- Signs of the Times for Thu, 31 Aug 2006 -



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Editorial: Talking Peace, Planning War

Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
31/08/2006

Did you know that in the past 8 weeks, 200 Palestinans, most of them unarmed civilians and many of them children, have been mercilesly gunned-down by the forces of the state of Israel? Are you aware that almost every day at least one Palestinian civilian is murdered in cold blood by the state of Israel? Did you know that the US government whole-heartedly supports and finances this systematic slaughter? Did you know that the 1,300 Lebanese civilians that were murdered in Israel's turkey shoot in Lebanon last month would still be alive today if it were not for the financial and military assistance that the US government gives to Israel?

Is it not utterly incredible to listen to George Bush tell the world about how his country is spreading "freedom and democracy" around the world and realise that most American citizens actually believe him, while their tax money -the sweat of their brows - is being used to murder innocent people in the Middle East. Let me be clear, these are not 'terrorists', there are NO terrorists, these are simply people unfortunate enough to find themselves living in a country that happens to be of strategic political importance to the American British and Israeli governments.

Of course, Lebanon and Palestine are but the tip of the iceberg, I could go on about the 250,000 Iraqi civilians who were murdered by this same American government over the past 3 years. Think about it. 1/4 of one million people, shot, bludgeoned or blown to pieces by the Army or agents of the alleged greatest democracy on earth. Where did it go wrong?

Suffice to say that the scale of the crimes of the American British and Israeli governments is directly proportional to the level of ignorance about what is really happening of the average British American and Israeli citizen. In short, it is staggering, and it is no exaggeration to say that if the average citizen knew what is really happening, they could quite possibly die of shock. It is the big lie therefore, the massive gulf between words and actions, that allows our leaders to keep their crimes hidden from public view. It is not that their crimes are actually hidden of course, they are on view for all to see, but when Bush or Blair or Olmert give orders to bomb or attack civilians they are careful to declare the action as being part of the war on terror or the fight to preserve freedom and democracy, and in doing so they create a certain cognitive dissonance in the minds of the average person who is faced with a choice. He must decide weather to use his brain and think for himself or to simply have faith and trust in his leaders. As such, it comes down to a choice between the easy and the hard, the frightening and the comfortable. There really is no choice. It is facilitated self-imposed delusion at its finest.

Personally, I like to think that this state of delusion in which most people find themselves is not really sustainable, that at some stage the gulf between words and deeds will become so huge that only the clinically dead can afford to not see it. Perhaps this is simply wishful thinking on my part however, and perhaps history will show that 99% of the population went to their graves still thinking that their own deaths at the hands of their own government was to promote "freedom and democracy".

Certainly at this point in time, the most likely candidate for any potential future wake-up call for humanity seems to be the Middle East. Israel is currently chomping at the bit to start the wholesale slaughter of Arabs, and America seems ready to help with its 130,000 troops and 10 permanent military bases in Iraq, all slowly turning their guns towards Iran. At the same time we see the massive concerted effort over the past 10 years to portray all Arabs as terrorists to citizens of Western nations. Could we really ask for a clearer signal of where this is going? Let me put it more plainly.

Your government has more or less successfully convinced you that all Arab people are terrorists or at least terrorist sympathisers, and to do so has gone to the extent of actually attacking and killing your fellow citizens and blaming it on Arabs to reinforce this 'reality'. At the same time it has stationed many thousands of troops in the Middle East region and is actively attempting to provoke a 'war'. Now tell me, where do think this is going to end up? Let me remind you that there have already been 2 world wars in the past 100 years, and the signs are multitude that another is around the corner. In the first world war 8 million people died. In the second world war 60 million people died. How many do you think might die in a third? 100, 200 500 million? Why not a billion? It's not like they haven't developed wonderful weapons that can easily do the job.

The Middle East then, appears to be the future global ground zero of choice, but again, how did we get here?

In March 2005, ex Israeli PM Sharon visited Bush at his Texas ranch where Bush repeated demands that Israel should halt all illegal settlement activity in the Palestinian West Bank territory. Within a day of returning to Israel, Sharon publicly ignored Bush's demands and ordered that the construction of new West Bank settlements should go ahead. The silence that issued from Washington was deafening, highlighting for all the world to see (apart from the victims of the Israeli-dominated and censored US mainstream press) that, regardless of what they say, Bush and Sharon are on the same page in terms of the future of a Palestinian state - there will be none.

The last serious effort that were made towards peace between Palestinians and Israelis was back in October 1993 when Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo peace accords and famously shook hands on the White House lawn, with Clinton pictured as peacemaker.

Rabin had gone further than any other Israeli PM in extending a just peace offering to the Palestinians, and throughout the encounter in Washington, the frequently anguished look on his face spoke of a man who realised that he would be lucky to get out of this alive. Peace, you see, does not go down very well with the bloodthirsty "Zionists" that dictate Israeli policy towards the Arabs that live in their 'god-given' homeland.

After Olso, Arafat returned triumphantly to Palestinian territory and was later elected president of the Palestinian National Authority. Right on cue however, bomb attacks by "Palestinian militants" against Israelis heightened tensions between the two sides. As regards the bizarre way in which 'Palestinian militants' always seem to launch attacks against Israeli targets at moments where a peace appears within reach, consider this report from last year out of Baghdad:

“A few days ago, an American manned check point confiscated the driver license of a driver and told him to report to an American military camp near Baghdad airport for interrogation and in order to retrieve his license. The next day, the driver did visit the camp and he was allowed in the camp with his car. He was admitted to a room for an interrogation that lasted half an hour. At the end of the session, the American interrogator told him: ‘OK, there is nothing against you, but you do know that Iraq is now sovereign and is in charge of its own affairs. Hence, we have forwarded your papers and license to al-Kadhimia police station for processing. Therefore, go there with this clearance to reclaim your license. At the police station, ask for Lt. Hussain Mohammed, who is waiting for you now. Go there now quickly, before he leaves his shift work”.

The driver did leave in a hurry, but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car was driving as if carrying a heavy load, and he also became suspicious of a low flying helicopter that kept hovering overhead, as if trailing him. He stopped the car and inspected it carefully. He found nearly 100 kilograms of explosives hidden in the back seat and along the two back doors.

The only feasible explanation for this incident is that the car was indeed booby trapped by the Americans and intended for the al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad. The helicopter was monitoring his movement and witnessing the anticipated “hideous attack by foreign elements”.

And lest we forget, Israel's intelligence and military have been training the Americans in Iraq on the finer points of Urban warfare and how best to counteract (read demonize) guerilla warfare tactics.

A little over two years after Oslo, and just in case he had any ideas about further 'peace mongering', Rabin was assassinated for his efforts by Israeli intelligence in a cover up that was very similar in essence to the murder of JFK. Barry Chamish details the findings that prove, more or less categorically, that the official version of rabin's murder is a lie.

In 1996, Rabin's replacement, Binyamin Netanyahu, headed a coalition government, which was unsurprisingly split over the peace process and subsequently collapsed. Netanyahu was succeeded by Ehud Barak, who was the next to visit the White House and meet with Arafat in 2001, again with Clinton as match maker.

Barak could afford to smile, he knew his offer to Arafat was not something Arafat could bring home to the Palestinian people. Read Clayton Swisher's The Truth About Camp David : The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process for the full story, but in essence, the talks were doomed to failure because of Barak's refusal to offer any substantial concessions to Arafat in return for assurances of peace. Of course, at the time, the Israeli-owned press informed the American public that the exact opposite was true, but then, there's nothing strange or unusual about that.

Unsurprisingly then, any prospect of further talks between the Israelis and the PA receded. In the impasse, the veteran right-winger and war criminal with a insatiable appetite for Palestinian blood, Ariel Sharon, toured Jerusalem's Muslim holy site, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, with an entourage of 1,000 armed men on September 29, 2000 - a flagrant provocation to the Palestinians. Sharon's belligerence paid of, provoking a second Palestinian intifada and soon thereafter propelling him into government in April 2001 - just what the Doctor of Death had been hoping for. Sharon further capitalised on the results of his provocation, using the Palestinian uprising to justify turning his back on the 'land for peace deal' and ordering the IDF to re-occupy the West Bank.

Not satisfied with their virtual stranglehold on the Palestinian territories and their 2 million haggard, impoverished and regularly murdered people, Israeli intelligence decided the time was right to implement their long established plan to create the conditions that will ultimately allow them to wage all out war on their defenseless Palestinian hostages and on the Arabic peoples of the wider Middle East.

9/11 was the Israeli false-flag operation par excellence, as then Israeli foreign minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu stated on the morning of the attacks in response to a question from a radio interviewer about his opinion of the atrocity: "It’s very good.” Then correcting himself and adding: “Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans].”

Coincidence? Hardly.

It is clear to all those with a minimal understanding of the history of the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" (a misnomer if there ever was one) that there never has been an Israeli government that ever planned to consent to Palestinian statehood. How could there have been? When we consider the glee with which Sharon, for example, ordered the butchering of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women and children refugees in the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1983, or the utter lack of empathy shown by Olmert to the murder of 1300 Lebanese (including hundreds of children) gives us a clear indication of the ethos underpinning the Zionist world view - all Arabs are less than human, much like all other 'gentiles'. Of course, we should not think that the Jewish people themselves will be spared the predations of their emotionless leaders. For the Israeli government to provoke war in the Middle East is like starting a fire in one's own home. All will be consumed.

Sharon remarked that: "anyone who kills a Jew or harms an Israeli citizen, or sends people to kill Jews, is a marked man. Period." In doing so, Sharon was merely stating what Jewish law has stated for thousands of years: that the life of a 'Gentile' is worth less than the life of a Jew (and thatof an arab even less). Jewish Talmudic law teaches that Jews alone are human, special chosen, and that they must assert their right as better than all others by force of arms. Once this is understood, the brutality of Israeli murders such as the death by missile of Sheikh Yassin or the gunning down of Palestinian children who throw rocks at the occupying IDF soldiers or the murder of 13000 Lebanese civilians can be understood for what it is - the enacting of the 'morality' of a group of psychopaths. Once the Jewish teachings are understood, the hopelessness of the Palestinian position and that of all the people of the Middle East (not to mention the rest of the world) can also be understood. We suggest our readers read Israel Shahak's book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, especially the chapter on The Laws Against Non-Jews.

Here is an excerpt from that chapter:

Murder and Genocide

ACCORDING TO THE JEWISH religion, the murder of a Jew is a capital offense and one of the three most heinous sins (the other two being idolatry and adultery). Jewish religious courts and secular authorities are commanded to punish, even beyond the limits of the ordinary administration of justice, anyone guilty of murdering a Jew. A Jew who indirectly causes the death of another Jew is, however, only guilty of what talmudic law calls a sin against the 'laws of Heaven', to be punished by God rather than by man.

When the victim is a Gentile, the position is quite different. A Jew who murders a Gentile is guilty only of a sin against the laws of Heaven, not punishable by a court. To cause indirectly the death of a Gentile is no sin at all.

Thus, one of the two most important commentators on the Shulhan Arukh explains that when it comes to a Gentile, 'one must not lift one's hand to harm him, but one may harm him indirectly, for instance by removing a ladder after he had fallen into a crevice .., there is no prohibition here, because it was not done directly: He points out, however, that an act leading indirectly to a Gentile's death is forbidden if it may cause the spread of hostility towards Jews.

A Gentile murderer who happens to be under Jewish jurisdiction must be executed whether the victim was Jewish or not. However, if the victim was Gentile and the murderer converts to Judaism, he is not punished.

All this has a direct and practical relevance to the realities of the State of Israel. Although the state's criminal laws make no distinction between Jew and Gentile, such distinction is certainly made by Orthodox rabbis, who in guiding their flock follow the Halakhah. Of special importance is the advice they give to religious soldiers.

Since even the minimal interdiction against murdering a Gentile outright applies only to 'Gentiles with whom we [the Jews] are not at war', various rabbinical commentators in the past drew the logical conclusion that in wartime all Gentiles belonging to a hostile population may, or even should be killed. Since 1973 this doctrine is being publicly propagated for the guidance of religious Israeli soldiers. The first such official exhortation was included in a booklet published by the Central Region Command of the Israeli Army, whose area includes the West Bank. In this booklet the Command's Chief Chaplain writes:

When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or in a raid, so long as there is no certainty that those civilians are incapable of harming our forces, then according to the Halakhah they may and even should be killed... Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he makes an impression of being civilized ... In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good.

This discussion of Jewish laws towards non-Jews puts Israel's denial of food to the Palestinians, discussed in the article above, and murder of Lebanese in a different light. The Jews who follow Jewish law have no moral or religious duty to help or care for the Palestinians or Arabs and non-Jews in general. On the contrary, because they are convinced that every Palestinian (and ultimately gentile) is a threat to Israel and to other Jews, their religious duty is to kill them all.

We will be clear. We do not think that all Jews agree with this teaching. There are many non-religious Jews who may not even be aware of it and there are many others who are taking a stand against such inhuman teachings, (which the mainstream media conveniently ignores). However, such teachings appear to us to be an accurate description of the policies of the State of Israel, whether or not the individuals involved are aware of the teachings.

These teachings appear to form the foundations of the culture within which the genocidal policies of Zionist leaders are acceptable to a significant portion of Israel's Jewish population. We note, moreover, that these policies are acceptable as well to a significant proportion of US fundamentalist Christians. We raise the issue of US Christians because it is clear that their attitude towards non-Christians is very similar, and historically, Christians have treated non-Christians, especially those who did not have white skin, as little more than "beasts walking on two legs" as former Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, once called Palestinians.

What is the basis of this sense of superiority? Religion, the supernatural ravings of an arrogant and bloodthirsty pseudo-divinity. Unfortunately, billions of people the world over, including Christians and Moslems, are influenced by these psychopathic delusions, as the legitimacy of their own beliefs rests upon the legitimacy of Jewish beliefs.

As for the Jews, for a people with a population of approximately 15 million world-wide, they appear to have an inordinate influence over the future of the planet, or at least such is true of their self-styled leaders. The survival of under 5 million of them, the Jewish population of Israel, could put in danger the survival of the other 6 billion of us alive today. It is the worst kept secret on the planet that Israel has nuclear weapons. It would be consistent with the Jewish law mentioned above for Israel to be willing to destroy the rest of the world if its leaders felt that there was a threat to Israel's continued existence. That Israelis have admitted that this is the worst case scenario is extremely troubling but not surprising.

But this discussion raises the issue of the modern bogeyman -- anti-Semitism. Is it "anti-Semitic" to say such things about Israel? We are not discussing Jews as a whole, and our criticisms of religion apply to the other world religions as well. We are discussing the State of Israel, the Zionist leaders, their genocidal policies towards the Palestinians and Arabs of the Middle East, and the apparent consistency between certain Jewish teachings and that policy. We also underline that the attitude of US evangelicals, and of much of the history of the Christian Churches, is in accord with these ideas even if the "chosen people" differ from case to case.

Defenders of Israel will label this argument as "anti-Semitic."

The manipulative tool that is monotheistic religion and those that have wielded it against humanity for thousands of years, appear destined to bring the world to the brink of a truly global holocaust, simply because they refuse to allow a wholly attainable peace settlement between the Israeli and Palestinian and Arabic peoples. With last year's assassination of Arafat by Israeli intelligence, the last hope for peace expired also. The 'peace map' is now officially dead rather than simply being an unofficial non-starter. The world has now entered the final phase of a despicable plan that has been many centuries in the making and which has as its goal the utter destruction of hundreds of millions of people on this planet.

While awareness of this reality is difficult to bear, it can at least help us to resolve the confusion we may have up to now experienced when we read the headlines that Bush has yet again called Olmert a a "Man of Peace", or that "Israel has a right to defend itself". Deception, insidious and all-encompassing, is the name of the game that the controllers of this planet are playing. If you carry within you even the embryo of a vision of a different and better future for humanity, please take a stand, now, and refuse to be lied to any longer. Your children's future will undoubtedly depend on it.
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Editorial: Bush tells reporters Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11

White House Press Conference
24/08/2006

Reporter: What did Iraq have to do with the attack on the World Trade Center?

Bush: Nothing

So does this mean that Bush lied? If so, what else is he lying about?

Watch the video below



You have been had. Question is, what are you gonna do about it?
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Editorial: The Great Housing Crash of '07: How low will prices go?

By Mike Whitney
08/30/06

This month's figures prove that the so-called "housing bubble" is not only real, but that its cratering faster than anyone had realized. As the UK Guardian reported just yesterday, "the orderly housing slowdown predicted by the Federal Reserve will (soon) become a full-blown crash".

All the indicators are now pointing in the wrong direction. Consumer confidence is down, inventory is at a 10 year high, and the number of homes sold in July was 22% lower than last year. As Paul Ashworth, chief economist at Capital Economics said, "Things seem to be getting worse very quickly. Freefall is a strong word, but I think it's the right one to use here." (UK Guardian)

The housing bubble is a $10 trillion equity balloon that will explode sometime in 2007 when more than $1 trillion in no-interest, no down payment, adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) reset; setting the stage for massive home devaluation, foreclosures and unemployment. ("By some estimates housing activity has accounted for 40% of all the jobs created since 2001". Times Online) July's plunging sales are just the first sign of a major slowdown. The worst is yet to come.

AAaaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeoooo!!!

The blame for this rapidly-approaching meltdown lies entirely with the Federal Reserve, the privately-owned collection of 10 central banks who cooked up a way to shift wealth from one class to another through low interest rates.

Sound crazy?

Well, just as high interest rates cause the economy to slow down; low interest rates have the exact opposite effect by stimulating the economy through increased spending. It's all pretty clear-cut.

When the stock market nose-dived in 2000 the Fed lowered rates 17 times to an unbelievable 1% to keep the economy sputtering-along while the Bush administration dragged the country to war, gave away $450 billion a year in tax cuts, and awarded zillions in no bid contracts to their friends in big business. All tolled, the Bush-handouts amounted to roughly $3 trillion dollars, the largest heist in history, and it was carried out under the nose of the snoozing American public.

At the same time, America's debts and deficits have continued to mushroom behind the smokescreen of low interest rates.

Rather than face the recession which should have followed stock market crash, the Fed chose to increase the money supply (which doubled in the last 7 years) and lower the qualifications for getting mortgages. (I read recently that 90% of first time home buyers not only lie on their mortgage applications, but that 50% of them say that they earn TWICE as much as they really do. The applications are not cross-checked with IRS statements) Now, tens of thousands of Americans live in $400,000 and $500,000 homes without a penny of equity in them and with loans that are timed to increase dramatically in 2007. (Many of the monthly payments will double)

So, how can we blame the Fed for the reckless and irresponsible behavior of the average homeowner?

Well, because they knew the effects of their "cheap money" policy every step of the way.

First of all, the Fed knew exactly where the money was going. Greenspan endorsed the shabby new lending-regime which put hundreds of billions of dollars in the hands of people who never should have qualified for mortgages. They were set up to fail just like the victims in the stock market scam who kept dumping their life savings in the NASDAQ when PE's were shooting through the stratosphere.

Secondly, the Fed knew that wages had actually regressed (2.3%) since Bush took office, so they knew that the soaring value of real estate was entirely predicated on debt not real wealth. In other words, home values increased because of the availability of cheap money which inevitably creates a buying-frenzy. It had nothing to do with real demand or growth in wages.

And, thirdly, according to the Fed's own figures, "the total amount of residential housing wealth in the US just about doubled between 1999 and 2006-up from $10.4 trillion to $20.4 trillion". Times Online.

UP $10 TRILLION IN 7 YEARS! That is the very definition of a humongous, economy-killing equity monster. In other words, the Fed knew the ACTUAL SIZE OF THE BUBBLE and chose to steer it towards the nearest iceberg without warning the public.

This is what Greenspan called "a little froth".

There is no real growth in the American economy. Figure it out. Last year Americans saved less than 0% of their net earnings while they borrowed a whopping $600 billion from their home equity to piss-away on a consumer spending-spree. Once home prices begin to retreat, that $600 billion will evaporate, real GDP will shrivel, and the economy will begin flat-lining. (Consumer spending is 70% of GDP)

The Federal Reserve's plan is so simple; we shouldn't dignify it by calling it a conspiracy. It's merely a matter of hypnotizing the masses with low interest rates while trillions of dollars of real wealth is diverted to corporate big-wigs and American plutocrats.

It might not be rocket science, but it worked like a charm.

Now, the trap-door has been sprung; the country is dead-broke and all the levers are in place for a police state. As the housing-balloon slowly limps towards earth, the new Halliburton detention centers are up and running, the National Guard is in Rummy's control, the Feds are able to listen-in on every phone call we make.

The noose is beginning to tighten.

New Orleans was just a dress rehearsal for the new world order; 300,000 million Americans reduced to grinding poverty while the economy explodes into sheets of flames.

Original
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Editorial: CNN's Vice President of Racism and Associates

by Stephen Lendman
August 31, 2006

by Stephen Lendman

Move over Bill, Chris, Michelle, Rush, Sean, & Company. Make way for a worthy challenger to the title of leader of the racist rant pack holding court weekday evenings on his hourly show on CNN. Who would have thought back in the days when this well-known cable TV financial news anchor was CNN's executive vice president and then president of the ill-fated CNNfn program he launched that one day he'd switch roles on the network and become the managing editor and anchor of a nightly news program he calls Lou Dobbs Tonight. And who might have guessed this well-thought of financial host would transform himself into a raving racist never letting a program pass without blaming all the country's ills on the poor and desperate people "the color of the earth" south of the border for practically everything going wrong in the country from the fraudulent war on terrorism to the falling dollar.

He does it on the nightly segment he calls "Broken Borders," and it hardly matters to this anchor/commentator (or most any other one on corporate-run TV) that these people only come here in desperation because the 1994 NAFTA trade agreement destroyed their livelihoods and lives at home, and the only way they can find work to feed their families is to come el norte. It would never occur to this program host or CNN's management that they they owe their audience an explanation why most people everywhere have no wish to leave their native lands, move to a strange new one where they don't speak the language or have any ties, and face a hard period of adjustment along with leaving their loved ones at home to do it. They only come here or elsewhere because they have no other choice if they wish to survive, and instead of blaming them, we instead should expose and denounce the US-led NAFTA-codified dictates that caused their immiseration in the first place.

What You Won't Hear About Immigrants On CNN

Most immigration, legal and illegal, around the world is the result of unemployment, poverty or conflicts forcing desperate people to move to more developed countries to find jobs or safety unavailable at home. According to the International Labor Organization, it's not just a US problem. It's a global one that in 2005 forced 200 million people to emigrate to a new country, up from 175 million in 2000 and 82 million in 1970. With at least half the world's population living in poverty and the numbers increasing annually (and a number of serious conflicts ongoing as well), is it any wonder so many of them are on the move each year seeking relief to be able to survive.

It's not getting any easier for them as the US and Western imposed globalized so-called neoliberal "free market" economic model is little more than a race to the bottom driven by giant corporations exploiting the developing world and its people for greater profits. It's what Michel Chossudovsky wrote about in his important 2003 book titled The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order. In it he explains the current WTO/IMF/World Bank imposed system is one of "capital creation through destruction." It creates big profits for transnational corporations at the expense of mass and growing poverty, human misery, the ability of the planet to sustain life, and eventually will lead to less demand for the exports these corporations need to continue increasing their profit growth. So why would smart corporate CEOs be willing to do this knowing a day of reckoning is ahead. Simple - today they reap the big profits they seek and Wall Street and investors demand and manana is for a future CEO to worry about. For the poor and desperate people south of our border and around the developing world, manana is today, and millions of them are on the move because of it.

Why Programs Like Lou Dobbs Tonight Get Regular Air Time

So why does CNN put up with the kind of demeaning and racist programming Lou Dobbs specializes in? Simple, because it draws large audiences meaning CNN (self-dubbed "the most trusted name in news") can charge premium rates to corporate advertisers that want their message heard on highly rated programs. It's the profit motive stupid like it always is. If it sells, it gets air time because that's what this business or any business is all about. Understanding that, you might believe TV networks would consider running porno films every night in prime time if they could get away with it as apparently that kind of material and gambling draw the largest audiences online. They surely would attract a big following on prime time TV as well although advertisers would have to be innovative in drawing audiences to their message after they'd been watching that other fare.

But as long as advertisers love it, will pay well for it, and it's allowed over the airwaves, CNN lets Dobbs get away with his crusading advocacy journalism that clearly crosses the line and violates the basic principles of honest news reporting. It's delighted to give him an hourly weekday sound stage to preach his message of hate and misinformation that fills the CNN airwaves with vitriolic language like "alien invasions" and "innundations" (illegal ones, of course). At other times he's called Mexican immigrants an "army of invaders" wanting to reannex parts of the Southwest - meaning, of course, their presence in large enough numbers threatens our white Anglo-Saxon culture. Still other outbursts refer to "illegal alien smugglers and drug traffickers are on the verge of ruining some of our national treasures." He also claims "the invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans (with) deadly imports" of diseases like leprosy and malaria.

What's most troubling is people believe this stuff, and he's winning awards for his work. In 2004, Dobbs received the Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration and the Man of the Year Award from The Organization for the Rights of American Workers for the other more credible regular segment he features on his program - the corporate outsourcing/exporting of US jobs to low-wage developing countries resulting in this nation joining the race to the bottom along with all the others exploiting working people for profit.

Dobbs is very hard line as a managing editor as well having the final say on what issues are discussed and who appears on his program. He makes no bones about wanting to avoid alternate views to his own and has said in so many words that the truth is what he says it is. To keep it that way, he carefully chooses guests whose views match his own making sure other versions of the truth almost never have a voice on his air time. So for viewers wanting to understand what the immigration issue is all about, they'll never find out tuning in to Lou Dobbs Tonight. But for extremist hate-mongers like the vigilante Minutemen, self-appointed to guard our southern border, challenge dark-skinned workers at day labor centers, and use violence with impunity to do it, Dobbs is preaching to the choir. Their hate-filled white-supremacist message to their followers is much like what Dobbs and his guests tells their audience - that Latino immigration here is "a silent Trojan Horse invasion that is eroding our culture." What they never explain is that demonizing immigrants and controlling their movement across borders is part of an imperial elite strategy used to exploit workers for power and profit and use xenophobic-induced fear as a way to help do it.

Dobbs Has Lots of Company In the Race-Baiting Game

It wouldn't be so bad if Dobbs and a few others were just outliers running counter to most other programming where viewers wanting objective journalism could still get it. But expecting that from the Fourth Estate anywhere on corporate-run television would be as likely as finding carnivores that were vegetarians. Just on CNN alone, Lou Dobbs has an array of worthy challengers. Take longtime anchor and commentator Jack Cafferty on air in the afternoons. He's as scornful of immigrants' rights as is Dobbs and derides them with vicious hate-talk like "mobs of illegal aliens....who don't belong here....and have no rights." He calls for "pull(ing) up the buses (demanding) these people...show their green cards....and the ones that don't have them, put them on the buses and send them home."

While Cafferty doesn't say how he wants these people assembled to prove their legal residency status or citizenship, it sounds like he favors neighborhood and house-to-house searches to find them. In other words, in Cafferty's strange mind, brown-skinned people are criminals, don't belong here, have no rights and should be deported back where they came from. Apparently it never occurred to Cafferty, Dobbs or other CNN hosts and commentators just as guilty at times of hate-talk that these so-called 'illegals" give back far more than they get here. They pay billions of dollars annually in taxes and get few social services for them in return. So the net-net from them is they help grow the US economy, and their employers value their services. If these immigrants, legal or illegal, weren't here and wanting work, the employers hiring them would be hard-pressed to fill the jobs most others don't want.

Spreading fear and hate is also the tactic former CNN commentator, now ensconced as an MSNBC political analyst, Pat Buchanan perfected years ago and is now preaching in his outrageous new book called State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. In it, Buchanan makes it sound like "the barbarians" are at our gates, they have us surrounded, outnumbered and outgunned, and our days are numbered as they're about to take us over, destroy our society and culture and make us over into whatever it is Buchanan thinks they have in mind. Buchanan has never shied away from controversy on-air, in his syndicated column or in an August 8 online one in which he referred to George Bush's "La Raza immigration policy, featuring amnesty and a 'path to citizenship' for 12 million illegal aliens, (and) pardons for all businesses that hired illegals." Thirty years ago while condemning Hitler as an anti-semite and racist, he praised the Nazi leader as "an individual of great courage" and wrote of his "genius (being) an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality....of the statesmen who stood in his way." It sounds a lot like sympathy with and praise for a man most consider the most heinous of all 20th century dictators.

He's also been on the extreme fringe in his views about African-Americans and the civil rights legislation so essential to them and once when serving in the Nixon White House told the President "the integration of blacks and whites - but even more so, poor and well-to-do - is less likely to result in accommodation than....in perpetual friction, as the incapable are placed....by government side by side with the capable." He's also said and written much that makes him fair game to be called an anti-semite and equal opportunity racist believer in white superiority, opposed to gay rights, demeaning of women and their rights, a believer that Christianity is the superior religion to all others, and hostile to the notion that real democracy is preferable to "quasi-dictatorial rule" from his undisguised admiration for Hitler's "courage (and) genius" and praise for the dictatorships of Francisco Franco in Spain and Augusto Pinochet in Chile calling them both "soldier-patriots."

In his new book, already a best-seller from all the free media exposure it's getting, Buchanan conducts a verbal racist jihad against all non-European immigrants meaning all those not white. He uses language like the US must keep "Americans of European descent (from becoming the) minority (in order to) survive (and George Bush's immigration policy) will lose the American Southwest to Mexico linguistically, ethnically, (and) culturally (and the Southwest) part of America is moving back to Mexico, from whom we took it in 1848." He further wrote "We are witnessing how nations perish....We are entered upon the final act of our civilization....Chicano chauvinists and Mexican agents have made clear their intent to take back through demography and culture what their ancestors lost through war....(we're losing ground) in the midst of a savage culture war (and) The first imperative is an immediate moratorium on all immigration....But even (then), success is not assured."

Buchanan also believes the Bush immigration policy is "economic treason against the American worker....(will result in) the complete Balkanization of America, (and) by 2050 America will be a Third World country....Our great cities will all look like Los Angeles today. Los Angeles and the cities of the Southwest will look like Juarez and Tijuana." With views like these, it would seem Pat Buchanan would rank high on the list of the kind of guests Lou Dobbs wants to feature on his nightly program even though he now works for a competitor.

Another Longtime CNN Anchor Who Excels In A Different Kind of Race-Baiting - Against Muslims

One other CNN stalwart also deserves mention and considerable scorn. He's longtime CNN reporter and anchor Wolf Blitzer who daily spews a different brand of racism along with the usual mix of US empire-supportive lies, myths, rationalizations and lots more heard all over the corporate media airwaves. Blitzer currently hosts a weekday afternoon program called The Situation Room as well as the Sunday Late Edition talk show. He began his journalism career with Reuters in their Tel Aviv bureau before moving to Washington as White House correspondent for the hard line ultraconservative Jerusalem Post. He's held a number of positions at CNN as military affairs reporter during the Gulf war, White House correspondent and more. What's ignored about Blitzer that should stir controvery is that at one time he was a lobbyist for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). That and his one-time connection to the Jerusalem Post are part of his roots making it impossible for Blitzer to be objective reporting on anything about Israel or events in the Middle East. It's easy and probably accurate to see him as AIPAC's on-air man at CNN. It's also no surprise that the preponderance of guests he has on with him share his views which are clearly one-sided and strongly pro-Israel.

Blitzer, his guests and others like them can't hide their disdain for Muslims they demean by inference as well as in language like "Islamic fundamentalists," militants, gunmen, terrorists and "Islamo-fascists." It's always been part of Blitzer's stock and trade which he clearly showed right after the high-profile Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing in April, 1995. He was quick on air to baselessly accuse Arabs (meaning Muslims) of an act of terrorism against the US even though US Army and Gulf war veteran Timothy McVeigh later was arrested, convicted and executed for the crime. That faux pas hardly mattered to Blitzer as throughout his career he's been consistently one-sided in his reporting on the Middle East that's never viewed Arabs, their Islamic religion or culture favorably. In fairness to Blitzer, culturally sanctioned forms of bigotry directed against Arabs and Islam have always been tolerated in the US going back decades. It's especially evident in the media and Hollywood films where Arabs have long been the butt of language referring to them as "camel jockeys, desert warriors and terrorists."

Post-9/11, however, that kind of characterization rose to an unrelenting Islamaphobic frenzy with the US in the vanguard of a new Western crusade against Islam though never calling it that. It's part of the Bush Administration's Messianic mission and need for convenient scapegoats to allow it and the interests of capital it represents free reign to pursue their quest for world dominance using preventive war and state-sponsored terrorism as the way to get it. Today that quest is centered in the Middle East and its vital oil reserves with the US and its Israeli ally jointly waging illegal wars of aggression with the aid and comfort given them by on-air empire-backing and racist flacks like Wolf Blitzer who never met a US or Israeli initiated war he didn't love and support.

It passes without irony or notice that this kind of racist warfare happened once before 900 years ago in the First Crusade. Back then Pope Urban II (no doubt seen as a good Christian then and now) launched an earlier holy war against Islam and Muslims to regain control of the Holy Land and sacred city of Jerusalem for Christianity. When his forces entered the city, they slaughtered the Muslims, Jews and even Eastern Christians living there believing no doubt they got their marching orders to do it from the Almighty. Today, a modern-day empire is on the march, and their faithful servants like Wolf Blitzer and his on-air guests spew their message of hate and support for it to convince a naive public tuning in it's the right thing to do, it's spreading democracy and Western civilization, and it will make us more secure and the world a better place for everyone.

What's Never Allowed On-Air In Contrast To What Always Is

It also passes without comment or notice that no subject is more sensitive in the West and over the corporate airwaves than any criticism of Israel. It's never aired because the corporate media won't allow it to be. In the US especially, it's the metaphorical "third rail" on-air and in politics. Touch it and pay dearly - severe denunciation, labeled an anti-semite or self-hating Jew, even ostracism. Today the powerful AIPAC Jewish lobby (Blitzer's former employer) has a lot to do with this and is part of an unholy alliance with the equally powerful Christian fundamentalists in the US and dominant neoconservatives running the Bush administration, Republican party and the country. It's unwritten and unspoken, but their message is clear and emphatic - no criticism of Israel is ever allowed and full unconditional support and encouragement is always extended to the Jewish state no matter what it does.

Whatever action Israel takes is thus viewed through the lens of self-defense, but whenever an Arab state or group like Hezbollah or Hamas defends itself against an Israeli attack it's called terrorism. It's always this way even when Israel is the aggressor, which is nearly always the case, as it was on June 25 when it invaded Gaza and the West Bank (again) and attacked the Palestinians and again on July 12 when it (again) did the same thing to the Lebanese. The Bush administration, US Congress, UN, world community and dominant corporate-run media voiced their wholehearted approval and support for what Israel did on both occasions and condemned the Palestinians, Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorists. It's impermissible to have it any other way, and it's always that way on programs like the ones Wolf Blitzer and Lou Dobbs host and in the language these hosts and their carefully chosen guests use.

The Dirty Business of Serving the Interests of Wealth and Power By Any Means

Since when do wars ever do anything besides cause more wars. And how do mass deaths and destruction from them or virulent racism at home supporting them do anything but anger those on the receiving end making them want to strike back in retaliation. It hardly matters in the corporate media world where TV hosts, commentators and those allowed air time with them take full advantage of their public platform to spread hate messages beneficial to those they represent and support but harm their targets and the rest of us. Program hosts like Lou Dobbs and Wolf Blitzer would never even consider the wars they feel are justly waged were and are in violation of international laws under the Hague Regulations, Geneva Conventions and UN Charter. It's of no concern to them or any of the other on-air (or in print) US and pro-Israel flacks and propagandists that include most all high-profile TV hosts, commentators and so-called pundits. Their stock-in-trade is disinformation so viewers not on to their dirty business only get the one-sided views the more savvy among us know are false, disingenuous and harmful to those on their receiving end.

Blitzer, like Dobbs, Cafferty, other CNN regulars and the whole unhealthy array of others all over the corporate radio and TV airwaves and in print like Pat Buchanan are there to do the job they're paid for and have shown they're willing to sell their souls to do it. They do it so the interests of wealth and power are well served and allowed to pursue the benefits they seek by whatever means they choose to get them. In that kind of world, wars are good because they're good for business and racism is allowed because easy to pick on scapegoats are needed, it never hurts the bottom line to demean and slander them, and it's always OK in the empire when the targets are people of color, the poor, unwanted immigrants, and especially Muslims collectively referred to as radical Islamists, militant jihadists and Islamo-fascists. It doesn't matter that most Muslims or people of any religious faith or race are just ordinary people like us in the West wanting to live their lives in peace and care for their families.

But the message delivered on the corporate-controlled airwaves rarely ever explains that. Alternative voices of reason and sanity are mostly shut out so the public can't hear views denouncing wars, racist hate, religious intolerance, and the need to work together for social equity and justice for all. The public also never hears that all religious faiths range in diversity and practice from liberal to fundamentalist, and aside from a small segment of extremist outliers in them all (Christianity and Judaism included), their adherents most often express their beliefs and live their daily lives according to the core principles they all espouse of moderation, tolerance of others and non-violence.

They hear none of that in the corporate media because that kind of thinking and discussion isn't good for business that thrives on conflict, dominance of the strong over the weak, and exploitation of the developing world and the people in it for profit. That kind of sanity and understanding also isn't good for the highly-paid on-air empire-backing flacks like Dobbs, Cafferty, Blitzer and the rest spreading the same kind of one-sided hateful, destructive messages. Their salaries depend on how well they serve their corporate employers, the numbers of viewers and listeners they get to tune in to hear them, and the bottom line profits the media giants get from the unrelenting cultural war they wage on-air for them. Our leaders call it "Western civilization," a corrupted notion of moral superiority that our way is best and all others are inferior to it. They want to export it to the world whether or not it wants it and at the barrel of a gun if it doesn't. The on-air empire flacks like Lou Dobbs, Wolf Blitzer and the rest are there for one purpose - to help them do it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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Israeli "Democracy"


Annan: Israel must stop killing Palestinians

Ynet
30/08/2006

In meeting with Palestinian President Abbas in Ramallah, UN secretary-general slams Israel, says more than 200 Palestinians killed since the end of June. He also calls on Israel to lift blockade on Gaza, allow free transfer of goods

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited Ramallah on Wednesday afternoon. In a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas he slammed Israel for hurting civilians and for the ongoing blockade on Gaza.

More than 200 Palestinians have been killed since the end of June and this must stop immediately, he said.
Annan called for the establishment of a Palestinian state, saying that was the solution for the problems in the region.

Earlier, Annan met with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem.

Annan noted in a press conference in Ramallah that he made his opinion clear during his meetings in Israel.

Beyond maintaining life a way of life must also be maintained, he said, adding that the blockade on Gaza must be lifted and the crossings must be opened. Israel must not only allow goods in, but also allow Palestinians to export, he said.

The UN secretary-general expressed his hope that Olmert and Abbas will meet soon to discuss the issues standing between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Before the press conference began, dozens of family members of Palestinian prisoners jailed in Israel waited for Annan at the Muqataa area and told him about their loved ones, demanding that he quickly work for their release.

Annan is aware of the fact that in the past few days, during his visits to Lebanon and Israel, he was mainly asked to refer to the issue of the war in Lebanon , but stressed that in light of this situation "we must not forget the suffering of the Palestinian people."

He made it clear that he has been exerting many efforts in a bid to halt the Israeli blockade on the PA, open the crossings and suspend the military operation in the Strip, but he also called on Palestinians to halt the firing of Qassam rockets and release kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit

If there are good intentions, a way to solve the solution can be found, Annan said. He added that in addition to Shalit, the senior Palestinian officials and ministers who have been arrested by Israel in recent weeks must also be released.

Addressing the intra-Palestinian struggles between Fatah and Hamas, Annan voiced his support for the efforts to reach a unity government and said that "this is a very important process."

"If the Palestinians can unite around a common, realistic program and if it can help bring the security situation under control, it would be a very positive development indeed and the United Nations will do whatever it can to support you," he added.

Abbas: Our prisoners are as important as Shalit

President Abbas said that he and Annan had discussed the situation in the territories, and thanked the UN chief for finding the time to visit the PA at such a difficulty period "in light of Israel's policy of destruction, killing and collective punishment."

He demanded that efforts be exerted for the release of the senior Palestinian officials jailed in Israel and in order to solve the problem of tens of thousands of Palestinians jailed in Israel.

"Just like Gilad Shalit is important for the people in Israel, our prisoners are very important to the Palestinian people," he said. "This is a very painful political and humane issue and we must work to solve it."

"We presented Annan with the efforts we are putting into the establishment of a Palestinian unity government which will be able to put an end to the siege imposed on us, work for a truce and bring the Gilad Shalit affair to an end," Abbas added.

He expressed his hope that the efforts to establish a unity government will bear fruit as soon as possible.

Before his meeting with Annan, Abbas appeared before hundreds of Palestinian government workers and stressed that their livelihood came before democracy, hinting to the people's situation during the era of Hamas (which was elected in democratic elections.)

Hamas officials said that the struggles and strikes carried out by the workers were part of the political game aimed at undermining the recent election results.



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Nine Palestinian Civilians killed in Gaza

Yahoo News
30/08/2006

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas called on the international community to "halt Israeli aggression" after nine Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli troops.

"We ask the international community to halt Israeli aggression," Abbas said in a statement after UN chief
Kofi Annan earlier demanded an immediate end to the Israeli offensive in Gaza where more than 200 people have been killed in two months.
Eight died in the Shejaiya neighbourhood of Gaza City, where Israeli soldiers have been operating since late Saturday in the latest thrust of a wider assault designed to retrieve a captured soldier and fight militants.

They included a 14-year-old boy shot in the chest, two men in their 30s also shot and five others who died from tank fire, medical officials said.

Abbas "vigorously denounced Israeli aggression in the occupied territories, in particular in the Shejaiya quarter" of Gaza City, the statement said.

Israel's operation on Wednesday was part of a two-month Israeli offensive in the increasingly lawless territory that has targeted militants but killed scores of civilians and left Gaza plagued with power shortages after its power plant was bombed.

Although Palestinian medical sources said most of those killed on Wednesday were civilians, the Israeli army said its troops only opened fire in response to attacks, admitting that forces were coming under heavy attack.

"I know of four different incidents in which gunmen either fired anti-tank missiles or they were approaching the forces," a spokeswoman told AFP.

She said troops were operating in Shejaiya to "destroy terror infrastructure" and that everything the military did in the
Gaza Strip is to create the right conditions for the return of Corporal Gilad Shalit.

Wednesday's deaths bring to 19 the number of Palestinians killed in Shejaiya since Israeli tanks and troops rolled in on Saturday.

At least 204 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have been killed in Gaza since June 28, when Israel launched its offensive to stop rocket attacks and recover the missing Shalit, captured three days earlier.

Annan, in the West Bank on the third leg of a major Middle East tour, called for Israel to stop its offensive, "all incursions" and its closure on Gaza, and demanded Palestinian militants stop firing rockets into Israel.

"Two hundred Palestinians have been killed since the end of June," Annan told a news conference with Abbas in Ramallah.

"This must stop immediately," he said. "The closure of Gaza must be lifted, the crossing points must be opened."

He also called for a "cessation" of the Qassam rockets fired by militants, and for Israel to release Palestinian parliamentarians and officials from the Hamas-led government arrested in the West Bank in late June.

"The creation of a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel is the key to solving the problems in this troubled region," he said.

Abbas, whose moderate
Fatah party is working towards a possible national unity government with the governing Islamist party Hamas, warned there could be no security until Israel ends its occupation and a Palestinian state emerges.

"Continued occupation of the Arab and Palestinian territories will not achieve peace," he said.

The Palestinian leader earlier renewed calls for militants to stop firing rockets into Israel, warning that such missiles were sowing "death and destruction" for the Palestinians.

Five Israelis have died as a result of homemade rockets fired from Gaza since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, with most of the missiles causing property damage or landing in open spaces.

Back in Gaza, the Israeli army said it had discovered a large tunnel, 13 metres (yards) deep and 150 metres long, running from a house in Shejaiya towards the Karni crossing with Israel, and released photographs.

"The tunnel was meant to be used for an attack on the terminal," a spokesman said, adding that planned strikes were the reason why the export-import terminal between Gaza and Israel had been closed in recent months.

In the occupied West Bank, Hossam Jaradat, the head of the armed wing of the hardline Islamic Jihad faction, died from wounds sustained during an Israeli commando operation on August 23.

Jaradat, whom Israel held responsible for numerous attacks against the Jewish state, suffered head wounds and had been in critical condition.



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Israeli Settlers assaulting American citizens

Associated Press
08.30.06

State Department warns of security problems for Americans, others in Gaza; says, 'citizens of Western nations, including Americans, involved in pro-Palestinian volunteer efforts were assaulted and injured in Occupied Territories by Israeli settlers and harassed by Israeli army'

Americans are unsafe in the Gaza Strip, and those in the Palestinian area should leave immediately, the US State Department said Tuesday.

Continuing or possible violence in Israel, it said, also makes it necessary for Americans to avoid locations associated with US interests or official US buildings, the State Department said Tuesday in an updated travel warning.

Even Americans and other people working to help the Palestinians should be wary, the warning said.
"In recent months, citizens of Western nations, including Americans, involved in pro-Palestinian volunteer efforts were assaulted and
injured in the Occupied Territories by Israeli settlers and harassed by the (Israeli army). Those taking part in demonstrations, nonviolent resistance, and direct action are advised to cease such activity for their own safety," it said.

The department said security has improved in northern Israel , as a ceasefire seems to be preventing rocket firing from Hizbullah .

"While the cessation of hostilities largely has been honored by both sides, the situation remains tense and a possible resumption of sporadic violence cannot be ruled out," the warning said.

'Conditions of lawlessness'

It cited security problems for Americans in Gaza and the West Bank, all territories controlled by the Palestinians.

"Violent demonstrations and armed conflicts between supporters of the Hamas and Fatah factions, and clashes between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants have increased in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank," it said.

"Overall conditions of lawlessness prevail in the Gaza Strip, including the recent kidnapping of journalists. Areas of violent conflict shift rapidly and unpredictably," The State Department said.

Fox News correspondent Steve Centanni from Washington, DC and his cameraman Olaf Wiig of New Zealand were freed by Palestinian gunmen on Sunday after being held captive for two weeks in the Gaza Strip.

Comment: "Even Americans and other people working to help the Palestinians should be wary". Are they joking? ANYONE trying to help the oppressed Palestinians is potentially marked for death by the state of Israel.

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Four residents killed and eight injured in Al Shujaeyya east of Gaza

IMEMC & Agencies
Wednesday, 30 August 2006

Palestinian medical sources reported on Wednesday morning that four civilians were killed and eight injured by heavy machine gun fire from Israeli tanks in AL Shujaeyya area, east of the Gaza strip.

Dr. Muawiya Hasanen, the Director of Emergency and Ambulance Department at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, reported that the four were identified as Rami Al Gharabli, Ziad Al Gharabli, Ra'ed Sabitah, and Mohannad Jundieh.

Medics enormous difficulties in reaching the area and evacuating the injured and the killed residents due to the continuous Israeli shelling.
Dr. Hasanen added that eight residents were injured, due to the intense and violent shelling which targeted residents' houses, and ambulances and medics could not get to the injured people.

Israeli tanks and war plans are still heavily shelling the area, according to local sources. The death toll, including the four killed in the Gaza strip since Saturday, reached 17 residents, 13 of them civilians.

Earlier on Wednesday at dawn, one resident was shot and killed by Israeli military fire near the evacuated settlement of Doughit, near Beit Lahia, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.

The resident was identified as Husam Abu Rokba, 24. Relatives of Abu Rokba stated that he was mentally challenged.



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Source: Israel delaying deal on Captured Israeli Soldier

Haaretz
31/08/2006

"The problem is that the Egyptian mediation team has no response from Israel, like as to when the prisoners would be released, how many and what type. Only with these responses will the mediators be able to offer something to the kidnappers. But Israel is not clarifying its positions. It is not taking any initiative that indicates its desire to complete the deal. There is no sign of readiness, there are no messages via Israel's overt channels, and the problem is - there are no messages even via the covert channels."


Comment: Shalit was bait, pure and simple, and Israel is not yet finished killing Palestinians in Gaza on the excuse that they are looking for Shalit. When they are done, they might be interested in getting him back, but maybe they want him dead so they can kill a few hundred Palestinian civilians in exchange.

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Israeli army kill senior Palestinian militant in Nablus: witnesses

www.chinaview.cn 2006-08-31 17:47:32

RAMALLAH, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) -- Israeli troops killed a senior Palestinian militant in an ambush in West Bank city of Nablus on Thursday morning and wounded four others, eyewitnesses said.

The elite Israeli forces stormed a neighborhood in the city and ambushed Fadi Qufaisha, 32, a field commander of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, armed wing of Fatah movement, said the witnesses. They added that Israeli soldiers appeared suddenly and shot at Qufaisha as he was walking in the city.
Medical sources said that Qufaisha died after a brief exchange of fire with the troops. Four others were moderately wounded. To the assassination of its leader, the al-Aqsa Brigades vowed on Thursday to respond with "several suicide attacks deep inside Israel".

A spokesman of the brigades in West Bank, who identified himself as Abu Udai, said that "our operations will be carried out inside Israel in response to the assassination of Qufaisha," vowing that "we will show you (the Israelis) painful strikes." Earlier on Thursday, Israeli troops pulled out of the Shijaiya district in eastern Gaza, after six days of fighting in the area, which had left 20 Palestinians killed, including three children and nine civilians.

An Israeli army spokesman told Israel Radio that the Israeli soldiers during the ground operation discovered two underground tunnels used by militants to infiltrate and carry out attacks against Israel.

Israel has killed more than 200 Palestinians, about half of them civilians, during its offensive in Gaza after the abduction of an Israeli soldier in late June by Palestinian militants. Israel had pulled troops and settlers out of Gaza last year after 38 years of occupation.

On the same day, Palestinian militant groups claimed responsibility for firing more than 10 homemade rockets from northern Gaza Strip to the southern Israeli town of Sderout. The Israeli army spokesman said that some of the rockets hit constructions in the town, adding that several Israeli civilians were treated after being shocked and panicked by the attacks.



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26% of Israelis Impoverished

Jpost.com
30/08/2006

The North has the highest poverty rate of any area in the country except for Jerusalem, and anti-poverty advocates warn that situation could well worsen following the recent war.

Twenty-nine percent of families and 40% of children in the North live under the poverty line, according to the National Insurance Institute's 2005 poverty report, issued Wednesday.

The national average stands at 20.6% of families and 35.2% of children. The overall rate of impoverished Israelis is 26.2%, or 1.6 million people, a rise of 1.7 percentage points from 2004, when the figure was 24.5%.

Jerusalem is by far the poorest city, with 41.7% of individuals below the poverty line and growing. The North, in contrast, improved over the past two years, with the proportion of poor individuals dropping from 33% to 31.6%. But nongovernmental organizations active in the region predicted that the numbers would rise due to the war and its aftermath.

"What we'll see in 2006 won't be better," said Sari Revkin, executive director of Yedid, the Association for Community Empowerment.

She pointed to closed businesses, loss of salary and the tremendous toll on self-employed people, who are looking at getting much less government compensation than what they lost in income. Additionally, she said, many recent hires lost their jobs when businesses closed during the attacks and now find that they are still unemployed.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert responded to the harsh criticism contained in the poverty report by announcing Wednesday night that he would name a new welfare minister by the end of the week. Olmert had been saving the post to be used in enticing United Torah Judaism to join the government. Tensions between UTJ and the coalition have continued to run high, however, and party representatives said they were no nearer to joining the government than they were six months ago.

Knesset rumors pointed to Minister of Jerusalem Affairs Ya'akov Edri (Kadima) as the top candidate for the post.

Minister and Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Eli Yishai (Shas) said, "I will fight over [social welfare programs] in the 2007 budget. That budget will reflect a genuine war on poverty and not place the hungry child as a secondary priority, behind the fighter jet... You can't put poverty in the freezer."

Defense Minister Amir Peretz (Labor) said, "The financial demands of the Defense Ministry do not come, and will never come, at the expense of resources to alleviate the class inequalities in Israeli society."

"The data reported in the report expose how many people in Israeli society are suffering and how great the injustice is. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the current government rearranged its priorities and implemented a number of activities that were not covered by this most recent report," he said.

MK Shelly Yacimovich (Labor), who heads the Knesset's Committee on the Rights of the Child and is a member of the Finance Committee, said, "Our children's condition worsens every year. Due to the brutal, extreme cut in child allowances, Israel ranks as one of the countries with the lowest stipends for children.

"The data in [the poverty report] indicate that empty slogans about moving people from living on allowances to finding jobs aren't enough. The labor market has turned into a slave market and work-weary parents, especially single mothers who are sole providers, work hard and are being exploited, just to raise poor children."

MK Nadia Hilu (Labor) said, "How many slaps in the face can the weak population take? This may lead to a social intifada."

Comment: Come to Israel! Live of garbage and be fed a diet of intellectual garbage by your government. Then die in a massive war created by your government. What self-respecting Jew could possibly resist?!

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Standoff at British Embassy compound in Tel Aviv

Last Updated Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:57:51 EDT
CBC News

A man who could be armed with a handgun forced his way into the British Embassy's compound in Tel Aviv on Thursday and is threatening to kill himself, said Israeli police.

The man appears to have a handgun, but it's not known whether the weapon is real.
Witnesses said a man jumped over the fence surrounding the compound and entered a car park around 2:45 p.m. local time. He shouted in Arabic that he would kill himself unless he was granted asylum.

Witnesses said he was holding a gun to his head.

Police are negotiating with the man, who has no hostages and hasn't fired any shots. All embassy employees are out of the building.

Israeli police couldn't respond until embassy staff called for them because the embassy grounds are considered British territory.

The embassy, on the Tel Aviv seafront, is ringed by a fence, and visitors are normally screened by security guards at the gate.



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State of Terror


FBI Shows Off Counterterrorism Database

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 30, 2006

The FBI has built a database with more than 659 million records -- including terrorist watch lists, intelligence cables and financial transactions -- culled from more than 50 FBI and other government agency sources. The system is one of the most powerful data analysis tools available to law enforcement and counterterrorism agents, FBI officials said yesterday.

The FBI demonstrated the database to reporters yesterday in part to address criticism that its technology was failing and outdated as the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks nears.

Privacy advocates said the Investigative Data Warehouse, launched in January 2004, raises concerns about how long the government stores such information and about the right of citizens to know what records are kept and correct information that is wrong.

The data warehouse is an effort to "connect the dots" that the FBI was accused of missing in the months before the 2001 attacks, bureau officials said. About a quarter of the information comes from the FBI's records and criminal case files. The rest -- including suspicious financial activity reports, no-fly lists, and lost and stolen passport data -- comes from the Treasury, State and Homeland Security departments and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

"That's where the real knowledge comes from . . . sharing information," said Gurvais Grigg, acting director of the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, who helped develop the system.

In a demonstration, Grigg sat at a computer and typed in the name "Mohammad Atta," one of the 19 hijackers in 2001. The system can handle variants of names and up to 29 variants on birth dates. He typed "flight training" in the query box and pulled up 250 articles relating to Atta.

The system, designed by Chiliad Inc. of Amherst, Mass., can be programmed to send alerts to agents on new information, Grigg said. Names, Social Security numbers and driver's license details can be linked and cross-matched across hundreds of millions of records.

No top secret information is in the system, officials said.

Grigg said that before 2002, it would take 32,222 hours to run 1,000 names and birth dates across 50 databases. Now agents can make such a search in 30 minutes or less, he said.

The 13,000 agents and analysts who use the system make an average 1 million queries a month, Grigg said. The system does not reach into the databases themselves but mines copies that are updated regularly, he said.

Irrelevant information can be purged or restricted, and incorrect information is corrected, he said. Willie T. Hulon, executive assistant director of the FBI's National Security Branch, said that generally information is not removed from the system unless there is "cause for removal."

Every data source is reviewed by security, legal and technology staff members, and a privacy impact statement is created, Grigg said. The FBI conducts in-house auditing so that each query can be tracked, he said.

David Sobel, senior counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the Federal Register has no record of the creation of such a system, a basic requirement of the Privacy Act. He also said the FBI's use of an internal privacy assessment undercuts the intent of the privacy law.

FBI officials said the database is in "full compliance" with the law.

Sobel said he learned under a Freedom of Information Act disclosure last week that the system includes 250 million airline passenger records, stored permanently.

"It appears to be the largest collection of personal data ever amassed by the federal government," he said. "When they develop the capability to cross-reference and data-mine all these previously separate sources of information, there are significant new privacy issues that need to be publicly debated."

Michael Morehart, chief of the FBI's Terrorist Financing Operations Section, has testified to Congress about some aspects of the system. He said that Treasury Department documents included in the database have helped counterterrorism investigations significantly.

Comment: What I would like to ask every single person reading this is: given that the terrorist threat is very likely non-existent, why exactly is the US government keeping these records on American citizens? For what purpose?

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New Intel Squadron Turns Aerial Eye on Terrorists

American Forces Press Service
30/08/2006

HURLBURT FIELD, Fla., Aug. 30, 2006 - Terrorists and their supporters around the world soon will be under the gaze of a powerful "unblinking eye" providing information on their whereabouts to a "brain" here.

The reactivation of the 11th Intelligence Squadron here marks a milestone for Air Force Special Operations Command, which gains its first intelligence squadron. The 11th IS, commanded by Lt. Col. David Hambleton, is assigned to Air Force Special Operations Forces, AFSOC's warfighting headquarters.

The squadron's mission is to process, exploit and disseminate to commanders information gathered by AFSOC's MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicles and other airborne intelligence and surveillance sources, Hambleton said. The Predator is a medium-altitude, long-endurance, remotely piloted aircraft operated by the 3rd Special Operations Squadron at Creech Air Force Base, Nev.

Operators at Creech use remote controls to fly Predators anywhere in the world, around the clock. That capability, when fully realized, will create what Army Gen. Doug Brown, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, calls an "unblinking eye" for special operations forces.

But even an unblinking eye is worthless without a brain to process the information the eye sees, said Air Force Col. Timothy Leahy, AFSOF vice commander.

"That's where the 11th IS comes in," he said.

"We're going to extract intel value from data streams coming off (reconnaissance aircraft), figure out what the bad guys are doing and provide information to special ops commanders so they can make combat decisions," Hambleton said. "Basically, the 3rd SOS will provide the data, and we'll tailor it for the SOF customer forward."

Special operations forces require SOF-specific intelligence, Hambleton said. So the entire data gathering-analysis-combat commander chain is specialized and unique compared to the way other Air Force commands process and disseminate data, he said.

For instance, AFSOC is the only major command where the intelligence weapons system, called the distributed common ground system, works hand-in-hand with the air operations center. In AFSOC, both the DCGS and AOC report to the AFSOF commander, Col. Michael Callan.

"I'm very excited to see the 11th IS a reality," Callan said. "Many dedicated members of the AFSOF and AFSOC staffs have worked very hard to make this day happen.

"Having the 11th IS provide dedicated intelligence support to our warfighters will make us better able to find, fix and finish our adversaries," he said. "I welcome Colonel Hambleton and his squadron members to AFSOF".

In the war on terrorism, tracking down elusive enemies is akin to what Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael W. Wooley, AFSOC commander, calls "finding the proverbial needle not in a haystack, but hiding among other needles."

Intel specialists of the 11th IS will "be able to discern what that needle among needles is doing," Leahy said. "Once the operators of the 11th Intelligence Squadron find and fix the enemy, the world's best special operators, riding in the back of AFSOC aircraft, will go in and finish them."

Comment: Terrorists don't exist, so who are they really looking at?

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"Radiation Belt Remediation" Plan Could Affect HF Propagation, Study Suggests

ARRL
Aug 15, 2006

NEWINGTON, CT -- A New Zealand university research group believes a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) "Radiation Belt Remediation" (RBR) plan could cause major worldwide disruptions to HF radio communication and GPS navigation. DARPA reportedly envisions the (RBR) system as a way to protect low-Earth orbiting (LEO) satellites from damage caused by severe solar storms or even from high-altitude nuclear detonations. The New Zealand-based research group suggests, however, that policymakers need to carefully consider the implications of the project. Headed by Otago Physics Department researcher Craig Rodger, the research group says RBR could significantly affect radio propagation from several days to a week or longer.

"We've calculated that Earth's upper atmosphere would be dramatically affected by such a system, causing unusually intense HF blackouts around most of the world," Rodger said in an Otego University news release. "Airplane pilots and ships would lose radio contact, and some Pacific Island nations could be isolated for as long as six to seven days, depending on the system's design and how it was operated." GPS would likely also be disrupted on a large scale, he added.
Flushing Particles Using VLF Signals

System tests would employ extremely high-intensity, very low frequency (VLF) radio waves to "flush" particles from radiation belts and dump them into the upper atmosphere. The disruptions would result from the deluge of dumped charged particles temporarily changing the ionosphere from a "mirror" that bounces HF radio waves around the planet to a "sponge" that soaks them up, Rodger says.

The group's paper, "The atmospheric implications of radiation belt remediation," appears in the August edition of the international journal Annales Geophysicae. Otago University researchers collaborated with the British Antarctic Survey, the Sodankyl Geophysical Observatory in Finland and the Finnish Meteorological Institute in its preparation.

Sleight of HAND

Unclassified US Department of Defense budget documents from earlier this year propose at least initially using the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP) near Gakona, Alaska, "to exploit emerging ionosphere and radio science technologies related to advanced defense applications." HAARP is jointly operated by the US Air Force and the US Navy. The project appears to be included under a program called "Sleight of HAND" (SOH).

"The effects of High Altitude Nuclear Detonations (HAND) are catastrophic to satellites," the budget report explains. "HAND-generated charged particles are trapped for very long periods of time, oscillating between the earth's north and south magnetic poles. This enhanced radiation environment would immediately degrade low-earth orbiting (LEO) spacecraft capability and result in their destruction in a short period of time."

The military budget documents refer to the SOH program as "a proof of concept demonstration" of technology and techniques to mitigate the HAND-enhanced trapped radiation, with the goal of accelerating "the rate of decay of trapped radiation from the LEO environment by a factor of 10 over the natural rate of decay."

Phase 1 of SOH would use a high-power ground-based source of VLF radiation - at least initially using the HAARP facility - "propagating through the ionosphere to deflect the trapped radiation deep into the atmosphere." If that proves valid and cost-effective, space-based demonstrations and tests apparently would follow.

Proposal Piques Interest of Amateur Radio Community

The New Zealand research paper caught the interest of at least one newspaper, the New Zealand Herald, and word of the plan soon was circulating within the worldwide Amateur Radio community. ARRL Propagation Report Editor Tad Cook, K7RA, investigated and filed a special propagation bulletin August 15.

"When I first heard of this on Monday morning, I thought it must be something from a fringe Web site peddling dark conspiracy theories," Cook commented, "but the newspaper reporting the news is real, and so is the team of scientists from New Zealand, the UK and Finland." Cook contacted Rodger to learn more.

"He proved very cooperative, accessible and helpful and told me RBR is a serious project, that 'money is starting to appear to investigate it in more detail,' and 'US scientists with military connections are treating it seriously'," Cook reports.

Sheer Energy

Cook says he shared with Rodger speculation by QST Contributing Editor Ward Silver, N0AX, to the effect that "the sheer energy needed to accomplish [RBR] would tend to rule it out from the start, and I don't know where they would erect the necessary antennas."

Responded Rodger: "This would be true, but they are hoping to rely on some of the non-linear processes in space plasmas, stealing the energy from the radiation belts to get the wave amplitudes high enough. We know this is possible - in theory - as it happens naturally already. We don't know how easy it will be to get it happening under our control."

Rodger says there are two plans to erect the necessary antenna. "One is to fly VLF antenna in space. This could be a power problem," he told Cook. "But for ground-based systems, you probably already know that most major naval powers have big VLF transmitters dotted over the globe."

Two US Navy VLF transmitters have power output capability in the megawatt range, Rodger remarked. "While these are designed to keep the signals mostly under the ionosphere, it shows the possibility for building big powerful antenna." No mention of HAARP appears in the group's research paper.

Ozone Layer Impact Minimal

The research group also calculated RBR's potential to affect the ozone layer but found that ozone depletion would be short-lived and similar to that resulting from natural processes such as large solar storms and volcanic eruptions.



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The enemy now is 'fascism'

By Tom Raum
Associated Press
Posted on Thu, Aug. 31, 2006

President Bush in recent days has recast the global antiterrorism effort as a "war against Islamic fascism." Fascism, in fact, seems to be the new buzzword for Republicans in an election season dominated by an unpopular war in Iraq.

Bush used the term this month in talking about the arrest of terrorism suspects in Britain, and he spoke of "Islamic fascists" in a later speech in Green Bay, Wis. Spokesman Tony Snow has used variations on the phrase at White House news briefings.
Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.), in a tough reelection fight, drew parallels Monday between World War II and the current fight against "Islamic fascism," saying both required fighting a common foe in multiple countries. Santorum has been using the phrase for months.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld took it a step further in a speech to an American Legion convention in Salt Lake City, accusing critics of the administration's Iraq and antiterrorism policies of trying to appease "a new type of fascism."

White House aides and outside Republican strategists said the new description was an effort to more clearly identify the ideology that motivates many organized terrorist groups, representing a shift in emphasis from the general to the specific.

Depicting the struggle as one against Islamic fascists is "an appropriate definition of the war that we're in," GOP pollster Ed Goeas said. "I think it's effective in that it definitively defines the enemy in a way that we can't because they're not in uniforms."

Muslim groups have cried foul. Bush's use of the phrase "contributes to a rising level of hostility to Islam and the American Muslim community," complained Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Conservative commentators have long talked about "Islamo-fascism," and Bush's phrase was a slightly toned-down variation on that theme.

Dennis Ross, a Mideast adviser to both the first Bush and Clinton administrations and now director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said he would have chosen different words.

"The war on terror has always been a misnomer, because terrorism is an instrument, it's not an ideology," Ross said. "So I would always have preferred it to be called the 'war with radical Islam,' not with Islam but with 'radical Islam.' "

Why even mention the religion? "Because that's who they are," Ross said. "Fascism had a certain definition. Whether they meet this or not, one thing is clear: They're radical. They represent a completely radical and intolerant interpretation of Islam."

While fascism once referred to the rigid nationalistic one-party dictatorship first instituted in Italy, it has "been used very loosely in all kinds of ways for a long time," said Wayne Fields, a specialist in presidential rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis.

"Typically, the Bush administration finds its vocabulary someplace in the middle ground of popular culture," Fields said. "It seems to me that they're trying to find something that resonates, without any effort to really define what they mean."

Pollster Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, said the "fascist" label might evoke comparisons to World War II and remind Americans of the lack of personal freedoms in fundamentalist countries.

"Having called these people evildoers, fascism is just a new wrinkle," he said.

The tactic recalled President George H.W. Bush's 1990 likening of Iraq's Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler. "I caught hell on this comparison of Saddam to Hitler, with critics accusing me of personalizing the crisis, but I still feel it was an appropriate one," the elder Bush later wrote in a memoir.

Charles Black, a longtime GOP consultant with close ties to both the first Bush administration and the current White House, said branding Islamic extremists as fascists was apt.

"It helps dramatize what we're up against," Black said. "They are not just some ragtag terrorists. They are people with a plan to take over the world and eliminate everybody except them."

Stephen J. Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown University, suggested that White House strategists "probably had a focus group and they found the word fascist."

"Most people are against fascists of whatever form," Wayne said. "By definition, fascists are bad. If you're going to demonize, you might as well use the toughest words you can."



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Democrats take fire at Rumsfeld

By ANNE PLUMMER FLAHERTY
Associated Press
Wed Aug 30, 2006

WASHINGTON - Democrats chastised Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for questioning the historical grasp of those who criticize the Bush administration's handling of war, accusing him Wednesday of engaging in "dangerous business."

Several members of Congress had been urging Rumsfeld's to resign long before he asserted to the American Legion on Tuesday that war opponents displayed the kind of thinking that delayed military action against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.

Rumsfeld said the world faces "a new type of fascism." And he warned against repeating the pre-World War II mistake of appeasement.
His speech in Salt Lake City, in which he also said administration critics suffered from "moral confusion," prompted angry reactions from Democrats hoping to win back control of Congress.

"It is a dangerous business to accuse those who disagree with you of moral and intellectual confusion," said Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. "Debate in our democracy is based upon respect, not vilification."

Said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.: "If Mr. Rumsfeld is so concerned with comparisons to World War II, he should explain why our troops have now been fighting in
Iraq longer than it took our forces to defeat the Nazis in Europe."

Responding Wednesday, Pentagon press secretary Eric Ruff said, "Facts are facts. As the secretary said in his speech, America and the free world face a gathering threat of challenges from a vicious enemy that is serious, lethal and relentless. There are important lessons from history that we ought to be mindful of as we talk about how we are going to meet the challenges extremist terror organizations present."

In his speech, Rumsfeld said it "was apparent that many have still not learned history's lessons." Aides later said he was not accusing the administration's critics of trying to appease the terrorists but was cautioning against a repeat of errors made in earlier eras.

Nevertheless, many Democrats in Congress viewed Rumsfeld's remarks as fighting words.

Sen. Jack Reed, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said Rumsfeld has been "substituting sloganing for strategy" and delivered a "calculated political argument" to make people believe that to support a war against terror requires support of the administration's policies.

"I think the analogy is very, very weak," Reed, D-R.I., said of Rumsfeld's comparison of Iraq to World War II.

It is time Rumsfeld "should be departing" the Pentagon, Reed added. Reed, Pelosi and other Democrats have been calling for the defense secretary's resignation for more than a year.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York called Rumsfeld's portrayal of Democrats a "strawman" and said Americans need answers on how to deal with a looming civil war in Iraq.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., shot back, saying Democrats were not committed to winning the war on terror. If they were, he asked, "Why does (Schumer's) party attack the president over and over again for using all the tools necessary to identify, track down and stop those who want to do us harm?" Democrats have objected to aspects of the president's terrorist surveillance program.

Also Wednesday, a New York Democratic House candidate, Navy veteran Eric Massa, accused Rumsfeld of lying about progress in Iraq.

Massa, who is challenging one-term Republican Rep. Randy Kuhl, said he was outraged by Rumsfeld's comments and faulted him for blaming the media for his own misstatements and missteps. He said the Bush administration has no effective plan to secure the country.

"This thing has disintegrated," Tim Walz, a Minnessota Democrat running for a House seat, said of Iraq.

Tracey Schmitt, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said the Democratic candidates' strategy is to criticize Republican efforts to win the war on terror, while elected Democrats are "committed to a strategy that will weaken our ability to defend America and make us less safe at home and abroad."

Comment: Oh no! The complicit Democrats accused Rummy of engaging in dangerous business! It's nice to see that there's still a party in US politics that knows how to get the job done. That job, of course, is providing the American people with an "alternative" to the Republican party that isn't really an alternative at all. Kerry was just as big a warmonger as Bush, and let's not forget that the Bush gang has done everything it has done since 9/11 with the seal of approval of a very large chunk of the Democratic party.

On the other hand, we ARE in agreement with Rummy that there is "a new type of fascism", and that appeasing the fascists is a bad idea. The problem is that the likes of Rummy, Bush, Kerry, etc. ARE the new fascists, even if they are just puppets.


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NYT move to block Web to Britons raises questions

By Daniel Trotta
Reuters
31 August 06

NEW YORK - A New York Times decision to block British online readers from seeing a story about London terrorism suspects raises new questions on restricting the flow of information in the Internet age, legal and media experts say.

The New York Times said on Tuesday it had blocked British Internet readers from seeing a story detailing elements of the investigation into a suspected plot to blow up airliners between Britain and the United States.

The story was published in Monday's paper. Under British laws, courts will punish media organizations that publish material that judges feel may influence jurors and prevent suspects receiving a fair trial.
"There has not been a prosecution for contempt over anybody publishing outside this jurisdiction (Britain), but logically there is no reason why there should not be," said Caroline Kean, partner at UK media law firm Wiggin.

While restricting what British media can report has been effective in the past, the Internet has made it far harder to stop information published by foreign outlets, which may breach Britain's laws, from being seen by UK readers.

The New York Times article cited unnamed investigators providing information not given publicly by British police.

It detailed the content of martyrdom videos and bomb-making equipment found by police and said an attempt to blow up the airliners was not as imminent as authorities had suggested.

The same article appeared on the paper's Web site, http://www.nytimes.com, but readers in Britain who clicked on the headline received the notice "This Article Is Unavailable." "On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain. This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial," the notice said. PUBLISHED IN BRITAIN However British newspapers the Times and the Daily Mail also published details from the New York Times article this week. A government source said no injunctions had been taken out against the British papers, but action could not be ruled out if details were in any future publications, closer to a trial date. "We're keeping it under careful, constant review," he said. Because British courts may impose heavy fines and jail editors, foreign newspapers sometimes hold potentially sensitive stories out of their British print editions. Media lawyer Mark Stephens of Finer, Stephens, Innocent said he could not see anything wrong with the blocked New York Times article and the decision by British papers to print similar details showed the contempt of court law may be the problem. "It's probably unhelpful to have an area of law which is so uncertain where one set of lawyers is saying censor everything while another says there's nothing wrong with it," he said. "Even by blocking you don't have the desired effect. You actually create an enhanced interest as the blocking becomes a story in itself, which fans the flames of curiosity," he said. This was the first time the New York Times had targeted a readership and blocked it from seeing a story on the Web, as far as a spokeswoman and a lawyer from the paper could recall. "The British take this very seriously and tend to attack publications for contempt even if the arguments that we would have made sounded fairly reasonable," George Freeman, a lawyer with the New York Times Freeman said it was no guarantee that someone in Britain could not find the story. "But our position is that we did what we could to prevent publication in Britain. If someone carries in on a jet plane a New York Times from New York, that's not our doing and we can't prevent that," Freeman said.



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Has '1984' Come to Life?

The Korea Times
30/08/2006

LONDON - Amid the chaos of London's morning rush hour it is easy to overlook many things. Surveillance cameras are one of them. People either ignore them or have gotten used to the numerous cameras sited all over the city. Paying a little bit of attention though enables you to realize the vast number of cameras in use . be it a subway station, an office building, a museum, a street, or a store, surveillance cameras are there. There are even cameras placed at the entrance of some ladies' rooms. It is virtually impossible to find a public spot that is free from the constant stare from them.

This bears a resemblance to George Orwell's 1984. The story also takes place in London. Winston Smith, the main character, lives in a totalitarian state, which censors everyone's behavior and even their thoughts. Big Brother constantly monitors everyone and if someone commits a "crime" he or she is instantaneously removed. Often, readers cringe at the thought of living under such circumstances. The thought of every single move being watched deprives people of the right to privacy and can seem inhumane.
Of course, today's situation is very different from the one described in the novel. Whereas the totalitarian government in 1984 installed cameras everywhere with the intention of monitoring the people in order to secure its rule, the current placement of surveillance cameras is a part of the country's security measures. Ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the international community has been obsessed with security.

Britain, as a country that has suffered terrorist attacks of its own, has all the reasons to be cautious. It is only reasonable for the government to take all measures to secure its country and people from any possible acts of terror and crimes in general. Placing cameras is a part of such security measures. In fact, the surveillance cameras played an important role in identifying and capturing those responsible for last year's London Liverpool Station explosion.

It is true that without the government's active involvement in public security people would feel less. More policemen and cameras liberates the public from the burden of constantly worrying about safety.

Yet, it is still difficult to shake off the uncomfortable feeling of being watched and the lack of privacy. It is saddening that today's world has reached a point where people can no longer feel safe without cameras everywhere to protect them from possible future crimes. Although different in many aspects, today's society more and more resembles that of 1984.



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Suspicious letters spark fear in Yukon government employees

Last Updated: Thursday, August 31, 2006 | 9:05 AM CT
CBC News

A suspicious letter addressed to a government office in Whitehorse did not contain a toxic substance.

The RCMP say the Department of Fisheries and Oceans office was evacuated yesterday after the letter was delivered.
A three-person contamination team arrived from Vancouver to test what investigators describe as an organic and glue-like orange crystalline powder.

Two employees who came in contact with the substance were quarantined and decontaminated before they were allowed to go home.

RCMP in Whitehorse are taking the matter seriously and are continuing their investigation.



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Kremlin to blame for Beslan deaths, claims Russian MP

UK Independent
30/08/2006

Almost two years after 331 people died in the Beslan school siege, one of the MPs investigating the tragedy has released a report that blames the Kremlin for the death of more than a third of the hostages, whose safety, he suggests, was not a priority.

Yuri Savelyev, an MP and member of the official parliamentary inquiry panel, claims that Russian forces deliberately stormed the school on 4 September 2004 using maximum force.

His account suggests the government disregarded the safety of the women and children cowering inside the school in southern Russia and that it was more interested in killing the pro-Chechen terrorists than saving the hostages.

According to Mr Savelyev, a weapons and explosives expert, special forces fired rocket-propelled grenades without warning as a prelude to an armed assault, ignoring the fact that negotiations were apparently still going on.

He says the explosions turned the school into a war zone when the Chechen gunmen retaliated, causing a fire which killed many of the hostages trapped beneath its burning roof.

Mr Savalyev's 700-page report, Beslan: the Hostages' Truth, contradicts the official account, which is that the school was not deliberately stormed and that it was the hostage-takers, not special forces, who detonated the two explosive devices that triggered the gunfight.

The Chechen rebel who apparently masterminded the siege - Shamil Basayev - was killed last month in an explosion that the Kremlin claims was the result of a special operation.

The search for his personal archive and an estimated $7m (3.7m) in cash has apparently led the authorities to abduct his last wife, whose identity and existence was a mystery until very recently.

Elina Ersenoyeva, 26, was snatched by masked gunmen on 17 August and has not been heard from since.



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Flashback: Chechen Separatists Say "Third Force" Behind Terrorist Attacks

02.09.2004
MosNews

Akhmed Zakayev, a special envoy to Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov has said that "a third force that brought Russian President Vladimir Putin to power" is behind all the terrorist attacks committed in Russia over the past two weeks. London-based Zakayev said this in an exclusive interview with the Caucasus Times newspaper, printed in Prague, Czech Republic.

Zakayev said that "Chechen resistance forces led by Ichkeria President Aslan Maskhadov have nothing to do with the hostage crisis in North Ossetia". He called the events a sad fact and condemned actions against Russian children and civilians.

Zakayev believes that the twin aircraft crash last week, the blast near Rizhskaya metro station on 31 August and today's events in North Ossetia are links in the same chain and that "the same power that wants to destabilize the situation in the North Caucasus region" is behind them.

A militant Muslim group called the Islambouli Brigades earlier claimed responsibility for downing two passenger plains and for the bomb blast in Moscow. The legitimacy of the group and the authenticity of such statements have not been verified.


Comment: "a third force that brought Russian President Vladimir Putin to power". International Zionism perhaps?

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Against the Empire


Chavez lauds Ahmadinejad's win over US on technical knock-out

IRNA
30 August 2006

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez here Wednesday said that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has defeated the the US on technical knock-out by offering to debate with his American counterpart, George W. Bush.

He made the remark while speaking to reporters after a two-hour meeting with his Syrian counterpart, Bashar Assad in Damascus.

Chavez said, "It would have been nice if Bush had accepted the proposal. Then I would have watched such a debate closely." During the press conference, attended by 100 domestic and foreign reporters, Venezuela's president praised Iran's policy towards the US pressures.
Chavez was holding a copy of Ahmadinejad's recent press conference in his hands and read selections from it as evidences of his own approach.

The Venezuelan president, heading a high-ranking political and economic delegation, arrived in Damascus this morning. He attended a press conference after meeting Assad.



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US accused of bid to oust Chvez with secret funds

Duncan Campbell
Wednesday August 30, 2006
The Guardian

- Millions of dollars given to opposition, claim critics
- Venezuelan groups' details hidden from list



The US government has been accused of trying to undermine the Chvez government in Venezuela by funding anonymous groups via its main international aid agency.

Millions of dollars have been provided in a "pro-democracy programme" that Chvez supporters claim is a covert attempt to bankroll an opposition to defeat the government.

The money is being provided by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) through its Office of Transition Initiatives. The row follows the recent announcement that the US had made $80m (42m) available for groups seeking to bring about change in Cuba, whose leader, Fidel Castro, is a close ally of Mr Chvez.

Information about the grants has been obtained following a Freedom of Information request by the Associated Press. USAID released copies of 132 contracts but obscured the names and other identifying details of nearly half the organisations.
The Office of Transition Initiatives, which also works in such "priority countries" as Iraq, Afghanistan, Bolivia and Haiti, has overseen more than $26m in grants to groups in Venezuela since 2002.

Among the grants detailed in the information are: one for $47,459 for a "democratic leadership campaign"; $37,614 for citizen meetings to discuss a "shared vision" for society; and one of $56,124 to analyse Venezuela's new constitution.

"What this indicates is that there is a great deal of money, a great deal of concern to oust or neutralise Chvez," said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (Coha) in Washington yesterday. "The US is waging diplomatic warfare against Venezuela."

He said that while the US had accused Mr Chvez of destabilising Latin American countries, the term "destabilisation" more aptly applied to what the US was trying to do to Mr Chvez.

"It's trying to implement regime change," Eva Golinger, a Venezuelan-American lawyer who wrote The Chvez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela, told AP. "There's no doubt about it. I think the US government tries to mask it by saying it's a noble mission."

She added: "It's too suspicious to have such a high level of secrecy."

President Chvez has also accused groups of taking American money and predicted that the US will seek to use its influence in Venezuela's December polls.

USAID officials denied any suggestion the money had any political aim and said the reason for anonymity for some groups was to protect them from potential harassment.

"The goal of the programme is to strengthen democracy, which is consistent with President Bush's 'Freedom Agenda'," said a USAID official yesterday. "A strong civil society is a critical part of any healthy democracy, just as it is in the United States, England or anywhere else in the world."

The official said that the money was used to pay for "a wide range of seminars, educational programmes and even public service TV commercials aimed at promoting dialogue between pro- and anti-Chvez camps. Other projects include workshops on conflict resolution, efforts to promote human rights, and training for positive citizen involvement in their communities."

USAID also supports programmes such as day-care centres for the poor, improvement for schools, junior sports teams, and children's homes, the official said, adding that the sums being spent in Venezuela were much smaller than those allocated elsewhere this year in Latin America, with USAID budgeting $3.8m for Venezuela compared with $84.8m for Bolivia and $85.1m for Peru.

The row comes just as China has agreed to invest $5bn in energy projects in Venezuela, including the building of 13 oil rigs and 18 oil tankers. Last week Mr Chvez announced that China was endorsing Venezuela's bid for the rotating Latin America seat on the 15-member security council, a candidacy strongly opposed by the US. The commercial arrangements with Beijing are seen as part of the Chvez government's strategy of establishing new links so as to lessen the country's dependence on US trade.

As a symbol of the friendly relations established between Mr Chvez and the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, there will be a festival of Latin-American music with a Caracas theme in Trafalgar Square this Friday evening. The two men met earlier this summer when the president was a guest at an event hosted by the mayor.



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Chavez 'united' with Syria against US aggression

AP
30/08/2006

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that his government is united with Syria in strong opposition to the United States' "imperialistic aggression" in the Middle East.

"We are here in Damascus to call for peace," Chavez told Syrian state television on Tuesday night. "These two countries are strongly united against the imperialistic aggression and hegemonic pretensions of the US empire."

Chavez said that during his visit in Syria officials of both governments will sign a document opposing Washington's "aggression" in the Middle East.




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Venezuela To Seize Golf Courses For Housing For Poor

BBC
30/08/2006


The mayor of Venezuela's capital Caracas says he plans to expropriate two exclusive golf courses and use the land for homes for the city's poor.

Mayor Juan Barreto has said playing golf on lavish courses within sight of the city's slums is "shameful".

Mr Barreto, an ally of President Hugo Chavez, has been trying to address a dramatic housing shortage in Caracas.

But critics say property rights are being eroded in Venezuela, where farms and ranches have also been seized.

Three years ago Mr Chavez's left-wing government started redistributing agricultural land that it said was underused to help landless peasants.
But this is the first time officials have announced plans to expropriate privately-owned urban land to make way for public housing, says the BBC's Greg Morsbach in Caracas.

Affluent suburbs

Mr Barreto had ordered the "forced acquisition" of the golf courses, city attorney Juan Manuel Vadell told the Associated Press.

He said compensation would be paid, at a level decided by an appraisal commission.

The golf courses - the Country Club and Valle Arriba club - are in the city's most affluent suburbs, home to millionaires, foreign diplomats and celebrities, and are seen by some as a haven for the rich.

Venezuelan farm
Venezuela has seized "idle" farm land for redistribution

They are also in districts run by the opposition.

Mr Chavez has not yet said whether he supports the move.

But opposition city council member Carlos Ciordia called the plans "electoral demagoguery" by Mr Chavez, who is hoping for re-election in December.

Fernando Zozaya, president of the Caracas Country Club, said "this has created great concern" among his club's members.

But Mr Barreto said: "It's shameful to see people playing golf and just right there in front of them is a shantytown."

"We are following the policies laid out by President Chavez... to give a new social direction to the city, so the city can be enjoyed by everyone," he said in a television interview.

Mr Barreto has said 5,000 people could be housed in the space taken up by a single golf course.



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Behind the plan to bomb Iran

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Asia Times
31/08/2006

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

It is no longer a secret that the administration of US President George W Bush has been methodically paving the way toward a bombing strike against Iran. The administration's plans of an aerial military attack against that country have recently been exposed by a number of reliable sources. [1]

There is strong evidence that the US administration's recent public statements that it is now willing to negotiate with Iran are highly disingenuous: (i.e. they are lying) they are designed not to reach a diplomatic solution to the so-called "Iran crisis", but to remove diplomatic hurdles toward a military "solution".

The administration's public gestures of a willingness to negotiate with Iran are rendered utterly meaningless because such alleged negotiations are premised on the condition that Iran suspends its uranium-enrichment program.
Considering the fact that suspension of uranium enrichment, which is altogether within Iran's legitimate rights under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is supposed to be the main point of negotiations, Iran is asked, in effect, "to concede the main point of the negotiations before they started". [2]

The Bush administration's case against Iran is eerily reminiscent of its case against Iraq in the run-up to the invasion of that country. Accordingly, the case against Iran is based not on any hard evidence provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but on dubious allegations that are based on even more dubious sources of intelligence. Iran is asked, in effect, to prove a negative, which is of course mission impossible - hence grounds for "non-compliance" and the rationale for "punishment".

The US administration's case against Iran is so weak, its objectives of a military strike against that country are so fuzzy, and the odds against achieving any kind of meaningful victory are so strong that even professional military experts are speaking up against the plans of a bombing campaign against Iran. [3] Furthermore, predominant expert views of such a bombing campaign maintain that it would more likely hurt than help the geopolitical and economic interests of the United States.

So if the Bush administration's "national interests" argument as grounds for a military strike against Iran is suspect, why then is it so adamantly pushing for such a potentially calamitous confrontation? What are the driving forces behind a military confrontation with Iran?

Critics would almost unanimously point to neo-conservative militarists in and around the Bush administration. While this is obviously not false, as it is the neo-conservative forces that are beating the drums of war with Iran, it falls short of showing the whole picture. In a real sense, it raises the question: Who are the neo-conservatives to begin with? And what or whom do they represent?

The neo-conservative ideologues often claim that their aggressive foreign policy is inspired primarily by democratic ideals and a desire to spread democracy and freedom worldwide - a claim that is far too readily accepted as genuine by corporate media and many foreign-policy circles. This is obviously little more than a masquerade designed to hide some real powerful special interests that lie behind the facade of neo-conservative figures and their ideological rhetoric.

The driving force behind the neo-conservatives' war juggernaut must be sought not in the alleged defense of democracy or of national interests but in the nefarious special interests that are carefully camouflaged behind the front of national interests. These special interests derive lucrative business gains and high dividends from war and militarism. They include both economic interests (famously known as the military-industrial complex) and geopolitical interests (associated largely with Zionist proponents of "Greater Israel" in the Middle East, or the Israeli lobby).

There is an unspoken, de facto alliance between these two extremely powerful interests - an alliance that might be called the military-industrial-Zionist alliance. More than anything else, the alliance is based on a conjunctural convergence of interests on war and international convulsion in the Middle East. Let me elaborate on this point.

The fact that the military-industrial complex, or merchants of arms and wars, flourishes on war and militarism is largely self-evident. Arms industries and powerful beneficiaries of war dividends need an atmosphere of war and international convulsion to maintain continued increases in the Pentagon budget and justify their lion's share of the public money. Viewed in this light, unilateral or "preemptive" wars abroad can easily been seen as reflections of domestic fights over national resources and tax dollars.

In the debate over allocation of public resources between the proverbial guns and butter, or between military and non-military public spending, powerful beneficiaries of war dividends have proved very resourceful in outmaneuvering proponents of limits on military spending.

During the bipolar world of the Cold War era, that was not a difficult act to perform as the rationale - the "communist threat" - readily lay at hand. Justification of increased military spending in the post-Cold War period has prompted these beneficiaries to be even more creative in manufacturing "new sources of danger to US interests" to justify unilateral wars of aggression. It is not surprising, then, that a wide range of "new sources of threat to US national interests" has emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union: "rogue states", "axis of evil", global terrorism, Islamic radicalism, "enemies of democracy", and more.

Just as the powerful beneficiaries of war dividends view international peace and stability as inimical to their business interests, so too the hardline Zionist proponents of "Greater Israel" perceive peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors perilous to their goal of gaining control over the "Promised Land" of Israel. The reason for this fear of peace is that, according to a number of United Nations resolutions, peace would mean Israel's return to its pre-1967 borders; that is, withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But because proponents of "Greater Israel" are unwilling to withdraw from these territories, they are fearful of peace and genuine dialogue with Palestinians - hence their continued disregard of UN resolutions and their systematic efforts at sabotaging peace negotiations. By the same token, these proponents view war and convulsion (or, as David Ben-Gurion, one of the key founders of the State of Israel, put it, "revolutionary atmosphere") as opportunities that are conducive to the expulsion of Palestinians, to the territorial recasting of the region, and to the expansion of Israel's territory. [4]

The military-industrial-Zionist alliance is represented largely by the cabal of neo-conservative forces in and around the Bush administration. The institutional framework of the alliance consists of a web of closely knit think-tanks that are founded and financed primarily by the armaments lobby and the Israeli lobby. These corporate-backed militaristic think-tanks include the American Enterprise Institute, Center for Security Policy, Middle East Media Research Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Middle East Forum, National Institute for Public Policy and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

These think-tanks, which might appropriately be called institutes of war and militarism, are staffed and directed mainly by the neo-conservative champions of the military-industrial-Zionist alliance, that is, by the proponents of unilateral wars of aggression. There is strong evidence that the major plans of the Bush administration's foreign policy have been drawn up largely by these think-tanks, often in collaboration, directly or indirectly, with the Pentagon, the arms lobby, and the Israeli lobby. These warmongering think-tanks and their neo-conservative champions serve as direct links, or conveyer belts, between the armaments and Israeli lobbies on the one hand, and the Bush administration and its congressional allies on the other.

Take the Center for Security Policy (CSP), for example. It boasts that "no fewer than 22 former advisory board members are close associates in the Bush administration ... A sixth of the center's revenue comes directly from defense corporations." The center's alumni in key posts in the Bush administration include its former chair of the board, Douglas Feith, who served for more than four years as under secretary of defense for policy, Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim, former Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle, and longtime friend and financial supporter Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

In its 1998 annual report, the center "listed virtually every weapons-maker that had supported it from its founding, from Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Northrop, Grumman and Boeing, to the later 'merged' incarnations of same - Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and so forth". [5]

Likewise, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a major lobbying think-tank for the military-industrial-Zionist alliance, can boast of being the metaphorical alma mater of a number of powerful members of the Bush administration. For example, Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne Cheney, State Department arms-control official John Bolton (now US ambassador to the UN), and the former chair of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, all have had long-standing ties with the institute.

The AEI played a key role in promoting Ahmad Chalabi's group of Iraqi exiles as a major opposition force "that would be welcomed by the Iraqi people as an alternative to the regime of Saddam Hussein". The group, working closely with the AEI, played an important role in the justification of the invasion of Iraq. It served, for example, as a major source of (largely fabricated) intelligence for the militaristic chicken hawks whenever they found the intelligence gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department at odds with their plans of invading Iraq. [6]

Another example of the interlocking network of neo-conservative forces in the Bush administration and the militaristic think-tanks that are dedicated to the advancement of the military-industrial-Zionist agenda is reflected in the affiliation of a number of influential members of the administration with the Jewish Institute for the National Security Affairs (JINSA).

These include, for example, Douglas Feith, assistant secretary of defense during the first term of the Bush administration; General Jay Garner, the initial head of the US occupation authority in Iraq; and Michael Ladeen, who unofficially advises the Bush administration on Middle Eastern issues.

JINSA "is on record in its support of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and against the Oslo Accord ... In its fervent support for the hardline, pro-settlement, anti-Palestinian Likud-style policies in Israel, JINSA has essentially recommended that 'regime change' in Iraq should be just the beginning of a cascade of toppling dominoes in the Middle East." [7]

The fact that neo-conservative militarists of the Bush administration are organically rooted in the military-industrial-Zionist alliance is even more clearly reflected in their incestuous relationship with the warmongering think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Like most of its lobbying counterparts within the extensive network of neo-conservative think-tanks, PNAC was founded by a circle of powerful political figures, a number of whom later ascended to key positions in the Bush administration.

The list of signatories of PNAC's founding statement of principles include Elliot Abrams, Jeb Bush, Elliot Cohen, Frank Gaffney, Zalmay Khalilzad, I Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Add the signature of Cheney to the list of PNAC founders, "and you have the bulwarks of the neo-con network that is currently in the driver's seat of the Bush administration's war-without-end policies all represented in PNAC's founding document". [8]

A closer look at the professional records of the neo-conservative players in the Bush administration indicates that "32 major administration appointees ... are former executives with, consultants for, or significant shareholders of, top defense contractors".

For example, Rumsfeld is an ex-director of a General Dynamics subsidiary, and his deputy during the first term of the Bush administration, Paul Wolfowitz, acted as a paid consultant to Northrop Grumman. Today the armaments lobby "is exerting more influence over policymaking than at any time since president Dwight D Eisenhower first warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex over 40 years ago". [9]

This sample evidence indicates that the view that the neo-conservative militarists' tendency to war and aggression is inspired by an ideological passion to spread American ideals of democracy is clearly false. Their successful militarization of US foreign policy stems largely from the fact that they in essence operate on behalf of two immensely powerful special interests, the military-industrial complex and the influential Israeli lobby. Neo-conservative architects of war and militarism derive their political clout and policy effectiveness primarily from the political machine and institutional infrastructure of the military-industrial-Zionist alliance.

It is necessary to note at this point that despite its immense political influence, the Zionist lobby is ultimately a junior, not equal, partner in this unspoken, de de facto alliance. Without discounting the extremely important role of the Zionist lobby in the configuration of US foreign policy in the Middle East, I would caution against simplifications and exaggerations of its power and influence over the US policy in the region.

It is true that most of the neo-conservative militarists who have been behind the recent US military aggressions in the Middle East have long been active supporters of Israel's right-wing politicians and/or leaders. It is also no secret that there is a close collaboration over issues of war and militarism among militant Zionism, neo-conservative forces in and around the Bush administration, and jingoistic think-tanks such as AEI, PNAC, CSP and JINSA.

It does not follow, however, that, as some critics argue, the US-Israeli relationship represents a case of "tail wagging the dog", that is, US foreign policy in the Middle East is shaped by the Israeli/Zionist leaders. While no doubt the powerful Zionist lobby exerts considerable influence over US foreign policy in the Middle East, the efficacy and the extent of that influence depend, ultimately, on the real economic and geopolitical interests of US foreign-policy makers.

In other words, US policymakers on the Middle East would go along with the desires and demands of the radical Zionist lobby only if such demands also tended to serve the special interests that those policymakers represented or served, that is, if there were a convergence of interests over those demands. [10]

Aggressive existential tendencies of the US military-industrial empire to war and militarism are shaped by its own internal or intrinsic dynamics: continued need for arms production as a lucrative business whose fortunes depend on permanent war and international convulsion.

Conjunctural or reinforcing factors such as the horrors of the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001, or the Zionist lobby, or the party in power, or the resident of the White House will, no doubt, exert significant influences. But such supporting influences remain in essence contributory, not defining or determining. The decisive or central role is played, ultimately, by the military-industrial complex itself - that is, by the merchants of arms or wars.

Notes
1. See, for example, Seymour M Hersh, The military's problem with the president's Iran policy, The New Yorker (July 10, 2006); Evan Eland, Military action against Iran? Antiwar.com (January 24, 2006).
2. Hersh, "The military's problem with the president's Iran policy".
3. Ibid; see also Ismael Hossein-zadeh, US Iran policy irks senior commanders: The military vs militaristic civilian leadership, OpEdNews.com (July 24, 2006).
4. A detailed discussion of this issue, and of the de facto alliance between militant Zionism and the powerful beneficiaries of war dividends, can be found, among other places, in Chapter 6 of my recently released book, The Political Economy of US Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2006).
5. William D Hartung, How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? (New York: Nation Books, 2003), page 101; William Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca, The military-industrial-think tank complex, Multinational Monitor 24, No 1 and 2 (January/February 2003).
6. Hartung, How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? pp 103-106. 7. Ibid pp 109-11.
8. Ibid p 113.
9. William Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca, "The military-industrial-think tank complex".
10. I have provided a longer discussion of the role of the Zionist lobby in the configuration of the US policy in the Middle East in Chapter 6 of The Political Economy of US Militarism.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh is an economics professor at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. This article draws upon his newly released book, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan Publishers).



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Iran president defiant on UN deadline day

Last Updated Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:05:12 EDT
CBC News

Iran has the right to pursue nuclear technology, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad maintained Thursday, hours ahead of a United Nations deadline for the country to stop enriching uranium.

"The Iranian nation will never abandon its obvious right to peaceful nuclear technology," state radio quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.
The West "should know the Iranian nation will not yield to pressure and not accept any violation of its rights," he said in a televised speech earlier.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency is scheduled Thursday to update the UN Security Council on Iran's nuclear activities, and to advise whether it complied with a July resolution to end uranium enrichment by Aug. 31.

Mohamed ElBaradei is expected to tell the council that Iran was enriching small quantities of uranium as recently as Tuesday.

Washington has indicated it will be urging the council to impose sanctions on Tehran.

Extracting a resolution on tough sanctions from a security council that's divided on the issue could prove difficult. China and Russia, who have veto power as permanent council members, oppose sanctions that would hurt Iran.

A number of European Union countries have also indicated they favoured exploratory talks with Tehran before resorting to sanctions.

On Aug. 22, senior Iranian negotiator Ali Larijani said Iran was ready for "serious negotiations" on its nuclear program.

His comments were part of Iran's formal response to a package of incentives that six countries hope will persuade it to halt its nuclear activities.

Tehran maintains it has a right to run a nuclear program to develop alternative energies. Western nations fear Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

Joe Cirincione, a security analyst at the Center for American Progress, worries that diplomacy may have a limited shelf life.

"It's really the Iranian government that's setting the beat, that is determining the pace of events," Cirincione said.

"There doesn't appear to be a compromise here. We're seeing a game of nuclear chicken at this point with both cars barrelling towards each other."



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Iran calls on Europe not to adopt sanctions

www.chinaview.cn 2006-08-31 07:20:37

TEHRAN, Aug. 30 (Xinhua) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday called on the European countries not to adopt sanctions after the Thursday's UN deadline demanding Iran to suspend uranium enrichment work, saying punishment could not force the country to abandon its nuclear program, the Iranian state-run television channel reported.
"Europe should better be independent to make decisions and resolve problems through negotiations, because sanctions cannot prevent Iranian people from conquest of peaks of pride," said Ahmadinejad.

The Iranian president made the comments at a meeting with former Spanish Premier Philippe Gonzales Wednesday, just one day before a UN Security Council deadline.

The Security Council (UNSC) has recently adopted a resolution urging Tehran to suspend by Aug. 31 all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, or face the prospect of sanctions.

On Tuesday, the president said at his personal press conference that no one can stop Iran's decision to continue its peaceful nuclear program.

Iran's ranking officials have said the resolution was "unacceptable", terming it as "illegal".

However, the United States also has reiterated that it was ready to push the UNSC to adopt another resolution to throw economic sanctions on Iran if the country failed to halt enrichment work after Thursday.

The U.S. has accused Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons under a civilian front, a charge categorically denied by Tehran which says that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.



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Woe is Lebanon


Israel spewed cluster bombs over Lebanon in last days of war: UN

Turkish Press
30/08/2006

UNITED NATIONS - UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said Wednesday that thousands of civilians were at risk in south Lebanon from unexploded cluster bombs dropped by Israeli forces in the last three days of the war against Hezbollah guerrillas.

He said the UN Mine Action Coordination Center had assessed "nearly 85 percent of bombed areas in south Lebanon" and identified "359 separate cluster bomb strike locations that are contaminated with as many 100,000 unexploded bomblets."

"What's shocking and I would say completely immoral is that 90 percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict when we knew there would be a resolution, when we knew there would be an end," he said.

"Every day, people are maimed, wounded and are killed by these ordnances," the UN relief coordinator said.

He said the bombs may have been manufactured "in a number of places", including the United States.
"Those places who made those bombs should have a serious talk with Israel on the use of such bombs that are making our lives so miserable trying to help the Lebanese people.

"I hope the US will talk to the Israelis on that, because it is an outrage that we have 100,000 bombs among where children, women, shopkeepers and farmers are now going to tread," Egeland said, adding that he had not been able to get an explanation from the Israelis so far.

Egeland said he would launch an appeal for more money for mine clearance when he attends Thursday's conference in Stockholm on Lebanon's reconstruction.

Representatives of more than a dozen organisations are also expected to attend the one-day meeting, the first donors' conference to be held since the Lebanon ceasefire two weeks ago.

In Geneva, Chris Clark, head of the UN Mine Action Service in southern Lebanon, said there had been a total of 59 confirmed casualties, including 13 deaths, caused by the explosives since the end of hostilities on August 14.

The United Nations has asked Israel to provide a list of sites targeted during its month-long offensive in Lebanon, something which is crucial for the clean up.

Israel and other countries which have used the weapons, notably the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kosovo, often face criticism because the weapons can kill indiscriminately.

Unexploded bomblets, which are often scattered over a large area, can pose a deadly threat to civilians, especially children, for months and even years after a conflict.

The Israeli military is believed to have fired around 2,000-3,000 rounds of heavier ammunition a day -- not only cluster bombs but also artillery shells and more conventional bombs -- in the early stages of its campaign to dislodge the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah fighters.



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Annan denounces Israel use of cluster bombs

www.chinaview.cn 2006-08-31 20:02:03

AMMAN, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan denounced here on Thursday during a news conference the Israel's use of cluster bombs during the war between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas.

After his talks with Jordan's King Abdullah II, Annan said that "those kinds of weapons should not be used in civilian and populated areas".
Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief coordinator, has earlier accused Israel of immoral use of deadly cluster bombs during Lebanon conflict.

According to Jan Egeland, UN mine experts have identified more than 350 cluster bomb strike locations in Lebanon. He says the sites are contaminated with more than 100,000 unexploded bomb lets. However, international law bans the use of such weapons in civilian areas.

During the press conference, Annan also called for the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, noting that "We need to implement the Resolution 1701 and to capitalize on building relations between Israel and Lebanon." He added that "this is the opportunity to move things for normal relations between Israel and Lebanon, if Resolution 1701 is implemented in its entirety".

The UN Secretary General is on a regional tour which includes Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Qatar, Palestine, Iran, Turkey, and Israel, trying to shore up a cease-fire that ended 34 days of fighting between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas.



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Annan: Israel responsible for most truce violations

Haaretz and News Agencies
30/08/2006

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday that Israel was responsible for most of the violations of the UN-brokered cease-fire that ended the 34-day conflict between Israel and Hezbollah two weeks ago.
Annan said he would ask Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in talks on Wednesday to lift Israel's air and sea blockade of Lebanon, imposed at the start of the war nearly seven weeks ago.

Speaking after a meeting with Defense Minister Amir Peretz in Jerusalem, Annan appealed for all sides to work together to ensure the peace holds and "not risk another explosion in six years or 20 years."

Peretz said Tuesday following talks with Annan that he hopes Israel will soon be able to lift its air and sea blockade of Lebanon, imposed at the start of its 34-day conflict with Hezbollah that ended with a United Nations-brokered truce on August 14.

"Israel will pull out once there is a reasonable level of forces there," he said.

The defense minister did not clarify what it would take for Israel to lift the embargo, but Israel has demanded that Lebanese and international forces take control of the Lebanon-Syrian border to prevent Hezbollah guerrillas from smuggling in arms.

The UN chief said he spoke with Peretz about lifting the blockade "as soon as possible in order to allow Lebanon to go on with normal commercial activities and also rebuild its economy."

Annan also met with the families of three kidnapped Israel Defense Forces soldiers Tuesday night, hours after calling for their release and for the lfiting of the blockade on Lebanon.

Reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were snatched by Hezbollah in a cross-border raid on July 12, which sparked the 34-day conflict ended on August 14 by a UN brokered cease-fire. Corporal Gilad Shalit was abducted by Palestinian militants in late June, after they tunneled under the Gaza-Israel border and raided his IDF base.

Goldwasser's wife, Karnit, told Israel TV after the meeting with Annan that he gave them no new information about the fate of their loved ones.

"But the good news was that we got a personal pledge from the secretary-general of the UN that he accepts the mission to get the three kidnapped soldiers home and that's a really big thing," she said.

The relatives said they had heard lip service from many international officials about efforts to get their relatives freed.

"We asked him to be the one to start turning words into deeds and bring about their return home, all three," Karnit Goldwasser said. "He spoke to Lebanese cabinet ministers from Hezbollah and asked them to help him."

The families of the three men also appealed for word on the soldier's conditions.

"They must first of all give us a sign of life. [Annan] must act toward that. It's a moral demand that's basic in any negotiations," Regev's brother Benny said before the meeting.

They also wanted Annan to back down from his demands that Israel lift its blockade of Lebanon, for fear that an end to the siege would allow Hezbollah to move its captives out of Lebanon.

Israel's ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, said Tuesday the meeting between Annan and the families carried important symbolism.

"I hope that he will leave here with a real feeling of obligation, of a moral mission to do everything he can - and he is going to several capitals in which there is influence on this matter - to bring about Udi [Ehud], Eldad and Gilad's speedy return home," Gillerman told Israel TV.

Meanwhile, veteran civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson, speaking in Beirut, said he was told that the three soldiers were alive during his meetings with Syrian President Bashar Assad and Khaled Mashaal, political leader of Hamas, in Damascus.

"The Hamas leadership says that the soldier they are holding is alive and well," Jackson told reporters in Beirut, where he was meeting political and religious leaders.

"The president [Assad] believes that the two held somewhere by Hezbollah are alive," he added.

Syria and Iran are the main backers of Hezbollah.
"Obviously under any kind of international law, we should have been given a sign of life immediately. But these are terrorists," government spokeswoman Miri Eisen said. "Though we'd like to believe them, we continue to demand the unconditional release of all three."

Annan arrived in Israel on Tuesday afternoon, after a visit to Lebanon during which he called on Hezbollah to free the two IDF soldiers it is holding and for Israel to end the sea and air blockade imposed on Lebanon at the start of the conflict.

"We need to resolve the issue of the abducted soldiers very quickly," Annan said. "We need to deal with the lifting of the embargo - sea, land and air - which for the Lebanese is a humiliation and an infringement on their sovereignty."

"I think the time has come for the siege to be lifted. The Lebanese have shown they're serious about the implementation of [UN resolution] 1701 in all the deployments and efforts they have made," he added.

Israel has insisted it will maintain the restrictions until an arms embargo against Hezbollah is enforced.

The UN chief has said there is a high risk of renewed hostilities unless the resolution is fully implemented.

Families pin hopes on Annan

Ahead of their meeting with Annan, the families of Regev and Goldwasser said Tuesday they hoped the UN chief would help secure their safe and quick release.

"We ask [Annan] to act toward releasing our soldiers," Regev's brother, Benny, said before the meeting with Annan.

"The UN decided that Lebanon and the Lebanese government and Hezbollah must release the soldiers without any conditions. This was the resolution. We expect him to act toward achieving it."

The family members also appealed for word on the soldiers' conditions.

"They must first of all give us a sign of life. [Annan] must act toward that. It's a moral demand that's basic in any negotiations," Benny Regev said.

"I know that Kofi Annan is an important man... he has a lot of power and influence and he can speak to the government in Lebanon," said Karnit Goldwasser.

Goldwasser's mother, Miki, said she would be open to talks and a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah.

South Lebanon visit

Earlier Tuesday, Annan flew to south Lebanon where up to 15,000 UN peacekeepers are expected to be sent to bolster the 16-day-old truce between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas.

Italy's first contingent of 800-1,000 troops set sail on what Rome said would be a "long and risky" mission. The aircraft carrier Garibaldi met four other Navy ships off the Mediterranean port of Brindisi for an official send-off for the force.

France promised to send a 900-strong battalion before the middle of September, with a second battalion to follow.

Annan also visited the base of the currently 2,000-strong UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in Naqoura.

The UN chief was briefed Tuesday by French Major General Alain Pellegrini, the UNIFIL commander, and other top officials, then reviewed an honor guard of UN troops in blue berets standing at attention on the green lawn inside the UN's white-walled compound.

He laid a wreath at a monument for nearly 300 peacekeepers killed in Lebanon since UNIFIL deployed here in 1978. Muslim and Christian clergymen said prayers, and Annan stood in silence in front of a display of portraits of those killed, including four UNIFIL members killed in an Israel Air Force strike on their base in Khiam on July 25.

Annan is expected to travel to Syria and Iran, Hezbollah's chief allies, later in the week.

The United Nations hopes to create a buffer zone in south Lebanon free of Israeli or Hizbollah forces and policed by up to 15,000 UN troops and a similar number of Lebanese soldiers.

It is hoping that Muslim nations will contribute troops to balance the 7,000 or so pledged by European countries.

Potential Muslim contributors include Indonesia, Malaysia
and Bangladesh, although Israel has objected to their taking part because they have no diplomatic ties with Israel.

"The UN should take steps to convince Israel to be rational in seeing the contribution of Indonesian peacekeeping troops," said Indonesia's chief security minister Widodo Adi Sutjipto, whose country has offered 1,000 troops.

Comment: Israel was also responsible for starting the attack on Lebanon by baiting Hezbollah to capture Israeli soldiers by sending them over the border INTO LEBANON!

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Israel to withdraw from south Lebanon after deployment of 5,000 UN peacekeepers

www.chinaview.cn 2006-08-31 18:52:23

PARIS, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Thursday that Israeli troops would pull out of south Lebanon after the deployment of 5,000 UN peacekeepers and 16,000 Lebanese troops.

"That is what I have just been discussing with the Israeli government," Annan told French private radio Europe 1.
"We agreed that with 5,000 UN troops and 16,000 Lebanese soldiers who will go down south, it would be a credible force to allow the Israelis to pull out entirely," he said.

"I hope that one week up to 10 days from now, we will have 5,000. At that point, the Israelis will be forced to pull out. It is very important because the situation is fragile. As long as there are Israeli troops on Lebanese territory, there are some Lebanese who are going to consider that they are being occupied," he said.

"I think we need to move as soon as possible," said Annan, who again called upon Israel to lift the sea and air blockade on Lebanon.

"We need to start lifting the blockade sooner because quite frankly I don't think the situation will hold until then," Annan said.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday ruled out lifting the blockade unless the UN resolution 1701 is fully implemented.

Resolution 1701, unanimously adopted on Aug. 11 by the UN Security Council, calls for a strengthened UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) from 2,000 to 15,000 troops, the deployment of the Lebanese army there, the withdrawal of Israeli forces, and the disarmament of Hezbollah.

The UNIFIL will deploy 5,000 peacekeepers by the end of September, according to the chief of the UN peacekeeping operation, Jean-Marie Guehenno.

"On Friday (Sept. 1st), the first troops -- Italian troops -- will start to deploy, which means we should reach, within a month, a level of 4,000 to 5,000 men or a doubling of the force," the French newspaper Le Monde quoted Guehenno on Thursday.

Annan is on a visit to the Middle East to try to consolidate the fragile ceasefire in Lebanon. After Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank and Jordan, he is expected to be in Damascus on Thursday for talks with Syrian leaders. He will also visit Iran, Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.



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Olmert, Annan at odds over UN force deployment

www.chinaview.cn 2006-08-30 19:34:13


JERUSALEM, Aug. 30 (Xinhua) -- Visiting United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert clashed in Jerusalem on Wednesday morning over the deployment of an international force on Syria border, daily newspaper Ha'aretz reported.

Annan, who arrived in Israel on Tuesday afternoon for a two-day visit after the 34-day-long Israel-Hezbollah conflict, was at odds with Olmert at a joint news conference.
According to the report, Olmert's view was that international peacekeepers will be stationed along the Syria-Lebanon border.

Annan, for his part, advised flexibility, arguing against a concrete demand for deployment of international troops on the Syrian border, which Hezbollah has long used as the supply route for arms and other material, much of it from Iran, said the report.

Annan, meanwhile, held that an effective mechanism for dealing with the issue should be set up in partnership with the government of Lebanon, hoping Israel would withdraw all its forces from Lebanon within days or weeks, once 5000 UN peacekeepers are on the ground.

Olmert, however, told the news conference that Israel would only lift its air and sea blockade over Lebanon once all the provisions of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which governs the Aug. 14 ceasefire, were in place.

The Resolution 1701 on ending hostilities in Lebanon, approved by both Israel and Lebanon, calls for Israel's withdrawal from south Lebanon and authorizes an increase of the existing UN force there to 15,000 troops to help Lebanese troops take control of southern Lebanon after Israel withdraws.

"We have about 2500 troops on the ground and we are going to try to double that number and get to 5000 in the coming days and weeks," Annan said after a meeting with Olmert.

Earlier on Wednesday morning, Annan held about an hour of talks with Olmert at the prime minister's residence in Jerusalem, during which he pressed Israel to lift its six-week air and sea blockade of Lebanon, which was imposed at the start of the 34-day-long war with Hezbollah.

Later on Wednesday, Annan is expected to meet with Israeli Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

Afterwards, he will go to the West Bank city of Ramallah for talks with Palestinian leaders and officials.

Israel is the second leg of Annan's Mideast regional tour after Lebanon, which will also take him to Syria or Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.



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War! What's It Good For?


Weapons cover-up revealed

August 31, 2006
SMH

The Australian Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, issued instructions to suppress a damning letter about the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the war, a former senior diplomat says.

Dr John Gee, an expert on chemical weapons, worked with the US-led weapons hunter, the Iraq Survey Group, after the war and wrote the critical six-page letter when he decided to resign in March 2004. In it he warned the Federal Government the hunt was, "fundamentally flawed" and there was a "reluctance on the part of many here and in Washington to face the facts" that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

Dr Gee recorded in an email soon after that "Downer has issued instructions it [my letter] is not to be distributed to anyone". He wrote to a colleague in the Iraq Survey Group that a senior official in the Office of National Assessments, the Prime Minister's intelligence advisory agency, had told him about Mr Downer's instructions.


In another email, Dr Gee said the head of the Defence Department, Ric Smith, told him the department did not receive a copy of the letter even though Dr Gee was working in Iraq under contract to it. Dr Gee said senior defence officials told him the Department of Foreign Affairs "had not passed the letter on to Defence".

Last night, a spokesman for Mr Downer said the minister "did not recall" receiving Dr Gee's letter but said he would check. But he described as "a conspiracy theory" material showing that the letter had not been given to the head of the Defence Department. "I have heard a lot of conspiracy theories over the years, but I have not heard that one before."

However, documents given to the Herald, including Dr Gee's resignation letter and his emails to another senior weapons inspector, Rod Barton, reveal serious efforts to contain his findings.

Mr Downer has previously admitted that he was briefed personally by Dr Gee on the expert's return from Iraq. But Mr Downer has never revealed the contents of that briefing. From the emails, it appears Mr Downer received the damning findings months before he and the Prime Minister, John Howard, accepted that no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.

One month after his briefing with Dr Gee, Mr Downer met the US head of the Iraq Survey Group, Dr Charles Duelfer. At their press conference, Mr Downer insisted the weapons hunt in Iraq "was still a work in progress" and he could not draw conclusions.



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U.S. to stage missile-defense test over Pacific

Reuters
Wednesday, August 30, 2006

WASHINGTON - The United States is set to test key parts of its emerging antimissile shield over the Pacific on Thursday, officially to collect data, but with the possibility that a target dummy warhead will be shot down.

The $85 million exercise is the first involving a live target since interceptor rockets failed to leave their silos during tests in December 2004 and February 2005.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman cited statements by al-Qaeda leaders and other radicals. (Chip Somodevilla -- Getty Images For NBC Meet The Press)

It is also the first since the ground-based system, which is part of a layered shield that includes naval and aerial components, was activated to guard against ballistic missiles test-fired on July 4 and 5 by North Korea.

Boeing Co. is prime contractor for the ground-based mid-course defense, as the backbone is known. Major subcontractors include Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp. and Raytheon Co.
In the exercise, a target missile is to be launched from Kodiak, Alaska, between 7 a.m. and noon Pacific time (1400 and 1900 GMT), weather permitting. A backup launch window has been scheduled for Friday.

For the first time, the ground-based interceptor missile is to be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California. Previous launches have been from Ft. Greely, Alaska, the other U.S. silo site.

Although an intercept is possible, the main goal is "to collect data on overall system performance and interceptor sensor technology," said Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency.

In the 10 full-fledged flight intercept tests to date, only five have shot down target missiles. Still, Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, head of the Missile Defense Agency, has said he is confident the shield would have worked against a U.S.-bound North Korean missile if a decision had been made to shoot it down.

North Korea test-fired seven missiles over the U.S. Independence Day holiday, including for the first time a long-range, multistage Taepodong 2. It failed about 40 seconds after launch, falling harmlessly into the Sea of Japan.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sunday that he wanted to have a full-scale test "where we actually put all the pieces together. That just hasn't happened."

The Missile Defense Agency plans to stage its next full-fledged flight intercept test -- where a shoot-down is the chief goal -- late this year or early next year, Lehner said.

Congressional and other critics say the tests to date provide only the illusion of a shield, relying on highly scripted events that bear scant relation to any real attack.

President George W. Bush in 2002 announced the United States would start operating the initial elements of a missile defense system by the end of 2004 to defend against a limited attack from a country like North Korea or Iran.

Since then, U.S. missile defense spending has risen to nearly $10 billion a year, the Pentagon's single biggest annual outlay to develop a weapons system.



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Rumsfeld Unsure of Ability To Intercept Korean Missiles

From News Services
Monday, August 28, 2006


FORT GREELY, Alaska -- After his first look inside the nerve center of the U.S. missile defense system, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Sunday sounded a note of caution about expectations that interceptors poised in 10 underground silos here would work in the event of a missile attack by North Korea.

Asked at a news conference whether he believed the missile shield was ready for use against a North Korean missile like the one test-fired unsuccessfully on July 4, Rumsfeld said he would not be fully convinced until the multibillion-dollar defense system has undergone more complete and realistic testing.

"A full end-to-end" demonstration is needed, Rumsfeld said, "where we actually put all the pieces" of the highly complex and far-flung missile defense system together and see whether it would succeed in destroying a warhead in flight.
Rumsfeld also said North Korea does not pose a military threat to South Korea, calling Pyongyang more of a danger as a distributor of weapons to other countries and perhaps terrorists.

"I think the real threat that North Korea poses in the immediate future is more one of proliferation than a danger to South Korea," he said.

Rumsfeld said it is clear that the overall condition of the North Korean military has deteriorated.

Later Sunday, Rumsfeld met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Ivanov. They discussed the Middle East and Afghanistan, as well as Russian concerns about an announced U.S. plan to remove nuclear warheads from some Trident long-range missiles aboard submarines and replace them with conventional warheads for potential use on short notice against terrorist targets.



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Army Meets Its Retention Goal

By LOLITA C. BALDOR
Associated Press
Aug 30, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Staff Sgt. Michael Obleton has already done two tours in Iraq, dodging roadside bombs as he drove trucks in Army convoys across the hostile countryside.

He may even return to the front again - a possibility that never occurred to him when he first joined the active Army in 1997, long before the 2003 Iraq invasion and the onset of what has become an increasingly unpopular war.

Obleton knows about the Bush administration's often-touted long war on terror, and he's seen the Iraq insurgency up close. But he's determined to continue the fight. So on Thursday he will stand by the flagpole at Kentucky's Fort Campbell, raise his right hand, and swear once again to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies."
As he recites his oath of service, administered by the Army's No. 2 ranking officer, Gen. Richard Cody, Obleton will become the 64,200th Army soldier to re-enlist this year - allowing the Army to meet its retention goal a full month before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

"The Army is a good career, there are a lot of benefits," he said this week from his post at Fort Campbell. "This is something I signed up for. It's a job. (The war) doesn't worry me."

While the Army struggled last year to meet recruitment goals, it has been able to keep soldiers in the service by using a growing list of incentives and escalating bonuses to shower troops with money, schooling and career advancements.

So far this year, the Army has doled out an average bonus of $14,000, to eligible soldiers, for a total of $610 million in extra payments.

The re-enlistments come despite the escalating casualties on the Iraq battlefield - where more than 2,600 troops have lost their lives since March 2003. And they have enabled the Army to meet its retention goal every year since 1998.

"The bonuses have a lot to do with it, along with a feeling of accomplishment that comes with doing their mission," said Army spokesman Henry Minitrez. He also said that retention rates have even gone up for some of the military's high-profile units - such as the 82nd Airborne or 101st Airborne divisions - when they return home from Iraq or Afghanistan.

Both the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve expect to meet their re-enlistment goals for this fiscal year, which are 34,875 and 17,712, respectively. Both totals are slightly higher than last year's goals.

The number of expected and confirmed re-enlistments dipped in 2003, the year the war began, but has increased since then.

It was the schooling opportunity, rather than a bonus, that was the attraction for Obleton, 35 and originally from Columbus, Ga.

While much of his unit - the 594th Transportation Company attached to the 101st Airborne Division - may be heading back to Iraq, he plans to stay in Kentucky for now and attend school to become an Army career counselor.

"I've known this was going to be a career for me," said Obleton, whose wife is also in the Army and intends to stay. "We made this decision together. We are both doing well and we've advanced in our careers."

Back in 1996 when he joined the Army reserves or a year later when he moved to the active Army, going to war wasn't an issue. But in January 2003, he was sent to Kuwait and was among those first units traveling back and forth across the border into Iraq in Army convoys.

He was there for seven months and then went back in June 2004 for a full year. The second tour, he said, "was more intense. You felt the threat." But, unlike many units, everyone in his company came back alive.

And once he finishes school, he would be happy to make a third trip to Iraq.

"These are the things we're trained to take on," he said. "We're still there. Our mission isn't complete."

Comment: The retention rate wouldn't have to be high if new soldiers could be recruited...

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NATO urges Afghans to evacuate Taliban stronghold

Last Updated Thu, 31 Aug 2006 11:25:47 EDT
CBC News

Coalition forces are planning a major offensive in the Taliban stronghold of the Panjwaii district and warning civilians to evacuate the area immediately.

NATO has not announced a timeline as to when the offensive will begin.
CBC's Carolyn Dunn said that Col. Steve Williams has issued a warning to the Taliban in the area, saying that if they don't want to die, they had better leave Pashmul.

Coalition forces have been trying to take control of the area, which is about 25 kilometres west of Kandahar. It is the site where several Canadians have been killed and wounded.

The vast majority of the civilians have already fled, mostly to Kandahar, due to the ongoing hostilities. But there are grape farmers are in the area to work in the vineyards.

In the past, coalition forces have gone into the area, confronted the insurgents and left soon after the battle was over, only to lose control of the area to the Taliban. NATO said this operation will be different.

International forces plan to stay in the area, maintain a security presence and offer humanitarian assistance for anyone displaced by the offensive.

Canada has about 2,200 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan.



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Life in "America"


Defense contractor CEOs' pay doubles

By ANDREW TAYLOR
Associated Press
Wed Aug 30, 2006

WASHINGTON - The chief executives of corporations making big profits from the war on terror are enjoying far bigger pay increases than CEOs of nondefense companies, according to a study by two liberal groups.

The study, conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, found that, on average, CEOs of corporations with extensive defense contracts are getting paid about double what they made before Sept. 11, 2001.
CEOs of other large corporations - without big stakes in the war - have averaged pay gains of 6 percent during the same period, the study said.

The highest paid defense CEO, George David of United Technologies Corp. - which makes Black Hawk helicopters and jet engines - took in $31.9 million in 2005. That actually represented a big cut in pay from the $88.3 million he made in 2004.

Halliburton Co.'s CEO, David Lesar, saw his compensation more than double last year to $26.6 million. Halliburton has been the top provider of logistical services in Iraq such as transportation and feeding U.S. troops, but has come under fire for no-bid contracts and allegations it overcharged the government.

The study focused on the pay of the CEOs of the 34 publicly traded U.S. corporations that were among the top 100 defense contractors in 2005 and for which defense contracts made up more than 10 percent of revenues.

The two groups calculated the CEOs' pay packages based on salary, bonuses, stock awards, long-term incentives and the value of stock options exercised in any given year. The information is publicly available from Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Among the companies surveyed were defense titans Boeing Co., General Dynamics Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp., and lesser known companies such as Oshkosh Truck Corp., supplier of heavy trucks, and Edo Corp., which makes cell phone jammers that can block roadside bomb explosions.

Between 2001 and 2005, the profits for the 34 companies have climbed 189 percent. Profits for U.S. corporations as a whole rose 76 percent.

Stock price gains for defense contractors have averaged 48 percent while the overall stock market has remained flat. Stock market gains translate into higher pay for executives, who often reap windfalls from stock options.

Spokesmen for two companies highlighted in the report noted that defense contracts represent just a modest fraction of their business. They also said it's unfair to criticize CEOs for success in lifting a company's stock price.

"This report is nonsense," said United Technologies spokesman Paul Jackson, who said defense contracts represent just 14 percent of 2005 revenues. "More than 80 percent of CEO George David's compensation is performance-based. The record shows UTC's shareowner return under his tenure totals 1,252 percent vs. 350 percent for the Dow and 275 percent for the S&P 500."

Another highly paid CEO is Jay Gellert, CEO of Health Net Inc., which provides managed health care to dependents of military personnel as well as Pentagon retirees. In the years immediately before Sept. 11, 2001, Gellert didn't break $1 million in compensation.

Gellert made $11.6 million last year after a big jump in military contracts that the company said in its SEC filings resulted from "a rise in demand for private sector services as a direct result of continued and heightened military activity."

Health Net spokesman David Olson said partial privatization of military health care has saved taxpayers money. Olson said Pentagon contracts comprise 17 percent of Health Net's business.

"He's the CEO of a public company and his incentive compensation is linked to increases in shareholder value, and that's the way it works," Olson said. "And Health Net's stock in 2005 was the seventh best performer in the Fortune 500."

Still, to the liberal groups sponsoring the study, the taxpayer-funded war shouldn't help drive up CEO pay.

"Why not say that if it's a contract with taxpayer dollars, they can't go to excessive CEO pay," said Betsy Leondar-Wright of United for a Fair Economy. "In past wars, there were efforts to limit war profiteering. We're having the reverse here. We're having people treating it as their own little bonanza."

Comment: State-sanctioned murder is a profitable business! "Business" is also booming for "private security contractors", aka mercenaries.

See? Bush is good for the economy.


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Data show one in eight Americans in poverty

Reuters
2006-08-30

In the world's biggest economy, one in eight Americans and almost one in four blacks lived in poverty last year, the U.S. Census Bureau said on Tuesday, both ratios virtually unchanged from 2004.

The survey also showed 15.9 percent of the population, or 46.6 million, had no health insurance, up from 15.6 percent in 2004 and an increase for a fifth consecutive year, even as the economy grew at a 3.2 percent clip.
It was the first year since President George W. Bush took office in 2001 that the poverty rate did not increase. As in past years, the figures showed poverty especially concentrated among blacks and Hispanics.

In all, some 37 million Americans, or 12.6 percent, lived below the poverty line, defined as having an annual income around $10,000 for an individual or $20,000 for a family of four. The total showed a decrease of 90,000 from the 2004 figure, which Census Bureau officials said was "statistically insignificant."

The last time poverty declined was in 2000, the final year of Bill Clinton's presidency, when it fell to 11.3 percent.

The stagnant poverty picture drew attention from Democrats and others who said not enough is being done to help the nation's poor.

"Far too many American families who work hard and play by the rules still wind up living in poverty," said Rep. George Miller (news, bio, voting record) of California, the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee.

Around a quarter of blacks and 21.8 percent of Hispanics were living in poverty. Among whites, the rate edged down to 8.3 percent from 8.7 percent in 2004.

"Among African Americans the problem correlates primarily to the inner-city and single mothers," said Michael Tanner of CATO Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington. He noted that blacks also suffer disproportionately from poor education and lower quality jobs.

Black median income, at $30,858, was only 61 percent of the median for whites.

Some 17.6 percent of children under 18 and one in five of those under 6 were in poverty, higher than for any other age group.

Still, real median household income rose by 1.1 percent to $46,326 from $45,817 -- its first increase since 1999. This was taken as a positive move by Republicans and administration officials.

"While we still have challenges ahead, our ability to bounce back is a testament to the strong work ethic of the American people, the resiliency of our economy, and pro-growth economic policies, including tax relief," said Office of Management and Budget Director Rob Portman.

The figures contained wide regional variations, ranging from a median household income of $61,672 in New Jersey to $32,938 for Mississippi.

Major cities with the highest proportions of poor people included Cleveland with 32.4 percent and Detroit with 31.4 percent under the poverty line.

Comment: "The laaaaand of the (un)freeeeeee and the hoooome of the hooooooomlesssss"

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Oil Company CEO Pay Averaged $32.7 Million in 2005, Study Says

By Vineeta Anand
Bloomberg

Rising prices and profits translated into pay packages for oil company chief executive officers that are nearly three times the size of similarly sized businesses, a new study from two watchdog groups said.

In 2005, the CEOs of the largest 15 oil companies averaged $32.7 million in compensation, compared with $11.6 million for all large U.S. firms, according to the study, released today by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy.
Amid reports of multimillion-dollar pay packages, shareholder activists have sponsored resolutions to limit compensation at companies like Exxon Mobil Corp. and Home Depot Inc. In May, three members of the House of Representatives criticized the retirement benefits of former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond and asked the company to fill a gap in its workers' pension fund.

"Instead of lining the pockets of executives, they should be investing the money into new sources of energy that go beyond fossil oils,'' said Sarah Anderson, director of the global economy project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, and a co-author of the study.

Anderson's group researches peace, justice and environmental issues. United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group based in Boston, tries to raise awareness about the effects of "concentrated wealth and power,'' according to its web site.

Combined $512.9 Million

Last year, the top executives at the 15 largest oil companies earned a total of $512.9 million, the study said. That figure includes the $95.1 million awarded last year to William Greehey, chief executive officer of Valero Energy Corp., the largest U.S. refiner, took home, including salary, bonuses, restricted stock and exercised stock options. Raymond, who retired in January as chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil, the most profitable U.S. company, collected $69.7 million.

Oil executives help manage the bottom lines as well as directing investments in oil and gas as well as fossil fuels, said John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute in Washington.

"They are paying dividends, buying back stock, and managing their businesses well,'' Felmy said. "Their CEOs should be fairly compensated.''

The groups also examined the pay of defense contractors' chief executives. The top executives at defense contractors and military suppliers have benefited from the boom in government spending since Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq.

As a group, the CEOs of the 34 defense contractors have received total compensation of just under $1 billion since 2002. The highest-paid executive in the group was George David, the chairman and CEO of United Technologies Corp., the maker of Pratt & Whitney jet engines and the Sikorsky helicopters. David received $31.9 million last year, the study said.



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Conspiracists Allege U.S. Seizing Vast S. American Reservoir

Kelly Hearn
for National Geographic News
August 28, 2006

Conspiracy theorists fear the United States is secretly taking control of South America's largest underground reservoir of fresh water.

The accusations are clouding international efforts to develop the Guaran Aquifer. And the rumors come at a time when water may be joining oil as one of the world's most fought-over commodities. (Related: "UN Highlights World Water Crisis" [June 5, 2003].)

Stretching beneath parts of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, the Guaran Aquifer is an underground system of water-bearing rock layers covering 460,000 square miles (1.2 million square kilometers)-an area larger than Texas and California combined.

The International Atomic Energy Agency says the Guaran may be big enough to supply drinking water to 360 million people on a sustainable basis.
Already, some 500 cities and towns across Brazil tap the aquifer for drinking water. Officials worry that overuse and expanding agricultural activities are threatening the reservoir's future health.

Currently experts are studying the sandstone aquifer's structure and devising ways to sustainably develop and manage the cross-border resource for farming, drinking supplies, and geothermal energy.

The Global Environment Facility, a U.S.-based funding consortium managed by the United Nations and the World Bank, has put the equivalent of 13.5 million U.S. dollars into the project.

That funding plus contributions from national governments adds up to a total of 27 million dollars for the first phase of the Guaran project, which began in 2003 and ends in 2009.

Distrust of the U.S.

But local distrust of U.S.-backed lending institutions-along with the presence of U.S. troops in Paraguay-has spawned suspicions that Washington is exerting slow control over the aquifer as insurance against water shortages in the U.S.

"The United States already has water problems in its southern states," said Adolfo Esquivel, an Argentine activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. "And it is clear that humans can live without oil, gold, and diamonds but not water. The real wars will be over water, not oil."

Esquivel points to a recent military deal, under which U.S. Special Forces will train with Paraguayan soldiers. He says this is evidence of Washington's creeping control - a claim that's been further popularized by an Argentine documentary, Sed, Invasin Gota a Gota (Thirst: Invasion Drop by Drop).

The theory centers on an ill-reputed jungle area known as the Triple Border, where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet.

The area is home to thousands of Muslim merchants who immigrated to South America from Syria and is known as a hotbed of smuggling, drug dealing, and arms sales.

U.S. officials have repeatedly said that merchants in the area launder money from illegal activities to Middle East terrorist groups, including Hezbollah.

At an August 24, 2004, press briefing in Washington, D.C., for example, the U.S. Treasury Department's Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing, Juan Zarate, referred to a "Hezbollah financier" imprisoned in Paraguay who Zarate said had been operating in the Triple Border.

"He was engaged in a panoply of different financial activities used to support Hezbollah, everything from extortion to counterfeiting of currency to ... smuggling," Zarate said. "Really, it was a potpourri of financial criminal activity that he was using and his counterparts were using to support Hezbollah and to send funds back to Lebanon." (Read the full transcript of the press briefing.)

But critics say the State Department's claims are little more than pretext for a subtle invasion.

"They have no evidence but claim a terrorist presence in the area so they can install a military base and exert control over the water," said Elsa Bruzzone, a policy specialist for the Buenos Aires-based CEMIDA, a pro-democracy group founded by retired Argentine military personnel.

Bruzzone also worries that loan conditions from foreign lenders will force national governments to privatize the aquifer to pay back funds.

She and other activists have pressured Mercosur-a regional trade bloc made up of the four countries that the aquifer underlies, plus Venezuala-to fight any foreign control over the aquifer.

Mercosur has recently proclaimed the aquifer to be the property of those national governments and initiated a committee to study the issue, Bruzzone says.

Overblown?

But many in South America feel the conspiracy theories are overblown, and U.S. officials have denied the allegations.

"The United States has no interest in the Guaran Aquifer, which the U.S. government recognizes as an important resource for the inhabitants of the region," said a January statement released by the U.S. embassy in Paraguay.

Jorge Rucks is an Argentina-based official for the Organization of American States (OAS). The four Guaran countries have elected the OAS to serve as executor of the aquifer-development project.

Rucks stresses that the four Guaran countries have power over the aquifer project.

He adds that the money managed by the UN and World Bank comes without strings.

"We are talking about grants, no credits," he said. "The money does not have to be paid back, and it carries no conditions."

But the history of colonial domination on this resource-rich and largely untapped continent keeps suspicions alive.

Miguel Auge is a hydrology professor at the University of Buenos Aires and was one of the first academics to initiate studies of the aquifer. He says South American governments and lawmakers should be careful.

"We can't forget the invasions that Latin American countries have suffered throughout history, because it is happening again," he said.

"Governments here have handed the most important patrimony we have-water, soil, oil, gas, and minerals-to foreign groups from North America and Europe."

The Guaran Aquifer uproar recently affected a millionaire conservationist from the United States.

Douglas Tompkins, an ecologist and former owner of Esprit clothing line, owns large chunks of Chile and Argentina, some of which sit atop the aquifer.

Earlier this month Argentina's populist undersecretary of land and housing, Luis D'Ela, decided to cut chains and padlocks at Tompkins's ranch, allowing a group of Indian activists onto the property, located in the Esteros del Iber wetlands in the north of Argentina.

D'Ela has told local media he is pushing legislation to seize Tompkins's land, in part because, D'Ela claims, the conservationist is part of the United States' effort to "grab control of our water."

Comment: Now why would they want to do that? Let's see, remember the Pentagon report on Climate Change?
Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents. 'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'


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Monsanto Buys 'Terminator' Seeds Company

by F. William Engdahl
August 27, 2006
GlobalResearch.ca


The United States Government has been financing research on a genetic engineering technology which, when commercialized, will give its owners the power to control the food seed of entire nations or regions. The Government has been working quietly on this technology since 1983. Now, the little-known company that has been working in this genetic research with the Government's US Department of Agriculture-- Delta & Pine Land-- is about to become part of the world's largest supplier of patented genetically-modified seeds (GMO), Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri.
Relations between Monsanto, Delta & Pine Land and the USDA, on closer scrutiny, show the deep and dark side of the much-heralded genetic revolution in agriculture. It proves deep-held suspicions that the Gene Revolution is not about 'solving the world hunger problem' as its advocates claim. It's about handing over control of the seeds for mankind's basic food supply-rice, corn, soybeans, wheat, even fruit, vegetables and cotton-to privately owned corporations. Once the seeds and their use are patented and controlled by one or several private agribusiness multinationals, it will be they who can decide whether or not a particular customer-let's say for argument, China or Brazil or India or Japan-whether they will or won't get the patented seeds from Monsanto, or from one of its licensee GMO partners like Bayer Crop Sciences, Syngenta or DuPont's Pioneer Hi-Bred International.

While most of us don't bother to reflect on where the corn in the box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes or the rice in a box of Uncle Ben's Converted Rice come from, when we grab it from the supermarket shelf, they all must originate with seeds. Seeds can either be taken by a farmer from the previous season' seeds, and planted to produce the next harvest. Or, seeds can be bought new each harvest season, from the companies which sell their seeds.

The advent of commercial GMO seeds in the early 1990's allowed companies like Monsanto, DuPont or Dow Chemicals to go from supplying agriculture chemical herbicides like Roundup, to patenting genetically altered seeds for basic farm crops like corn, rice, soybeans or wheat. For almost a quarter century, since 1983, the US Government has quietly been working to perfect a genetically engineered technique whereby farmers would be forced to turn to their seed supplier each harvest to get new seeds. The seeds would only produce one harvest. After that the seeds from that harvest would commit 'suicide' and be unusable.

There has been much hue and cry, correctly so, that this process, patented 'suicide' seeds, officially termed GURTs (Genetic Use Restriction Technologies), is a threat to poor farmers in developing countries like India or Brazil, who traditionally save their own seeds for the next planting. In fact, GURTs, more popularly referred to as Terminator seeds for the brutal manner in which they kill off plant reproduction possibilities, is a threat to the food security as well of North America, Western Europe, Japan and anywhere Monsanto and its elite cartel of GMO agribusiness partners enters a market.

The Curious History of Delta & Pine Land

Delta & Pine Land is a company that, despite the pine in its name, has deep roots. Founded in 1888, it has its headquarters at One Cotton Row in Scott, Mississippi, nestled between Goat Island and Choktaw Bar Island on the Mississippi River, near the Arkansas border. However, the people running things at Delta Pine are anything but your typical Mississippi black-dirt cotton farmers.

In 1983, Delta & Pine Land (D&PL) joined with the US Department of Agriculture in a project to develop Terminator seeds. It was one of the earliest experiments with GMO. It was a long-term project. The US Government has been serious about Terminator beginning more than two decades ago.

In March 1998 the US Patent Office granted Patent No. 5,723,765 to Delta & Pine Land for a patent titled, Control of Plant Gene _Expression. The patent is owned jointly, according to Delta & Pine's Security & Exchange Commission 10K filing, 'by D&PL and the United States of America, as represented by the Secretary of Agriculture.'

The patent has global coverage. To quote further from the official D&PL SEC filing, 'The patent broadly covers all species of plant and seed, both transgenic (GMO-ed) and conventional, for a system designed to allow control of progeny seed viability without harming the crop'(sic).

Then, in a manner reminiscent of Big Brother in George Orwell's novel, 1984, D&PL claims, 'One application of the technology could be to control unauthorized planting of seed of proprietary varieties...by making such a practice non-economic since non-authorized saved seed will not germinate, and, therefore, would be useless for planting.' D&PL calls the thousand-year-old tradition of farmer-saved seed by the pejorative term, 'brown bagging' as though it is something dirty and corrupt.

Translated into lay language, D&PL officially declares the purpose of its Patent No. 5,723,765, Control of Plant Gene _Expression, is to prevent farmers who once get trapped into buying transgenic or GMO seeds from a company such as Monsanto or Syngenta, from 'brown bagging' or being able to break free of control of their future crops by Monsanto and friends. As D&PL puts it, their patent gives them 'the prospect of opening significant worldwide seed markets to the sale of transgenic technology in varietal crops in which crop seed currently is saved and used in subsequent seasons as planting seed.'

Instead, the farmer or the country whose farmers depend on Monsanto patented GMO seeds must pay a license fee to Monsanto each year to get new seeds. 'No tickee, no laundy,' as the old Brooklyn poet would say.

Terminator is the answer to the agribusiness dream of controlling world food production. No longer would they need to hire expensive detectives to spy on whether farmers were re-using Monsanto or other GMO patented seed. Terminator corn or soybeans or cotton seeds could be genetically modified to 'commit suicide' after one harvest season. That would automatically prevent farmers from saving and re-using the seed for the next harvest. The technology would be a means of enforcing Monsanto or other GMO patent rights, and forcing payment of farmer use fees not only in developing economies, where patent rights were, understandably, little respected, but also in industrial OECD countries.

With Terminator patent rights, once a country such as Argentina or Brazil or Iraq or the USA or Canada opened its doors to the spread of GMO patented seeds among its farmers, their food security would be potentially hostage to a private multinational company, a company which, for whatever reasons, especially given its intimate ties to the US Government, might decide to use 'food as a weapon' to compel a US-friendly policy from that country or group of countries.

Sound far-fetched? Go back to what then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did in countries like Allende's Chile to force a regime change to a 'US-friendly' Pinochet dictatorship by withholding USAID and private food exports to Chile. Kissinger dubbed it 'food as a weapon.' Terminator is merely the logical next step in food weapon technology.

The role of the US Government in backing and financing Delta & Pine Land's decades of Terminator research is even more revealing. As Kissinger said back in the 1970's, 'Control the oil and you can control entire Continents. Control food and you control people...'

In a June 1998 interview, USDA spokesman, Willard Phelps, defined the US Government policy on Terminator seeds. He explained that USDA wanted the technology to be 'widely licensed and made expeditiously available to many seed companies.' He meant agribusiness GMO giants like Monsanto, DuPont or Dow. The USDA was open about their reasons: They wanted to get Terminator seeds into the developing world where the Rockefeller Foundation had made eventual proliferation of genetically engineered crops the heart of its GMO strategy from the beginnings of its rice genome project in 1984.

USDA's Phelps stated that the US Government's goal in fostering the widest possible development of Terminator technology was 'to increase the value of proprietary seed owned by US seed companies and to open up new markets in Second and Third World countries.'

Under WTO rules on free trade in agriculture, countries are forbidden to impose their own national health restrictions on GMO imports if it is deemed to be an 'unfair trade barrier.' It begins to become clear why it was the US Government and US agribusiness which during the late 1980's pushed at the GATT Uruguay Round for creation of a World Trade Organization, with its supranational arbitrary powers over world agriculture trade. It all fits into a neat picture of patented seeds, forced on reluctant WTO member nations, under threat of WTO sanctions, and now of Terminator or suicide seeds.

A closer look at who runs and owns Delta & Pine Land is instructive.

Arkansas Politics and D&PL

The largest shareholder in D&PL is the Stephens Group of Little Rock, Arkansas. Here is where things become interesting indeed.

The man who is Chairman of the Board of DP&L is Jon E.M. Jacoby, who came to DP&L as representative of the Stephens Group. Jacoby is a Director and Vice Chairman of The Stephens Group LLC, the Arkansas-based private equity firm owned by the Stephens family.

The Stephens Group prides itself on being the nation's largest investment bank outside Wall Street, based, of all places, in little ol' Little Rock, in hillbilly land, Arkansas, one of the poorest states in the United States. Stephens Inc. is also one of the biggest institutional shareholders in 30 large multinationals including the Arkansas based firms Tyson Food, the world's largest chicken industrial factory operation and the infamous Arkansas giant, Wal-Mart.

Jackson Stephens, who founded the group with his brother, Witt, were more than just lucky Arkansas bankers and billionaires. Stephens evidently built his career and fortune by being connected to the 'right' people. He was a US Naval Academy classmate of Jimmy Carter and during the Georgia bank scandals of President Carter's Office of Management & Budget chief, Bert Lance, it was Jack Stephens who stepped in to bail Lance out of an extremely embarrassing financial debacle with Lance's old bank, National Bank of Georgia.

How Stephens helped Jimmy Carter's fellow Georgia buddy, Lance, is the interesting part. Stephens introduced Lance to a Pakistani businessman, Agha Hasan Abedi. Abedi was the founder of a curious Luxembourg-registered, London-based bank called BCCI.

In 1990, BCCI was convicted of money laundering for the Columbian Cocaine Cartels in Miami.

In October, 1992, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released an 800-page report on the BCCI collapse. They called the BCCI scandal, 'the largest case of organized crime in history, spanning over some 72 nations,' adding that it represented an 'international financial crime on a massive and global scale,' and that the bank 'systematically bribed world leaders and political figures throughout the world.'

The Senate report concluded that among the provable charges against BCCI were 'BCCI's criminality, including fraud...involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the America; BCCI's bribery of officials in most of those locations; its support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; its management of prostitution; its commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; its illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers.'

Jackson Stephens was no casual business acquaintance of BCCI's Agha Hasan Abedi. In response to the concerns over Jackson Stephens' involvement in BCCI, the Ohio Attorney General noted in a 1993 report, 'Stephens' name has been linked to securities violations that allegedly occurred when the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a foreign bank dominated by Pakistani financier Agha Hasan Abedi, acquired stock and control over the Washington-based First American Bank.' In 1991, Stephens joined BCCI investor Mochtar Riady in buying BCCI's former Hong Kong subsidiary from its liquidators.

The Stephens Group was well-connected to another interesting Asian banking group, the billionaire Indonesian Riady family of Moktar and his son James Riady, who own the Lippo Bank in Indonesia. The Riadys are Chinese-Indonesian businessmen who, of all places, moved to Arkansas in the 1970's, despite holding billions of assets in Asia. Stephens and Riady hit it off and soon Stephens and Riady bought a bank in Hong Kong. Stephens then invited Riady to invest in a Little Rock, Arkansas bank called Worthen.

BCCI and Jackson Stephens, chairman of the Stephens Group of Arkansas were well known to one another. Stephens Group board member, Jon E.M. Jacoby, today Chairman of Delta & Pine Land, and still a Vice Director of The Stephens Group, was a very senior, trusted member of the Stephens' inside circle for more than 35 years.

Jackson Stephens' Stephens Group financially staked Sam Walton when he started Wal-Mart in 1970. Stephens also financed Tyson Foods to become the agribusiness global giant it is today. Jon Jacoby, as senior executive of the Stephens Group, had arranged the 1970 Wal-Mart deal. Jon E.M. Jacoby and Jackson Stephens went way back.

Jacoby was Vice President of Stephens Inc. in the early 1990's, shortly after the BCCI scandals and early into the Presidency of another Jackson Stephens protg, former Arkansas Governor and recipient of Stephens' political largess, William Jefferson Clinton.

When an Arkansas reporter questioned Jacoby on allegations of Clinton's alleged corruption as Governor of Arkansas, Jacoby quipped, "You see a girl walking down the street. You can say, 'There goes a beautiful girl' or "There goes a whore.' What the hell's the difference? They've both got legs."

Arkansas politics is known for its colorful metaphors and its colorful politicians like William Jefferson Clinton. It's good to get a little of the flavor of this Arkansas colorfulness to get a better picture of Delta & Pine Land.

Stephens Group, Tyson Farms and Other Arkansas Fairy Tales

A tangled web of relations links the Stephens Group and Delta & Pine Land of Scott, Mississippi with another satellite in the agribusiness orbit of the influential Stephens Group. The Stephens Group is also linked intimately with Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, the US' largest agribusiness processor of industrialized chicken meat, and arguably one of its most unsanitary ones.

Tyson Foods curiously emerged from the recent Avian Flu (H5N1) virus scare as a winner, using the lie that their factory farm mass-bred assembly-line chickens were more 'sanitary' than free-roaming small farm chickens of Asia.

Washington Administrations, at least since the Presidency of Bill Clinton, seem to have a love affair of some sort with Tyson Foods.

It began when Clinton sought to name an Arkansas crony, Mike Espy, to be his Secretary of Agriculture. Before Clinton could submit Espy's name to the Senate for confirmation, however, Espy was sent to Arkansas for a meeting that would decide if Espy had the right stuff. The meeting was with Don Tyson, head of Tyson Foods.

Tyson apparently concluded that Espy indeed had the right stuff, at least as far as Tyson was concerned. Soon after being named head of USDA, Espy enacted measures significantly weakening Federal chicken waste and contamination standards. That opened the floodgates for expansion of Tyson Foods chicken factory farms into the huge concentrations of chicken waste and rivers overflowing with toxic pollution in Arkansas and beyond.

The Wall Street Journal on May 28, 2003 reviewed the allegations surrounding then-President Clinton and his wife, Hillary. They detailed some relevant points from the Clintons' Arkansas days:

1977

Hillary Rodham Clinton joins the Rose Law Firm. Jackson Stephens joins with former Carter administration budget director Bert Lance and a group of Mideast investors--later identified as key figures in the corrupt Bank of Credit & Commerce International--in an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Financial General Bankshares in Washington, D.C

1978

October: Mrs. Clinton, now a partner at the Rose Firm, begins a series of commodities trades under the guidance of Tyson Foods executive Jim Blair, earning nearly $100,000. (author's emphasis). The trades are not revealed until March 1994.

November: Bill Clinton is elected Governor of Arkansas.

The Rose law firm was the house law firm of Jackson Stephens' Stephens Group investment bank in Little Rock. To be the corporate law firm of the Stephens Group was no casual affair. It implied a deep trust relationship and perhaps more. As one crony of Jackson Stephens put it at that time, 'Jackson Stephens? He's the man who owns Arkansas.'

The head of the prestigious Rose law firm in Little Rock in those days was C. Joseph Giroir jr. In 1977 Giroir hired a young lawyer named Hillary Clinton to work for Rose. It was all one cozy Arkansas-Indonesia family back then.

The Wall Street Journal commentary on the Clinton years had the following entry for 1987, as Clinton was still Arkansas Governor:

1987:

Officials at investment giant Stephens Inc., including longtime Clinton friend, David Edwards, take steps to rescue Harken Energy, a struggling Texas oil company with George W. Bush on its board. Over the next three years, Mr. Edwards brings BCCI-linked investors and advisers into Harken deals. One of them, Abdullah Bakhsh, purchases $10 million in shares of Stephens-dominated Worthen Bank. (author's emphasis).

Jackson Stephens' political largesse was non-partisan: Democrats Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and then Republican George W. Bush, the man now in the White House as Monsanto seeks approval to take over the Stephens Group's Delta & pine land.

In December 1992, just after Clinton had been elected President in a campaign financed at critical points by Jackson Stephens and friends, including the Indonesian-American Riady family, Vince Foster, an Arkansas friend of the Clinton's, and a law partner at Hillary's Rose law firm, met James McDougal. Foster arranged for McDougal to buy the Clintons' remaining shares in Whitewater Development Co. That land deal was focus of Congressional investigation of the Clintons. McDougal was loaned the money for the purchase by Tyson Foods counsel Jim Blair, the long-time Clinton friend and commodities adviser who in 1978 had 'tutored' Hillary in her fabulously successful commodities speculation. The loan by Tyson's Jim Blair to McDougal was never repaid.

No sooner did Bill and Hillary Clinton move into the White House, and the Tyson Foods-approved Mike Espy took over as US Secretary of Agriculture, than Hillary's former law partner, Joseph Giroir, set up a corporation. It was called Arkansas International Development Corporation (AIDC). In fact, it appears that the AIDC was set up to do joint ventures with the Indonesian Lippo Group of the business partners of Jackson Stephens, Mokhtar and James Riady.

The Arkansas International Development Corporation brokered a deal between Indonesia's Lippo Group and Arkansas' Tyson Foods that opened Indonesia to import Tyson Foods industrially-produced Arkansas factory farm chickens. One food Indonesia does not need to import is certainly chickens. The cheap Arkansas imports destroyed the fragile economy of domestic Indonesian small family chicken farmers.

Another project of AIDC was to issue bonds to build an airport in the Arkansas backwoods for the sole purpose of shipping Tyson Farms chickens to Indonesia. Recall that Clinton's wife had been profiting from the trading advice of Tyson Foods since October 1978, a month before her husband became Governor.

Under the Clinton Presidency, agribusiness, especially agribusiness tied to the Stephens' interests, made huge advances.

Agriculture Secretary Espy was forced to resign in October 1994, and was indicted on charges of accepting bribes and other gratuities. Among the charges against him were making false statements, concealing money from prohibited sources, illegal gratuities, illegal contributions, falsifying records, interstate transportation of stolen property, money laundering, and illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies. The largest corporate offender was Tyson Foods. Tyson had illegally offered Espy $12,000 in airplane rides, football tickets and other payoffs. Espy got off because the law makes it easier to convict a briber than a bribee. Tyson paid the government $6 million to close its case.

Tyson had been enthusiastic supporters of the Clinton family for years. In 1994, Time reported that a senior pilot for Tyson, Joe Henrickson, had been grilled for three days by the Espy Independent Prosecutor, Dan Smaltz, and FBI agents. They grilled the Tyson pilot about earlier transfers of cash to the (Arkansas) Governor's (Bill Clinton) mansion. According to Time, Henrickson claimed to have carried white envelopes containing a quarter-inch stack of $100 bills on six occasions.

Time magazine reported that, 'In one case, [Henrickson claimed] a Tyson executive handed him an envelope of cash in the company's aircraft hanger in Fayetteville and said, 'This is for Governor Clinton.' Arkansas has its political traditions and the Stephens and Tyson families are evidently skilled practitioners of that art.

The real interest in Jacoby's Delta & Pine Land

By now the question comes, what is so attractive about the Stephens Group's Delta & Pine Land that Monsanto makes its second bid to add it to its global genetically-engineered seeds empire?

It's the patent Delta & Pine Land, together with the US Government, holds--Patent No. 5,723,765, titled, Control of Plant Gene _Expression. The USDA through its Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) in Lubbock, Texas, as already noted, has worked with Delta & Pine Land since 1983 to perfect Terminator GMO technology. Patent No. 5,723,765 is the patent for Terminator technology.

One year later, in early 1999 Monsanto, the largest producer of GMO seeds and related agri-chemicals, announced it was acquiring Delta & Pine Land along with Delta's Terminator patents.

In October 1999, however, following a worldwide storm of protest against Terminator seeds that threatened the very future of the Rockefeller Foundation's 'Gene Revolution' Dr. Gordon Conway, President of the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation, met privately with the Board of Directors of Monsanto. Conway convinced Monsantom that for the long-term future of their GMO Project, they must go public to indicate to a worried world that it would not 'commercialize' Terminator. Development of the genetic revolution and genetic engineering as a research area had been the project of the Rockefeller Foundation over decades, along with researchers in the family's Rockefeller University.

The Anglo-Swiss Syngenta joined with Monsanto in declaring solemnly that they would also not commercialize their work on GURTS or Terminator suicide seed technology.

That 1999 announcement took enormous pressure off of Monsanto and the agribusiness GMO giants, allowing them to advance the proliferation of their patented GMO seeds globally. Terminator could come later, once farmers and entire national agriculture areas like North America or Argentina or India had been taken over by GMO crops. Then, of course, it would be too late. The Rockefeller-Monsanto 1999 press conference was clearly application of classic Lenin Bolshevik tactics-Two Steps Forward, One Step Back...

Despite the Monsanto declaration of a moratorium on Terminator development, the US Government and the again independent Delta & Pine Land refused to drop their Terminator development.

In 2000, a year after the Monsanto Terminator moratorium announcement, the Clinton Administration's USDA Secretary, Dan Glickman, refused repeated efforts by various agriculture and NGO organizations to drop the Government's support for Terminator or GURTs. His Department's feeble excuse for not dropping support for the work with Delta & Pine Land was that it allowed the US Government to put 'leverage' on D&PL to 'protect the public interest.' Six years later it became clear: the only leverage the US Government had put on D&PL's commercialization efforts on GURTs had been to lever it into commercial reality.

Delta Vice President, Harry Collins, declared at the time in a press interview in the Agra/Industrial Biotechnology Legal Letter, 'We've continued right on with work on the Technology Protection System (TPS or Terminator). We never really slowed down. We're on target, moving ahead to commercialize it. We never really backed off.'

Nor did their partner, the United States Department of Agriculture, back down on Terminator after 1999. In 2001 the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) website announced: 'USDA has no plans to introduce TPS into any germplasm...Our involvement has been to help develop the technology, not to assist companies to use it.' As if to say, 'see, our hands are clean.' Then they went on to say the USDA was, 'committed to making the [Terminator] technology as widely available as possible, so that its benefits will accrue to all segments of society (sic)...ARS intends to do research on other applications of this unique gene control discovery...When new applications are at the appropriate stage of development, this technology will also be transferred to the private sector for commercial application.' Terminator was alive and well inside the Washington bureaucracy.

In 2001, the USDA and Delta & Pine executed a Commercialization Agreement for Terminator, its infamous Patent No. 5,723,765. The Government and Delta & Pine Land were not at all concerned about worldwide outcry against Terminator.

That announcement came two years after Monsanto had dropped its planned takeover of D&PL, with its Terminator patents.

The world was left with the (misleading) impression that Terminator was dead. Reality was it was anything but dead. Seven years later, long after public outcry against Terminator technology had died down, Monsanto re-entered and bought Delta & Pine Land and its Terminator patents.

Delta & Pine Land's global net

The key scientific member of the Delta & Pine Land board since 1993 has been Dr. Nam-Hai Chua. Chua, 62, is also head of the Rockefeller University Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory in New York, and has been for over 25 years, the labs which are at the heart of the Rockefeller Foundation's decades-long development, and spending of more than $100 millions of its own research grants to create their Gene Revolution. Until 1995, Chua was also a scientific consultant to Monsanto Corporation, as well as to DuPont's Pioneer Hi-Bred International. Chua is at the heart of Rockefeller's Gene Revolution. And, clearly, Delta & Pine Land and their research on Terminator have been in the center of that work.

Delta & Pine Land is well-placed globally to proliferate its suicide seeds now, with the corporate and financial clout of the giant Monsanto company. Delta & Pine already has subsidiaries including D&PL Argentina, D&PL China, D&PL China PTE in Singapore, Deltapine Paraguay, Delta Pine de Mexico, Deltapine Australia, Hebei Ji Dai Cottonseed Technology Company in China, CDM Mandiyu in Argentina, Delta and Pine Land Hellas in Greece, D&M Brazil Algodao of Brazil, D&PL India, D&PL Mauritius Ltd.

This vast global network combined with Monsanto's dominant position in the GMO seeds and agri-chemicals market along with the unique DP&L Patent No. 5,723,765, Control of Plant Gene _Expression, now give Monsanto and its close friends in Washington an enormous advance in their plans to dominate world food and plant seed use.

F. William Engdahl is Contributing Editor of Global Research and author of the soon-to-be-released book, Seeds of Destruction: theDark Side of Genetically-engineeredFood. He also authored ' A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics,' Pluto Press, He may be contacted at his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

Comment: Now why would they want to do that? Let's see, remember the Pentagon report on Climate Change?

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'


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The Sky is Falling


Supernova caught in its exploding act

Reuters
Wed Aug 30, 2006

LONDON - Teams of international scientists have used observations from NASA's Swift satellite and other telescopes to witness the evolution of a cosmic blast into a stellar explosion or supernova.

The blast is thought to be a milder type of gamma-ray burst (GRB) -- the most powerful type of explosion known to astronomers -- called an X-ray flash.

It is known as GRB060218 after the February 18 date it began in the constellation of Aries about 440 million light years away. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.
"This extends the GRB-supernova connection to X-ray flashes and fainter supernovae, implying a common origin," said Elena Pian of Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics in Trieste and the lead author of one of four research papers about the event in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

It is the second-closest gamma-ray burst ever detected and the first view of a supernova in the act of exploding, according to the astronomers.

Pian and her group confirmed that the explosion was tied to a supernova called SN2006aj a few days after the outburst, which lasted 100 times longer than a typical gamma-ray burst but was much dimmer.

Alicia Soderberg and her colleagues at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena used radio and X-ray wavelengths to calculate that GRB060218 was about 100 times less energetic than ordinary GRBs but similar events are probably more common.

In another report in the journal, Sergio Campana and scientists at the National Institute for Astrophysics observatory in Merate, Italy also said the collapsing star was associated with a supernova.

X-ray flashes appear to signal an explosion that leaves behind a neutron star while gamma-ray bursts are thought to mark the birth of a black hole, a region of space from which nothing can escape.

Scientists led by Paolo Mazzali, of the Max Planck Institute of Astrophysics in Garching, Germany found that the star had a smaller mass than those estimated for the normal GRB-supernova.

"The properties of GRB060218 suggest the existence of a population of events less luminous than classical GRBs, but possibly more numerous," Mazzali said in a statement.

In a commentary in the journal, Timothy Young of the University of North Dakota in the United States said the research has shown that at least some GRBs are warnings of the imminent explosion of massive stars.

"All four papers make clear that the exploding object sent out both a slightly aspherical shockwave, typical of a supernova, and a jet-like stream of material characteristic of a GRB," he said.



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Scientists Admit Tunguska Meteorite Was A Comet

31.08.2006

Tunguska cosmic body (TCB) was a comet, containing organic matter, says Russian scientist, the fellow of Troitsk Institute of Innovative and Thermonuclear Research.
The scientist reports that the TCB was a comet, containing organic matter, which was heated after entering Earth's atmosphere, and organic matter started decomposing intensively and emitting carbon dioxide.

The scientist also showed the results of chemical analysis of particles found in wood and soil - their composition reminded that of the Halley's comet, studied by means of "Vega" spaceship.

The scientists are still unable to perform total identification of the TCB chemical composition, but they are sure that some high-temperature process (an explosion) had definitely taken place.



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Scientists pinpoint polar cataclysm date

By WILLIAM KATES
Associated Press
Wed Aug 30, 2006

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - A 30-mile maze canyons in Antarctica was carved out of bedrock by the catastrophic draining of subglacial lakes during global warming between 12 million and 14 million years ago, according to university researchers who warn a similar event today could have serious environmental consequences.

Although scientists have previously theorized that the Labyrinth region in southern Victoria Land was created by water released from lakes that had formed under glaciers, researchers at Syracuse University and Boston University say they found geological evidence to bracket the timing of the last major flooding and link it to a global warming trend at the time.
The scientists pinpointed the timing of the last subglacial flood by dating volcanic ash preserved on bedrock surfaces, said Laura Webb, a professor of earth sciences at Syracuse who took part in the study.

The Labyrinth is a network of ice-free bedrock channels and scoured terrain emerging from beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. It is one of a series of large channel networks that cross the Transantarctic Mountains. Some of the chasms are up to 800 feet deep and thousands of feet wide. Scientists have long speculated that the volume of water required to create the channels was far more than that produced by melting glaciers.

Webb said it appeared the subglacial flooding was not continuous but episodic, and likely lasted days or months at a time.

In an article on the study that appeared last month in the journal "Geology," Webb and her colleagues estimated the flood raged with approximately 1,000 times the volume of water flowing over Niagara Falls. At that rate, it would take Lake Ontario, for instance, about a month to drain, she said.

Suzanne Baldwin, another Syracuse professor who was one of the study's principal researchers, warned that the ancient episode has implications for global climate change today.

Subglacial lakes in Antarctica were first identified in the 1960s, some sealed beneath up to 2 1/2 miles of ice. Since then, more than 150 have been discovered. But it is thought thousands may exist. The largest is Lake Vostok, similar in size to Lake Ontario. Another is the size of Rhode Island.

Baldwin and her colleagues believe there must be a more complete investigation of how a similar catastrophic release might alter the present-day environment.

Such a massive release of fresh water from the subglacial lakes would affect the stability of the East Antarctic ice sheet, the circulation of water in the Southern Ocean, and global weather patterns, all of which could change the balance of the Earth's ecosystems, she said.

Dominic Hodgson, a geologist at the British Antarctic Survey, said formation of the Labyrinth has been attributed to subglacial meltwater since at least 1993, but the Syracuse study provided a "better estimate" of the timing of its creation.

Hodgson, who has written extensively about global warming and its impact on Antarctica, said some lake water discharges are contemporary. One such rapid discharge occurred in 1997-1998 when a one-mile-square lake emptied into two other downstream lakes under the ice sheet over a period of 16 months.

"It is very unlikely that the volume of these discharges would equal those of the Miocene (epoch), when the Labyrinth formed, because the ice sheet then was much more dynamic and temperate and therefore likely contained - and discharged - substantially greater volumes of subglacial meltwater," Hodgson said.

The British scientist said that present day global warming has not had any measured effects on the volume or movement of subglacial meltwater beneath the Antarctic ice sheet "so it is premature to predict a new era of flooding as a result of global warming."



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Born in the USA


DRIVER'S RAMPAGE: Carnage in the streets of San Francisco

Matthew B. Stannard, Susan Sward and Nanette Asimov
San Francisco Chronicle
Wednesday, August 30, 2006

The first call to San Francisco police came in Tuesday at 12:47 p.m. -- a shiny black Honda Pilot had just plowed into another vehicle at Larkin Street and Golden Gate Avenue near Civic Center.

It's the kind of routine vehicle accident that police hear about innumerable times every day.

But this smashup was not routine. And it was no accident.

Within minutes, the driver of the Pilot would speed into the hills straddling the Western Addition and Pacific Heights, ripping back and forth through a 15-square-block area like a ripsaw on four wheels, leaping curbs, cutting corners and tearing the wrong way through traffic.

Throughout the chaos, only one thing seemed clear: The driver was on a hunt. A hunt for humans.
The day of carnage apparently began -- and took its worst toll -- in Fremont. A 54-year-old man was walking along the bike lane on Fremont Boulevard, between Ferry Lane and Decoto Road, when a black Honda Pilot sport utility vehicle came up behind him.

According to Fremont police Sgt. Jeff Swadener, the Pilot suddenly slipped into the bike lane, hitting the pedestrian and throwing his body several feet into a field between St. James the Apostle Catholic Church and a boarded-up Victorian house.

"Did the driver swerve on purpose, or was he just fumbling with a cell phone or something and drifted out of the lane? We don't know," Swadener said.

The man died at 11:50 a.m.

Almost precisely one hour later, San Francisco police received the 12:47 p.m. call from Larkin Street and Golden Gate Avenue, also involving a black Honda Pilot.

The Pilot was next seen on Sacramento and Polk streets, where Norris Song, manager of Sushi Rock, watched the SUV going by at 40-plus mph on Sacramento -- the wrong way.

Norris looked out of his restaurant and saw that the driver had hit a man in his late 20s. People crowded around the man, sitting on the sidewalk, until an ambulance arrived.

Customers shouted: "That guy's crazy!" By the time police and an ambulance arrived, the driver was gone.

Within minutes, the driver of the Pilot was terrorizing the neighborhoods near the Western Addition and Pacific Heights.

At California and Fillmore streets, witnesses said, three people were struck as the Pilot ran a red light and turned south toward Bush Street.

"He was going berserk," said Eliseo Billones Jr., 24.

Dropping south of Bush Street, the Pilot bounced like a mad pinball along the streets and sidewalks, leaving a trail of blood.

Police are still trying to reconstruct the sequence of mayhem, but the locations of the hit-and-run rampage were pieced together through the accounts of police and witnesses.

Police Inspector Rich Alves said that at Webster and Sutter, the driver apparently tried to hit a pedestrian, an older Chinese man, but just clipped him. The victim was taken to the hospital with a hand injury -- one of the lucky ones.

At Frankie's Bohemian Cafe, at Pine and Divisadero, the sound of thumps turned bartender Dan Fulford's head.

Outside, he saw a woman down in the crosswalk, weeping. Across the street at the 24 bus stop, a man lay in the gutter, holding the back of his head; another man held a license plate and watched the Pilot speed away.

"Everybody was standing around, kind of in shock," Fulford said. "We thought it was a regular hit-and-run."

Customers called 911 as they trickled outside, joining a growing crowd that soon spilled off into the street -- safe in the assumption that lightning doesn't strike twice.

"We thought it was all over," said Max Bran, a regular. "Hit and run -- he's gonna get caught."

Not yet.

The Pilot also struck two women outside the Palm Tree Cafe at Bush and Divisadero streets, said owner Mai Ichikawa.

Larry Jackson saw the Pilot heading east on Bush Street, approaching a red light as a woman was crossing the street in the crosswalk.

"He let her go by till she got in front and then he just punched it,'' speeding up and knocking her down, he said. Jackson attended to the woman, who didn't appear badly hurt, as the driver sped away.

The nightmare multiplied at Sutter and Steiner, where witnesses said two men were struck as they walked across the street. As would-be rescuers tried to help, the Pilot came back through the intersection -- in an apparent attempt to hit the two men again.

And then a third time, before speeding away.

"It was just like he came back to finish the work," said witness Benny Praditkul, who works on Neecha Thai restaurant at the corner of Sutter and Steiner.

A doctor dining in the restaurant ran out to help the men who were by then lying on the curb. Both men were conscious and crying. They were taken away in an ambulance.

The Pilot rocketed north on Fillmore, past a beauty salon where stylist Linda Tuttle recalled the driver sitting close to the steering wheel, dressed like a businessman, his face angry.

Amy Yoo, who owns the Trio Cafe next door, said the SUV drove by on the sidewalk, then turned left at Bush going the wrong way, back toward Larry Jackson and the crowds growing outside Frankie's Bohemian Cafe.

Barclay Lynn, 39, of San Francisco, said she and a friend were driving east on Bush when they saw a black SUV driving away from a motorcyclist who had been hit at the intersection of Bush and Fillmore.

"The motorcyclist stood in the intersection trying to signal the driver to stop,'' Lynn said. The SUV then "went speeding ... on Bush heading west, weaving in and out of traffic.''

The Pilot roared toward the intersection of Bush and California, its windshield caved in, its front and side smashed, according to witnesses.

"I was in my car coming south on Fillmore and the light turned green," said DuWyane Thomas, 29.

"Two seconds after my car was in the intersection I saw the SUV coming 35 or 40 miles an hour and hit the man in the crosswalk. His body was thrown 25 feet," he said. "His body stuck to the grille of the car and was tossed off as the car turned right. If the guy had not turned right I believe this guy would have been run over completely."

The Pilot roared north on Pine, where Bohemian Cafe bartender Fulford and his regulars began to realize something was wrong as they saw people running north, screaming warnings.

"There he is! It's the car! It's coming this way!" witnesses cried.

An ambulance had already arrived to assist the earlier victims, said Bran, one of the Frankie's regulars. It was parked by the island, traffic backing up behind. The Pilot swerved into the bus lane.

"We thought he was going to stop but instead he just stepped on the gas," Bran said. "It didn't matter, regardless of the lights."

With people scrambling to escape its path, the Pilot tore north past the ambulance, sideswiping newspaper boxes and sending them tumbling into the street. As it pulled alongside the restaurant, Fulford looked outside, and his eyes met the driver's.

"He looked at us as he went flying by," he said. "He looked right at us."

The Pilot roared north, then turned west on California Street, striking two people in front of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on California Street at Presidio Avenue. Their blood remained on the sidewalk later, and a mangled bicycle lay 50 feet farther down the sidewalk.

Security cameras in front of the center captured images of the incident, which happened at 1:12 p.m.

But the driver was still on the loose.

Moments later, the Pilot roared through a red light and turned left, narrowly missing a man as he crossed the street at California and Spruce.

"It was just by a couple of inches,'' said architect Jeremy Warms. "Then the car came down the opposite way down Spruce and the police converged in on him all at once.''

Warms said the police blocked the man's path and he heard a crashing sound -- police said one officer was slightly injured in the collision. Then the officers pulled the man out of the car and sat him down on the curb.

"He looked calm and pretty clean-cut, like a normal guy,'' Warms said. "He sat on the pavement for a good 25 minutes ... I don't think anyone said anything to him. They put him in a police car and took him away.''

The office manager at a dental office at 500 Spruce St., who identified herself only as Kira, saw the arrest from a second-floor window.

"They dragged him out and put him on the ground. They got him up. He was absolutely indifferent, no fear, no expression. He was like a zombie.''

She said he was bald, with a mustache, wearing a gray sport jacket. He showed no sign of injury. Police identified him as Omeed Aziz Popal, 29, of Fremont, and said he would be booked on 14 counts of attempted murder.

In addition to the man killed in Fremont, several in San Francisco remained hospitalized, two in serious or critical condition. But others were fortunate, including Jesse, a young man who walked out of San Francisco General Hospital at 4:30 p.m., a smile splitting the slight beard on his face.

"I'm lucky to be alive," he said. "Life's good."



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Lawyer charged with murdering neighbor

By JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN
Associated Press
Wed Aug 30, 2006

FAIRFIELD, Conn. - A lawyer climbed through a neighbor's bedroom window and stabbed him to death after being told by a family member that the man had molested his 2-year-old daughter, authorities say.

Barry James, 58, was stabbed in the chest nearly a dozen times Monday. The lawyer, Jonathon Edington, 29, was charged with murder and burglary and was released on $1 million bail Wednesday.

Capt. Gary MacNamara said that police had not received a complaint about the child being assaulted before the killing, and "we have no indication it's true or not true."
Edington's attorney, Michael Sherman, said the information came from Edington's wife. "The daughter gave the mother information which was alarming and disturbing. The mom relayed it to her husband. That was the spark," Sherman said.

James' 87-year-old mother discovered his body. When officers went to Edington's home, they found him standing by his kitchen sink with what appeared to be blood on him, and a large kitchen knife next to him on a counter, authorities said

"He's in shock," Edington's attorney said. "This is the most unexpected turn of events one can imagine with this young man's background."

Police had gone to the neighborhood before, when Edington called to complain that he could see James through a window, police said. "Either he was partly clothed or revealed parts of his anatomy that were inappropriate," MacNamara said.

Edington, a graduate of Syracuse University and Fordham University Law School, has been practicing patent law, Sherman said. Police said Edington has no criminal record.

Rita James declined to comment on her son's death.

James served two days behind bars in 2001 on a drunken driving charge, according to the state Correction Department.

"He had some bizarre behavior over the last month," said Darrell Maynard, a neighbor. "He drove his car through his garage, hit the other neighbor's building."

Another time a neighbor found James intoxicated on the street, Maynard said. James shouted obscenities at children, he said.

As for Edington, Maynard said: "Something had to happen that was terrible for this to have occurred." Edington "seemed like a computer geek or something. He was not anybody you would ever feel you were threatened by."



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President Bush 'assassinated' in new TV docudrama

thisislondon.co.uk
31.08.06

This is the dramatic moment when President George Bush is gunned down by a sniper after a public address at a hotel, in a gripping new docudrama soon to be aired on TV.

Set around October 2007, President Bush is assassinated as he leaves the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago.

Death of a President, shot in the style of a retrospective documentary, looks at the effect the assassination of Bush has on America in light of its 'War on Terror'.

The 90 minutes feature explores who could have planned the murder, with a Syrian-born man wrongly put in the frame.

Peter Dale, head of More4, which is due to air the film on October 9, said the drama was a "thought-provoking critique" of contemporary US society.
He said: "It's an extraordinarily gripping and powerful piece of work, a drama constructed like a documentary that looks back at the assassination of George Bush as the starting point for a very gripping detective story.

"It's a pointed political examination of what the War on Terror did to the American body politic.

"I'm sure that there will be people who will be upset by it but when you watch it you realise what a sophisticated piece of work it is.

"It's not sensationalist, or simplistic but a very thought-provoking, powerful drama. I hope people will see that the intention behind it is good."

The film will premier at the Toronto Film Festival in September and was written and directed by Gabriel Range.



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CBS Whittles Katie Couric's Waist In Doctored Photo

Huffington post
31/08/2006



Unbelievable catch by Brian Stelter at TVNewser, courtesy of an eagle-eyed tipster: CBS visibly altered Katie Couric's photo in its "Watch" Magazine, slenderizing her waist, arms and neck. Yowsers! TVNewser id's the first photo as Katie's official CBS photo, taken at the upfronts in May. Let's hear it for transparency and accuracy in the news!




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A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall


Drought to shut down rain forest resort

Reuters
Wed Aug 30, 2006

OTTAWA - A well-known resort town in a Canadian Pacific rain forest must shutter its hotels and businesses this week because a prolonged drought has slashed water supplies, officials said on Wednesday.

Tofino, perched on the tip of Vancouver Island on Canada's Pacific coast, is in a picturesque region that is popular with surfers and whale watchers. It relies on rainwater to fill its main reservoir, and officials ordered the shutdown because there has been no significant rainfall since June.

"We just don't have the water to offer them, that's all there is to it," Tofino mayor John Fraser told CBC television, noting the town was experiencing its third driest year on record and had ordered businesses to shut from Friday.
"We normally end up getting a good rain sometime along the way (to) bail us out. But this year has just been different ... the weather forecast for the next two weeks, even two months is still continued dry without prospect of rain," said Fraser.

Local hotels, restaurant and businesses complained that the closure would cause big losses, since it comes at the start of the popular three-day Labor Day weekend.

One local businessman said Tofino had regularly experienced problems with water supplies in previous years, in part because of a boom in tourism.

"Water has been a major issue in Tofino ... because of the fact that (in summer) 15,000 to 20,000 people are in a town that normally holds 1,500," Laird Salton told CBC.

The town has switched to a secondary supply and is advising residents to boil drinking water.

Fraser said Tofino planned to increase the size of its reservoir to prevent similar problems next year.



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Carolinas prepare as Ernesto gets stronger

Last Updated Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:45:44 EDT
CBC News

Hurricane watches have been issued for coastal communities in North and South Carolina as a strengthened tropical storm Ernesto is once again set to make landfall.

Ernesto was downgraded to a tropical depression on Wednesday, but regained some of its strength after moving out over the warm Atlantic waters. It was upgraded to a tropical storm early Thursday.
With sustained winds of 96 km/h and gusts whipping even higher, the storm is expected to make landfall on the southern Carolina coast Thursday afternoon or evening. Ernesto must have winds of 119 km/h to be bumped up to hurricane status.

A hurricane watch has been issued from South Carolina's Santee River, north of Charleston, to Cape Lookout, about halfway up North Carolina's coastline.

A hurricane watch means the region could experience hurricane-strength rain and winds within the next 12 hours.

Tropical storm warnings extend further along the coastline, from Georgia's Savannah River up to Albermarle Sound near North Carolina's northern border.

The centre is also warning of isolated tornadoes in eastern North Carolina later Thursday.

Troops on alert

Forecasters are warning people living along the Carolina coasts to expect as much as 200 mm of rain and possible localized flooding and storm surges of up to 1.5 metres.

"These amounts could cause life-threatening flash floods," the National Hurricane Centre said in its 8 a.m. ET update.

While officials haven't issued any evacuation orders, hundreds of National Guard troops are on alert, and officials in the Carolinas advised residents to be ready for anything.

"We know we're going to get a lot of rain, we know this is going to be a water event," North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley said.

According to projections, the storm could move into southern Ontario late Saturday or early Sunday.

Ernesto came ashore as a tropical storm late Tuesday in southern Florida, having lost its hurricane status after passing over the mountains of eastern Cuba.

The storm has been blamed for the death of one woman in Haiti, who was swept away by floodwaters.

Also Thursday, Mexican officials ordered the evacuation of 10,000 people as a strong Hurricane John passes by the Baja California peninsula.



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Netherlands reports 1,000 heatwave deaths in July

AFP
Aug 30, 2006

The Netherlands recorded 1,000 extra deaths during July when the country was hit by a summer heatwave, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) has said.

In the first week of July, 200 more people were reported dead than the average figure for that period.

Like other statistical agencies in Europe, the CBS did not directly blame the additional deaths on the heatwave. It noted however that deaths increased in particular on days following high temperatures.




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