major hurricanes if they sweep ashore in different regions around the same time, Guard leaders say.
To counter equipment shortfalls caused largely by the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Guard has borrowed more than $500 million worth of equipment from the active duty military to restock its units. Thousands of trucks, Humvees and other supplies have been shifted mostly from inland states' Guard units closer to where storms are more likely to strike.
Army and Air Guard officials also are spending at least $900 million on new communications equipment and hundreds of tractors and trucks.
But that may be too little, too late, for states warily watching the weather reports as the nation enters peak hurricane season.
If a hurricane hits North Carolina and another one spins toward Texas, "we would have to make some very difficult decisions," Col. Pat Tennis, the National Guard's director of operations, told the Associated Press.
"Have we thinned the lines? Yes we have. Could we deal with the consequences of another hurricane like Katrina? Yes. Could we deal with two? That would be very challenging," Tennis said.
Guard officials, he said, would have to "look at population densities, what states could volunteer their equipment ... and we would have to travel equipment longer distances in order to meet the emergency."
Tennis' comments come nearly a year after more than 50,000 Guard members from across the country raced to the Gulf Coast to assist in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which destroyed wide swaths of the Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas coasts.
Similar concerns were expressed by Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard. Blum said the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have taken a toll on the Guard's equipment.
"We have to be able to respond even faster here at home than they have to overseas," said Blum, adding that because of agreements between state adjutants general, "we are able to move equipment from other states, to make up for the shortfalls in some states. We have to do that every single day to make the mission work."
According to documents, the Guard has borrowed 3,418 pieces of equipment from the active military, ranging from generators and Humvees to refueling tankers and medical gear.
One Guard document says the states should already have had the equipment as part of their warfighting capabilities, but "due to deployments and stay behind equipment for (Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom), the states are particularly short."
Military units departing Iraq have left hundreds of trucks and Humvees in the war zone, and lost many others due to wear and tear or attacks.
The Army is vowing to spend $21 billion between 2005 and 2011 to buy new equipment for the Guard, including funds to replace hundreds of trucks and trailers. Army spokesman Paul Boyce said there will be a "firewall" around the Guard money to insure the full amount is protected against budget cuts, and he said separate funding for the Reserves will be in the 2007 budget requests.
"We're spread really, really thin. That's a common concern that I hear about," said Maj. Gen. Roger Lempke, president of the Adjutants General Association of the United States. "My concern is having enough equipment to support a major event in a state."
Lempke, who is adjutant general in Nebraska, agreed that multiple crises will be difficult to handle.
"If we get sequential or simultaneous events, it could be a problem. We might not have the equipment we need nearby and we might have to go clear across the country to get it."
He said Guard units in North Carolina and Louisiana, for example, had to leave a lot of equipment, including trucks and Humvees, behind in Iraq and need replacements to meet their training and homeland security needs.
Right now, he said, his home state is borrowing two Black Hawk helicopters from Arizona to help with firefighting, because Nebraska sent eight of its aircraft to Iraq. And those two helicopters, he said, "were vital to saving two towns" in the western region of the state.
According to a budget document dated late last week, the Army and Air National Guard are buying more than 200 five-ton tractors; about 2,000 cargo trucks, and more than $300 million in communications equipment, including about 200 mobile tracking systems. Some of the equipment has been bought, other purchases are not completed.
U.S. Northern Command, which is largely responsible for homeland security, has also bought more mobile communications equipment, and would be ready to move that into a region if needed.
"We just have to keep the process going and keep our fingers crossed in the meantime," said Lempke. "I think they're doing the best they can."
Comment: Let's review: Much of New Orleans still lies in ruins a year after Katrina struck. Obviously, neither the National Guard nor any other agency was used to truly help rebuild New Orleans and help residents rebuild their lives. If Katrina is any indication, affected residents will be pretty much left to their own devices if there is even one major hurricane, let alone two.
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Earthquake rattles Russia, northern Japan
ASSOCIATED PRESSFri, Aug. 18, 2006
TOKYO - A strong earthquake of preliminary magnitude 6.0 shook the eastern Russian province of Sakhalin, rattling parts of northern Japan early today, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries, Japan's weather agency said.
There was no fear of tsunami - huge waves caused by undersea disturbances or volcanic activities - from the temblor, the Meteorological Agency said in a statement.
The quake struck in Russia's Sakhalin province, about 770 miles north of Tokyo, and was centered about 6 miles under the earth's surface, the agency said.
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It Ain't Over
Robert Fisk: Lebanon's pain grows by the hour as death toll hits 1,300
Independent
17 August 2006
They are digging them up by the hour, the swelling death toll of the Lebanon conflict. The American poet Carl Sandburg spoke of the dead in other wars and imagined that he was the grass under which they would be buried. "Shovel them under and let me work," he said of the dead of Ypres and Verdun. But across Lebanon, they are systematically lifting the tons of rubble of old roofs and apartment blocks and finding families below, their arms wrapped around each other in the moment of death as their homes were beaten down upon them by the Israeli air force. By last night, they had found 61 more bodies, taking the Lebanese dead of the 33-day war to almost 1,300.
In Srifa, south of the Litani river, they found 26 bodies beneath ruins which I myself stood on just three days ago. At Ainata, there were eight more bodies of civilians. A corpse was discovered beneath a collapsed four-storey house north of Tyre and, near by, the remains of a 16-year old girl, along with three children and an adult. In Khiam in eastern Lebanon, besieged by the Israelis for more than a month, the elderly village "mukhtar" was found dead in the ruins of his home.
Not all the dead were civilians. At Kfar Shuba, dumper-truck drivers found the bodies of four Hizbollah members. At Roueiss, however, all 13 bodies found in the wreckage of eight 10-storey buildings were civilians. They included seven children and a pregnant woman. Ten more bodies were disentangled from the rubble of the southern suburbs of Beirut - where local people claimed they could still hear the screams of neighbours trapped far below the bomb-smashed apartment blocks. The Lebanese civil defence organisation - almost as brave as the Lebanese Red Cross in trying to save lives under fire - believe at least three families may be trapped in basements deep below the wreckage.
Ignoring the dangers of unexploded ordnance, several Lebanese Shia Muslims returned to their destroyed homes to retrieve personal belongings - including family snapshots and albums that contain the narrative of their lives - only to fall between gaps in the broken apartment blocks and plunge dozens of feet into the darkness beneath. Among the last to die only minutes before the UN ceasefire came into effect was a child who was found in her dead mother's arms in Beirut.
How many of these dead would have survived if George Bush and Tony Blair had demanded an immediate ceasefire weeks ago will never be known. But many would have had the chance of life had Western governments not regarded this dirty war as an "opportunity" to create a "new" Middle East by humbling Iran and Syria.
Ignoring the dangers of unexploded ordnance, several Lebanese Shia Muslims returned to their destroyed homes to retrieve personal belongings - including family snapshots and albums that contain the narrative of their lives - only to fall between gaps in the broken apartment blocks and plunge dozens of feet into the darkness beneath. Among the last to die only minutes before the UN ceasefire came into effect was a child who was found in her dead mother's arms in Beirut.
How many of these dead would have survived if George Bush and Tony Blair had demanded an immediate ceasefire weeks ago will never be known. But many would have had the chance of life had Western governments not regarded this dirty war as an "opportunity" to create a "new" Middle East by humbling Iran and Syria.
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Israeli forces demolish home with family still inside, father and son killed
Maan News Agency
16/08/2006
A Palestinian father, 65 and his son, 45, were killed and another 2 seriously injured in an Israeli air strike on a home in Sheikh Nasser, east of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, an activist affiliated to the Al Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad movement, was killed and another one arrested during an armed clash in Al Farahin, east of Khan Younis.
Medical sources at the Nasser hospital said that Hasan Sha'ath, 65, and his son Ibrahim, 45, who were killed in the air strike, were totally dismembered when they were brought to the hospital. They said that the two injured people wwere in a critical condition.
Israeli F16 warplanes destroyed a three-floor building while some members of the Sha'ath family were still inside the house. Ambulance crews and civil defence forces rushed to the demolished house and were able to removed the two dead bodies and the two injured people. They are continuing to search under the rubble for more injured people who are thought to be trapped underneath.
Eyewitnesses said that half the building's residents had left before the bombardment , but several others were unable to leave in time. They pointed out that the Israeli army gave residents very little warning before they bombed the building claiming that it belonged to a member of the Al Aqsa Brigades, the military wing of the Fatah movement.
The Israeli army said that Israeli forces injured two Palestinian gunmen during an armed clash between members of the Palestinian resistance in Al Farahin, east of Khan Younis, and several Israeli forces and military vehicles positioned near the Israeli-Gaza border fence in Khan Younis.
The Israeli army added that Israeli forces fired at Palestinian gunmen attempting to infiltrate into Israel near the Kissufim crossing. Mu'atasim Kdeeh, 20, was killed and another injured. The Israeli forces arrested the injured man whose identity is not known.
Eyewitnesses said that the Palestinian resistance fighters launched one rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) into an Israeli military vehicle, hitting it directly. They added that the armed clash lasted for a long time and a heavy exchange fo fire could be heard.
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Unexploded bomblets a danger in Lebanon
By KATHY GANNON
Associated Press
Thu Aug 17, 2006
TYRE, Lebanon - Hamid Asan Hasan dropped his wallet, and as he stooped to pick it up he spotted the small round object. Curious, he picked that up too. It exploded and blew off part of his hand.
The Lebanese army passed out leaflets Thursday to warn residents of south Lebanon to beware of just such weapons. It was too late for Hasan, who was injured Sunday, one day before the cease-fire took hold to end fighting between
Israel and Hezbollah.
"The place is full of unexploded ordnance, shells and mortars," said Chris Clark, program manager for the U.N. Mine Action Coordination center in Tyre.
But that's not the biggest problem, he said.
The most dangerous of the ordnance littering south Lebanon after 34 days of Israeli bombardment are bomblets spewed from cluster bombs packed into Israeli artillery shells, Clark explained.
"Our primary problem is the cluster bombs," he said. The bomblets they spit out are small round explosives that Clark likened to a small grenade. A cluster bomb can be delivered either by air or by artillery shells. In this war, he said, Israel delivered them by shells that exploded before hitting the ground. That sprayed small bomblets over an area half the size of a football field.
Normally, cluster bombs are used against tanks and explode on impact with steel. But in this conflict, Clark said, the shells were fired into areas, both urban and rural, where Israel thought Hezbollah guerrillas might be hiding.
Because the targets were not tanks, many bomblets fell on the ground or asphalt pavement and did not explode.
"This leaves them in an angry state, a very volatile state," said Clark. The bomblets are barely the size of a flashlight battery.
Southern Lebanon has a long history of war and deadly explosives. Before the latest fighting began July 12 with the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah guerrillas, mine clearers had removed most of the ordnance from past conflicts below the Litani River, 18 miles north of the border. The exception was land mines that run the length of Lebanon's border with Israel. They were planted by Israel and U.N. mine clearers have maps with their locations.
Hasan said he was not sure what he picked up not far from his home in Haris, 12 miles from the southern port city of Tyre. Lying in his bed at Jamal Amal Hospital in Tyre, Hasan said he planned to return home but fears a fresh encounter with explosives.
In the village of Tibnin, near the border town of Bint Jbail - scene of some of the most brutal ground combat - the main street is covered with bomblets.
"They are all over. Anybody on the street is in danger," said Roland Huguenin, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross. "A car almost drove over one, and I was yelling 'stop, stop.' You will kill us both."
Outside the hospital in Tibnin, U.N. mine clearing teams collected dozens of bomblets that they later exploded. Clark said Tibnin was especially dangerous. He estimated that 80 percent of all the bomblets that fell there had not exploded.
The tens of thousands of refugees returning to their homes in the south are vulnerable. Often, the bomblets are buried in the rubble of ruined villages.
"You might just be moving a piece of debris and you won't realize what it is and it can kill you," Clark said.
In Taibeh, also near the border with Israel, residents were living in fear.
Manifa Haider, 35, returned after fleeing to Syria. In an eggplant patch at her hilltop home in Taibeh are two 3-foot-wide holes. Some kind of Israeli projectile is just visible in each.
"I'm scared. I'm scared to go in my garden, but we have to eat. We have no water, no supermarket, everything is gone," she said. "We keep our children in the house. They can't play outside anymore. You don't know what they (unexploded ordnance) look like, toys, some look like pencils or pens."
Clark said no explosive devices are disguised as toys. "Everything is straight ordnance," he said.
In Marjayoun, Andy Gleeson, a spokesman and engineer with the British-based Mines Advisory Group, said the bomblets make victims of the unaware.
"The danger lies in naivete and in tampering. It lies in people picking items up and moving them around, and that's not safe."
Comment: Israeli leaders knew exactly what they were doing when they ordered the use of cluster bombs against civilian targets. The only alternative is to assume that the Israeli government and military are both incompetent, and that they had no idea that unexploded bomblets would litter civilian areas after the invasion. Either way, it's bad news for the stability of the Middle East.
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Demonstrators Remain in Hospital for Head Injuries in Bil'in
August 15th, 2006
ISM Media Alerts
Rina Klauman, a Danish citizen from Copenhagen, and Lymor Goldstein, Israeli and formerly of Germany are still being hospitalized for their injuries from a demonstration in Bil'in village on Friday against the confiscation of 60% of Bil'in's farmland by the separation wall and Jewish settlements.
The injuries of Rina, who was beaten on the head by border police, and an Israeli lawyer, Lymor Goldstein, who was shot in the head with a plastic-coated steel bullet on Friday, are the most serious injuries the army has caused in Bil'in since Ramzi Yassin, who was shot in the head with a plastic-coated steel bullet. Ramzi, from Bil'in, was handing out water during a demonstration in Bil'in on July 8th 2005, when he was shot in the side of the head. The bullet caused severe bleeding of his brain and he was left unconscious for 7 days and with permanent brain damage.
Last night Rina was transferred to Hadasa Ein Karem hospital in Jerusalem from the Hebron hospital in the West Bank for more extensive tests. They found in an MRI that she has small bleeding in her brain from a concussion she received when an Israeli border policeman beat her with his gun at the demonstration.
She is not able to walk and suffers from vomiting, but is able to talk and in stable condition. It is possible that if the bleeding does not subside, however, she may need complicated surgery to drain the blood.
Lymor is currently in a stable condition at Tel Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv. He was taken in for immediate surgery, which took 3 hours, and a rubber bullet as well as shards of bone and damaged brain tissue were removed from his head and an internal hemorrhage was stopped. It is likely that he will need several more surgeries to correct his vision, and at this point it seems the only brain damage he has incurred affects his sight.
Bil'in village has held protests at least once a week since January 2005 against the separation wall that cuts through the village, and almost every week non-violent protestors are injured by the military's violent repression of their demonstrations.
Comment: See this link for a video of the shooting, and remember that the Israeli soldiers were entering the village to illegally expropriate Palestinian land and the villagers and a few Israelis and internationals were coming out to meet them unarmed.
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Unilateral action by Israel spawns violence in Gaza
By George Bisharat
Originally published August 17, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO // With the spotlight on Lebanon, another Middle East milestone is passing largely unnoticed. However, its lessons are just as important. A year ago this week, Israel began implementing its unilateral Gaza disengagement plan -- yet the region is beset by violence. Why did withdrawal of 8,500 Jewish settlers from Gaza lead to more conflict? Can Israel withdraw from Arab territories without inviting attack?
Last August, Gaza Palestinians greeted disengagement with both cautious hope and cynicism. They relished freedom from the daily humiliations of military occupation. Students longed to study, children to frolic on the beach, and entrepreneurs to build businesses. Yet many also saw disengagement as an expression of racial preference for Jews. Israel could not annex the Gaza Strip without absorbing 1.4 million Palestinians, thus jeopardizing its status as a Jewish state.
Israel marketed disengagement to Americans as a step toward peace, but Palestinians remembered the October 2004 comment of Dov Weisglass, adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: "The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."
Why would Israeli politicians subvert negotiations with Palestinians? Perhaps because no Palestinian leader could agree to Israel's planned takeover of Jerusalem and much of the West Bank.
Thus, the Gaza "disengagement" plan is also the Jerusalem and West Bank "expansion" plan. The number of Israelis settling in the West Bank this year exceeds the number withdrawn from Gaza.
Further conflict, therefore, was inevitable.
Moreover, while Israel decolonized Gaza, its military occupation continues. Israel still controls the entry and exit of people and goods into the region, patrols its coast and airspace, oversees its water, fuel, electric utilities, and sewage, and enters it with military forces at will. Under international law, "effective control" determines whether a territory is occupied.
Since the January Palestinian elections, hailed as the fairest in the Arab world, Israel has strived to undermine the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, withholding $50 million to $60 million monthly in tax revenues owed to the authority. The U.S. and European Union have followed, halting aid to the Palestinians until the Hamas government renounces violence, recognizes Israel and pledges to honor prior agreements of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas has not yet bowed but has repeatedly signaled willingness to negotiate.
Of course Hamas should not just halt violence -- it had suspended military operations for 17 months, until June -- it should also renounce it. But shouldn't the same standard apply to both parties? Shouldn't recognition and respect for prior agreements be reciprocally required of Israel, which denies Palestinian national rights and regularly violates the Oslo accords?
Palestinian civil servants have gone without salaries since January. Gazans have suffered serious deterioration in nutrition and health. The special U.N. rapporteur on conditions in the occupied Palestinian territories warned in June of an impending humanitarian crisis, saying, "In effect, the Palestinian people have been subjected to economic sanctions -- the first time that an occupied people have been so treated."
On June 24, Israeli troops entered Gaza and abducted Dr. Osama Muantar and his brother, Mustafa, alleging they were members of Hamas. The two joined some 9,000 Palestinian prisoners languishing in Israeli jails. Many have not been charged with a crime and more than 100 are minors.
The following day, Palestinian groups attacked an Israeli army post, killing two soldiers and capturing a third.
Since then, Israel has laid siege to the Gaza Strip, closing it to travel and trade and abducting 64 Hamas officials, including Cabinet ministers and parliamentary representatives. Its jets have bombed roads, bridges, government buildings, Gaza's main electrical generating plant, homes, fields, orchards, workshops, and offices. To date, 184 Palestinians have been killed, including 42 children, while another 650 have been wounded.
In 1982, Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula as part of a comprehensive peace agreement with Egypt. Twenty-four years of peace on that border followed. But unilateral redeployments that only shift the character of Israeli control over Palestinian lives will never yield such results. Unilateralism -- wherein the legitimate interests of the other party are ignored -- is the flaw, not withdrawal.
Would Americans remain quiescent if a neighboring power sealed our borders and airspace, suffocated our economy, expanded into our most desirable lands and attempted to throttle our democratically elected government?
We should counsel Israel to abandon unilateralism and unremitting violence against civilians. Negotiations based on respect for international law and equal rights offer the only way to lasting peace.
George Bisharat, a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, writes frequently on the Middle East. His e-mail is bisharat@uchastings.edu.
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Israel to expropriate 275 acres near Hebron
George Rishmawi – IMEMC & Agencies - Thursday, 17 August 2006, 19:48
The Israeli government issued a military order on Thursday to expropriate some 275 acres of farmlands that belong to Palestinian farmers near Hebron, Palestinian sources reported.
Palestinian News Network said that the order includes property in the village of Beit Ummar, the town of Halhoul and Al-Arroub Refugee camp north of Hebron.
According to a source of the Palestinian Land Defense Committee, the order was issued by what is called "Deputy Chair of the highest planning committee in ."
The order number 20-T/901 includes wide areas of land close to a highway 60, a bypass road used mainly by Israeli settlers.
Road 60 was built after Oslo agreement was implemented to allow Jewish settlers to travel to and from their settlements without going through Palestinian cities. This road, however is entirely built on land confiscated from Palestinian farmers.
Israeli sources said a warning announcement was published allowing Palestinians farmers two months to petition to the Israeli high court of justice against confiscating their land.
Sources at the municipality of Halhoul said they never managed to stop from confiscating land even if they go to court. The source added that this latest order will allow the army to expropriate 90 acres which brings the area of the confiscated land from the town up to 700 acres, of the best farm land in the town.
On the other hand, the military order will expropriate 175 acres In Beit Ummar, raising the total of the confiscated area to 1500 acres, most of it is agricultural land.
It is likely that this expropreiated land will be used to expand the Gush Etzion settlement bloc which is located on the northern part of Hebron district.
Israel plans to annex the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, which is built on expropriated Palestinian land, into Israel in a final agreement with the Palestinians.
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Hizbollah hands out cash to Lebanese
Reuters
Fri Aug 18, 2006
BEIRUT - Hizbollah handed out bundles of cash on Friday to people whose homes were wrecked by Israeli bombing, consolidating the Iranian-backed group's support among Lebanon's Shi'ites and embarrassing the Beirut government.
"This is a very, very reasonable amount. It is not small," said Ayman Jaber, 27, holding a wad he had just picked up from Hizbollah of $12,000 in banknotes wrapped in tissue.
Israeli and U.S. officials have voiced concern that Hizbollah will entrench its popularity by moving fast - with Iranian money - to help people whose homes were destroyed or damaged in the 34-day conflict with Israel.
Hizbollah has not said where the funds are coming from to compensate people from an estimated 15,000 destroyed homes. The scheme appears likely to cost at least $150 million. The Lebanese government has yet to launch anything similar.
Trying to bolster a five-day-old truce, Lebanese troops moved deeper into south Lebanon a day after France dealt a blow to hopes of building a strong U.N. force to help the army take control of the region as Israeli troops withdraw.
The United Nations said it had received substantial offers of troops for Lebanon, but was disappointed that France was only offering to send 200 additional soldiers.
"We had hoped - we make no secret of it - that there would be a stronger French contribution," said U.N. deputy secretary-general Mark Malloch Brown.
International and Lebanese government aid efforts risk being overshadowed by Hizbollah's swift action on reconstruction.
Hizbollah said it had so far given the one-time cash payment to 120 families whose homes in the southern suburbs of Beirut were destroyed in Israeli air strikes. The money is to help families rent and furnish alternative accommodation.
"We have full information on all the buildings that have been destroyed or damaged," said a Hizbollah official at one of 12 assistance centers the group has set up in the suburbs.
"Later on, we will either pay for new flats or rebuild the buildings that were destroyed."
Hizbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah promised the compensation in his first speech after the truce took hold.
PAINFUL EXPERIENCE
France's reticence to contribute more troops follows disastrous peacekeeping missions in the past. It lost 58 paratroopers to a Shi'ite suicide bomb attack in Beirut in 1983 and some 84 soldiers in Bosnia in the early 1990s.
"I'd like to remind you of the experience of painful operations where U.N. forces did not have a sufficiently precise mission or the means to react," French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie told RTL radio.
The Italian government formally approved the deployment of troops to Lebanon. It did not say how many would be sent, but officials have said Italy was ready to offer up to 3,000 troops.
Prime Minister Romano Prodi said Italy wanted to contribute, but that the mission must have clear rules of engagement.
The Lebanese army began deploying south of the Litani River, about 20 km (13 miles) from the border with Israel, on Thursday.
A senior security source said about 4,500 Lebanese troops were already south of the Litani and more units were joining them on Friday as the force builds up to an eventual 15,000.
Some troops reached the village of Shebaa, near the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms enclave, a key source of tension between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas before the recent war.
Hizbollah fighters have melted away as the Lebanese army arrives, but they have not left the south or given up the rocket launchers they used to bombard Israel during the conflict.
Malloch Brown said Hizbollah's disarmament required an agreement between the group and the Lebanese government.
At least 1,181 people in Lebanon and 157 Israelis were killed in the conflict that erupted after Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12. (Ed: Israel crossed into Lebanon resulting in the capture of the two Israeli soldiers)
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Until It's Over
2400 detainees in the Negev on Hunger Strike
Saed Bannoura
IMEMC & Agencies
August 16, 2006
Protesting naked body searches practiced by the prison authorities at the Israeli Negev detention camp against the relatives of the detainees, at least 2400 detainees announced hunger Strike on Tuesday morning.
Palestinian Detainees Media Center reported that the detainees in twenty sections at the Negev desert detention camp returned all meals since Tuesday at noon in protest to the hostilities practiced against them and against their parents.
The Center added that soldiers are attempting to force wives, mothers or sisters of the detainees to undress completely in order to search them before they visit their detained family members.
The incident took place on Tuesday when soldiers tried to force mothers, sisters and wives of detainees from Qalqilia, Salfit and Bethlehem districts in the West bank, to remove all of their clothes under the pretext of searching them.
The detainees said that these violations came despite an agreement between their representatives and the prison administration to refrain from conducting these illegal practices against the detainees and their families.
It is worth mentioning that one young woman from Qalqilia refused to be strip searched and was deprived from visiting her detained brother.
Also residents William Hilal from Salfit, and Khaled Asakra from Bethlehem were subjected to strip search during visitation hours several days ago.
Soldiers also used police dogs during the searches which terrorized the families, especially the children.
Moreover, the detainees said that the strike also comes in response to recent decision to bar twenty detained imams from moving between the prison sections to conduct the Friday prayers.
For the first time since the Negev facility was reopened after the beginning of the current Intifada late 2000, the Israeli Prison Authorities barred the representatives of the detainees from moving between the facility's branches. This decision could lead to further escalation in the detention camp.
The representatives are also prisoners who are selected by the detainees to represent them in front of the prison administration.
The detainees said that they might take further measures if the administration attempts to take away their achievements and rights they managed to obtained through several years of struggle.
There are at least 2400 detainees in the Negev, among them 500 detainees who have been there by repeated extensions of their detention orders without clear charges against them since the Israeli Authorities use a"secret files", secret files means that the detainee or his lawyer cannot even know what charges are filed.
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AIPAC Congratulates Itself on the Slaughter in Lebanon
By JOHN WALSH
Counterpunch
16/08/2006
"My fellow American," Howard Friedman, President of AIPAC, begins his letter of July 30 to friends and supporters of AIPAC, "Look what you've done"! After warning that "Israel is fighting a pivotal war for its life," by which he means Israel's wanton slaughter and all-out destruction in Lebanon, Freiedman condemns "the expected chorus of international condemnation of Israel's actions" and Europe's call for "a cease-fire immediately." Then he exults: "only ONE nation in the world came out and flatly declared: Let Israel finish the job. . That nation is the United States of America--and the reason it had such a clear, unambiguous view of the situation is YOU and the rest of America Jewry." (All emphases in the original here and below.) Here I must take issue with President Friedman since I bet that most Jewish Americans, in contrast to the AIPAC crowd, were horrified by the slaughter in Lebanon. In fact if anyone other than President Friedman wrote this, he would be accused of fabricating a Jewish plot and labeled a nutty conspiracy theorist and scurrilous anti-semite.)
"How do we do it"? President Friedman asks a little further on. The answer is "decades of long hard work which never ends." Not only is it hard work--but it's eternal. However, President Friedman is not content with generalities and gives us some of AIPAC's trade secrets. Here are two notables:
"AIPAC meets with every candidate running for Congress. These candidates receive in-depth briefings to help them completely understand the complexities of Israel's predicament and that of the Middle East as a whole. We even ask each candidate to author a 'position paper' on their views of the U.S.-Israel relationship--so it's clear where they stand on the subject." (Would it not be great to see these "position papers"? I wonder how many candidates would release them? And what do the candidates get for all this effort? A pat on the back?)
"Members of Congress, staffers and administration officials have come to rely on AIPACs memos. They are VERY busy people and they know that they can count on AIPAC for clear-eyed analysis.. We present this information in concise form to elected officials. The information and analyses are impeccable--after all our reputation is at stake. This results in policy and legislation that make up Israel's lifeline." (Another way to read this is that the pea-brained hillbillies who make up most of the Congress can be led by the nose if the memos are simple enough. Testimony to this fact enters my mailbox, as I write, in the form of a must-read interview with Noam Chomsky, which details just how distorted the discussion of Israel and the war on Lebanon has become in the U.S.)
President Friedman's letter continues with more headliners: "Unfortunately, our work has just begun"! "Hizballah must be defeated." And finally, "The war is a diversion"!!!! This last section argues that the war in Lebanon is a "distraction," to "divert attention away from Iran's nuclear weapons program"! (In case you haven't noticed President Friedman loves exclamation points, which leads one to wonder whether a good dose of lithium might not be in order.) But this "analysis' is hopelessly confused since Israel started the war on Lebanon using a minor border skirmish as an excuse - as Chomsky points out in the interview alluded to above. It leaves one wondering about AIPAC's analyses. Are they "clear-eyed" as Friedman claims, or wild-eyed?
President Friedman closes with the exhortation: "Now is the time for us, American Jews, to stand up and tell our elected officials that they must demand Iran halt its pursuit of atomic arms." In other words, next stop Iran if AIPAC can swing it. And in that lies a great danger. The Bush administration is losing ever more of its base and only the neocon establishment and AIPAC remain securely in its camp. (Even some of the born-agains are deserting.) With the November elections coming, Rove and Bush desperately need AIPAC support, and so they may be even more susceptible than usual to its demands for going after Iran. Indeed this is a dangerous time.
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Italy agrees to take part in UN Lebanon force; France says force should be more international
by Martine Nouaille
AFP
August 18, 2006
ROME - The Italian cabinet unanimously agreed at an emergency meeting to send troops to Lebanon as part of an expanded UN force but Germany ruled out sending ground forces and general dismay lingered over the level of France's proposed contribution.
Italy could send 3,000 troops as its contribution to the planned 15,000-strong UN force, aimed at strengthening the existing 1,990-member UN interim force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), according to senior politicians quoted by the ANSA news agency Friday.
They could be operational from the start of September.
But the exact manner and details of the Italian participation still have to be defined "in consultation with the other countries taking part in the mission, and obviously France," Prime Minister Romani Prodi said.
The two houses of parliament were due to vote on the proposal later Friday and were expected to back it.
The planned Italian contribution would dwarf that offered by France which has talked about a detachment of 200 troops in spite of hopes that it might deploy between 2,000 and 4,000 and provide the backbone of the UN presence.
Paris repeated Friday that the expanded UN force in Lebanon must have a clearly defined mission and rules of engagement, and that it should be truly international.
President Jacques Chirac made the comments in a telephone call to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, his office said.
France currently commands UNIFIL and the extra 200 troops would supplement the 200 French troops already in UNIFIL.
Chirac "insisted on a necessary balance in the distribution of the contingents which must reflect the engagement of all the international community, including the European countries," his spokesman said.
UN Security Council Resolution 1701, unanimously adopted last week, gives a mandate for the UN interim force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to swell to 15,000 as Israeli forces withdraw from the region.
The United Nations is hoping to send a first deployment within 10 to 15 days, of between 3,000 and 3,500 soldiers.
Besides Italy, several countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey have expressed willingness to contribute troops. Bulgaria is considering sending troops as part of a peacekeeping mission, but no official decision has been taken yet, Foreign Minister Ivaylo Kalfin said Friday in parliament.
Finland said Friday it might send up to 250 men but no decision would be taken for two weeks.
France has suggested that 1,700 navy and air servicemen currently involved in operations off the coast of Lebanon could support UNIFIL, but only under French and not UN command.
Merkel on late Thursday ruled out sending ground troops to join UNIFIL, but said Germany could send a "maritime protection component" and provide logistics, air transport and reconnaissance, depending on what rules of engagement are agreed upon.
Paris is concerned that the force to be deployed will not be robust enough or be permitted to oblige both Israel and Hezbollah to abide by the resolution without a strong mandate.
France faced criticism in the European press on Friday for not offering more troops for southern Lebanon, which was seen as jeopardizing the UN force's difficult task of imposing peace, accusing Paris of a "loss of nerve" and "being afraid".
But French media of both left and right backed the approach, saying Lebanon could prove a quagmire and France did not want to be left holding "a hot potato" with help from a few Europeans "and the inevitable blue helmets (UN troops) from Fiji."
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Blair sends Lord Levy to meet Israelis
By Andy McSmith
17 August 2006
Lord Levy, Tony Blair's special envoy, was said to be in Israel meeting government officials yesterday to report back to the Prime Minister on the state of the ceasefire in Lebanon.
Labour's chief fundraiser has kept a low profile since his arrest over allegations that Labour sympathisers were offered peerages in exchange for loans or donations.
The allegations have no bearing on Lord Levy's role in the Middle East, which he has visited on Tony Blair's behalf, but when the affair blew up calls were made for his sacking. However, Lord Levy's diary for the first six months of 2006, posted on the Foreign Office website, show that he has remained active in his unpaid role.
In April he paid three visits to Jerusalem to meet senior Israelis, including the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. In a year, he seems to have met Mr Olmert more often than the past and present foreign secretaries, Jack Straw and Margaret Beckett, combined.
The shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, said that the extent of Lord Levy's role was "not a satisfactory state of affairs"
Comment: Lord Levy, "a leading international Zionist", who is singlehandedly responsible for ensuring new Labour's coffers remain full and who raised the money needed in 1997 for Blair's party to "sweep to victory". Despite being a self-mad millionaire, in 2000, Levy posted tax returns of just £5,000, suggesting that he earned the average national wage of £21,000. Levy is known to have used offshore trusts in the past and his companies had links with one or more tax havens until 1997. But at around the time of the general election he moved the Michael Levy Acquisitions Trust, an offshore trust based in Guernsey, back to the UK.
It was also reported that a second offshore trust - The Rothschild Trust in Guernsey, which held the shares of his principal company, Wireart - was altered at about the same time, with Levy and his wife, Gilda, taking over as trustees.
At the forefront of several alleged "Jewish" groups in the UK, one of which organised a recent rally in support of Israeli actions in Lebanon.
Levy was arrested and questioned in connection with the "Cash for Peerages" inquiry by the Metropolitan Police on 12 July 2006 where the Blair government had been giving titles in exchange for donations to the Labout Party. After six hours of questioning Levy was released on police bail.
Since 2002 Levy has been Blair's special envoy to the Middle East and counts among his friends former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak among others.
Levy and Blair, former tennis partners, first met in 1994 at a dinner party, where they were introduced by a senior Israeli diplomat.
A leading international Zionist organising the funding of the Labour party and with the 'ear' of Tony Blair introduced to Blair by a "senior Israeli diplomat" (Arch Zionist Gideon Meir) and who is now at the center of British policy on the Middle East??
I think I feel a conspiracy theory coming on.
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U.S. to move quickly on Iran sanctions
By BARRY SCHWEID
AP Diplomatic Writer
Thu Aug 17, 2006
WASHINGTON - The United States intends to act next month to have the United Nations impose penalties on Iran for refusing to suspend its enrichment of uranium, a State Department official said Thursday.
"They will be well-deserved," Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told reporters. "It's not a mystery to the Iranians what is going to happen."
U.S. officials did not specify the proposed punishment.
Beyond the nuclear program, Iran supports Hezbollah as well as other terrorist organizations and has played a destabilizing role in the Middle East, said a department spokesman, Tom Casey.
The Security Council has said Iran faces penalties if it does not suspend uranium enrichment, an important step in making nuclear weapons.
Iran has until the end of the month for an official response. Tehran also had said it would reply by Tuesday to a proposal by the United States and the European Union for concessions that include Washington's supplying of some civilian nuclear energy.
Some critics urged the Bush administration to get on with negotiations with Iran.
A group of 22 former military officials and retired diplomats said President Bush immediately should open discussions. Thursday's letter also cautioned against any consideration of the use of military force.
"An attack on Iran would have disastrous consequences for security in the region and U.S. forces in Iraq, and it would inflame hatred and violence in the Middle East and among Muslims everywhere," the letter said.
Iran contends its enrichment and other nuclear programs are civilian in nature.
"We certainly want to give the Iranians the chance to take this last opportunity to accept the offer that is on the table," Casey said.
Burns said the U.S. wants to moved quickly in September on the proposed U.N. penalties. He said the role of Iran in the Middle East has raised concerns among Arab and other countries about Tehran's intentions.
"There is broadened concern about the policy of a country that flexes its muscles," he said. "Iran wants to be the dominant country in the region."
As for the cease-fire in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, Burns said Iran and Syria, the principal backers of the Hezbollah militia, "have a responsibility to respect the peace."
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Israel justice minister to resign over harassment charge
AFP
August 18, 2006
JERUSALEM - Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon is to resign from the cabinet, a spokesman said, one day after the attorney general decided to indict the minister over accusations of sexual harassment.
Ramon, a close aide of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and a leading member of his centrist Kadima party, will announce his resignation on Sunday.
"The minister has decided to tender his resignation on Sunday in keeping with his decision to renounce his parliamentary immunity," spokesman Tzahi Moshe told AFP Friday.
Attorney General Menachem Mazuz decided on Thursday to indict Ramon over accusations of sexual harassment lodged by a woman soldier, based on the recommendation of a police investigation launched last month.
The woman reportedly said the justice minister tried "to kiss her in an aggressive manner" during a social gathering at the defence ministry in Tel Aviv, days after the launch of Israel's offensive in Lebanon.
Legal commentators had warned that the indictment could have forced the minister to resign.
Ramon -- the latest in a string of senior state figures to be hit by scandal -- has categorically denied the accusations.
"I am certain of my innocence and will prove it in court," he has said.
Another woman on Friday claimed in the Maariv newspaper that Ramon had also sexually harassed her three years ago.
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Syrians demand military action to reclaim Golan Heights
Telegraph
By Patrick Bishop
18/08/06
Pressure is mounting on Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, to follow Hizbollah's example and consider force to eject Israel from Syrian land that it has occupied for nearly 40 years.
The public appetite for action is just one of the uncomfortable consequences regional rulers are facing, as Arabs compare their leaders' performances over Israel with the Lebanese "resistance".
Mr Assad, who supports Hizbollah, was quick to praise the militia's "victory" in a post-conflict speech and to bathe in its reflected glory.
Their deeds, he said, had "shattered the myth of an invincible army". But his rhetoric has turned public attention once again to the problem of the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in 1967 and annexed in 1981.
"There is anger and daily demands by ordinary people to open this front," said Mohammed Habash, a leading Muslim moderate and member of the Syrian parliament, talking on the al-Arabiya television channel.
He proposed peace negotiations with a strict deadline of a year. If these failed, he said, the Syrians should "try to do what the Lebanese did in their own country".
An official government newspaper, al-Thawra, warned Israel this week that Syrians "will not allow our land to be occupied forever... you must understand that our people will fight the way the Lebanese resistance fought you".
But the idea of Mr Assad going to war with his massively more powerful neighbour has met with laughter in the Arab world. His father, Hafez al-Assad, liked to be known as the "Lion of Damascus". His son is considered to be mousy by comparison, particularly in pro-western Arab countries, whose leaders he attacked in his speech as "half-men in favour of half-solutions".
Jordan's al-Ghad newspaper remarked that "the Syrian president spoke as if he had just returned from the front line". The Saudi-owned Al-Sharq al-Awsat said that, since the loss of the Golan Heights, Syria "has not fired a single shot" at Israel.
Mr Assad's scramble to share Hizbollah's prestige reflects the standing that the organisation has won in 33 days of fighting. Arab nations had an unbroken record of defeat and humiliation at the hands of Israel, and what was no more than a successful defensive action has acquired the lustre of a great success.
Posters have appeared in Beirut showing the Hizbollah leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and lorries mounted with Katyusha rockets alongside the words "The Divine Victory", written in English.
Saad Hariri, the leader of the biggest anti-Syria block in the Lebanese parliament, accused Damascus of exploiting the bloodshed and insisted that "the resistance is a product of [all] Lebanon". Meanwhile, Hizbollah has won praise from unlikely quarters. The liberal English language Daily Star newspaper carried a front-page editorial yesterday entitled: "Love it or hate it, Hizbollah has lessons for all Arabs."
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More Madness
UN probes child prostitute ring
BBC
17/08/06
The United Nations is investigating allegations that some of its peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo have used child prostitutes.
It said there were reports that a child prostitution ring was operating in the east, close to a large concentration of UN troops and government soldiers.
A UN probe last year found that peacekeepers in DR Congo had sexually abused girls as young as 13.
Afterwards it banned its troops from having sex with locals.
The investigation revealed that UN peacekeepers had used food and money to pay girls to have sex with them.
There are some 17,000 peacekeepers serving with the UN mission in DR Congo (Monuc).
It is the world's largest peacekeeping contingent charged with overseeing last month's elections, the results of which are due by this weekend.
In the latest allegations from South Kivu province, the girls involved are reported to have said that most of their clients were government troops and civilians, but that they also included peacekeepers.
"Monuc takes these allegations very seriously and has expressed extreme shock at the testimonies of the victims of this illegal activity," it said in a statement.
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N. Korea Appears to Be Preparing for Nuclear Test
ABC News
By Jonathan Karl
17/08/06
There is new evidence that North Korea may be preparing for an underground test of a nuclear bomb, U.S. officials told ABC News.
"It is the view of the intelligence community that a test is a real possibility," said a senior State Department official.
A senior military official told ABC News that a U.S. intelligence agency has recently observed "suspicious vehicle movement" at a suspected North Korean test site.
The activity includes the unloading of large reels of cable outside P'unggye-yok, an underground facility in northeast North Korea. Cables can be used in nuclear testing to connect an underground test site to outside observation equipment. The intelligence was brought to the attention of the White House last week.
Even before this most recent intelligence, there has been growing concern within the U.S. government that North Korea has been moving toward a nuclear test. North Korea is believed to have enough nuclear material to build as many as a dozen nuclear bombs, but it has never tested one. A successful test would remove any doubt that North Korea is a nuclear power.
"What does he have to lose?" asked one senior military official, referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
On July 4, North Korea conducted seven ballistic missile tests, which provoked international condemnation, including a unanimous United States Security Council resolution condemning its actions. A nuclear test, however, would be seen as a much greater provocation than the missile tests. Only seven other nations in the world have ever conducted nuclear tests.
U.S. officials fear a nuclear test could provoke a nuclear arms race in East Asia, forcing Japan and South Korea to develop their own nuclear weapons.
"A nuclear test is going to be alarming and troubling for everyone and would cause a very strong reaction I think from all of North Korea's neighbors," said former National Security Council official Michael Green, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
U.S. officials caution that the intelligence is not conclusive. Last year U.S. spy satellites picked up suspicious activity at suspected test sites in North Korea, leading some to predict an imminent nuclear test, but nothing happened.
Underground nuclear tests are notoriously difficult to detect ahead of time. U.S. intelligence agencies, for example, failed to predict nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998.
Officials say it is possible that North Korea may either be putting on a show for American spy satellites to get attention, or may conduct a nuclear test in an entirely different location.
Some analysts believe Kim Jong Il may feel the only way to be taken seriously is to prove that North Korea is a nuclear power. Officials acknowledge that nobody really knows Kim Jong Il's intentions, but there is a belief among analysts that he is upset about the recent U.N. resolution condemning his missile tests and upset with the Chinese for supporting that resolution.
"It is the view of most in the community that there is a 50-50 chance North Korea will conduct a nuclear test by the end of the year," said one analyst.
Asked what the United States would do in response to a nuclear test, a senior U.S. official told ABC News, "We would try to hermetically seal the hermit kingdom."
The official said the United States would immediately push for sanctions to cut North Korea's ties to the outside world. Another possible option would be a naval blockade of North Korea.
But it is unclear how effective such efforts would be. North Korea is already the most isolated country in the world.
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Letter threatens to blow up Taj Mahal
By BISWAJEET BANERJEE
Associated Press
August 18, 2006
LUCKNOW, India - Police in northern India have heightened security around the Taj Mahal after receiving a letter threatening to blow up the monument, officials said Friday.
Sandbag bunkers have been set up outside the towering entrance gates leading to the 17th century monument and soldiers belonging to an anti-terrorist squad have been posted on 24-hour duty, said Ashok Kumar, a senior government official in Uttar Pradesh state where the Taj Mahal is located.
Police were investigating a handwritten letter purportedly sent by an al-Qaida supporter, saying the terrorist group planned to carry out blasts at the Taj Mahal.
Police were skeptical about the letter, but had begun investigations, Kumar said Friday.
"Police are verifying the source of the letter," he said. "The letter could be false but we cannot afford to be complacent. We are not taking any chances and have enhanced security at the Taj."
"The letter, signed by someone calling himself Mohammed Mirza and claiming to be associated with the al-Qaida, was received at the office of the superintendent of police in Agra on Thursday," Kumar said.
"The letter said the al-Qaida had plans to carry out blasts at the Taj Mahal and around busy markets of Agra," he said.
Meanwhile, as part of the new security drill, tourists have been warned not to carry any liquids, including bottles of mineral water, to the fabled white marble structure, located in the city of Agra, 130 milesfrom the Indian capital, New Delhi.
At least 100 additional paramilitary soldiers armed with automatic weapons have been posted at strategic points on the outer periphery of the Taj Mahal complex, said a top police officer.
Police have also begun work on a dossier of residents living within 500 meters (yards) radius of the monument, said Dipesh Juneja, superintendent of police in Agra. "This will help the police spot any new entrants or visitors to the area," Juneja said over telephone.
As part of special security arrangements for the monument, the state government has asked the federal civil aviation authorities and India's air force to declare a no-fly zone over a four 2.5-mile radius around the Taj Mahal, said N. C. Bajpei, Uttar Pradesh's topmost official.
The majestic domed monument was built by the Mogul Emperor Shah Jehan between 1632 and 1654 for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. It houses their graves and a mosque, as well as several other graves of lesser Mogul royalty.
Nearly 2.5 million tourists visited the Taj Mahal last year, according to official estimates.
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ETA threatens response to Spanish "repression"
By Jason Webb
Reuters
August 18, 2006
MADRID - Basque separatist group ETA said on Friday peace talks with the Spanish government were in crisis and threatened to respond to what it called repression of pro-independence activists.
"If the attacks continue against Euskal Herria (the Basque Country), ETA will respond," the group said, using language which will be interpreted here as a threat to end its five-month-old ceasefire and resume 38 years of armed struggle.
The unspecified threat was contained in a communique sent to Basque newspaper Gara hours after separatist politicians complained about a three-year-old ban on Batasuna, a party linked to ETA.
Talks with the government were in "evident crisis," ETA said, laying the blame on the lack of "bold decisions toward establishing a democratic framework in Euskal Herria."
The government "has used repression to weaken the Abertzale Left," ETA said, using the Basque term for the pro-independence movement.
A government official said ETA was applying pressure for Batasuna to be allowed into planned discussions between political parties on the future of the Basque Country.
There was little danger the group would break its truce, said the official, who did not want to be named. "They're just playing politics," he said.
ETA, which analysts say has been weakened by hundreds of arrests in recent years, killed more than 800 people in its fight for independence for the Basque Country which began in the last years of Franco's dictatorship.
Madrid wants peace talks to concentrate on disarmament and moving ETA prisoners closer to their homes. It also wants the talks to run separately to deliberations between political parties on the future of the Basque Country, which straddles northern Spain and southwestern France.
There is consensus that any deal must include Batasuna but the Socialists say the ban on the party, imposed for its links to ETA, will not be lifted until it condemns violence.
Batasuna's leader Arnaldo Otegi accused the Socialists on Thursday of breaking promises made in private about the ban.
In a response to the ETA communique on Friday, the Socialist Party called ETA "terrorists."
"There are clear rules to democratic politics, and anyone who wants to participate has to abide by them," said the communique signed by senior Socialist official Alfonso Perales.
Batasuna wants a referendum on independence for the Basque Country, even though the region already enjoys considerable autonomy over areas including education and health. Polls show only a minority of Basques want to leave Spain.
The peace talks have been fiercely criticized by Spain's conservative opposition which accuses Zapatero of giving in to "terrorists." The French government has refused to talk to ETA, which concentrated its violent campaign in Spain.
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Iraqi forces detain 77 in crackdown
By ROBERT H. REID
Associated Press
August 18, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen attacked a convoy of civilian trucks Friday, killing one guard, and a cache of arms was seized in a Baghdad mosque, officials said. Security forces detained 77 people across Iraq in a crackdown on sectarian and political extremists.
The convoy carrying unspecified goods had just left Baghdad for the northern city of Irbil when it came under attack in Taji, 10 miles north of the capital, said police Lt. Ahmed Al-Qaisi.
He said one guard riding alongside in an SUV was killed and another was injured.
Iraqi police found five bodies with gunshot wounds in Mahmoudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad, and a roadside bomb killed one person in Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad.
A statement by the General Command of the Armed Forces said Iraqi soldiers raided the Al-Sediq Sunni mosque in Baghdad's Ghazaliyah neighborhood after a tip and confiscated mortar shells, a belt of explosives likely to be used by a suicide bomber, 27 wire communications sets, rocket propelled grenade launchers and magazines of bullets.
Ghazaliyah, a predominantly Sunni area, is one of the most volatile neighborhoods of Baghdad and has been targeted by Iraqi and U.S. forces in a new security crackdown in an effort to stem the sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites.
Some 12,000 additional U.S. and Iraqi forces have been sent to Baghdad to enforce peace in the capital.
The tit-for-tat attacks between the two communities since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite mosque has raised fears of an all-out civil war, and diverted resources needed to fight the 3-year-old Sunni insurgency by loyalists of
Saddam Hussein.
Friday's statement did not say if any arrests were made at the mosque, but listed the results of the nationwide crackdown: 77 detained in the last 24 hours including 31 people with strong evidence of terrorist activities against them.
It said the 31 included four Iraqis who were caught planting a roadside bomb south of Baghdad, five Egyptians and a man who had obtained a security clearance pass for the highly protected Green Zone, an enclosed area in Baghdad containing government headquarters and the U.S. facilities.
The security operation follows a sharp spike in violence in the country - about 3,500 Iraqis were killed in July in sectarian or political violence nationwide, the highest monthly toll for civilians since the war started in March 2003.
On Thursday, U.S. officials confirmed that 2,625 roadside bombs - directed mostly against American or Iraqi forces - exploded or were discovered before detonation in July, a sharp rise compared to 1,454 bombs in January.
The figures suggest that the Sunni Arab insurgency is gaining strength despite setbacks, including the June 7 death of al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed in a U.S. airstrike northeast of Baghdad.
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Wealth and Health
Bush meets with economic team
By DEB RIECHMANN
Associated Press
August 18, 2006
CAMP DAVID, Md. - High gasoline prices, a slowing economy and upcoming congressional elections were the backdrop Friday of President Bush's annual meeting with his top economic team, held this year in a cooler clime.
Instead of gathering at his Texas ranch, where the mercury is topping 100 degrees, the president and his advisers huddled at the shady Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains.
The meeting, which began with a dinner Thursday evening, comes at a time when only 37 percent of Americans support his handling of the economy, according to AP-Ipsos polling in early August. It also comes about two months before congressional midterm elections that will determine whether Republicans continue to control the House and the Senate.
"Every year the president takes time in August to meet with his economic team for an in-depth discussion about the economy and how we can be sure that the administration's policies are on track to keep the economy strong and growing," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.
Perino said they would discuss the macroeconomic picture and job growth, financial markets, tax policy, the budget and current and future spending on government entitlement programs.
Among those in attendance: Vice President Dick Cheney, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, National Economic Council Director Allan Hubbard and White House budget chief Rob Portman.
Cheney recently predicted that the Republicans would prevail in the midterm elections partly because the U.S. economy is "kicking along in very good shape."
Democrats, on the other hand, argue that Bush's economic plan has left wages flat and gas and health care costs high. They also blame Republicans for a failed attempt to raise the minimum wage by insisting that it be coupled with cutting taxes on multimillion-dollar estates.
"Despite the president's rosy rhetoric and campaign slogans, the American people know the Bush economy doesn't work for them, as they've endured stagnating wages, skyrocketing health care costs and record-high gas prices," said Stacie Paxton, press secretary for the Democratic National Committee.
There has been recent good news on the inflation front.
A surge in energy prices pushed the Consumer Price Index higher in July, but other prices were more restrained. That raised hopes on Wall Street that interest rates won't be rising. Also, wholesale prices were up just 0.1 percent in July and, excluding food and energy, actually fell by 0.3 percent.
Other economic reports give evidence that the economy is slowing.
The Federal Reserve reported that industrial production rose by 0.4 percent in July - just half the June gain, as manufacturing output slowed dramatically. And the
Commerce Department said new home construction dropped by 2.5 percent in July, the fifth decline in the past six months.
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Northwest advised workers to see treasure in trash
Reuters
Tue Aug 15, 2006
NEW YORK - Bankrupt Northwest Airlines Corp. advised workers to fish in the trash for things they like or take their dates for a walk in the woods in a move to help workers facing the ax to save money.
The No. 5 U.S. carrier, which has slashed most employees' pay and is looking to cut jobs as it prepares to exit bankruptcy, put the tips in a booklet handed out to about 50 workers and posted for a time on its employee Web site.
The section, entitled "101 ways to save money", does not feature in new versions of the booklet or the Web site.
Northwest spokesman Roman Blahoski said some employees who received the handbook had taken issue with a couple of the items. "We agree that some of these suggestions and tips ... were a bit insensitive," Blahoski told Reuters.
The four-page booklet, "Preparing for a Financial Setback" contained suggestions such as shopping in thrift stores, taking "a date for a walk along the beach or in the woods" and not being "shy about pulling something you like out of the trash."
The booklet was part of a 150-page packet to ground workers, such as baggage handlers, whose jobs will likely be cut after their union agreed to allow the airline to outsource some of their work, Blahoski said.
Prepared with the help of an outside company, the booklet encourages employees to manage their money better and prepare for financial emergencies.
"If you have saved some money, pat yourself on the back -- you deserve it," the booklet reads. "Take out only what you need and spend prudently."
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Fatter patients 'have better chance of surviving heart disease'
The Scotsman
By Angus Howarth
18/08/06
HEART patients classed as overweight have better survival rates than those deemed "normal", according to new research.
The findings have called into question the standard measure of obesity.
Scientists say the research exposes shortcomings in the use of Body Mass Index (BMI), which has formed the basis of defining healthy and abnormal weight for more than 100 years.
The latest research conducted by American scientists from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, pooled data from 40 studies involving about 250,000 people with heart disease.
It found, as expected, that severely obese patients had a higher risk of heart-related death - but it also showed that overweight patients, as defined by their BMI scores, had better survival rates and fewer heart problems than those with a normal BMI. People with normal BMIs were, in turn, less likely to die than people with low BMIs.
The experts stressed that the findings did not suggest obesity was not a health threat, but rather that the 100-year-old BMI test was too blunt an instrument to be trusted. The better outcomes for overweight patients were most likely due to muscle, which weighs more than fat, the researchers said in the Lancet.
Dr Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, who led the study, said: "Rather than proving that obesity is harmless, our data suggest that alternative methods might be needed to better characterise individuals who truly have excess body fat, compared with those in whom BMI is raised because of preserved muscle mass."
BMI, invented by the Belgian statistician and sociologist Adolphe Quetelet in 1869, is calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by their height in metres squared.
It is relied upon in clinical trials designed to assess the health risks associated with weight. Someone with a BMI of less than 18.5 is considered underweight; between 18.5 and 24.9 lies within the "normal" range; and 25 to 29.9 is classified as "overweight". Clinical obesity is defined by a BMI of 30 or greater.
Many experts now say waist circumference or waist-to-hip ratio, which indicate levels of abdominal fat, are better guides.
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MySpace users hit by hacker virus
Daily Mail
18th August 2006
Users of the popular MySpace website have been warned by computer experts that viruses linked to the interactive site, which boasts more than one million regular users, are in circulation.
Experts believe that hackers have hit the hugely popular site and say the viruses in circulation can change settings, delete files, secretly track users' movements online and even damage computers.
They believe that the hackers have hidden dangerous software on the site which means that computers can be attacked unaware to users while they are just viewing pages.
"There is a very real threat to users of MySpace, and in fact we have already seen several MySpace specific viruses emerge," Graham Cluley of computer security company Sophos told the Standard Lite newspaper.
The site is hugely popular, especially with teenagers, and it has recorded growing numbers of users in recent months, now accounting for 4.5 per cent of all internet traffic.
However, its popularity has also led to it becoming a target for scams.
Mr Cluley believes the current virus can be blamed on the site's teenage appeal.
"The problem is that people tend to let their guard down because they think the site is safe. But even a picture of a fluffy bunny rabbit on the site can contain a hidden piece of software that could harm your machine," he said.
"We've also seen pages that contain code to automatically spread viruses through MySpace's buddy system, which lets you add friends to your profile."
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Spaced Out
Spectacular Meteor Shower Possible for 2007
By Joe Rao
SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist
posted: 17 August 2006
12:48 pm ET
A spectacular meteor shower might be in the offing late next summer, SPACE.com has learned.
It may not last very long, but could produce a bevy of bright, swift shooting stars for favorably positioned skywatchers. The prediction is found in a technical report, co-authored by two astronomers who are targeting Sept. 1, 2007 as the date for the potential display.
The meteors are called "Aurigids" because they appear to fan-out from the constellation of Auriga, the Charioteer.
At least a strong shower
Meteor showers occur whenever we ride into the dusty debris left behind in a comet's orbit. The debris left behind by Kiess, a comet last seen in 1911, is what produces the Aurigids. The comet takes approximately 2,500 years to orbit the Sun, but there are also dense trails of dust traveling along its orbit. Earth has had glancing blows in the past with a few of these dust trails in 1935, 1986 and 1994.
In 2007, however, the Earth is expected to pass very close to the center of a dust trail, which astronomers Esko Lyytinen of Finland and Peter Jenniskens of NASA's SETI Institute in California said, should result in "a spectacularly rich shower of bright meteors."
The researchers in the past used computer models to predict outbursts of the Leonid meteor shower, which wowed skywatchers in 2001 and 2002.
Shooting stars, or meteors, are common any night of the year; five or six per hour are normal. During a respectable meteor shower, they can be seen streaking across the sky every few minutes. But occasionally the sky explodes in a shower of sparks, a rare meteor "storm" that is something to get excited about.
Meteor storm possible?
No one is certain how strong next year's Aurigids may be, but tomorrow, Jenniskens will make an announcement at the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Prague concerning an "Aurigid Meteor Storm" of Sept. 1, 2007.
Meteor storms are typically said to involve at least 1,000 meteors per hour, a rate sometimes achieved only in 15-minute bursts. It is not clear what sort of hourly rate Jenniskens will announce as his prediction, however.
"I do not know why Peter Jenniskens will announce this as a storm," Lyytinen told SPACE.com. "I have not especially tried to predict the strength but I would guess only a good or moderate shower, a storm not impossible."
The peak of the shower is predicted to occur at 11:37 GMT. Unfortunately this comes during daylight for Europe and much of North America. But the western United States and Canada, as well as much of Alaska and Hawaii will still be in pre-dawn darkness and would be in an excellent position to view it.
Another drawback will be a gibbous Moon, four days past full, whose light could interfere with observing. But, Lytinnen said, many of the meteors are expected to be very bright. "So, maybe the moon does not make very much harm in the observations ... I hope."
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Astronomers look for near-Earth objects
By WILLIAM J. KOLE
Associated Press
Thu Aug 17, 2006
PRAGUE, Czech Republic - They're out there, hidden among a haze of stars - killer asteroids. Now the world's astronomers are keeping a wary eye to the skies for giant objects on a collison course with Earth.
Experts say there are about 1,100 comets and asteroids in the inner solar system that are at least a half-mile across, and that any one of them could unleash a global cataclysm capable of killing millions in a single blinding flash.
On Thursday, the International Astronomical Union said it has set up a special task force to sharpen its focus on threats from such "near-Earth objects."
"The goal is to discover these killer asteroids before they discover us," said Nick Kaiser of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, which hopes to train four powerful digital cameras on the heavens to watch for would-be intruders.
There are no asteroid busters to stop one right now, but scientists believe that one day a defense could be devised, such as using spacecraft to divert a killer comet.
Congress has asked
NASA for a plan to comb the cosmos for even smaller, more distant objects, including asteroids just 1 1/2 football fields across. The space agency is to catalog their position, speed and course by 2020. Already, there are 103 objects on an "impact risk" watch list.
Scientists warn there are as many as 100,000 of these "smaller" heavenly bodies with the potential to take out entire cities or set off a tsunami like the killer wave that swept through the Indian Ocean in December 2004.
Earth's craters bear silent witness to what can happen even when a smallish asteroid slams home. In 1908, one struck remote central Siberia, unleashing as much energy as a 15-megaton nuclear bomb. Fortunately, it wiped out 60 million trees, not people. Had it hit a populated area, the loss of life would have been staggering.
There's some recent good news too: Earth's most pressing threat - the asteroid 99942 Apophis - appears to have eased. Scientists initially gave it a 1-in-5,500 chance of hitting the planet in 2036, with enough power to wipe out the New York City metro area. But experts said Thursday the latest observations suggest those odds have dwindled to 1-in-30,000.
They won't be sure until it makes an earlier pass in 2029, when it's expected to come within 18,640 miles of Earth. If that sounds comfortably distant, consider this: It's closer than many commercial satellites and a good deal nearer than the moon.
Although close encounters are unnerving, they give astronomers a unique opportunity to get a better glimpse of asteroids and comets - the leftover building materials of the universe - and gain a better understanding of the origins of the solar system.
Scientists say expanding their database of the objects crowding Earth's neighborhood could help produce a permanent warning system like those that now monitor the Pacific for tsunamis or keep tabs on volcanoes and earthquake zones.
Give the world a decade or so of lead time to deal with a specific threat, they say, and it stands a chance of getting out of harm's way - perhaps by sending up a spacecraft to nudge an asteroid off-course.
"Right now, unfortunately, there are no 'asteroid busters' or hot lines. Who ya gonna call?" said Andrea Milani Comparetti, a professor of mathematics at Italy's University of Pisa.
To be on the safe side, astronomers trying to determine the odds of one hitting Earth work with computer models that surround it with thousands of "virtual asteroids." Experts then map out the likely orbits for each one and factor those in to come up with the probability of an impact.
But widening the search for threatening objects creates a problem: Discoveries could become commonplace, either creating unnecessary panic and confusion or lulling the public into a false sense of complacency.
"We're now going to be finding such objects once a week instead of once a year," said David Morrison, a NASA scientist who will chair the new task force.
"Only in Hollywood do asteroids arbitrarily change orbits," he said. "But there is great potential for misunderstanding. Dealing with probability and risk is a problem for all of us, whether we're dealing with asteroid impacts or terrorist attacks."
Bottom line: Mankind may not be able to dodge every cosmic bullet.
"It's through collisions that planets are born," said Giovanni Valsecchi of Italy's National Institute of Astrophysics. "And it's through collisions that planets die."
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Missile-like metal tube is reported over Hilo Airport
By Rod Thompson
Star Bulletin
Thursday, August 17, 2006
HILO - The FBI and the Transportation Security Administration are investigating sightings of an object resembling a missile flying over the Hilo Airport area Tuesday morning, Hawaii County Civil Defense said.
Reports gave opposite descriptions of its direction and widely varying estimates of its size.
The largest estimate was about 12 feet long, and the smallest was one foot. One report said it was headed over the airport's main runway, but another said it was headed north from Hilo, away from the airport.
Civil Defense official Lanny Nakano said the federal agencies classified the sighting as unconfirmed. The FBI and TSA did not return requests for comment.
Nakano, reading from notes from another Civil Defense official, said it was seen at 10:18 a.m. headed away from the airport.
But an eyewitness, who asked that his name not be used, told the Star-Bulletin he saw it heading from the Civic Auditorium area to the Keaukaha area, which would take it over the main runway.
That witness saw a silver tube with no markings or fins, trailing "vapor" that quickly dispersed.
"The noise was super-loud," he said.
Police also interviewed about a half-dozen witnesses who saw or heard it, said police spokeswoman Chris Loos.
Loos and the nameless witness said there were plane flights before and after the object was sighted, but the object did not appear connected to their presence.
At Pohakuloa Training Area, 30 miles to the west, spokesman Bob McElroy said there were no military exercises using missiles.
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Today's SOTT Award
Top Chinese diplomat tells US to 'shut up' on arms spending
by Robert MacPherson
AFP
Thu Aug 17, 2006
LONDON - China's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, throwing diplomatic language to the wind, has told the United States in no uncertain terms to "shut up and keep quiet" on the subject of Beijing's growing military spending.
Interviewed for a BBC radio programme on the topic Thursday, Sha Zukang also said China would "do the business" and sacrifice its own people's lives if any nation supported a declaration of independence by Taiwan.
Responding to jitters within the Bush administration about Beijing's spiraling military budget, Sha said the United States itself accounts for half of the entire world's military spending.
"The China population is six times or five times that of the United States," he said. "Why blame China?... It's better for the US to shut up and keep quiet. It's much, much better."
His voice rising, Sha continued: "It's the US's sovereign right to do whatever they deem good for them -- but don't tell us what is good for China. Thank you very much!"
Sha was equally explicit on Taiwan declaring independence with US backing -- a prospect that the BBC programme, by former Beijing correspondent Carrie Gracie, called the motivating factor behind Chinese military spending.
"The moment Taiwan declares independence, supported by whoever, China will have no choice," he said.
"We will do the business through whatever means available to my government. Nobody should have any illusions on that. We will do the business at any cost."
He added: "It's not a matter of how big Taiwan is, but for China, one inch of the territory is more valuable than the life of our people. We will never concede on that."
China's rising military spending, which has grown by double digits for much of the last 15 years, has caused concern in the United States and amongst China's neighbors in Asia.
In March the National People's Congress (parliament), largely a rubber-stamp for decisions taken at the top level of the Chinese Communist Party, approved a 14.7-percent increase in military spending to 35 billion dollars (27 billion euros) this year.
Although this is paltry compared to the 419 billion dollar (325 billion euro) US defense budget in 2006, the Pentagon last year estimated that China's defense spending was two to three times the publicly announced figure.
In a speech in Beijing in July, Defence Minister Cao Gangchuan said modernization of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) remained a priority, the China News Service reported.
"The entire military must eye the historic destiny of China's military in the new century and new era and push forward the main line of a Chinese-style revolution in military affairs," he was quoted as saying.
He added: "We must unswervingly fulfill our sacred duty to defend state sovereignty, territorial integrity and security and never tolerate Taiwan independence and never permit Taiwan independence forces under any name or under any circumstances or form to split Taiwan from the motherland."
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