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Editorial: The Bogeyman Industry
Butler Shaffer
Lew Rockwell
September 12th 2006
"For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true." ~ Lucretius
When I was a small child, I delighted in scaring my two younger sisters with specters dreamed up by me with the help of radio broadcasts. My mind was a bottomless well of monsters, hobgoblins, and - scariest of all - those amorphous demons whose lack of clarity in shape made them all the more terrifying. I was a Ziegfeld of theatrical production, with sound effects produced by my ghostly vocalizing, the pounding on walls, or the scratching of my fingernails on a door; while my special effects took the form of crawling beneath their beds at night and kicking the bedsprings. The script was nothing special, it being sufficient that the acting would generate the desired screams.
I have been out of the fear-mongering business for many decades now, the field having been taken over by well-financed professionals with whom I am unable and unwilling to compete. The stage props and special effects have become so massive and expensive as to leave little room for a small-time operator to succeed with nothing more than voice-over screeches. For the enterprise to be worthwhile today, economies-of-scale demand that the intended audience be expanded beyond one's immediate family. The bogeyman has become a multinational operation, leaving a budding young entrepreneur to content himself with annoying the neighbors with a garage band.
Fear-peddling is very much in danger of becoming monopolized by the state, which long ago realized that keeping people perennially frightened was the most effective method of maintaining them in a huddled and obedient mass. From the primitive tribal chief who was able to convince his neighbors of the threats posed by the "Nine Bows" across the river, to today's political shakedown artists with their terrorist phantoms, fear has been the essential organizing principle of politics.
As my sisters and I learned at an early age, fear objects are most terrifying when their identities are vague and formless. Lions and tigers and bears are dangerous, but never as frightening as shadowy creatures who haunt darkened streets or hallways. I recall the stark terror I experienced in listening to Lionel Barrymore's radio presentation of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," and imagining the ghost of Jacob Marley clanking his way up a lonely staircase. I also recall the disappointment I felt in seeing my first movie version of the story: I had, after all, dreamed up a far scarier specter than Hollywood was able to accomplish with special effects photography.
Like small children, we are now living in a society that the institutional order - particularly the state - tries vainly to hold together through fear. While pointing to "others" as threats to our well-being - one of the clearest symptoms of psychological projection - the state unwittingly acknowledges its terrorist foundations. We must be kept in constant terror of faceless and formless men - or women - who might attack us in some unexpected manner; we must learn to fear unattended packages, or breast-feeding mothers on airliners, or dark-skinned people who speak in languages we do not understand. We have even been warned to feel unsafe at petting zoos and roller-skating rinks, as government officials warn us to be constantly alert to dangers from "suspicious" others.
Lest we not accord world events their "proper" potential for threats to our lives, we have been provided with one of the most idiotic of political gimmicks: a color-coded chart identifying the level of fear we should feel. Like Pavlovian dogs, our operant conditioning is apparently deigned to elicit from each of us an expected rush of adrenalin as the colors move upwards from yellow to orange to red.
It is rational for men and women to have an awareness of potential dangers in their environments, and to make an appropriate response when needed. Some very dangerous and ill-motivated people did murder nearly three thousand people on 9/11. It is important that the identities and purposes of those involved be revealed, even if doing so requires us to look in directions we are uncomfortable considering. On the other hand, it is quite irrational - to the point of being pathological - to embrace the doctrine of a malevolent universe; to live in constant fear of everything and everybody at all times. I was in college, in the early 1950s, when the shadowy hobgoblin of the "communist infiltrator" became a useful tool to mobilize fear on behalf of expanded governmental power. I recall one study in which people were asked whether they suspected any of their neighbors of being communists. Many did, offering such "evidence" as a man having National Geographic maps pinned to his walls, or a couple who were accustomed to entertaining people at their home late at night. I also recall a legislator in our state who was convinced of the presence of a communist "conspiracy" within the faculty of the state university. When informed that there was no evidence to support such a charge, the solon responded that the lack of evidence only confirmed the effectiveness of the conspiracy! Again, fear-objects are rendered more terrifying when we imagine them operating in shadows, where our imaginations must be employed to fill in the details.
Today's "terrorist" or "jihadist" would doubtless be defined in the same murky fashion. Of course, "jihad" is a word very few people understand, it only being sufficient that everyone fear it. Our fears of such persons are hastened because we do not understand the causal explanations for their actions. Nor are most of us desirous of learning such causes because, to do so, would give rise to an even greater fear: that of discovering the nature of the political games being played at our expense. It is far better that we simply accept the bogeyman du jour as our fear object, and recite all the appropriate mantras on behalf of our attachment to patriotic causes that only lead to our destruction.
We are told, on a daily basis, that our lives are under constant threat of attack from terrorists. But if this is so, where are these supposed terrorists? President Bush and his defenders have been bleating that their expanded police and surveillance powers are keeping terrorists out of the country, a proposition that is rendered laughable by the daily influx of immigrants from Central America! If it has been so easy for millions of people to enter this country in spite of determined government efforts to prevent it, what efficacious mechanisms has the Bush administration put in place to keep out terrorists? Nor does the government's performance in New Orleans suggest to any thoughtful person that it is capable of making an effective response to any alleged danger.
The so-called "war on terror" is just another of the many state-run rackets designed to benefit governmental, media, and various business interests, all of whom profit from state-induced fears of others. Greater power and more tax dollars flow to political systems; the media enjoys an increase in viewers and readers; while untold numbers of government contractors, along with suppliers of goods and services for a market of frightened people, profit from this protection racket. In threatening to expand the war to other countries, the state increases hostilities from its targeted enemies, thus engendering more fears from Americans who demand "protection."
If physicians could figure out ways to inject people with deadly viruses that they could then treat with expensive tests, drugs, and medical advice, their profession would precisely correlate with the methods of the state!
President Bush and other politicians - along with the agents of disinformation in the media - spent many hours exploiting the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Bush went to the World Trade Center site ostensibly to honor the victims of that atrocity, but in fact his purpose was to take advantage of that event in order to reinforce the mindset of fear upon which the state depends for the continuing expansion of its power over our lives. Fear is a condition the state cannot allow to enervate; it must be constantly revitalized. Like a morsel of food to Pavlov's dogs, Mr. Bush's memorial wreath served - like Memorial Day ceremonies - to reinforce the conditioning that is the state's power source.
On the same day that Mr. Bush gave his performance in New York City, Faux News had a feature asking: "Is Iraq war a 'sideshow' in the war on terror?" Intelligent minds would do better to ask: is the war on terror a sideshow in the war on the American people?
Butler Shaffer [send
him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University
School of Law. He is the author of Calculated
Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival
Original
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: "Palestinians will never surrender"
Dr Sattar Kassem interviewed by Silvia Cattori in Nablus.
Silvia Cattori: You are a strong voice in Palestine, but a voice we don't hear much in French speaking countries. Why?
Sattar Kassem: For 26 years, I am not authorized by the Israeli authorities to go out of Palestine. I spent two years in the Israeli jails and eight months in a Palestinian prison under Arafat's regime. I was injured by four bullets shot by men recruited by the Palestinian authorities. But I am always here, with my pen, to help my people to recover their rights and try to get a change in the Arab world. I firmly believe that present Arab regimes must disappear, because they defend foreign interests and not the interests of their citizens. Most of these dictatorial regimes are collaborating with Israel, so against the rights of the Palestinians and the Lebanese. These regimes are the puppets of certain powers, more particularly of the United States.
Silvia Cattori: Were you arrested and the victim of an assassination attempt under Mr Yasser Arafat's regime because you criticized his policy? Does that mean that you had no democracy, no freedom under his government?
Sattar Kassem: Under Arafat's regime there was no democracy, no freedom of opinion at all. So many people where arrested! In 1999, with nineteen other persons, I signed a statement saying that there was so much corruption in the country and that Arafat was leading that corruption.(1) So he put us in jail. After that, I wrote an article entitled "Democracy under the prisons" where I criticized Arafat for his undemocratic behaviour. For that reason, they sent some people to shoot me. Arafat never wanted to implement any kind of democracy.
Silvia Cattori: Do you mean that the 1996 elections was not a fair election?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. It was not fair because there was so much fraud in that election. But there was no opposition, so nobody cared.
Silvia Cattori: So now, for the first time in the region, you had fair elections, Hamas won and, for the first time in history, we have seen the European Union punishing, by way of sanctions, a people under occupation?!
Sattar Kassem: That is true, that is a paradox. That question should be directed to the Europeans. We had fair and honest elections but we did not have the general atmosphere of democracy, and that was a problem. Probably you noticed outside too, that after Hamas won the election, it appeared clearly that a certain number of personalities -particularly in Fatah party- did not accept the result of this election.
Silvia Cattori: In such a difficult context, do you think that the Hamas movement will succeed to implement that atmosphere of democracy you call for?
Sattar Kassem: I do not think so, not because they are not able to do it, but because they are facing terrible problems from so many sides. The Israelis do not want to let this government function. Actually, the Israelis have arrested most of the ministers and many legislative members.
Silvia Cattori: When you complain about "Arab regimes" do you include the Palestinian authority?
Sattar Kassem: I include the former Palestinian authority and Abou Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), the present President of the Palestinians.
Silvia Cattori: But, when you make such a statement, is it based upon facts you can prove on the basis of your personal experience?
Sattar Kassem: I have been an opponent to the leadership of the PLO in the parliament for more than 30 years. From my knowledge and research on Arafat, I learned that he had abdicated his revolutionary task and that he was not working for the interests of the Palestinians: that he worked as a filter for the Israelis and, finally, that he had damaged the image of the Palestinians in the different Arab countries he used to live in; and also that he had damaged the ethical and the social fabric of the Palestinian people.
Silvia Cattori: Have you an example?
Sattar Kassem: For instance, he used to send the young, loyal and faithful Palestinians who proved to be real fighters to southern Lebanon where they used to get killed. Why? Because one of Arafat aides used to contact the Israelis to inform them about the mission of those fighters; so that they would not be surprised. By that way, the Israelis killed those young people.
Silvia Cattori: Do you mean that Mr Arafat never imposed any security policy to his fellows?
Sattar Kassem: What I can tell you is that information used to flow into the hands of the Israelis. Arafat never made any kind of investigation within the PLO to know who was leaking information to them. So, if you insist on such behaviour, this means that the leaking of information is receiving your consent. It is for that reason that I am saying I knew that he was not revolutionary but that he was filtering. The faithful Palestinians used to be put aside by different means, and Arafat generally kept around him those Palestinians who cared about their personal interest.
Silvia Cattori: So, in your opinion the leaders around Mr Arafat where compromising from the start?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. From the early seventies, Arafat always depended on suspect people who, I think, have security ties with the Israelis. They were corrupt when they were in Lebanon, in Tunisia, in Jordan. When Arafat was in these Arab countries he intended misbehaviour. He never prevented his aids to misbehave and do many wrong things in the Arab streets. For instance, when he would let one of his fellows humiliate a tribal Jordanian leader; this would lead the whole tribe to start hating the Palestinians. When the PLO was fired and kicked out of Beirut by the Israeli army, they went to Tunisia. The Tunisians tell us that when the Palestinians came to Tunisia, they brought with them brothels, whore-houses. All whore-houses flourished because there were so many clients - Palestinian clients. The Palestinians made bars and dirty places in Tunisia flourish. For the Tunisians, the Lebanese, the Jordanians and the Kuwaitis, these are the true Palestinians. That's what they think. From that time we have been hated in Tunisia, Kuwait and Lebanon. I wrote several articles against this scandalous corruption warning that these leaders where guiding their people towards a very terrible end. Except for people who had direct experience with these leaders, very few believed me. From 1994, after Arafat's arrival in the West Bank and Gaza, the people started to realize that what I was telling them was the truth. It is unfortunate that they discovered the truth too late. True he is dead now, but we are still suffering from all his policies. Therefore, I can say that he was no different from any other Arab leader.
Silvia Cattori: Did these people of Arafat's circle belong to the staff that came back to Palestine in 1994?
Sattar Kassem: Yes, alas.
Silvia Cattori: But did Mr Arafat know that his aides were misbehaving? Was he aware of what was happening around him?
Sattar Kassem: Yes, he was aware and he was very clever. If you are challenged several times and you don't correct your behaviour then you intend such behaviour. Arafat was warned hundreds of times by so many people that his aides were misbehaving, but he did nothing to stop that. He was supported by the money he got from Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Emirates. So, because Arafat was the man of Israel and America, these countries were asked to finance him. He had a lot of money; he was the richest so called "revolutionary man" in the world. How can that be when revolutionaries are generally under siege? Without the consent of Israel and America, these countries wouldn't give him money. These aren't independent countries. Now it is on orders from Israel and America that they aren't giving money to Hamas.
Silvia Cattori: Did you work with the people in Mr Arafat's entourage?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. I worked with them for some time and I saw what I am telling you about. This is the truth.
Silvia Cattori: Did you write about that?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. I wrote a book in Arabic called "The Road to Defeat" about what Arafat and his aides used to do.
Silvia Cattori: If I understand you well, this means that Mr Arafat was far from the reality and from the real expectations of his people?
Sattar Kassem: I think that the Israelis consumed him. That's what the Israelis do to their agents. Once they are consumed they throw them away and I think that is what the Israelis did to Arafat: after spoiling him, they threw him away because he was of no more use to them.
Silvia Cattori: When I met Mr. Arafat in April 2002, I got the feeling that he was surrounded by a number of opportunistic people. Was he not the victim of bad advisers?
Sattar Kassem: Yes, but he was the leader, the centre. He never tried to have honest advisers; he always lived with dirty people. And dirty people always give dirty advice. I even have a definition for "Arafatism" and I spread it internationally. "Arafatism" means that Arafat was the one who used corruption to bring the Palestinians to their knees.
Silvia Cattori: But in the opinion of the leaders of the solidarity movement, for instance, or of a writer like Uri Avnery who considered him as his personal friend, Mr. Arafat was a great man living in a very simple way, "a partner to build a new hope"!
Sattar Kassem: That is true; he used to live a very simple life. However, I believe that Arafat's mission served the Israelis, but not the Palestinians. His life was very simple, but his aides were very rich. Some of them lived in 5 star hotels and used to go to Monte Carlo and Las Vegas. You know how difficult life is in Palestine. I invite those people who supported Arafat and believed that he was honest with the Palestinians to come and talk openly about his policies. I am ready.
Silvia Cattori: But how can we believe that Mr. Arafat's mission was to accomplish what the Israelis wanted?
Sattar Kassem: At least for me, all my expectations about Arafat turned out to be true. I am convinced of what I am saying. For instance, in 1979, I wrote that the PLO was going to recognize Israel. At that time, the people didn't believe me and started saying that I was a spy, because I raised doubts about Arafat. In 1994, when Arafat came to stay in Palestine, I wrote that he would do the same thing he used to do in Lebanon; that he would open whore-houses, he would damage the Palestinian ethical and social structure and he would co-operate security-wise with the Israelis. Unfortunately, all that I wrote turned out to be true. I told all this frankly to the authorities. That is why they shot me.
Silvia Cattori: When you speak of the "Palestinian ethical and social structure", what did you mean exactly?
Sattar Kassem: Any people should live with an ethical code, so as to be able to respect others and to live with them. If the ethical code is absent, then everybody will be against everybody else. If there are no ethics how can we live together? This is what happened during Arafat's time. All the bad people, the gangsters, became strong and all the good people stayed at home. Arafat time established a system of terrible values, which caused respect among people to disappear.
Silvia Cattori: Despite all of that, it appears that PLO leaders succeeded in winning the sympathy of the left all over the world. Until today, most of the leftist parties consider Arafat and PLO representatives as revolutionary leaders and they still support them, and distrust Hamas authorities?
Sattar Kassem: Generally speaking, Arafat was entrusted with giving that image. But he was not honest at all. Of course, Arafat was not the only leader in Palestine. There were leftist leaders too, like George Habache, for instance, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. There was Nayef Hawathme also, who is the leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Arafat and his aides - although they knew beforehand that the international community was not going to liberate Palestine - gave that false image that they were really working for Palestine with the help of the international community. The Palestinian leaders and the Arab leaders in general, used to show to the international community that they care about their people. In fact they are the true allies of Israel.
Silvia Cattori: If the PLO representatives are, like you say, detrimental to the interests of the Palestinians, why doesn't the Hamas government remove them?
Sattar Kassem: From the time Hamas won the elections, Fatah leaders, with the support of their representatives outside, started working very hard against the new government. They have been co-operating with the United States, with Arab countries and with Israel to topple the Hamas government. Of course, that is part of Arafat's heritage. They have been working very hard to rob Hamas of its authority and topple the government. That is why they have been concentrating on the PLO since Hamas won the elections. The PLO was so disregarded by Arafat and his aides - they did not care about the PLO. They did not even care about the Palestinian National Charter. When they signed the Oslo Accords, despite the fact this agreement was contradictory to the Palestinian National Charter, none of them cared. Now they care, because they want to strip Hamas of its authority. So, that is part of a conspiracy. It is an international conspiracy.
Silvia Cattori: Do you mean that the PLO representatives are part of a conspiracy against Hamas?
Sattar Kassem: Yes.
Silvia Cattori: Do you consider Mrs. Leila Shahid, the PLO representative in France for more than twenty years, and who was appointed recently by Mr Abou Mazen to the European Union, as part of what you call a "conspiracy"?
Sattar Kassem: All of them are cooperating with the Europeans States, the United States and the Israelis against our real national interests. I personally believe that Leila Shahid is part of Arafat's court. For me, as a Palestinian, Leila Shahid is not a reliable person. I do not trust her. If I was in the Authority, I would remove her, because what she has been talking outside of Palestine all about for so many years is a kind of surrender. This will not bring any just peace to the Palestinians. We want peace, but the peace we believe in is the peace that will bring the Palestinian refugees back to Palestine. Other than that, on the contrary of what she says, we have not to talk about. So, all the Palestinians who are part of the Oslo Accords, for us, are not accepted. They are part of Arafat's policies, part of the corruption, and part of the collaboration with the Israelis. Now, if some people say that they won us some friends, we too can win friends. We can explain our situation; everybody can explain the difficulties and the miseries the Palestinians have been facing over the years. And, as for the leftists and for the rightists, we can also talk to them and try to convince them of our real aspirations. So, to gain supporters in Europe is not enough. What Leila Shahid, and all the others who follow her participated in is the liquidation the Palestinian cause. And that is why today most of the Palestinian people support Hamas.
Silvia Cattori: Did you vote for Hamas?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. I voted for Hamas. Why? Because we want to regain the Palestinian cause, because we should keep our just cause alive. And the Palestinian cause is not the establishment of a so called "Palestinian authority"; that is not what we care about. We care about the return of five million of refugees who have been suffering for around sixty years and living under very difficult and dire conditions in refugee camps. That is what we care about. And besides, Arafat and Fatah and all of these PLO people who pretend to represent us have also been conspiring against other Arab countries, such as Syria and Lebanon. They have been contributing to the Israeli and United State propaganda. They have also been standing against Iran, although Iran has been extending so much help to the Palestinians. Again, if we talk about financial aid that these people insist we should get from Europe that is an adventure. How can I depend, and my live, on the Europeans? At any time if they feel displeased with me, they will say, "OK, I am turning off the tap." That is what happened. Although the European states insist on democracy, it appears that they do not defend democracy, they do not want democracy, and they want a democracy that is tailored to their own interests. So, if we want to live, we have to depend on ourselves. And under occupation, it is the responsibility of Israel to provide enough food and to provide salaries for the people under occupation. That is international law. Besides, if I need some help and some financial assistance, I should get it from friends, not from those who are supporting Israel.
Silvia Cattori: Who are these friends?
Sattar Kassem: At least I can get it from Malaysia for instance; I can get it from Iran. I was a presidential candidate in 2005 and I told the people: if I am elected, I am not going to take a penny from those who are not our friends, because at any time they may threaten us. I want my live secure.
Silvia Cattori: Are the people who succeeded Mr. Arafat better?
Sattar Kassem: Abou Mazen is a very weak person and he doesn't have a vision. All Palestinians know him. I have known Abou Mazen personally for more than thirty years and I know that he has been against resistance all the time. So, Arafat was just putting him there until the time comes.
Silvia Cattori: In your opinion is he an honest man?
Sattar Kassem: I think he is better than Arafat in that sense, but he is very weak. He is like a tool. Fatah people supported him to keep him in power, especially as they knew he was weak.
Silvia Cattori: Was he not the man that Israel and United States promoted, as from 2003?
Sattar Kassem: He was Israel's choice, but all the influential people in Fatah are the men of Israel and the United States. So, these three parties made that choice, but the person chosen is very weak and incapable.
Silvia Cattori: Are the authorities of the Hamas government more capable?
Sattar Kassem: The government of Hamas has nothing to do with the former Fatah governments. It hasn't taken the chance yet. Since Hamas won the legislative elections, all sort of troubles started to obstruct that government from carrying out its duties. Hamas hasn't taken the chance so we can't judge, we must wait. Generally speaking, Hamas didn't take the offensive. They are scared. What I mean by taking the offensive is not, of course, to carry guns and kill everybody.
Silvia Cattori: Are you thinking of the offensive against corruption? Did you expect that the Hamas government would open the files as soon as it took office and arrest the corrupt politicians?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. The new authorities should, at least, open the files of corruption. But they didn't do so. They didn't even talk about it. They are scared. The new government was even supposed to collect the thousands of cars that Arafat distributed to his own people, sell them and use that money to pay salaries to the employees who have been without income for months.
Silvia Cattori: So why didn't the Hamas government collect these cars? Do they fear causing a civil war?
Sattar Kassem: As I told you, they are scared. When they are asked to correct the situation they will tell you that confrontation will lead to civil war. This is not an excuse, since, if they open the files of corruption, they would be able to make all Fatah people leave the country.
Silvia Cattori: How could the Hamas government take the risk of a confrontation, since the real power, like the Security Service, is still under Mr Abou Mazen's orders?
Sattar Kassem: I think that our authorities have good intentions, but they can do nothing, because whatever they say or do, they will be considered internationally as "terrorists". However, if they had opened the corruption files, then most of corrupt Fatah leaders would have left the country. That isn't "terrorism"; that has to do with an internal problem.
Silvia Cattori: Are you in contact with members of the Hamas government?
Sattar Kassem: I see them, I meet them, and I phone them in Gaza and here in the West Bank.
Silvia Cattori: The Israeli officials used to portray them as mad people? How are they in fact?
Sattar Kassem: They are nice people. They are honest and they would like to serve the Palestinians. Unfortunately they are facing many obstacles and they are accused of being "terrorists", that is the problem.
Silvia Cattori: Do you think that the European Union supports the United States' boycott against the Hamas government with the intention of helping the Israelis to win and to constrain the Palestinians to give up their rights? Further, has France been pushing in 2004 for the 1559 resolution in order to suppress the only force of resistance able to constrain Israel to draw back?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. Look at the Europeans: they want Hamas disarmed; they want Jihad Islamic disarmed, they want Hezbollah disarmed, they want Syria and Iran disarmed. So, who is going to defend the Arabs? Why should Israel not be disarmed? This is completely unfair and that is completely unreasonable. It is unacceptable. I want to defend myself. Who could be so mad as to accept to be crushed without fighting back? How on earth can they ask Hezbollah to be disarmed, while Israel is armed to the teeth? The Europeans States are actually adopting the Israeli point of view; they are not adopting a fair and balanced point of view - they are completely biased. If they want us disarmed, they should ask Israel to disarm as well. Then there will be a kind of justice.
Silvia Cattori: The Swiss diplomacy the promotion of the "Geneva Accord", relying on Mr. Abbed Rabbo; an "accord" that the majority of the Palestinian factions have strongly refused.(2) Is this denial of your aspirations not upsetting the Palestinians?
Sattar Kassem: I think this Swiss initiative does not represent the Palestinians, but rather the parties who have compromised with Israel and the United States. The western powers believe that there is a kind of democracy that is tailored to their own interests and to the interests of the neo-liberal capitalism. If it deviates, then it is not democracy. That is unreasonable. You know, they think that they are dealing with an immature and adolescent people. No, we are mature, we have our own thinkers, we have our own intellectuals, we can analyse things and we can read them in the right way. These Palestinians, who are cooperating with Israel, with the Europeans countries and the Americans to halt Hamas, are actually committing treason. How could these people, like Rabbo, incite against Hamas saying that, "If you do not support the Geneva Accord, if you don't support those who promoted it, the Hamas extremists will ascend to power"?
Silvia Cattori: But now, the Hamas government is in power. Again, why didn't Hamas condemn the attitude of all those people who go on participating in masquerades, in contempt of democracy?
Sattar Kassem: Hamas does not have the power. Until now Hamas has not had the power. The security services are all under the leadership of Abu Mazen, and from the time of the elections, Fatah has been making so many problems for Hamas, that they did not leave them any time to plan, or to think about what to do. Fatah has been busying Hamas in daily problems. Besides, Abu Mazen has monopolized all the security services; so upon whom can they depend? Fatah has created a real problem, not only for Hamas, but for the people. For example, you can go now into town and you will see armed people. Who are they? They are Fatah people. They are armed and they harm the people, they steal from private properties, they can threaten, they blackmail the people, and sometimes they kill. I was shot by these people in 1995.
Silvia Cattori: Are they still doing the same?
Sattar Kassem: Yes, they are still doing the same. They were brought up by Yasser Arafat and financed by Yasser Arafat, so many of them now belong to the security service. The security service is supposed to preserve and to observe the security of the people. Instead they are threatening the people's security.
Silvia Cattori: That means that, as yesterday, under Mr. Arafat's power, people are scared because Fatah people are still powerful?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. We are scared of the Israelis and of Fatah people. Both are making threats to our security.
Silvia Cattori: So, you have two camps: the camp of Fatah, which is struggling to not lose its power and the camp of Hamas, who would like to defend the interests of the people, but which is impotent?
Sattar Kassem: That is true. And the camp of those who are against our own people is strong, because they are supported by Israel, by the United States, and by the European countries. Mr. Bush said openly, "We are supporting Abu Mazen financially and militarily." They are supplying him with guns. Guns to use against whom? Against Israelis? No, against Hamas, of course!
Silvia Cattori: Does this mean that, when Mr. Abu Mazen and the PLO representatives call the new Hamas government to respect the results of the agreements negotiated with Israel, it is just because they want to preserve the privileges they got?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. They want Hamas to adopt the Oslo Accords so that they will preserve their personal interests and privileges. The Europeans and the Israelis needed supporters for the Oslo Accords. This is why they encouraged the corruption that Arafat established in the West Bank and Gaza. For the United States, Israel and European countries, corruption was an instrument to get supporters. So, much of the European money was wasted for the corrupt people. Palestinians do not believe that the negotiation has been productive for them; on the contrary. So they don't want it anymore.
Silvia Cattori: Do you think the European Union will change its strategy and recognise the legitimacy of the Hamas authorities?
Sattar Kassem: No. The European countries will never recognize Hamas, never. The European states are a tool in the hands of the Israelis and the Americans. There are not independent. They are not united. If Hezbollah wins the war, the movement within the Arab countries will accelerate.
Silvia Cattori: What are the differences between Hamas and Hezbollah?
Sattar Kassem: Hamas does not have a strong organisation, weapons or training. Hamas is under occupation. Palestinians suffer, but regardless, they will continue their fight. They will never surrender.
As for the Hezbollah, Israel will not be able to disarm or cripple them. Hezbollah will remain strong. What is now important about Lebanon is that the people should know what terrible things Israel is doing against this country, as well as against Palestine. In fact, Israel is not destroying Hezbollah. Israel is harming the entire Lebanese civil population. The attack on Lebanon was huge, but Israel hit the civilians and hasn't been hitting Hezbollah. Thousands of civilians have been killed and injured. Tens of thousands of houses have been destroyed, as well as bridges, factories and electrical generators. So the people need to learn about the mentality of the Israelis and their destructive behaviour. That is why I think we have to make the Palestinian cause an Arab and an Islamic one. Hezbollah has an excellent organization, a good administration, a good conflict management. Israel has tried several times to launch attacks against Hezbollah. This is not the first attack, but Hezbollah always turns out to be the winner. The problem for us is that recognition by the Europeans and the Americans of our right to resist is something impossible, because we aren't powerful. Unless we are strong enough, we can't convince anyone.
Silvia Cattori: You arrive at the same conclusion as the Lebanese political analyst, Youssef Aschkar,(3) who thinks that the so-called "war against terrorism" is a war against societies and against communities, a war cynically designed to destroy entire countries and peoples. He also concludes that the latter are no longer protected by their authorities.
Sattar Kassem: Yes, that is alas true. This is not, as Bush and Blair say, a war against "terrorism". This is a war against all of us.
(1) This refers to the «Appeal of the 20 » drafted by the members of the Legislative Counsel, among whom was Hussam Khader. Israel abducted him in 2003 and since, he remains imprisoned. This appeal denounced Mr. Arafat's compromises with the occupying Israelis, corruption, and the difficulties generated by the Oslo-Accord.
(2) The Geneva-Accord, signed in Geneva in December 2003, is the result of two years of negotiations. This agreement is consider unjust and unfavourable to the Palestinians. The Israeli, Yossi Beilin, and the Palestinian, Abed Rabbo, were the chief negotiators, along with the pro-Israeli, Alexis Keller, mandated by Switzerland to pilot this initiative.
(3) http://www.voltairenet.org/article136760.html
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Editorial: War Stories
By Elias Khoury
09/10/06 "Al-Ahram"
Hundreds of men and women walk over the rubble, carrying the coffins of 19 martyrs. Black clothes, tears and ululations. I stood to the side of the road observing the scene. I'm saying, 'to the side of the road', when it wasn't a road. I'm saying 'the scene' when it wasn't a scene. How to narrate feelings that have no name? When I went into the village of Aita Ashaab I couldn't believe my eyes. There was the name but no village. Nothing but a great ruin blocking the horizon. All the houses demolished, walls leaning on emptiness, emptiness leaning on dust.
I went to the village last week as if returning among the returnees. I wasn't carrying a house key. But I carried my heart and went along, only to be shocked at the demolished village filling up with returnees embracing the void. Everything but the sun was clothed in black. The sun was grey and stinging. I was walking in the rubble when a young man stood next to me and started narrating stories of heroism and death. But I didn't need stories that I already knew. I'm saying 'already knew' when I didn't know them. But I felt that the scene was coming at me from within an aged memory. Not my memory, rather a mixture of things some of which I lived in the past. But why am I seeing the ghost of 1948? Why am I seeing Barwa and Ghabsiya and Ein Zaitoun?
There they went into the villages, evicted their inhabitants, lined the houses with dynamite and blew them up. Here they didn't go in. Well, they had barely reached the village square when death showered them; they retreated, went on retreating till they reached the Blue Line, leaving behind the remains of a Merkava tank, part of a jeep, abandoned containers. But they had destroyed the village before going in. And, as in the year of the Nakba, they ordered the residents to leave with the help of amplifiers. I saw the memory of the year of the Nakba, and I saw the peasants carrying the keys to houses without doors or walls. This time the peasants returned in black, carrying the keys. And I saw those years when we shed our young in the villages of the south, watering the olives of Lebanese Galilee with the blood of the young of Palestinian Galilee.
That was in 1968. We were in our twenties. Kafar Shouba, Kafar Hamam and Habbariya were the start of the journey that taught us the way to Bent Jbeil, Aita Ashaab and Aytaroun. I saw as if I was remembering. But memory deceives, and so does the eye.
I stood before the ruins, and the tears flowed. No, it was before that scene that I stood, when the people carried the coffins walking over the rubble with the dust of death blanketing them. I couldn't feel the tears collecting at the edges of my eyes, burning them, before they fell on my cheeks. The dust covered us under the burning sun, the sweat trickling out of our pores and spreading over our bodies. I didn't realise I was crying when I did. I had never experienced weeping that came out of the whole body, mixing tears and sweat.
No, it was neither sadness nor memory. It was rather that storming feeling of belonging to this land, of those people, the dead and the living, being family.
How to tell a martyr who does not know me that we have become family, and that it should be disallowed to have to part the day we met? How to tell demolished houses that they have become un-visited homes, that the tobacco shoots hanging in gorged rooms are the sweat of my brow, that they are the undone work that has become my name and address? How to speak without that water that has given me a thirst for love? How to carve in my heart words that emerge from the depths of pain, which speak a language only the victim knows?
I listened to the stories of heroism, walked along the demolished alleyways with a group of young men, before we reached the outskirts of the village, where the marks of the Merkava's chains stood side by side with the demolition truck that razed the houses. I listened to the details of the battle, in which a battalion of the invincible army was forced to retreat.
They came upon them from underground, from the dumps, from where they could not expect them, turning Khillat Warda, where the two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner, into a field of the resistance and a confrontation arena.
I stood and there was the procession. Coffins carried on the shoulders. A woman throwing rice at the procession, men hitting their own cheeks, women mixing weeping with ululation. And I saw the ruins as if I were in an infinity of dust without beginning or end. As if that same procession would cut through all the destroyed villages and towns. Everywhere is destroyed, without ceilings -- except for the coffins covered with black cloth and the flags of the resistance. Nowhere but the coffin, no story but death, no water but tears.
I saw as if I was, rather, remembering, and listened to the story of a succession of generations. Abu Shawqi, an octogenarian from Hawla, said he walked off, fleeing the Hawla massacre in 1948, and has not stopped walking for 58 years. 'But this time we did not flee,' the white-haired man said, sitting on the mastaba of his house in the southern village. 'This time we learned that we do not flee, we force them to flee.'
At the entrance to Bent Jbeil, which witnessed the most violent battles of endurance, I stood before a pond with geese swimming in it. Everything in the town is demolished, but the geese swim on, caring for neither dust nor the smell of corpses being dragged out from under the rubble.
A horizon of water, and stories of heroism and death.
Peasants carrying coffins on their shoulders. Coffins turned into ships, tears turned into water, stories of resisting the Israeli monster, and a south that stretches from the Blue Line to the blue of the sky.
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Editorial: 9-11; the "unifying myth" for the war on terror
By Mike Whitney
09/11/06 "Information Clearing House"
To a large extent, the war on terror is a shabby promotional scheme designed to mobilize the nation for a permanent state of war while curtailing civil liberties. There's nothing original in this analysis, but it does explain the importance of media as a vehicle for Bush's public relations campaign. It also explains why high-ranking officials in the administration are still provided unlimited air-time to reiterate the same bland bromides over and over again without being challenged.
To commemorate the 5th year anniversary of 9-11, the political talk-shows have again given Cheney, Rice and Bush an open forum to make their claim that "America is safer" and that "we are winning the war on terror". Cheney even went so far as to say, "We've done a helluva job here at home on homeland security....I don't know how you can explain 5 years of no attacks, 5 years of successful disruption of attacks, 5 years of defeating the efforts of Al Qaida to come back and kill more Americans."
In Cheney's mind, the government is performing its task satisfactorily if he can say, "What are you complaining about, you're still alive aren't you?"
This is a fair indication of how far the "bar has been lowered" for government accountability since Bush took office.
Condoleezza Rice's performance on CNN was grimmer than Cheney's. Rice repeated the absurd claim that the US might yet uncover evidence of links between Saddam and Al Qaida. She said, "There were ties between Iraq and Al Qaida."
The fact that government officials lie is hardly shocking or newsworthy. What is surprising, however, is the complicity of the media in propagating those deceptions without argument. As Robert Fisk noted some time ago, the news should actually be called, "High-ranking government official said;" since the news exclusively reflects the war-mongering, business-friendly perspective of government.
This phenomenon has gotten steadily worse since the attacks of 9-11. In fact, the war on terror is the greatest public relations campaign of all time, involving all the major media which continue to promote the same, tired themes ad nauseum. There is virtually no refuge in the corporate media for the nearly 40% of the public who don't accept the official version of 9-11, or for the 63% of American who "no longer believe the Iraq war was worth it", or for the vast number of people who "don't believe we are safer". Their views are simply dismissed as irrelevant since they do not advance the objectives of ownership and the state.
This "open-conspiracy" of controlled media seems much more interesting to me than the many anomalies surrounding the attacks of 9-11. At the very least, there is a concerted effort by corporate big-wigs and western elites to manage public perceptions through an increasingly sophisticated disinformation campaign. (Rumsfeld appears to be way out front of his colleagues in this regard by targeting the internet, chat rooms, blogs, liberal journalists, and Arab media)
The central part of the present campaign is now, and will continue to be, the war on terror, that threadbare PR scam which justifies America's global resource war. 9-11 is the unifying myth that animates the war on terror and without that point of reference the whole project would quickly unravel.
Today's anniversary of 9-11 promises to be another futile attempt to reengage the public and try to shore-up support. Bush can be expected to invoke the same stale imagery of dusty fireman and smoldering buildings while the bag-pipes wail in the distance. The nation will again be dumped into a bottomless pool of grief in the vain hope that their feelings will reinvigorate the war effort.
It won't work.
The American people are tired of Iraq, tired of Bush, and tired of the war on terror. It will take more than Bush's feigned patriotism or David Horowitz's revisionist-rehash in "The Path to 9-11" to energize the war on terror. Even the best propaganda campaign has its limits.
The only way to get the public back "on board" is with a "massive casualty-producing event" in the United States. And, don't think they haven't thought about that in Washington.
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Editorial: When assumption trumps objectivity
By Habib Battah
Sunday 03 September 2006, 12:23 Makka Time, 9:23 GMT
After four weeks of devastating Israeli air raids across Lebanon, American news network NBC began its Nightly News bulletin with its anchorman, Brian Williams, asking: "Does the US really have any influence in this war?"
Hours earlier on sister network MSNBC, anchorwoman Chris Jansing seemed to be at a similar loss. "Can anything be done to stop the violence?" she asked.
But to an American audience, the thought of a Syrian or Iranian news anchor posing the same questions would be fit for a comedy skit.
After all, the Syrians and Iranians wield an obvious "influence" over the course of the conflict according to the NBC channels, which like CNN, Sky and many other Western new organisations reported relentlessly on claims that Hezbollah's rocket imports were made possible through the help of its two "rogue" allies.
But where was the parallel analysis of multi-billion dollar weapons shipments bound for Israel from the United States? Most Western broadcasters reported religiously on the number of rockets fired at Israel each day of the month-long conflict, often comparing fresh figures with those of previous days and weeks, even peppering the audit with analysis and commentary.
Absent however was almost any accounting of the daily tonnage of US-manufactured munitions dropped from an unknown fleet of US-manufactured jets levelling an untold number of Lebanese homes and villages.
Sanitised
On American television screens, the US role in this conflict was a relatively sanitised one, pictured as diplomatic rather than military; seen across negotiating tables and in visits to foreign capitals - a far less sinister role than that repeatedly attributed to the Iranians and Syrians over allegations of their financial and logistical support.
In fact, so penetrating was the alleged connection that some channels, such as Bloomberg Television, began referring to Hezbollah on second reference as merely "the Syrian- and Iranian-backed group". But why did Bloomberg not choose to identify Israel, the largest official recipient of US foreign military assistance for decades, as "the US-backed state"?
Whether the decision was deliberate or unconscious, the prevailing notion of non-military US involvement is just one of many underlying assumptions communicated by the US media about the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, assumptions that were continually reinforced in comments made by anchors and by hired analysts.
Viewed as part of an overall package, the assumptions appear to reflect US foreign policy, particularly the relationship with Israel, much more than the pursuit of journalistic objectivity.
Of course it would be unfair to generalise by suggesting that the Western media did a poor job of covering this war. On the ground in the midst of air strikes, ground fire and naval attacks, American and European journalists, particularly those reporting from south Lebanon, genuinely risked their lives to tell the story.
Contradictory
The efforts of many Western reporters operating out of towns such as Tyre at a time when the Israeli military vowed to fire on any vehicle that moved were no less valiant than those displayed by their colleagues from the Arab media. However, a clear difference emerged between battlefield reporting and the animated conversations that went on thousands of miles away in air-conditioned studios. At some points it even appeared as if the two were completely contradictory.
Beginning with the war in Iraq, American media outlets developed an obsession with hosting former military personnel as analysts, so much so that it now appears as if large American networks have become a sort of retirement programme for the US military's top brass. An inherent problem with this formula is a tendency to reflect the views and strategic interests of the US government rather than offer critical analyses that shed light on the complex realities of the battlefield.
Take coverage of the Israeli commando raid on Baalbeck during the third week of the conflict on August 2. The Israeli military had reported that it kidnapped five Hezbollah members, but MSNBC's reporter on the scene quoted local villagers who said those apprehended were "just nobodies".
Hezbollah also claimed that ordinary civilians, not fighters, had been kidnapped. Meanwhile Israeli newspaper Haaertz quoted Lebanese sources as saying that more than a dozen civilians were killed in the attack.
Details may still have been sketchy on the ground in the Bekaa valley but in MSNBC's East Coast studio, the view from its military analyst, Rick Francona, was starkly clear. Francona, a former lieutenant-colonel in the US Air Force, swiftly praised the attack as an "excellent raid" and "well done" on Israel's part. He then began to postulate confidently about the motives behind the operation, saying "Israel obviously had intelligence of high-profile targets" and naming Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, as a possibility.
Optimism
But even Israel's chief of staff, Dan Halutz, appeared to be playing down the operation, with an article in Haaretz quoting him as saying "the soldiers had not aimed to take any individuals in particular, but rather to demonstrate that the IDF [Israeli military] could reach any part of Lebanon".
Not only does Francona manage to analyse the situation solely from Israel's point of view, but his optimism even appears to exceed that of the Israelis themselves.
Weeks later, on August 23, the Lebanese press would post pictures of the Baalbeck captives returning home, indicating that all five men had been returned to Lebanon through the International Committee of the Red Cross, which served as a liaison with the Israeli military.
The chief suspect had been Hassan Nasrallah; not the leader of Hezbollah but an elderly village farmer that shared the same first and last name. "They wanted to use us for propaganda about the arrest of Hassan Nasrallah," the former detainee told Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper in a reference to the Hezbollah leader.
Among the other returned captives were relatives and friends of Nasrallah, the farmer that is.
Looking back at the initial coverage, one would wonder why MSNBC and countless others chose to report the claims of the Israeli military machine over those of witnesses on the scene.
Malicious
The Baalbeck incident was by no means isolated. Time and again, the TV generals seemed so confident in Israel's stance that any talk of malicious activity was dismissed regardless of pending investigations.
Another case in point was Israel's attack on a UN post, killing four observer troops, on July 26. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, quickly condemned the strike as "apparently deliberate", noting "a co-ordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long-established and clearly marked UN post".
The Irish foreign ministry said one of its officers at the post had made at least six warning calls to the Israelis during their bombardment. Reports also emerged of email correspondence from a Canadian soldier giving warning that the Israelis had been striking near the UN position for "weeks upon weeks", according to the soldier's wife who was quoted by Canadian TV as calling the Israeli attack "intentional".
Meanwhile UN officials quoted by Reuters said "the firing continued even as rescue operations were under way", while Annan called for a "full investigation" into the "disturbing incident".
But these multiple claims seemed to be of little consequence to the CNN military analysts back home. A retired US Air Force general employed by the station dismissed the controversy outright, saying the Israeli strike was simply "a screw-up, a major screw-up".
Assumptions over Israel's intentions were not limited to analysts but also to senior journalists, such as Tim Marshall, Sky's foreign editor, who confidently labelled the attack as "inadvertent" and "an accident waiting to happen" on the same evening as it had occurred. It was almost as if Marshall were pre-empting the Israeli government's apology and denial of wrongdoing, which would not come until the next day.
'No evidence'
Instead of adopting a cautious approach to a developing story - as any good journalist would - the authoritative voices from CNN and Sky seemed merely to reflect the views of Israel and its allies. Listening to a press statement from the US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, it almost seemed as though the press outlets had become a conduit for official statements. "We take them at their word," Bolton said of the Israeli reaction. "There is no evidence to the contrary."
Less than a week after the killing of the UN observers, the headlines shifted to another attack by Israel, this time in Qana where at least 28 civilians, including 16 children, were killed as a result of air attacks. Qana also happens to be the site of an attack by Israel in 1996 that killed more than 100 people - Israel denied responsibility at the time but subsequent UN investigations were inconclusive.
Israeli officials also denied responsibility for the more recent bloodbath, accusing Hezbollah of somehow staging the attack by firing from the area, using the civilians as human shields. Israel's UN ambassador, during a speech at the Security Council, even went so far as to entertain the possibility that Hezbollah "wanted and wished" for the mass killing.
American news outlets began to pick up the claim, despite the absence of ground reporting or any other kind of supporting evidence. As bodies were being carried out of the rubble, a CNN anchorwoman in Atlanta turned to an Arab media analyst and asked if Arab TV channels acknowledged Hezbollah's use of civilians as human shields. The analyst did not refute the claim but merely indicated that Hezbollah criticism was a taboo subject for regional news networks.
Human shields
Later CNN military analysts would describe Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization" that breached Geneva Conventions by using human shields. Despite the lack of physical evidence in either direction, it seemed just as easy for the in-studio analysts to assume Israel's innocence as it was for them to assume guilt on the part of Hezbollah, even when the Israeli military did the actual shooting.
Israel's third "accident" came on August 11 when six innocents were killed as its missiles struck a civilian convoy fleeing the bombardment in South Lebanon.
Three days later, when the smoke began to clear and a shaky ceasefire took hold, the Lebanese death toll had reached 1,100, the vast majority being civilians. On the Israeli side, the majority of deaths were military, 117 soldiers and 40 civilians, according to Reuters. (Hezbollah casualties were quoted as a separate figure with the group claiming no more than 80 and Israel claiming more than 500.)
The vast disparity between Lebanese civilian deaths and those of Israeli civilians remained formulaic throughout the war, but the TV generals seemed to tell a different story, constantly using the adjective "indiscriminate" to describe Hezbollah's rocket attacks and "very accurate" in describing Israel's tactics and weaponry.
In fact, on several occasions, Israeli officials interviewed by American broadcasters touted Israel's policy of restraint and gave warning of the country's ability to pursue a "scorched earth policy" in Lebanon.
Interviewers often accepted such a response either by ending the interview at that point or moving on to different questions. One can hardly imagine an American interviewer remaining silent if an Arab official spoke of flattening the Jewish state in such genocidal terms.
Unrealistic
Few phrases were repeated more often during this war than that of "Israel's war against Hezbollah" and "Israeli strikes on Hezbollah targets" mainly in South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut.
The examples of this usage on NBC, CNN, Sky and many, many other channels were simply ubiquitous throughout the month of war coverage - the two phrases used many times a day as an introduction to the whole package of reporting, all framed as a war solely on Hezbollah. However, on the ground, there could not have been a more unrealistic assessment of reality.
According to a report released by Oxfam on August 14, the destruction across Lebanon included "7,000 homes, 160 factories, markets, farms and other commercial buildings, 29 water and sewage-treatment plants, electrical plants, dams, ports and airports, 23 petrol stations, 145 bridges and overpasses; 600 kilometres of roads".
The figures do not include damage to television towers, which were attacked in at least four different places across the country, disrupting signals and causing millions of dollars in damage to the Lebanese broadcasting industry.
Where were the TV generals to explain the threat of media coverage to Israel's war on Hezbollah? Lebanon's entire transnational road system was incapacitated by Israeli missiles, but when anchors rationalised this by speaking of "Hezbollah supply lines", where were the military men to explain that weapons could easily be smuggled through back roads and mountain passages?
Was it clear that Hezbollah did not have its own discreet transportations routes to begin with?
And when the Lebanese international airport was struck repeatedly, where were the generals to explain that rockets had traditionally been carried into Lebanese territory on flat beds and not commercial airliners?
The battlefield analysts seemed so transfixed on analysing Israel's invasion tactics that they rarely looked at the conflict from the opposite end of the map. So much airtime was devoted to Israeli commanders and military spokesman claiming victory, but Hezbollah representatives seemed to have been boycotted by the American press much as they had been boycotted by the American government.
Basic
In reality, Hezbollah was claiming victories of its own, but at times it seemed as if the American media were too busy reflecting their government's viewpoint to have noticed.
The TV generals dutifully relayed Israel's daily claims of destroying rocket launchers and medium-range missiles by shading overhead maps with digital pens. But rarely did they discuss Hezbollah's attacks on scores of Israeli Merkava tanks in what was seen as valiant effort at resisting one of the world's most powerful military machines.
If the shading of military maps proved too complicated for the American public to comprehend, broadcasters and commentators often broke down their assumptions in more basic terms. When Israel, for example, decided to launch a land invasion to claim all Lebanese territory south of the Litani river, CNN's Wolf Blitzer simply referred to the attack as "what some are calling a new Normandy," and "Israel's D-Day"; a reference to the Allied powers' invasion of Nazi territory in World War II.
When Blitzer began to discuss that day's events on the battlefield, he, like dozens of other American broadcasters, spoke of Hezbollah rockets landing in "Israeli neighbourhoods". Israel on the other hand, retaliated by bombing "Hezbollah strongholds".
But in reality, these strongholds were also neighbourhoods and support among their residents for Hezbollah could not have been any less than Israeli citizens' support for their own military. If Hezbollah areas cannot be considered neighbourhoods, then why not refer to Israeli neighbourhoods as "Israeli military strongholds"?
After all, a recent report in the Guardian newspaper in Britain by Jonathan Cook alleged that Israel also built military installations and mortar batteries near residential areas. In any case, the lack of balance is problematic: it conveys humanity on the one side and vague militarism on the other.
Omitted
As another example, Blitzer conducted one of two CNN interviews with the grieving wife of an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hezbollah. But where were the parallel interviews with the families of Lebanese held by the Israelis? How could audiences really identify with the other side if all of its emotive, humanising details were repeatedly omitted?
In a show that aired on MSNBC during the first week of the conflict, Chris Matthews illustrated daily life in Haifa by comparing it with a city in California; "very modern", he explained. Cosmopolitan Beirut, on the other hand, where the nightlife rivals any capital in Western Europe, did not get a mention in the entire show.
Detail from Israel also entered the religious realm during a separate broadcast with Rita Cosby, an anchorwoman who qualified a report of rocket attacks on the city of Nazareth as an attack on the "home town of Jesus".
But where was the mention of Jesus's wine-making miracle in the Lebanese town of Qana during the mass killings that took place there? And what of the many other biblical references across Lebanon, in Tyre and Sidon when the two cities were subjected to continuous Israeli shelling?
In the end, some broadcasters ditched the metaphors altogether. Tucker Carlson, an MSNBC talk-show host, actually criticised Israel's tactics in fighting Hezbollah while interviewing an Israeli spokesperson. But he made no qualms with objectivity during his concluding statement. "I hope you succeed," he told the Israeli official. "And I hope you do it quickly."
Can one imagine an American broadcaster ever conveying such enthusiastic support to a Hezbollah official?
Habib Battah is a Lebanese writer
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9/11 - Whodunnit? The Answer Is Clear
Poll: 45% of Americans blame Bush for 9/11
September 11, 2006
CNN
WASHINGTON - The percentage of Americans who blame the Bush administration for the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington has risen from almost a third to almost half over the past four years, a CNN poll released Monday found.
Asked whether they blame the Bush administration for the attacks, 45 percent said either a "great deal" or a "moderate amount," up from 32 percent in a June 2002 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
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Bush unbowed in 9/11 address
Last Updated Mon, 11 Sep 2006 22:44:27 EDT
CBC News
The war on terror is no less than the "struggle for civilization," U.S. President George W. Bush said Monday night on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Bush made his nationally televised address from the Oval Office, after a day spent honouring the nearly 3,000 dead at all three sites of the attacks - New York City, Shanksville, Pa., and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
"America did not ask for this war, and every American wishes it were over, and so do I," Bush said. "But the war is not over - and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious."
Bush said that most of those behind the 9/11 attacks have been killed or captured, and promised that the search for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda members would continue.
"Our message to them is clear: No matter how long it takes, America will find you, and we will bring you to justice," he said.
Bush characterized the Middle East as the key to the world's peace, highlighting a vision where its citizens would be free from the "deserts of despotism."
"If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons," Bush said.
No attacks since 9/11
While mentioning the fact there have been no further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, the president pointed to bombings around the world and charges brought in apparent foiled plots as as evidence that extremism remained a threat.
Bush praised the efforts of law enforcement and the intelligence community, and promised to continue to supply them with "every response and legal authority to do their jobs."
Last week, Bush publicly acknowledged for the first time that suspects accused of terrorism have been detained abroad in secret CIA prisons, indicating that all of them were now at at the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the military tribunals ordered by the Bush administration at Guantanamo were illegal.
Global threat
After addressing the global threat, Bush attempted to make the case for the war in Iraq, though he admitted that Saddam Hussein's regime was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
Three days ago, the U.S. Senate intelligence committee concluded that there was no evidence of a link between the former Iraqi president and al-Qaeda, based on an analysis of CIA intelligence.
While Bush said the world was safer without Hussein in power, he did not go into the type of specific reasoning that Vice President Dick Cheney did while appearing on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday.
Cheney asserted that Hussein would have prospered from the global spike in oil prices, would have ignored United Nations sanctions and would have resumed his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
Bush said the notion that a pullout in Iraq would lead to an end to terrorist attacks was mistaken, adding he "cherishes the memory" of the nearly 3,000 Americans who have been killed in the Iraqi war.
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Bush confesses to war crimes
Nicolas J S Davies
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Sep 11, 2006
George W. Bush's speech on September 6 amounted to a public confession to criminal violations of the 1996 War Crimes Act. He implicitly admitted authorizing disappearances, extrajudicial imprisonment, torture, transporting prisoners between countries and denying the International Committee of the Red Cross access to prisoners.
These are all serious violations of the Geneva Conventions. The War Crimes Act makes grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and all violations of Common Article 3 punishable by fines, imprisonment or, if death results to the victim, the death penalty.
At the same time, Bush asked Congress to amend the War Crimes Act in order to retroactively protect him and other U.S. officials from prosecution for these crimes, and from civil lawsuits arising from them. He justified this on the basis that "our military and intelligence personnel involved in capturing and questioning terrorists could now be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act . . . ," and insisted that "passing this legislation ought to be the top priority" for Congress between now and the election in November.
His profession of concern for military and intelligence personnel was utterly misleading. Military personnel charged with war crimes have always been, and continue to be, prosecuted under the Universal Code of Military Justice rather than the War Crimes Act; and the likelihood of CIA interrogators being identified and prosecuted under the act is remote -- they are protected by the secrecy that surrounds all CIA operations.
The only real beneficiaries of such amendments to the War Crimes Act would be Bush himself and other civilian officials who have assisted him in these crimes -- Rumsfeld, Cheney, Gonzales, Rice, Cambone, Tenet, Goss, Negroponte and an unfortunately long list of their deputies and advisors.
Bush asked Congress to do three things in these amendments. "First, I am asking Congress to list the specific recognizable offenses that would be considered crimes under the War Crimes Act so our personnel can know clearly what is prohibited in the handling of terrorist enemies."
One prong of the U.S. government's attack on the Geneva Conventions has been the assertion that they do not provide a laundry list of what techniques of treatment and interrogation are permitted or prohibited. This is, of course, because the Geneva Conventions instead contain blanket prohibitions on torture, cruelty and humiliation. It has only been the efforts of U.S. officials to encroach on these prohibitions that may have raised doubt among U.S. personnel as to what is and is not permitted.
Captain Ian Fishback, the military interrogator who blew the whistle on Camp Nama (Nasty Assed Military Area) in Iraq, has contrasted his orders in Iraq with the rules he had been taught, "My feelings were that it clearly violated what I had learned as the appropriate way to treat detainees at West Point. . . . You don't force them to give you any information other than name, rank, and serial number. That's the gist of the Geneva Conventions." Captain Fishback's account of the war crimes he was involved in at Camp Nama is in the latest edition of Esquire magazine.
Bush continued, "Second, I'm asking that Congress make explicit that by following the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act, our personnel are fulfilling America's obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions."
This is the crucial change that Bush wants in the law. The War Crimes Act currently criminalizes murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, humiliating and degrading treatment, and arbitrary punishment of prisoners, based on the prohibitions in Common Article 3 of the Geneva conventions. Bush is asking Congress to replace the straightforward prohibitions in Common Article 3 with the provisions of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, which includes extraordinary protections for U.S. officials.
These protections are clearly designed to undermine the Geneva Conventions, the War Crimes Act and even the Nuremberg Principles. Section 1004(a) of the Detainee Treatment Act states that, in the case of "operational practices . . . that were officially authorized and determined to be lawful at the time they were conducted, it shall be a defense that such officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces or other agent did not know that the practices were unlawful and a person of ordinary good sense and understanding would not know the practices were unlawful."
This would shift the legal standard from the clear one defined by the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act as it is presently written to one of who knew what when, requiring courts to conclude beyond reasonable doubt that the perpetrator knew his actions were unlawful. Even if opinions written by Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jack Goldsmith and David Addington were found to have no legal basis at all, they could suffice to cast doubt on Bush and his colleagues' knowledge of their crimes, which would be crucial under the amended law.
"Third," Bush said, "I'm asking that Congress make it clear that captured terrorists cannot use the Geneva Conventions as a basis to sue our personnel in courts, in U.S. courts. The men and the women who protect us should not have to fear lawsuits filed by terrorists because they're doing their jobs."
This would protect U.S. officials from civil liability for human rights violations. Prisoners released from Guantanamo have already filed such lawsuits against the U.S. government, Bush, Rumsfeld and other officials, which might help to explain why these amendments are Bush's "top priority."
The central myth of the War on Terror is that the world faces an unprecedented threat from terrorism that renders obsolete the existing laws of war and international behavior.
Bush framed his justification of torture in a classic use of this mistaken logic: "And in this new war, the most important source of information on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists themselves. Captured terrorists have unique knowledge about how terrorist networks operate. They have knowledge of where their operatives are deployed and knowledge about what plots are under way. This is intelligence that cannot be found any other place. And our security depends on getting this kind of information. To win the war on terror, we must be able to detain, question and, when appropriate, prosecute terrorists captured here in America and on the battlefields around the world."
The context Bush did not provide is that this applies equally to all prisoners of war. Captured soldiers usually do possess information that would be valuable to their captors, and the Geneva Conventions do constrain the ability to extract this information from them, but this is by design. Based on bitter experience, the people and governments of the world have decided that torture is so abhorrent that it must be completely outlawed, even though this results in the loss of information that might save lives or even alert captors to an existential threat to their country.
The purpose of the Hague and Geneva Conventions is to provide all people with certain protections in times of war, to place some limits on the otherwise limitless human suffering that war inflicts. Arguably, governments have agreed to rules of war precisely so that they can continue to wage limited war without plunging their societies into the total chaos that would result from unrestricted use of increasingly destructive modern weapons against entire populations. The Geneva Conventions afford different status to different classes of people, giving rise to different protections for combatants, prisoners of war and civilians. However the notion that certain classes of people fall entirely beyond the protection of these Conventions is not a serious interpretation, unless one is talking of something other than human beings.
For five years, U.S. government officials have justified unlawful actions with political arguments that have no legal merit. Now that the political tide is turning, Bush and his associates are behaving like other war criminals throughout history, marshalling what power they have left to shield themselves from the legitimate consequences of their actions.
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Bush Aims to Kill War Crimes Act
By Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith
09/05/06 "The Nation"
The US War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a felony to commit grave violations of the Geneva Conventions. The Washington Post recently reported that the Bush administration is quietly circulating draft legislation to eliminate crucial parts of the War Crimes Act. Observers on The Hill say the Administration plans to slip it through Congress this fall while there still is a guaranteed Republican majority--perhaps as part of the military appropriations bill, the proposals for Guantánamo tribunals or a new catch-all "anti-terrorism" package. Why are they doing it, and how can they be stopped?
American prohibitions on abuse of prisoners go back to the Lieber Code promulgated by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. The first international Geneva Convention dates from the following year.
After World War II, international law protecting prisoners of war and all noncombatants was codified in the Geneva Conventions. They were ratified by the US Senate and, under Article II of the Constitution, they thereby became the law of the land.
Wishing to rebuke the unpunished war crimes of dictators like Saddam Hussein, in 1996 a Republican-dominated Congress passed the War Crimes Act without a dissenting vote. It defined a "war crime" as any "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. It thereby advanced a global trend of mutual reinforcement between national and international law.
The War Crimes Act was little noticed until the disclosure of Alberto Gonzales's infamous 2002 "torture memo." Gonzales, then serving as presidential counsel, advised President Bush to declare that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to people the United States captured in Afghanistan. That, Gonzales wrote, "substantially reduced the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act."
Noting that the statute "prohibits the commission of a 'war crime' by or against a US person, including US officials," he warned that "it is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges." The President's determination that the Geneva Conventions did not apply "would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."
Unfortunately for top Bush officials, that "solid defense" was demolished this summer when the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruled that the Geneva Conventions were indeed the law of the land.
The Court singled out Geneva's Common Article 3, which provides a minimum standard for the treatment of all noncombatants under all circumstances. They must be "treated humanely" and must not be subjected to "cruel treatment," "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment," or "the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."
As David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center pointed out in the August 10 issue of The New York Review of Books, the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rusmfeld "suggests that President Bush has already committed a war crime, simply by establishing the [Guantánamo] military tribunals and subjecting detainees to them" because "the Court found that the tribunals violate Common Article 3--and under the War Crimes Act, any violation of Common Article 3 is a war crime." A similar argument would indicate that top US officials have also committed war crimes by justifying interrogation methods that, according to the testimony of US military lawyers, also violate Common Article 3.
Lo and behold, the legislation the Administration has circulated on Capitol Hill would decriminalize such acts retroactively. Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, told the Associated Press on August 10, "I think what this bill can do is in effect immunize past crimes. That's why it's so dangerous." Human rights attorney Scott Horton told Democracy Now! on August 16 that one of the purposes of the proposed legislation is "to grant immunity or impunity to certain individuals. And these are mostly decision-makers within the government."
The Coming Debate
Bush officials have not acknowledged that one of their real motives for gutting the War Crimes Act is to protect themselves from being prosecuted for their own crimes. But so far they have apparently offered only one other reason for tampering with the law: The existing law, especially the Geneva language prohibiting "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment," is too vague to enforce. (Perhaps the Bush Administration should declare the US Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" as too vague to enforce as well.)
Fidell noted in an August 9 Washington Post article that military law includes many terms like "dereliction of duty," "maltreatment" and "conduct unbecoming an officer" that may appear vague but that are nonetheless enforceable. The Army Field Manual bars cruel and degrading treatment. When Attorney General Gonzales recently testified at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that "outrages upon personal dignity" was too ambiguous, Senator John McCain stated that top military lawyers see no problem in complying with Common Article 3.
The arguments for preserving the War Crimes Act and rejecting the Bush amendments, in contrast, are multiple and overwhelming:
1. Commitment to the Geneva Conventions protects US service people from future retaliation.
As former Secretary of State Colin Powell has argued, abandoning the Geneva Conventions would put US soldiers at greater risk, would "reverse over a century of US policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions" and would "undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops, both in this specific conflict [Afghanistan] and in general."
2. The War Crimes Act will prohibit "torture-lite" in the future.
According to Scott Horton, the proposed legislation is "designed to provide an OK to certain techniques which fall just short of torture that are being used by the CIA," including "waterboarding, longtime standing and hypothermia," techniques that have been "linked to severe injuries and fatalities."
3. The War Crimes Act will prohibit future Abu Ghraib-type outrages.
The Bush Administration's legislation would remove the prohibition on "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." Repealing the War Crimes Act, the Washington Post's R. Jeffrey Smith reported, is decriminalizing the forced nakedness, use of dog leashes and wearing of women's underwear that shocked the world at Abu Ghraib prison.
Derek P. Jinks an assistant law professor at the University of Texas, author of a forthcoming book on the Geneva Conventions, said in an August 9 Washington Post article that the "entire family of techniques" used to degrade, humiliate and coerce prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo "is not addressed in any way, shape or form" in the Bush Administration's proposal. Retired Army Lieut. Col. Geoffrey Corn, until recently chief of the war law branch of the Army's Office of the Judge Advocate General, said in the same article, "This removal of [any] reference to humiliating and degrading treatment will be perceived by experts and probably allies as 'rewriting'" the Geneva Conventions.
This "rewriting" could have very concrete ramifications in practice. The international tribunal prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia deemed acts like placing prisoners in "inappropriate conditions of confinement," forcing them to urinate or defecate in their clothes, and threatening them with "physical, mental, or sexual violence" to be humiliations, degrading treatment and outrages. The proposed changes to the War Crimes Act would indicate that it is not a crime for Americans to conduct such acts.
4. Gutting the War Crimes Act will promote the perception of the United States as an outlaw country.
As a letter signed by sixteen members of Congress recently said, such legislation "would harm the reputation of the United States as a leader promoting and protecting human rights." What would be more deserving of scorn than a country that lets potential war-crime defendants repeal the very law under which they might be prosecuted?
5. The Bush legislation unfairly exempts high government officials from the very war crimes charges they are leveling against lowly "grunts."
Since the start of the Iraq War there have been more than thirty prosecutions under the military law that prohibits war crimes, with many more pending. But they have all prosecuted low-level military personnel. Gutting the War Crimes Act would leave the military "bad apples" at the bottom subject to prosecution but would let the civilian "bad apples" at the top evade all responsibility.
As Horton points out, the Uniform Code of Military Justice already incorporates the Geneva Convention rules, but it does not apply "to Donald Rumsfeld or Stephen Cambone or to people in the White House." The point of the War Crimes Act is that it "spreads the application of the Geneva Conventions the next level up to civilians, and particularly to civilian policymakers." From the beginning, the "prosecutorial focus" of the War Crimes Act "was intended to provide deterrence at that level." Repealing it undermines the fundamental principle of equal justice under law.
6. Preserving the War Crimes Act is part of reasserting the rule of law in America.
The War Crimes Act has been a central focus of the Bush Administration's scorn for all Constitutional limits on the power of the President and the executive branch. It was the idea that the President could by fiat declare US and international law null and void that animated the Gonzales torture memo. It was this denial of constitutional limits that the Supreme Court resoundingly rebuked in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. A rebuff to the Bush Administration's attack on the War Crimes Act is a reassertion of those constitutional limits.
The War Crimes Act can be a bridge to a more just and peaceful world. The incorporation of the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions on war crimes into national law affirms America's commitment to international law. It embodies an implementation of the global heritage of the Nuremberg trials, the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. It embeds that tradition within our own national law.
In the wake of World War II, Justice Robert Jackson, chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, observed that "the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law." Making statesmen responsible to law is what the War Crimes Act is all about.
Defending the Law
The arguments for preserving the War Crimes Act are conclusive (except perhaps to those who might face criminal prosecution under them). Indeed, the Administration's decision to gut the War Crimes Act is a gift to those who want to see American statesmen held accountable to national and international law. It suggests that the Bush Administration itself recognizes the criminality of many of its actions. And it shows in the sharpest relief why the War Crimes Act is needed.
But, at least for the moment, Bush's Republican allies still control both houses of Congress; they are in a position to slip a repeal of the War Crimes Act into any piece of legislation they choose. Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey, senior member of the House Committee for Homeland Security, told The Nation, "The Bush Administration and the GOP leadership in Congress is trying to quietly excuse and even codify cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners in US custody, at secret CIA prisons abroad and even the abhorrent practice of extraordinary rendition [the outsourcing of torture and other cruel treatment to other countries]."
While the Administration has been lining up its ducks, the campaign to save the War Crimes Act has just begun. The advocacy group Just Foreign Policy has started an online campaign to save the War Crimes Act. "This is not an obscure point in the law. What's at stake here is whether, for example, the abuses of prisoners by sexual humiliation that shocked us at Abu Ghraib are clearly illegal under US law," national coordinator Robert Naiman observes. "If we found these actions outrageous, we are obligated to tell our members of Congress to protect the law that bans them."
Markey adds, "Every American citizen should call the White House and their members of Congress because these changes being made in the dead of night could be the green light for other countries that capture American troops to treat them cruelly or torture them."
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CIA interrogators 'sign up for liability cover'
News.com.au
September 11, 2006
MANY CIA officers involved in questioning war-on-terror detainees have signed up for a government-reimbursed insurance plan that would pay their legal expenses if they are sued or charged with criminal wrongdoing, The Washington Post reported today.
Citing unnamed current and former intelligence officials, the newspaper said the trend reflected heightened anxiety at the Central Intelligence Agency that officers may be vulnerable to accusations they were involved in abuse, torture, human rights violations and other misconduct.
They worry that they will not have Justice Department representation in court or congressional inquiries, the report said.
The Post said the anxieties stem partly from public controversy about a system of secret CIA prisons, in which detainees were subjected to harsh interrogation methods, including temperature extremes and simulated drowning.
The White House contends the methods were legal, but some CIA officers have worried privately that they may have violated international law or domestic criminal statutes, the paper said.
President George W. Bush announced last week that he had transferred the last 14 detainees from secret CIA prisons abroad to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and expressed his determination to try them.
But defence attorneys for the suspects are expected to argue that admissions made by their clients were illegally coerced as the result of policies set in Washington, The Post said.
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Passengers' chat will be recorded to foil hijackers
11/09/2006
Telegraph
Air passengers could have their conversations and movements monitored as work intensifies to design the terrorist-proof aeroplane.
Researchers in Britain and Europe are looking at technology that would see a comprehensive network of microphones and cameras installed throughout the aircraft, including the lavatory, which would be linked to a computer.
This computer would be "trained" to pick up suspicious behaviour, said Catherine Neary, of Bae Systems, one of the British participants in a £24 million European Union project Safety of Aircraft in Future European Environment.
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"It would pick passengers who are behaving oddly or in an unruly manner," she said. "They may appear nervous, or could be getting up while the plane is taxiing. If someone looks as if they are praying, the microphones would be able to tell if they were by picking up key words."
Eventually, the computer would be programmed to understand a variety of languages.
"Passengers are not being snooped on by humans, but by machines which will process the data, which would not be stored after the flight unless there is an incident," she said.
"There are likely to be cameras and microphones in the toilet, because that is where terrorists go to assemble bombs." The camera could also be trained to detect seemingly harmless items being left in aircraft lavatories that could later be assembled to make a lethal device.
"If people know they will be safer, they will be happy to accept the sensors, but we are considering the legal implications of this."
Bae Systems is co-operating with Reading University on the project designed to make the aircraft as secure as possible. "We are concentrating on onboard threat protection," said James Ferryman, a lecturer in computer science.
"We would be looking at ways in which people behave which would give rise to suspicion. It is a challenge to distinguish between situations - such as two children play fighting or someone being attacked."
The aviation industry is monitoring the project closely. ''We are always looking at new initiatives that would enhance security," a British Airways spokesman said. "BA already has CCTV which monitors activity outside the reinforced cockpit door. But we believe it is robust ground security which is the key to safety in the air."
Even before the aircraft takes off, passengers could be swept with an "electric nose" a hand-held device which could tell if they had had any contact with explosives.
Other initiatives include sophisticated biometric cameras at the check-in desk and departure gate. By comparing the iris, it could check that the passenger presenting him or herself at the airport was the one boarding the aircraft.
Work is already in hand to examine putting electronic chips on luggage that would match ones embedded in the boarding pass. They would make it easier to link passengers to their bags or, more importantly, find them when they are separated.
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Agents scrutinize all in the US in the name of surveillance
LA Times
11/09/2006
As Americans consider whether they are more safe or less five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, one thing is certain: They are being monitored by their own government in ways unforeseen before 19 terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Within minutes of the strikes, U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering authorities mobilized to find the culprits and prevent another attack. They ramped up the tapping of Americans' phone calls and voicemails. They watched Internet traffic and e-mails as never before. They tailed greater numbers of people and into places previously deemed off-limits, such as mosques.
They clandestinely accessed bank and credit card transactions and school records. They monitored travel. And they broke into homes without notice, looking for signs of terrorist activity and copying entire file cabinets and computer hard drives.
Authorities even tried to get inside peoples' heads, using supercomputers and "predictive" software to analyze enormous amounts of personal data about them and their friends and associates in an effort to foretell who might become a terrorist, and when.
In the five years since the attacks, the scope and breadth of domestic surveillance has steadily increased, according to interviews with dozens of current and former U.S. officials and privacy experts.
Some of these programs have been debated and approved by the courts and Congress - the traditional checks against unjustified intrusions on Americans' right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment.
But others have not, and some of them are operating without the knowledge or approval of judicial and legislative overseers, officials and experts say.
Two such classified programs have been disclosed by the media, over the objections of the Bush administration. One involves the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of suspicious phone calls and e-mails into and out of the United States. The other is an effort by the Treasury Department and the CIA to monitor international bank transfers.
Beyond top secret
Privacy experts believe that some of the activity is so secret that none but a small circle of top Bush administration officials and operational support personnel know about it - even though Congressional leaders are legally required to be notified.
"The White House simply refuses to be straight with us about what they're up to," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who says he has pressed unsuccessfully for answers as a member of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, which entitles him to classified briefings on the subject.
In response, administration officials say that they have the authority to conduct whatever surveillance is under way, in part due to the special war powers granted to President Bush by the Congress a week after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In a speech Thursday, Bush lobbied Congress for updated and expanded surveillance powers, saying they are needed to keep pace with a stealthy and technologically savvy enemy.
Meanwhile, the domestic surveillance effort continues within virtually every U.S. counter-terrorism, law-enforcement and intelligence agency.
The programs comprise actual surveillance of Americans' activities and communications, and "dataveillance," the practice of mining the vast amounts of personal data compiled on Americans.
On both fronts, the NSA is leading the effort from its headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., just outside Washington, D.C.
Robert Deitz, general counsel for the NSA, told Congress last week that the NSA's primary mission since Sept. 11 has been to develop ways of eavesdropping on al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations that have used cutting-edge technologies to stay one step ahead of their pursuers.
The NSA has improved its ability to monitor the entire spectrum of communications, including fiber-optic and wireless transmissions, instant messages, BlackBerry e-mails and voice conversations sent over the Internet, say officials and experts.
They add that the intelligence community may not be breaking any laws because these kinds of communication might not be covered under loosely worded federal laws that don't account for advances in technology.
Several congressional officials and privacy experts said they believe the NSA also tracks the movement of "persons of interest" by the electronic signals emitted by their cell phones and the global positioning navigation system in the vehicles they drive.
Letter to search
On the ground, the FBI has led the way on the low-tech surveillance front, using little-known powers given to it under the USA Patriot Act and other post-Sept. 11 policies.
Before Sept. 11, virtually all FBI surveillance was authorized by court-approved warrants and subpoenas issued through federal grand juries, which have some measure of oversight by citizen jurors and judges.
Since then, however, the FBI has dramatically increased the use of "National Security Letters," which allow agents to obtain information on people they deem suspicious with little probable cause and without judicial approval. Unlike traditional search warrants, the "target" does not have to be notified.
FBI agents are also using what are known as "sneak-and-peek" warrants on a wider scale, entering hundreds of homes clandestinely to gather intelligence and copy computers and files, again without notification.
And they have conducted surveillance on antiwar, religious, civil rights and environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Treasury Department agents have directed searches of bank records and other financial information in more than 4,000 cases, usually without notifying the U.S.-based individuals, companies, charities and nonprofit organizations, interviews and documents show.
The U.S. military has a program known as "Threat and Local Observation Notice," or TALON, which compiles reports of suspicious activity in and around military installations.
Under TALON, military intelligence squads have monitored Americans at scores of events, including religious and antiwar protests, and filed suspicious action reports, according to records obtained by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
High-tech surveillance
Many government officials and privacy experts say the most alarming expansion in domestic surveillance involves the use of computers and the Internet.
Because gadget-happy consumers are snapping up the latest high-technology devices and online services to make life easier, authorities and private data brokers now have easy access to a digitized footprint of their activities and interests. Phone records, political preferences and purchasing habits are now only mouse clicks away from government agents.
After Sept. 11, government agencies began combining information collected by private companies with their own storehouses of intelligence. Authorities then used "social networking" software to map relationships among large groups of people in America and overseas. And they used "predictive" software to determine terrorism risks associated with individuals based on their activities, purchases, personal quirks and habits.
In 2004, an investigation by the Government Accountability Office found 199 U.S. government uses of data mining, 54 of which used private-sector data, including credit-card records, Internet logs and other information, some of which was of questionable accuracy.
"This has to be largest intrusion on privacy that we have ever seen in the history of this country, undoubtedly," said James Dempsey, policy director for the nonpartisan Center for Democracy and Technology and a former Congressional staffer.
One former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with even the most secret surveillance and data-mining programs defended them, saying that when combined, they form a nearly all-encompassing web that is critically important to the overall counter-terrorism effort.
He said the programs have been hugely successful in catching individual terrorists and in allowing authorities to home in on geographic "hot spots" and ways that terrorist cells communicate and operate.
"If you lose programs like these, you rip a huge hole out of the hide of protection we have put in place around the United States," the former official said. "They are tremendously important, in ways people cannot even imagine."
Angry lawmakers
But even some supporters of such programs believe the administration's failure to disclose them to Congress and the courts could lead to a Constitutional showdown, and soon.
Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote recently to President Bush that he had learned of "some alleged intelligence community activities about which our committee has not been briefed.
"If these allegations are true, they may represent a breach of responsibility by the administration, a violation of the law, and, just as importantly, a direct affront to me and the members of this committee who have so ardently supported efforts to collect information on our enemies," wrote Hoekstra, a staunch Bush ally.
"The U.S. Congress," Hoekstra added, "simply should not have to play Twenty Questions to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution."
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War's Critics Abetting Terrorists, Cheney Says
Washington Post
September 11, 2006
Vice President Cheney offered a veiled attack yesterday on critics of the administration's Iraq policy, saying the domestic debate over the war is emboldening adversaries who believe they can undermine the resolve of the American people.
"They can't beat us in a stand-up fight -- they never have -- but they're absolutely convinced they can break our will, [that] the American people don't have the stomach for the fight," Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The vice president said U.S. allies in Afghanistan and Iraq "have doubts" the United States will finish the job there. "And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we've had in the United States," he said. "Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists."
Cheney unapologetically defended the 2003 invasion that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, saying the administration would have done "exactly the same thing" even if it knew before the war what he acknowledged knowing now -- that Iraq did not have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Yet he also gave a bit of ground, as he was pressed repeatedly by interviewer Tim Russert about statements that turned out to be wrong or damaging to his credibility.
The vice president acknowledged he had been overly optimistic in predicting a quick demise to the Iraqi insurgency that continues to bedevil U.S. forces. More than a year ago, in May 2005, Cheney proclaimed the insurgency was in its "last throes." Since then, more than 1,000 U.S. troops have died and sectarian violence has intensified.
"I think there's no question . . . that the insurgency's gone on longer and been more difficult [than] I had anticipated," Cheney said. But he added that 2005 will be seen as a "turning point" in Iraq's history because of elections that have led to a democratic government.
He did not mention warnings from the intelligence community and others that the post-invasion Iraq could be consumed by religious violence, and that pacifying the country would require many thousands more troops than those committed by the White House.
Cheney's appearance came on the eve of the five-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and as the Bush administration ratchets up efforts to convince Americans that the war in Iraq is part of a global struggle against Islamic terrorism and extremism. As it tries to keep GOP majorities in Congress, the White House is hoping to make the elections more about battling terrorism in general than about the unpopular war in Iraq.
In sending out Cheney to do a nearly hour-long interview with Russert, the administration chose one of the principal authors of its national security strategy -- but one whose stature has been eroded, in part, by assertions that Democrats and even some administration allies consider as lacking credibility.
Democrats reacted with scorn to Cheney's latest comments.
"Vice President Cheney's influence over our nation's foreign policy and defense has made America less safe," said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.). "The vice president was a chief architect of the effort to manipulate intelligence to build a case for invading Iraq; he ignored the threat of insurgencies, he took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, and today he made clear that he would do nothing different."
Cheney appeared unruffled as Russert asked him again and again about his past remarks or about policies that have lost popularity with Americans.
When Russert presented polling data suggesting that most Americans do not view Iraq as part of a war against terrorists, Cheney replied, "I beg to differ. . . . The fact is, the world is much better off today with Saddam Hussein out of power."
Russert pushed Cheney on his repeated assertions that Sept. 11 plotter Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, which the vice president has used to raise the possibility of a connection between Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks.
Cheney said yesterday the CIA had presented a Czech intelligence report to him of the meeting but later "backed off" it; U.S. intelligence reports, however, repeatedly cast doubt on that meeting, even in the months before Cheney discussed it publicly in September 2002, according to a declassified report released Friday by the Senate intelligence committee.
Separate from the issue of Sept. 11, the vice president maintained, prewar Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism. He quoted former CIA chief George Tenet in saying there was a relationship between Hussein and al-Qaeda going "back at least a decade" before the U.S. invasion.
Cheney asserted that the slain al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had fled Afghanistan and "set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of '02 and was there from then, basically, until basically the time we launched into Iraq." The Senate intelligence committee reported that, by October 2005, the CIA had debunked the idea of any prewar relationship between Zarqawi and Hussein's government.
Cheney told Russert that he had not read the Senate report.
Cheney said it is "hard to say" whether there are more terrorists now than five years ago. But the fact that al-Qaeda has launched no successful attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, shows that the administration's policies are working, he added.
"I don't know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years of, of defeating the efforts of al-Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans," Cheney said. "You've got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right."
Cheney said he sees "part of my job is to think about the unthinkable, to focus upon what, in fact, the terrorists may have in store for us." He said the threat that drives administration thinking is "the possibility of a cell of al-Qaeda in the midst of one of our own cities with a nuclear weapon, or a biological agent. In that case, you'd be dealing -- for example, if on 9/11 they'd had a nuke instead of an airplane, you'd have been looking at a casualty toll that would rival all the deaths in all the wars fought by Americans in 230 years."
Comment: Make no mistake, 'ol Dick is trying to label "peaceniks" as "terrorists". Sounds strange? Well heck! Haven't you noticed that black is white and up is down in the world of the terrible terror trio of Israel the US and the UK?
Here's a novel idea for big brave Dick. Why doesn't he get his sorry ass over to the Middle East and engage in a "stand-up fight" with ordinary Iraqis or Palestinians. There would be no shortage of offers from people eager to give Dick some of his own medicine.
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Cheney reasserts Iraq/al-Qaeda links
By Demetri Sevastopulo
Published: September 10 2006 21:01 | Last updated: September 10 2006 21:01
US Vice-President Dick Cheney repeated assertions on Sunday on links between the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda despite a recent Senate intelligence committee report that concluded otherwise.
In defending the decision to invade Iraq despite its lack of weapons of mass destruction, Mr Cheney said the fact that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former head of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed in a US air strike this year, was in Baghdad before the war was evidence that Iraq had links to al-Qaeda.
But a Senate intelligence committee report on prewar Iraq intelligence released on Friday concluded that there was no evidence that Mr Hussein's Ba'athist regime had either harboured or turned a blind eye to Mr Zarqawi.
In an hour-long interview on NBC television, Mr Cheney argued that the invasion of Iraq had improved the country. While recognising the increase in sectarian violence, he said Iraq was better off without Mr Hussein. "If we weren't there . . . the situation would be far worse than it is today," Mr Cheney said.
He acknowledged that the US intelligence on Iraq had been poor but he appeared to put the blame on the Central Intelligence Agency, saying George Tenet, the former director of the spy agency, had told President George W. Bush that the case that Mr Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk".
But he said the lack of weapons of mass destruction would not have changed the decision to invade Iraq.
"If we had to do [it] over again, we would do exactly the same thing," Mr Cheney said. He also defended the use of controversial methods - including the domestic spying programme and US detention policies - in the "war on terror", saying they had helped stop further attacks on the US. "There has not been another attack on the US," he said. "That is not an accident."
Congress is considering legislation to authorise the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping programme. In the wake of a June Supreme Court ruling that the military commissions created to try prisoners at Guantánamo Bay were illegal, the White House and Congress are working towards approving a revamped military tribunal.
Republicans are becoming concerned that Democrats could gain control of one, or both, houses of Congress in November elections. With decreasing support for the Iraq war, which has resulted in the deaths of 2,662 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis, the administration is trying to argue that success in Iraq is key to winning the "war on terror".
Mr Cheney, who said last year the insurgency was in its "last throes", acknowledged on Sunday that "we did not anticipate an insurgency that would last this long". But he said the US was "well on the way" to success, meaning viable government, a country that was not a safe haven for terrorists, and the elimination of al-Qaeda.
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Poll: Half Britons think Britain "losing terror war"
www.chinaview.cn 2006-09-12 17:35:22
LONDON, Sept. 12 (Xinhua) -- More than half of British people think the "war on terror" is being lost, the BBC reported on Tuesday.
According to a latest survey, carried out for the BBC five years after 9/11 attacks, 53 percent of respondents believed the British government was losing the "war on terror," and 56 percent thought it was being lost by other western governments.
Four out of 10 people questioned said they felt less safe now than when the so-called war on terror began after the 9/11 attacks, while 11 percent felt safer.
In the survey, some 52 percent thought British troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan now, and half believed they should leave Iraq. And about 52 percent believed western governments should not negotiate with al-Qaida, and almost a third thought they should.
Some 55 percent people said British government is too closely aligned with U.S. foreign policy, and 19 percent thought it was about right.
According to the report, GfK NOP surveyed almost 1,000 people nationally on Sept. 8-10 for the BBC's Ten O'Clock News.
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Terrorism - Standard Strategy Of The 'Democratic' State
UK agents 'had role in IRA bomb atrocities'
Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
Sunday September 10, 2006
The Observer
The controversy over claims that Britain allowed two IRA informers to organise 'human bomb' attacks intensified this weekend.
A human rights watchdog has handed a report to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which concludes that two British agents were central to the bombings of three army border installations in 1990.
Meanwhile the Police Ombudsman's Office in Belfast confirmed it is investigating allegations by the family of one victim that the bomb in Newry on 24 October 1990 could have been prevented.
The British Irish Rights Watch report will also put the focus back on the alleged MI6 agent 'J118'. Army intelligence officer turned whistleblower Martin Ingram has alleged 'J118' was Sinn Fein's chief negotiator Martin McGuinnesss.
The Mid Ulster MP strenuously denies Ingram's allegations and has claimed the speculation is fuelled by the Democratic Unionist Party.
The 'human bomb' tactic involved forcing civilians to drive vehicles laden with explosives into army checkpoints and included deadly sorties near Newry and Coshquin outside Derry. Six British soldiers and a civilian worker at an army base died in the simultaneous blasts on either side of Northern Ireland.
British Irish Rights Watch said: 'This month BIRW sent a confidential report to the Historical Enquiries Team on the three incidents that occurred on 24th October 1990... at least two security force agents were involved in these bombings, and allegations have been made that the "human bomb" strategy was the brainchild of British intelligence.
'Questions arise as to whether the RUC, Garda Síochána and the army's Force Research Unit had prior and/or subsequent intelligence about the bombings. These questions in turn lead to concerns about whether these attacks could have been prevented and why no one has been brought to justice.'
Although British Irish Rights Watch has made no reference to the identities of the informers they allege were involved in the 'human bomb' plot, the group's intervention in the controversy is a significant development.
The group has issued several detailed reports previously outlining cases of collusion between loyalist terrorists and the security forces. These include the Pat Finucane murder and the killing of Raymond McCord Jr by the Ulster Volunteer Force. In both cases, British Irish Rights Watch claim many of the loyalists involved in these murders were agents for the security forces - allegations that were later substantiated.
Speaking from a secret location in Europe this weekend, Ingram (not his real name) said that while the latest report was not decisive proof over his claims about 'J1118', it raised questions about the role of informers in the 'human bomb' killings.
'This report from a very credible source brings up the question of informers working at the top tier of the IRA who were allowed to commit crimes up to murder while working for the state. 'I stand by what I have said in the past about "J118" and challenge anyone to debate it with me in a public forum.'
Ingram, a former NCO with the army's highly secretive Force Research Unit, said he was prepared to expose his own identity in public in any such debate.
Comment: "Suicide bombers" the "brainchild" of British intelligence? I do declare! What an amazing and very interesting concept...
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IDF commander: We fired more than a million cluster bombs in Lebanon
By Meron Rappaport
Last update - 14:20 12/09/2006
"What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs," the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.
Quoting his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets.
In addition, soldiers in IDF artillery units testified that the army used phosphorous shells during the war, widely forbidden by international law. According to their claims, the vast majority of said explosive ordinance was fired in the final 10 days of the war.
The rocket unit commander stated that Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) platforms were heavily used in spite of the fact that they were known to be highly inaccurate.
MLRS is a track or tire carried mobile rocket launching platform, capable of firing a very high volume of mostly unguided munitions. The basic rocket fired by the platform is unguided and imprecise, with a range of about 32 kilometers. The rockets are designed to burst into sub-munitions at a planned altitude in order to blanket enemy army and personnel on the ground with smaller explosive rounds.
The use of such weaponry is controversial mainly due to its inaccuracy and ability to wreak great havoc against indeterminate targets over large areas of territory, with a margin of error of as much as 1,200 meters from the intended target to the area hit.
The cluster rounds which don't detonate on impact, believed by the United Nations to be around 40% of those fired by the IDF in Lebanon, remain on the ground as unexploded munitions, effectively littering the landscape with thousands of land mines which will continue to claim victims long after the war has ended.
Because of their high level of failure to detonate, it is believed that there are around 500,000 unexploded munitions on the ground in Lebanon. To date 12 Lebanese civilians have been killed by these mines since the end of the war.
According to the commander, in order to compensate for the inaccuracy of the rockets and the inability to strike individual targets precisely, units would "flood" the battlefield with munitions, accounting for the littered and explosive landscape of post-war Lebanon.
When his reserve duty came to a close, the commander in question sent a letter to Defense Minister Amir Peretz outlining the use of cluster munitions, a letter which has remained unanswered.
'Excessive injury and unnecessary suffering'
It has come to light that IDF soldiers fired phosphorous rounds in order to cause fires in Lebanon. An artillery commander has admitted to seeing trucks loaded with phosphorous rounds on their way to artillery crews in the north of Israel.
A direct hit from a phosphorous shell typically causes severe burns and a slow, painful death.
International law forbids the use of weapons that cause "excessive injury and unnecessary suffering", and many experts are of the opinion that phosphorous rounds fall directly in that category.
The International Red Cross has determined that international law forbids the use of phosphorous and other types of flammable rounds against personnel, both civilian and military.
IDF: No violation of international law
In response, the IDF Spokesman's Office stated that "International law does not include a sweeping prohibition of the use of cluster bombs. The convention on conventional weaponry does not declare a prohibition on [phosphorous weapons], rather, on principles regulating the use of such weapons.
"For understandable operational reasons, the IDF does not respond to [accounts of] details of weaponry in its possession.
"The IDF makes use only of methods and weaponry which are permissible under international law. Artillery fire in general, including MLRS fire, were used in response solely to firing on the state of Israel."
The Defense Minister's office said it had not received messages regarding cluster bomb fire.
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Hundreds Of Lebanese Protest Blair in Lebanon
Guardian
11/09/2006
Hundreds of angry demonstrators waving Lebanese flags and chanting "down with Blair" gathered to protest at Tony Blair's meeting with Fouad Siniora at the prime minister's office in the heart of Beirut today.
Held back by a line of Lebanese troops and security personnel enforcing a 1km buffer zone around the office, some protesters carried posters reading "Blair, you killer, go to hell" and "The blood of Qana is splashed across your ugly face" in reference to an Israeli attack on a village in south Lebanon during the war that killed 34 children.
National music blared from nearby speakers. "We must take revenge on Blair," one of the organisers roared into the microphone, mirroring an earlier call by the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt to take revenge on the Syrian president, Bashar Assad.
"He is a dog and if we see him we will kill him," said a group of young boys wrapped in the flags of Hizbullah and Amal, Lebanon's two main Shia parties. "We want to kill him, really we do," one of them insisted.
The gathering was largely of leftwing groups and Shia parties but there was also a showing from two of Lebanon's largest Christian groups.
Most demonstrators viewed Mr Blair's visit as an attempt to score points at home.
"They hate him in his country and we hate him here - he only came to make himself look good," said Hussein, 29.
Mazen Bassoun, 21, a student organiser from Beirut's southern suburbs, said Mr Blair's policy in the region had been a failure since his first day in office. "The Middle East has been in crisis for more than 50 years. Blair has been the British leader for 10 years and he has done nothing but follow George Bush. Now at the end of his career he is trying to solve the problems of the region with three days of publicity. I don't think he is really taking any measures to stop the violence - it's just a media show for the British people."
Many of the demonstrators were students who had come despite fears they would be met with repression. "A lot of people didn't come after the government warning last night," said Marwan, 22. "We feared the army might become violent."
Some protesters believe Mr Blair's visit will further polarise the country. "His visit will divide the country. Now some ministers will shake his hand and that will make a lot of the country very angry with them," said Malak, a 23-year-old student.
Much of the protesters' anger was directed at the Lebanese government, which they accused of collaborating with the Israelis by delaying the ceasefire to allow Israeli forces to inflict the maximum amount of damage on Hizbullah. "Our government are collaborators," Malak said. "They are the same as Blair."
There was also anger at Blair for allowing planes carrying weapons to refuel in Britain on their way to Israel. "He only talks with the politicians who steal from the country," said Roula Shar, 18. "He is a terrorist. He helped supply Israel with the bombs that killed our children."
Mr Bassoun said he believed Blair's policies had harmed the security of the British people. "I think by his policies he is inviting terrorism to come to Britain. I don't think any Lebanese person would do this, but there are many people in the Middle East who now want to commit terrorism against Britain."
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Israeli Politician calls for 'removal' of Arabs
Jpost
11/09/2006
MK Effie Eitam called Sunday for the expulsion of Arabs from the West Bank and the removal of Israeli Arabs from the political scene, igniting the most recent in a series of clashes between Arab and Israeli Knesset members.
"We have to expel most Arabs from Judea and Samaria," Eitam said at a memorial service for Lt. Amihai Merhavia, a soldier who was killed in the battle for Bint Jbail in South Lebanon. "We can't deal with all these Arabs, and we can't give up the territory, because we've already seen what they do there. Some of them might have to stay under certain conditions, but most of them will have to go."
Eitam also launched a pointed attack at Arab Knesset members, whom he labeled "traitors."
"We've got to remove Israeli Arabs from the political scene. We've allowed a fifth column to grow here - a group of traitors. We can't have a hostile group like this in our political system," said Eitam.
Left wing and Arab MKs slammed Eitam's remarks as "racist," and Hadash chairman Muhammad Barakei and Meretz chairman Yossi Beilin called on Attorney- General Menahem Mazuz to press criminal charges against Eitam for "racist incitement." Beilin added that Eitam's statement constituted "racist incitement [that] even crosses the red lines of the extreme Right. A Jewish democratic state cannot live with such statements."
According to an amendment to the law of parliamentary immunity, an MK's immunity can be lifted if they incite racism or ethnic prejudice.
"These comments would have sounded more authentic if he had said them in German," said MK Ahmed Tibi (United Arab List). "These types of remarks are the lowest form of racism in Israeli society."
It was the first time that Eitam has publicly supported the deportation of Palestinians, a move that was espoused by National Union founder Rehavam Ze'evi as the "transfer" model.
Eitam's comments came in the wake of a highly controversial weekend visit of Balad MKs Azmi Bishara, Jamal Zahalka and Wasal Taha to Syria. On Sunday, the attorney-general announced that he was opening an investigation against the MKs for violating a 2001 law that bans politicians from visiting enemy states, prompting Bishara to announce that he was "willing to pay the price" for the trip to Syria.
"Arab solidarity cannot be maintained without paying a price," Bishara said Monday to the London-based newspaper Al-Hayat.
Their trip "proves why Israel has to remove Israeli Arabs from our political system," said Eitam.
Several hours after Eitam made the comments, he attended a meeting of the Knesset Interior Committee, where Interior Minister Roni Bar-On reiterated his request that the Foreign Ministry revoke the passports of the Balad MKs.
During that meeting, Bar-On reignited a fight with Arab representatives of the North by repeating his claim that Arab municipalities mismanaged funds and fled responsibility during the war.
Two weeks ago, when Bar-On first made the statement during the committee meeting, the Arab representatives present responded with shouts of "scoundrel" and "racist" and were eventually removed from the room.
On Monday, different representatives attended the meeting but the results were the same. One local municipality leader asked Bar-On about the comments he made, and began shouting: "You scoundrel, you have sold yourself to the state," when Bar-On said that he stood by his comments.
That leader, along with several local leaders from Nahariya, all had to be forcibly removed by security guards and nearly exchanged blows with the guards as they were dragged from the room.
"I'd like to ask who invited these people here," said Eitam after the commotion had died down. "This exactly proves my point. We allow these people into our political system and we allow them into our committees and what do we get but violence and disruption?"
Comment: Let's get this straight; an Israeli politician who suggests but has no power to effect the transfer of all Palestinans from their land, is vilified for it. Meanwhile, the Zionist leaders who DO have the power to ethnically cleanse or murder all Palestinians, and are actually implementing it at present are believed when they claim that they are NOT??!
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3 dead after U.S. Embassy attack in Syria
Last Updated Tue, 12 Sep 2006 06:40:29 EDT
CBC News
Syrian forces killed three armed men and wounded another on Tuesday after an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Damascus in which a car was blown up and gunfire exchanged with guards.
Syrian Interior Bassam Abdel Majid, in a report carried on state run television, said the incident appears to have been a "terrorist attack" aimed at the U.S. Embassy. The Interior Ministry oversees police forces in Syria.
"Investigations are underway to find out more details," Majid told Syrian Television.
There were no American deaths in the attack, according to a Syrian who works at the U.S. Embassy, but a stray bullet injured a Chinese diplomat who was standing on top of the Chinese Embassy building nearby, the official Chinese Xinhua News Agency reported.
The diplomat was taken to hospital for treatment. Both embassies are in the diplomatic district of the Syrian capital.
In Washington, the U.S. State Department confirmed that an attack occurred on the U.S. Embassy, saying the people involved were "unknown assailants" and the incident is over.
"Local authorities have responded and are on the scene," said Kurtis Cooper, a State Department spokesperson.
Television footage of the scene showed a bombed out car.
A witness who spoke on condition on anonymity told the Associated Press that two armed men stopped a car on the street in front of the embassy, got out of the car, shot at the Syrian guards in front of the entrance to the embassy and then blew up the car.
The guards shot back, and security forces in the area moved quickly to the street, said the witness.
The Canadian Embassy is about two kilometres away from the American building. A Canadian official said embassy employees are assessing the situation.
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Attackers killed outside US embassy in Damascus
12 September 2006
UK Independent
Syrian security forces killed three attackers, the government said, after gunmen apparently blew up a car outside the US Embassy and exchanged fire with Syrian guards today.
The Interior Ministry, which is in charge of police, said a fourth attacker was wounded in the incident, which it called a "terrorist attack".
The report, carried on state-run television, said an investigation was under way.
In Washington, a US State Department spokesman confirmed the attack on the American embassy by "unknown assailants" and said the event appeared to be over.
"Local authorities have responded and are on the scene," said spokesman Kurtis Cooper said.
A Syrian who works at the US Embassy said there were no American causalities.
Comment: Despite the fact that Syrian security forces dealt with this attack, this will certainly be used as more grist for the 'Syria supports terrorism' mill.
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Perpetrators of Mass Killings in Ukraine Finally Identified as Soviets (Zionists)
Radio Polonia
12/08/2006
A Ukrainian government commission has concluded that thousands of people buried in a mass grave outside Kiev were killed during Stalin's purges, not by Nazi soldiers. The commission's conclusion supports the testimony of elderly witnesses in the nearby village of Bykovnia, who said they saw trucks dripping blood en route to the site in the 1930's, before the Nazis occupied the area. Unofficial estimates put the number of bodies in the grave at 200,000 to 300,000. Villagers in Bykovnia broke five decades of silence to accuse Stalin's secret police after the Ukrainian government erected a monument in May 1988 blaming Nazi occupiers for the crime.
The villagers in December forced Ukrainian authorities to establish the commission, saying three previous investigations had covered up the truth by blaming Nazi troops.
Dr. SÅ‚awomir Kalbarczyk, Chief Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, said during the international scientific conference "Archeology and Terror" conference that took place in Tallin in Novembre 2005:
It is worth mentioning that the Bykovnia pits did not say their „last world" and may provide still a lot of valuable information, since the Ukrainian authorities plan to carry out further exhumations there. They were to be conducted in August last year, however were postponed til this year. The National Remembrance Institute's prosecutors have been invited in the capacity of observers.
There were found in Bykovnia numerous objects, belonging undoubtedly to the Polish citizens, among others, the uniforms, military caps, "knee-boots", Polish coins (including their issue of 1939), and also the objects manufactured in Poland or in the Western Europe. Unfortunately, all those things were separated from the corpses, so they could not be attributed to any concrete persons. One thing is however of a crucial value - it is a driving license belonging to the person who appears on a partial list of the executed civilians, drawn up by the NKVD (those who were murdered in Ukraine).
Besides, the Ukrainian soil conceals more secrets. In 1997, the Ukrainian authorities carried out exhumations in the neighborhood of the former NKVD prison in Vladimir in Volhynien in order to check information disclosed by the local population on burial of Stalin's regime victims at that place. From death-pits there were excavated the remains of 100 persons, whose skulls had bullet holes in their rear part. With the corpses there were many items of the Polish origin: shoulder boards of the Polish military men and policemen, uniform buttons with the image of the White Eagle, etc.
Just recently, the Institute of National Remembrance has been informed that one of the investigations, conducted by the Military Prosecutor's Office in Ukraine brought to discovery in Kiev of the remains of 270 unidentified Polish officers. In cooperation with the Ukrainian party Poles will do their very best to explain this gloomy atrocity which, supposedly, may have a certain link with the Katyn Crime. Such assumptions are justified as a trace of the prisoners murdered in Ukraine breaks off, among others, in the Kiev prison.
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5 years after 9/11, many around the world angry at U.S.
AP
11/09/2006
The nations of the world joined Monday in solemn remembrance of Sept. 11 - but for many, resentment of the United States flowed as readily as tears.
Critics say Americans have squandered the goodwill that prompted France's Le Monde newspaper to proclaim "We are all Americans" that somber day after the attacks, and that the
Iraq war and other U.S. policies have made the world less safe in the five years since.
Heads bowed in moments of silence for the 3,000 killed in the attacks on New York and Washington - while the No. 2 al-Qaida leader issued new warnings in a videotape. And dissident voices said the world has traded in civil liberties and other democratic rights in its war on terror.
In Europe, where Islamic terror has struck twice since 9/11, in the Madrid train bombings and the London transit attacks, the silent tributes were tinged with doubts and recriminations.
Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel - an advocate of repairing ties with Washington that were frayed under her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder - had veiled criticism of the United States, saying: "The ends cannot justify the means."
"In the fight against international terror ... respect for human rights, tolerance and respect for other cultures must be the maxim of our actions, along with decisiveness and international cooperation," she said.
The international landscape has changed irreversibly since terrorists hijacked four airliners in 2001, crashing two into the World Trade Center, one into the
Pentagon and another into a Pennsylvania field.
Adding to the global jitters, a senior al-Qaida leader issued a new warning.
"You gave us every legitimacy and every opportunity to continue fighting you," said Ayman al-Zawahri, addressing the United States. "You should worry about your presence in the (Persian) Gulf and the second place you should worry about is Israel."
Another video posted on the Internet by al-Qaida showed previously unseen footage of a smiling
Osama bin Laden and other commanders in a mountain camp apparently planning the Sept. 11 attacks.
Allies in the U.S.-led war on terrorism renewed their resolve Monday to fight fanaticism, while skeptics countered that they can no longer follow a superpower they say has relinquished its right to lead.
"Right after Sept. 11 the world was united with Americans. Their moral leadership was unquestioned," Pawel Zalewski, head of the Polish parliament's foreign relations committee, wrote in the Gazeta Wyborcza. "However, this strong moral authority was abused as a result of the Iraq war."
Exactly five years after its message of solidarity, Le Monde titled its lead editorial "The Mistakes of Bush."
In Caracas, Venezuela, about 200 marchers protested what they called "imperialist terrorism" carried out by the United States since the 9/11 attacks. Demonstrators - many of them supporters of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and some of Arab descent - carried Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian flags. Many criticized the U.S. invasions of Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani wrote
President Bush on behalf of the Iraqi people, expressing condolences to the families of Sept. 11 victims.
"On this sad and memorable day, I would like to reiterate the gratitude of the people of Iraq for the people of America and for your leadership," Talabani wrote. "The people of Iraq will never forget those who helped them in getting rid of the most brutal and terrorist regime of
Saddam Hussein."
New Zealand's Prime Minister Helen Clark joined many when she said: "No, we're not more secure since 9/11."
Clark said more should be done to reach out to moderate states and leaders in the Islamic world to encourage understanding between different peoples, and to help end the sense of alienation and exclusion among some young Muslims that fuels extremism.
In Europe, bells tolled in Rome's city hall square. Bouquets of white roses and yellow carnations were piled in a memorial garden where the names of 67 Britons killed in the New York attacks are inscribed. Relatives tearfully remembered their dead.
"It doesn't get any easier, but our minds are much calmer, and we can think through all the events without being flooded by tears and sadness," said Adrian Bennett, whose 29-year-old son, Oliver, was killed.
At a 38-nation Asia-Europe summit in Helsinki, Finland, leaders stood in silence in a circle. The stock exchanges in Nordic and Baltic countries observed two minutes of silence to honor the victims.
French President Jacques Chirac, in Helsinki, reiterated in a written message to Bush his nation's "friendship" in the fight against terrorism.
A week after the Sept. 11 attacks, Chirac flew over the World Trade Center site - the first foreign leader to pay personal condolences. That solidarity quickly dissipated into rancor in the buildup to the Iraq war, when Chirac led opposition to Bush's plans.
Israel's Haaretz daily expressed disappointment and cynicism in an op-ed piece that said: "This is Sept. 11 five years later: a political tool in the hands of the Bush administration."
In Southeast Asia, U.S. and Philippine troops fighting Islamic extremists in the jungles prayed for peace and safety. Other remembrances took place in Japan, Australia, Finland, South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who won the country's first post-Taliban election, expressed the appreciation of the Afghan people to the U.S. for the "sacrifices of your sons and daughters" in rebuilding his country. But in the Afghan capital, many residents said they had not seen much improvement since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the Taliban for harboring bin Laden.
Comment: Let's cut to the chase; Israel and the US carried out 9/11 as a "new pearl harbor" in order to further their political and racist agendas. Once you accept that, then we talk about what state the world is in and where it is going.
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Musharraf lets Taliban attack Canadian troops: security expert
Last Updated Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:13:41 EDT
CBC News
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has refused to clamp down on pro-Taliban elements in his own country and is allowing the militants to launch attacks on Canadian troops, a security expert says.
Canadian officers stationed in southern Afghanistan increasingly find young Pakistani men among the ranks of Taliban fighters who have trained in the radical mosques of Pakistan.
Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Musharraf was declared a key ally in the "war on terror."
But Sunil Ram, a former officer in the Canadian Forces who teaches at an American military university, said Musharraf has reneged on a promise to shut down hundreds of extremist religious schools preaching hatred against the West.
Ram says that Pakistan is not willing to purge Taliban supporters from the Pakistani military and intelligence services, despite claims to the contrary.
"Why hasn't he shut down the madrassas [Islamic religious schools]? Why hasn't he sealed the border?"
"Ultimately the situation in Pakistan is feeding the situation in Afghanistan," Ram said.
Musharraf's admission
On a visit to Kabul to meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai last week, Musharraf admitted for the first time that the Taliban are using Pakistan as a base.
"There are al-Qaeda and Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan," Musharraf said. "Clearly they are crossing from the Pakistan side and causing bomb blasts in Afghanistan.'"
But Musharraf denied that his government or his intelligence agency support the incursions.
Musharraf said he's put 75,000 troops on the border to stop the flow of arms and recruits, but insists it's impossible to seal the border.
Ram said it's a question of priorities.
"It can be done ... he has a half million troops on the border with Indian Kashmir," he said.
Switched sides
Pakistan was a strong supporter of Afghanistan's former Taliban regime, but switched sides after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Since then, Islamabad has arrested more than 700 al-Qaeda suspects, including some close associates of Osama bin Laden.
Some Afghan and U.S. officials think top al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders like bin Laden are hiding either in Pakistan or near the Pakistan-Afghan border.
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Every Day, Israel Murders Palestinian Civilians
Palestinian Child killed by Israeli army shells in Rafah, his brother is clinically dead
IMEMC & Agencies
Monday, 11 September 2006,
Palestinian medical sources reported on Sunday evening, that a Palestinian child was killed and his brother was his brothers is clinically dead after the Israeli army shelled an area near the Gaza International Airport, east of Rafah city, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
The child was identified as Jihad Abu Sneima, 14, and his brother Nayef, 20, was seriously injured and was pronounced dead one hour after his injury.
In a separate incident, Israeli troops, armored vehicles and military bulldozers were seen lining-up, near Kissufim area, east of Al Qarara town, east of Khan Younis in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, apparently preparing for a ground offensive there.
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Two Innocent Palestinian Civilians Murdered by Israeli special forces near Jenin
IMEMC & PNN - Palestine News Network
Monday, 11 September 2006
Two young men on their way to work Monday came under attack by Israeli special forces, who shot multiple rounds into the taxi in which they were travelling. Both men were killed, and the taxi driver was wounded.
The driver, 36 year old Qadry Frasini, reported to the Palestine News Network, "I was driving the two young men to work when we pulled up behind a large truck carrying fruits and vegetables. Before I knew it, our car had come under fire. Pedestrians nearby managed to quickly hide, but it became clear to me that my two passengers had been hit."
Medical sources announced that the two killed in the attack were Anees Tawfiq Amor and Ahmed Muhammad As'ad. The driver managed to escape with only a wounded foot. Palestinian security forces are investigating the attack and are holding Israeli forces responsible for the deaths.
Local sources reported that neither of the two men were known to be members of any resistance groups. Israeli special forces are generally used by the Israeli army for extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinians suspected of being connected to resistance groups, but civilians often end up being victims of the attacks. Such extra-judicial assassinations are illegal under international law, and Israel has been widely condemned for its continued use of the method.
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Israeli Army opens fire at Palestinian school children in Dar Salah village east of Bethlehem
IMEMC & Agencies
Monday, 11 September 2006
Israeli soldiers opened fire at school students in Dar Salah village, east of the West Bank city of Bethlehem, on Monday morning.
Two army jeeps stormed the village then head towards the village schools and tried to provoke the children. When they failed, they opened fire at the students, no injures were reported, eyewitnesses said.
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Report: 90% of Palestinian complaints to police 'unsolved'
By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondent
Last update - 07:57 11/09/2006
A total of 90 percent of the complaints filed by Palestinians in the West Bank against Israeli citizens for violent attacks have been closed without charges being filed, according to a report prepared by the human rights organization Yesh Din, which will be made public Monday.
The organization is staffed by volunteers, who focus on the way law is enforced vis-a-vis Israelis in the West Bank, describes the police handling of the complaints as negligent, careless, unprofessional and disrespectful.
During the first 11 months of 2005, a total of 299 police investigations into Palestinian complaints of Israeli violence against them were initiated, according to the Yesh Din report. Data for the total number for 2006 are not included in the report.
The report is based on a sample study of 92 cases, filed with police during both 2005 and 2006. A third of these complain of assault - battery, use of firearms and other weapons, stone throwing - however the report concludes that 80 percent of these cases were closed without any charges being filed against the suspects.
In response, the Judea and Samaria Police said that "the data was passed on to the responsible authorities."
On the basis of the sample study, it turns out that 90 percent of the cases were closed without charges being brought against anyone. In 83 percent of the cases, the reason was that the suspect could not be found or there was insufficient evidence.
In 7 percent of the cases, the cause was that the forms on which the complaints had been filed were lost - which meant that it was impossible to investigate the case.
A total of 96 percent of the cases, having to do with trespassing - including damage to olive groves - were closed without bringing charges against suspects. All cases in which involving property damage were closed without charges.
Yesh Din says that Palestinians are sometimes prevented from filing complaints against settlers who damaged their property by the unwillingness of police officers to take down their testimony or because they are asked to present documents that they do not have.
According to a closer study of a sample of 42 cases, the following problems emerged in the police treatment of the plaintiffs: Their testimonies were not taken in Arabic; in few instances did the investigators agree to visit the site of the alleged crime; evidence from the crime scene was collected unprofessionally; testimonies of key witnesses were not taken; in almost all cases, no line-ups of Israeli suspects were held; in all 42 cases the police failed to check the suspects' alibis.
The report points to fundamental problems in the way the Judea and Samaria Police is structured. While it is responsible for the largest police district in the country, it only has 6 percent of the police force at its disposal and receives a mere 2.5 percent of the overall police budget.
In addition, the number of patrol cars available is very limited, and the policemen can only leave their stations to collect evidence if they are accompanied by an IDF patrol.
The report also points to failings in the way the IDF has handled Palestinian complaints. Contrary to the police, the IDF is neither limited in manpower nor budgets.
However, the soldiers have not received any instructions on their role in protecting Palestinian civilians from Israeli attackers, even though the IDF claims the contrary. In practice, a great deal of confusion exists.
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Propaganda Alert! Anti-aircraft missiles in Gaza - Israeli minister
Reuters
11/09/2006
Palestinian militants have acquired anti-aircraft missiles that pose a new threat to Israeli aircraft flying over the Gaza Strip, an Israeli cabinet minister said in remarks published on Monday.
"Terror organizations in the Gaza Strip have shoulder-held missiles that to our knowledge have not yet been used. This will make the (military's) mission much more complex," Public Security Minister Avi Dichter said in the Yedioth Ahronoth daily.
Israeli drones routinely overfly the Gaza Strip and the air force uses attack helicopters and fighter-bombers to strike against Palestinian militants.
"The issue (of the missiles) was discussed at Sunday's cabinet meeting," said a spokesman for the Public Security ministry, declining to provide information on their exact type.
The Israeli military has been pressing an offensive in the territory since the abduction of a soldier, Gilad Shalit, on June 25 by a group of militants, including members of the governing Islamic faction Hamas.
More than 200 Palestinians, about half of them civilians, have been killed in the Israeli operations.
Yuval Diskin, head of Israel's Shin Bet security service, told parliament last month large quantities of anti-tank rockets and anti-aircraft missiles were being smuggled into Gaza from Egypt in a bid by local militants to emulate Hizbollah fighters in Lebanon.
Hizbollah surprised Israel with its stockpile of advanced rockets during a 34-day war that ended in a ceasefire on Aug. 14.
An Israeli army spokesman declined to comment on Dichter's remarks.
Israel pulled its troops out of Gaza a year ago after 38 years of occupation.
Comment: HA! What a ridiculous proposition and one that is clearly meant to justify the continued murder of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli forces of occupation. If any resistance fighters in Gaza had access to missile they would long since have been used against Israeli troops. Of course, that is not to say that Israel will not provide "evidence" of said missiles. After all, they are past masters are fabricating evidence of terrorist acts that they themselves perpetrate.
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Blair Meets Captured Israeli Soldier's Family - Snubs Palestinians
UK Mirror
11/09/2006
TONY Blair was yesterday criticised by the Palestinian president for meeting the families of three kidnapped Israeli soldiers but snubbing victims in Palestine.
Mahmoud Abbas said: "We have 10,000 prisoners and I'd have loved the Prime Minister to meet their representatives. But we'll put him in the picture."
Mr Abbas was speaking at a joint news conference with Mr Blair in Ramallah.
Earlier in Jerusalem Mr Blair met the parents of Gilad Shalit, 20, kidnapped by militants in Gaza.
Also there were the parents of Ehud Goldwasser, 31, and father and brothers of Eldad Regev, 26, snatched by Hizbollah in Southern Lebanon provoking war with Israel.
Promising to raise the men's plight, Mr Blair said: "It's inhumane to keep people kidnapped and not even tell families they're alive."
After hearing Mr Abbas agree to meet Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "without pre-conditions" Mr Blair vowed to use his, last months in office to pursue Mid East peace.
He said: "This issue is as important as any other in the time that remains for me."
He also offered to deal with Palestine's Hamas party if talks to form a government of unity with the more moderate Fatah party proved successful.
A British woman known as Kirsty protested at the conference by wearing a T-shirt, proclaiming "Tony Blair you make me ashamed to be British".
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Palestinian rivals ready to form coalition
12 September 2006
UK Independent
The prospect of Hamas sharing power in a coalition Palestinian Authority was in sight last night after the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, announced a deal with the Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, on a "political agenda".
A Fatah-Hamas coalition based on at least the implicit recognition of Israel appears to offer the most realistic chance of easing the crippling Israeli and international economic blockade which has inflicted even deeper poverty and insecurity on Palestinians, especially those living in Gaza.
Tony Blair indicated on his trip to the Middle East that the international community would be prepared to open contacts with such a unity government - but with the proviso that it adhered to the preconditions of recognising Israel, renouncing violence, and adhering to previous agreements signed by the Fatah-led PA.
The small print of the political agreement between Mr Abbas and the Hamas Prime Minister remained unpublished. But officials on both sides suggested that it would be based on the so-called "prisoners' document" signed by a group of members from both factions last May, and the 2002 Beirut initiative, in which Arab states promised recognition of Israel in return for the latter returning to 1967 borders.
The wording of the prisoners' document envisaged a "final" two-state solution to the conflict, and if endorsed by Hamas's leadership it would be the first time the faction had formally recognised partition of what was Palestine until 1948.
With Mr Haniyeh sitting beside him, Mr Abbas said on Palestinian TV: "We have finalised the elements of the political agenda of the national unity government ... Hopefully, in the coming few days we will begin forming the government of national unity."
Tzipi Livni, Israel's Foreign Minister, reacted to Mr Abbas's announcement by urging the international community not to waver in demanding acceptance of its three preconditions and added that the main question was whether "we are seeing a real change here". The US administration said that it needed further details of the deal.
The normally hardline spokesman for Hamas, Sami Abu Zuhri, reinforced widespread expectations that Hamas would not explicitly recognise Israel - at the very least ahead of any substantive peace process - by declaring that its position had not changed, and adding: "We will never recognise the legitimacy of the occupation." But an official travelling with Mr Blair, who returned home from Lebanon yesterday after urging a "re-energising" of the Middle East peace process, said: "Of course we have to see the details, but potentially this is a highly significant announcement."
While the prisoners' document - drawn up by a group of inmates in an Israeli jail led by the popular Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti - stops well short of meeting the demand for a renunciation of violence, it implies that armed attacks against Israel could be limited to those within the occupied West Bank.
Hamas officials indicated yesterday that Mr Haniyeh wanted to remain as Prime Minister in any new coalition, and it was not clear how many of the new ministers would be from Fatah. This is an issue likely to be discussed in negotiations in coming days.
Mr Olmert indicated for the first time during Mr Blair's trip that he would be prepared to meet Mr Abbas without setting the precondition of the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier seized by Hamas and other militants on 25 June. But he has so far been adamant that any further progress would depend on the preconditions imposed on Palestinians for implementation of the all-but-moribund "road map" - including the disarming of Hamas, elected to office in January this year.
* Up to 90 per cent of investigations into complaints of attacks on Palestinians and their property by Jewish West Bank settlers are closed by police without any charges being filed, an Israeli human rights group said yesterday.
The 148-page report from the two-year-old voluntary organisation Yesh Din said that "Israel was abusing its obligation to defend the Palestinian civilian population in the Occupied Palestinian Territories against the criminality of Israeli civilians". The report blames "serious faults" in the Israeli military and police.
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Iraq and Afghanistan - Mission Accomplished. Next Stop Iran
Marine colonel's Iraq report fuels US gloom
Staff and agencies
Monday September 11, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Iraq's biggest province has suffered a total breakdown in law and order in which al-Qaida has emerged as the dominant political force, according to descriptions of a classified US military intelligence review reported today.
The report, by the US marine corps colonel Peter Devlin, focuses on the vast, arid region of Anbar in the west, which contains the insurgent-held towns of Fallujah, Ramadi and Haditha.
The Washington Post quoted military officers who had seen the report as saying the area was "beyond repair".
"We haven't been defeated militarily, but we have been defeated politically - and that's where wars are won and lost," was one army officer's summary of the review quoted by the newspaper.
The same officer concluded that there were no functioning Iraqi institutions in the province, and that al-Qaida in Iraq, the insurgent group founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was Anbar's most powerful political force.
The report is believed to be the most negative one sent from the field in Iraq.
Mr Devlin has been stationed in Anbar since February and is regarded as one of the military's most respected and level-headed intelligence officers, adding to concern in Washington about his comments.
"In the analytical world, there is a real pall of gloom descending," the newspaper quoted the former defence analyst Jeffrey White as saying.
Four marines were killed in July in Anbar province, and nearly 22,000 marines are currently based in the region.
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Why the Numbers Don't Add Up in Iraq
By Patrick J. McDonnell
Times Staff Writer
09/10/06 "Los Angeles Times"
BAGHDAD - In this besieged capital, it was a rare good-news story: Killings had plummeted by as much as 50% since U.S. and Iraqi forces hit the streets last month in a show of strength after the sectarian bloodbath of July.
"We're actually seeing progress out there," Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the chief military spokesman here, said when making the announcement.
Not so fast.
Last week, Iraqi officials released new figures showing the city morgue had received more than 1,500 victims of violent death in August - a significant drop of about 17% from the record of more than 1,800 killings in July, but hardly a great leap forward.
How the U.S. military arrived at the 50% figure remains a mystery. Commanders won't release the raw data, saying such specifics could help the enemy.
In the volatile atmosphere of today's Iraq, numbers can lie and statistics can be notional, be they from U.S. or Iraqi sources.
Government agencies here rarely keep reliable statistics. Fear and partisan agendas sway Iraqi officials, making them reluctant to divulge what little data they collect. The U.S. military's fondness for secrecy tends to clash with the brass' demands for "metrics" to quantify any progress.
This tension often leads to curious contortions of numbers and nomenclature.
During weekly news briefings deep inside barricaded compounds, commanders regularly display slick charts, multicolored bar graphs and PowerPoint presentations, all heralding good news.
"One more indicator that operations are in fact reducing the amount of attacks on civilians is shown here on this graph," Caldwell assured reporters the other day, pointing to a bar chart dutifully placed on an easel by a stone-faced uniformed subordinate. But all the numbers had been carefully scrubbed. They were classified.
"We typically characterize trends in ways that do not divulge raw data," explained a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson.
Commanders have consistently declined to say how many civilians have been killed by U.S. forces, although officials have acknowledged tracking the number. Avoiding the Vietnam-era stigma of "body counts," authorities also refuse to divulge "kill" totals for suspected insurgents.
A similar imprecision applies when it comes to describing the enemy.
At the conflict's outset, U.S. officials used phrases such as "dead-enders," Saddam Hussein "loyalists" and "foreign terrorists" in an attempt to label the armed opposition a marginal force.
Gradually, as it became clear that Iraq was in the midst of a protracted guerrilla war, the U.S. military rejected the title "resistance," with its connotations of legitimacy, and settled on "insurgents" or "terrorists" as operative labels.
But the evolving nature of the battle has thrown those terms into question too.
"The core conflict in Iraq [has] changed into a struggle between Sunni and Shia extremists," the Pentagon wrote in an unusually frank report to Congress last month. "Death squads and terrorists are locked in mutually reinforcing cycles of sectarian strife."
Trained and equipped by the U.S. government, Iraq's security forces have been infiltrated by thousands of militiamen loyal to Shiite clerics and factions. There is widespread agreement among military commanders that Shiite militiamen are behind most death squad killings.
The term "death squad" entered public discourse during the dirty wars in Central America to describe clandestine assassins who often plied their trade with the tacit approval of government authorities in the region. But the issue of Shiite death squads is an extremely touchy one for the U.S.-backed, Shiite-dominated government.
Members of the fiercest death squad are allegedly recruited from the Al Mahdi militia, a group under the command of Muqtada Sadr, a virulently anti-U.S. cleric whose supporters are key players in the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.
U.S. officials were reluctant to use the term until July, when Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top military commander here, and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad issued a joint statement condemning "in the strongest possible language the recent attacks by terrorists and death squads against innocent Iraqi civilians."
The following day, Caldwell used the term repeatedly when speaking with reporters - but he applied the term to both Sunni and Shiite Arab groups.
"We're really not boring in on what organization they're from," said Col. Michael Shields, commander of the Army's 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team.
By unmooring death squads from the context of government-backed Shiite militias, U.S. officials have redefined the problem - and avoided a direct confrontation with the U.S.-backed Iraqi leadership.
Like their U.S. colleagues, Iraqi authorities have demonstrated an adroitness with numbers, terms and dates.
A week ago, Mowaffak Rubaie, Iraq's national security advisor, went on television with great fanfare to declare that authorities had arrested Hamed Jumaa Farid Saeedi, allegedly the No. 2 man in Al Qaeda here.
"This is a major blow for Al Qaeda in Iraq," Rubaie declared, trumpeting a story that spread across the globe.
Later in the week, U.S. officials acknowledged that the suspect had been captured more than two months earlier, and had been sitting in detention all that time.
"When Dr. Rubaie said we had just captured him this week, we've gone back and what he really meant was they had just been cleared to announce that he was in fact in captivity," Caldwell told reporters.
The question of Iraqi casualties has also been a contentious one.
Iraqi officials stopped giving out daily death counts more than a year ago, Iraqi authorities said, after government officials decided that the steady stream of casualties was too bleak.
One of the most reliable barometers of the bloodshed here has been the monthly numbers report from the Baghdad morgue, where coffins strapped to car roofs arrive hourly, and residents trying to identify loved ones look through gruesome autopsy photos.
Last week, health officials unveiled a change in morgue policy: All requests for statistics would henceforth be routed through the Health Ministry. Morgue officials who previously provided details have abruptly "retired" or left the country.
Iraqis worry about a sinister turn. Sadr loyalists head the Health Ministry. In effect, Sadr controls an agency in charge of putting out information on killings reportedly committed by his own gunmen.
Even as information sources have been squeezed, Iraqi authorities have cracked down on the media, threatening to close newspapers and TV stations whose reporting falls afoul of the government line. Last week, the Iraqi government closed the widely watched, U.S.-style satellite channel Al Arabiya for a month, dispatching police to the channel's Baghdad offices. The Shiite government charged that the station, based in Sunni-dominated United Arab Emirates, had aired "sectarian" reports.
Even Iraqi officials acknowledge that Al Arabiya's reports about Iraq are more straightforward than dispatches from Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based channel that authorities here considered pro-insurgency and whose Baghdad office was shut down two years ago.
Still, the government Friday issued a public warning - this is the final chance for Al Arabiya to "correct its behavior."
"We have a problem in Iraq with media that is against the Iraqi people," explained Ali Dabbagh, a government spoke
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Iraqi prime minister in Iran for official visit
Last Updated Tue, 12 Sep 2006 05:37:49 EDT
The Associated Press
Iraq's prime minister paid Iran a visit on Tuesday, his first to the neighbouring country since taking office in May.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki arrived in Tehran, Iraqi state television said without elaborating.
Al-Maliki was expected to affirm friendly relations but also discuss mutual respect for each nation's internal affairs. U.S. officials have accused Iran of not doing enough to stop militants infiltrating into Iraq.
Iraq's new Shia leaders have close ties to Iran. In July 2005, former Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari made the first visit to Iran by an Iraqi premier since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
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Afghan women protest against reintroduction of 'vice and virtue police'
Christian Aid
05/09/2006
Women's groups in Afghanistan want an urgent meeting with Afghan ministers and MPs to protest against a plan to reintroduce the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice which was first set up by the Taliban
The Taliban's brutal 'vice and virtue police' enforced a strict interpretation of Islamic law and beat women for 'offences' such as showing their wrists or ankles, wearing nail varnish or going outside their home without a male relative.
Women were also stopped from attending school, working, or being seen by a male physician, while women doctors and nurses were banned from working.
Men did not escape punishment and were beaten if they trimmed their beards.
A proposal by the Afghan Ministry of Religious Affairs to reinstate the department was considered by the cabinet on July 16 and has now been referred to parliament, which is likely to pass it into law.
The government says the new department will not be like the one operated by the Taliban but will focus on preventing alcohol, drugs, crime and corruption.
However, the Afghan Women's Network (AWN), the largest women's rights organisation in Afghanistan, representing 94 groups including a Christian Aid partner (Voice of Women), fears the department could impede women's rights and freedoms.
Following a meeting in Kabul to discuss their response, the AWN released a statement calling on the Afghan government not to re-instate the department.
Instead they want more support given to Imams, religious scholars, and ordinary teachers so that they can take responsibility for the moral and religious education of Afghan society.
'In the event that the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is re-established there are concerns that it will be used for similar purposes as it was under the Taliban; a mechanism through which to hinder social development and the freedom of expression, impede the rights of mobility and privacy and, ultimately, stop the continued development of women,' the statement said.
The AWN believes that the government can fight what they term 'social and ethical' corruption through existing institutions such as the police, courts, schools and mosques.
And it said that if the department were to be reintroduced representatives from women's rights groups must be involved with the selection of staff.
'We are demanding a firm and binding commitment from our government that this department, should it become a reality, make an active, substantial and public commitment to the continued freedom and development of the women in Afghanistan,' the statement said.
Comment: Long live American "democracy"! Thank you George Bush and your Neocon and Zionist friends! What a wonderful 'reality' you are 'creating'.
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Millions of Afghans face hunger as crops fail
Christian Aid
11/09/2006
Millions of Afghans are facing hunger after a complete failure of the harvest in parts of the country, according to an emergency Christian Aid assessment.
The field survey in 66 villages in the west and northwest of the country has revealed that in the worst affected areas, farmers have lost 100 per cent of their crops, after a failure of the main rains last winter and spring.
People are already going hungry, while farmers and agricultural labourers are migrating out of drought-affected areas in search of work. Livestock farmers are either selling their animals or moving them to areas with pasture and water, which is exacerbating existing food shortages. Children, pregnant women, landless families and the elderly are the groups whose health is most at risk, according to the assessment.
'People are not dying of starvation yet, but it is very obvious that a great deal of help is needed or the situation will become very serious within a few months,' said Sultan Maqsood Fazel, Christian Aid's advocacy officer in Afghanistan. 'Meat is scarce in some areas and people are telling us that their food supplies will not last much longer.'
'There is a shortage of water in rivers and wells and the rapidly falling water tables have resulted in an acute shortage of drinking water and water for irrigating farmland,' said Dr Ahmad Zia Shams, programme manager in Herat for Christian Aid partner organisation Agency for Humanitarian and Development Assistance in Afghanistan (AHDAA), which builds irrigation systems and provides drinking water.
Christian Aid is funding several projects in Herat province to dig new wells or expand existing ones. We have already started contacting donors to raise funds to provide assistance to those affected by the drought and will launch a joint appeal with other agencies later this month.
Money is needed immediately for drinking water, food, animal fodder and counselling as well as for longer-term priorities like healthcare and agricultural improvement work.
Christian Aid is calling on international donors, including the UK government, to pledge money to the emergency drought appeal launched by the UN and Afghan government, who have asked for 76 million dollars.
'This week the world will clearly be remembering the terrible events of Sept 11, 2001 in New York and Washington,' said Christian Aid spokesman, John Davison.
'We would ask them also to remember that five years ago, there was a drought in Afghanistan that threatened the lives of five million people. While much has happened on the international scene over this period, once again we are facing a serious drought threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions in Afghanistan,' he added.
In 2001 Christian Aid launched an emergency appeal for Afghanistan which raised £3.79 million. This money was spent on emergency drought assistance, as well as longer-term rehabilitation projects.
In July, the United Nations and the Afghan government warned that more than 2.5 million people are facing food shortages and are in need of immediate assistance.
This is on top of the 6.5 million Afghans living in rural areas who already suffer every year from chronic or seasonal food shortages. Many of the provinces affected had only just recovered from a previous drought, which ended in 2003.
Christian Aid, along with its local Afghan partners, carried out the drought assessment in five provinces in the west and northwest of the country - Herat, Ghor, Farah, Badghis and Faryab - where more than a million people are thought to be affected by the drought.
In Herat, Badghis and Ghor most water sources have completely dried up, so people are having to travel long distances to find drinking water. In some parts of Faryab province the wheat harvest is down 90-100 percent.
In Herat, the rain-fed harvest loss is 90-100 per cent while the harvest from irrigated land is 40 per cent down. In Ghor, there is 70-90 percent decline in the harvest.
Comment: What a coincidence! The US comes and "liberates" Afghanistan and within a few years the previously almost non-existent opium production skyrockets while the previously plentiful harvest of staple foods plummets.
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Iran 'misunderstandings' cleared
BBC News
10/09/2006
The EU's foreign policy chief has said that misunderstandings about Iran's nuclear programme have been cleared up, in talks with its chief negotiator.
Javier Solana and Ali Larijani said progress had been made in a second day of talks to find a compromise to avoid UN sanctions against Iran.
The two officials said they would meet again next week.
But Iran has ruled out accepting any preconditions for talks and dismissed calls to suspend uranium enrichment.
Suspension was an issue in the past and Iran would not take a step back, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi.
Iran says its nuclear programme is solely for power generation.
'Progress made'
Mr Solana said he had worked for more than seven hours with Mr Larijani at the federal chancellory in the Austrian capital, Vienna.
Iran press upbeat
"We have clarified some of the misunderstandings that existed before. We have made progress that we want to continue," he said.
The US on Friday said it hoped the UN Security Council would begin work on a draft resolution authorising sanctions against its long-time foe next week, after Iran ignored a UN-imposed deadline to suspend enrichment.
But other powers have expressed doubt that sanctions would prove effective against the world's fourth-largest oil exporter.
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Iran offers 2-month atomic enrichment halt
Reuters
10/09/2006
Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani offered a 2-month suspension of its nuclear enrichment programme in weekend talks with European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, an EU diplomat said on Sunday.
"Larijani offered a 2-month suspension. But we don't know any details about when it would begin, whether before or after negotiations with Iran on the (incentives) package would begin," said the EU diplomat from one of the six countries that offered Iran incentives to freeze its uranium enrichment programme.
He was speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to talk with journalists.
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Tehran powers up South Lebanon with generators and fuel
By Lysandra Ohrstrom
The Daily Star
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
BEIRUT: Iran has distributed more than 40 power generators to municipal authorities in Southern Lebanon over the past week to temporarily restore electricity to villages most damaged during the Israeli offensive. Abdel-Raouf Adib, a representative for the Iranian Red Crescent, said the $1 million program will supply enough fuel to meet the power consumption needs of each southern village for at least three months. By the end of the week a total of 53 generators and the necessary equipment will be delivered - each town will receive between one and three depending on its size.
A representative for the Energy and Water Ministry, which is working with the Red Crescent on the program, said the generators will provide limited power to public utilities and a few private homes while Electricite du Liban (EDL) repairs ruined electricity networks.
"Last week they started delivering power generators to all villages in South, mainly to power the water pumps and wells because all of the grids have been destroyed," Ali Berro told The Daily Star.
Berro dismissed a report published Monday in local daily As-Safir, which said the Iranian Red Crescent had directly coordinated with Hizbullah to deliver generators to the municipal leaders of Khiam and Bint Jbeil.
"There has been no direct coordination with Hizbullah, but Minister Fneish is a member of the party so there is indirect involvement," Berro said.
The lack of electricity has lead to severe shortages of water for irrigation, further compounding financial losses for Lebanon's 195,000 farmers, 75 percent of whom are smallholding, meaning they own 1 hectare of land or less. According to the Lebanese Farmers Association, 85 percent of farmers lost a portion or all of their harvest during July and August - early estimates put cumulative damages to the sector between $135 and $185 million, mainly stemming from lost crop yields.
Though the main sub-stations in the South were spared Israeli fire, 150 transformers - vital for power delivery - need to be replaced at a cost of $900,000 and 50 need to be repaired to restore power supplies to 90 percent of the population in Southern towns, according to EDL.
Since the cease-fire went into effect on August 14, Lebanon's farming sector remains paralyzed as machinery cannot operate, food cannot be conserved, and water cannot be pumped.
EDL's spokesperson said 14 teams are working constantly, but refused to specify when repairs would be complete. Berro said Egypt has pitched in and donated some transformers, speeding up the process.
Tom White, the head of the UN office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Tyre said Monday 32 of the 35 transformers in Bint Jbeil alone have been damaged and it would take local authorities a minimum of five months to fix networks and restore reliable distribution.
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Raindrops Keep Fallin on Our Heads
Huge New Zealand explosion likely caused by meteor
12 September 2006
Stuff.co.nz
A meteorite is believed to have burned up over Canterbury today before slamming into the ground in a field.
A loud boom heard throughout the region was most likely to be from a meteorite, up to the size of a medicine ball, Stardome Observatory in Auckland says.
The loud boom was heard over Canterbury, with sightings as far afield as Hanmer Springs in North Canterbury, and Hinds in Mid-Canterbury.
Observatory spokesman Andrew Buckingham told NZPA: "We're still finding out what's going on".
Initial reports had come through the police communications system, with follow ups from eyewitness accounts.
"It sounds like a large meteor coming down... soccer ball size upwards," Mr Buckingham said.
It was more likely to be one large rock entering the earth's atmosphere as a fireball, rather than a meteor shower.
The boom was either the meteor breaking the sound barrier or exploding as it burned up.
Stardome Observatory in Auckland's spokesman Andrew Buckingham said it was not a particularly unusual event.
New Zealand had one or two fireballs a year.
This one had been "at a time and place where people have seen it".
It sounded very similar to a bright fireball seen in Taranaki on July 7, 1999, he said.
Stardome wanted to see camera or film footage of the fireball, he said.
Emergency services were inundated with calls from the public about the noise, with initial reports suggesting a meteor strike.
A Christchurch Fire Communications spokesman said the first calls from the public started at 2.53pm today, with people reporting windows rattling and the air "shaking".
There was speculation a "sonic boom" had been caused by space debris, he said.
Several people reported seeing a glowing red ball streaking over the Canterbury sky.
"Whilst sunning myself in Ilam, I saw a bright meteorite fly high over one of the buildings with a yellow tinge. It continued for about five seconds before breaking off into two smaller pieces and disapearing. Seconds later a loud rumble permeated the air, which startled me," said Georgia Weaver from the University of Canterbury.
The meteor has shown up on the McQueen's Valley seismograph.
A GNS Science spokeswoman said they were aware of the incident.
"Something has hit the ground hard, it's not an earthquake," she said.
An Air Force spokesman told NZPA none of their aircraft were responsible - none of the current fleet went fast enough to create a sonic boom.
The Christchurch airport had reported they had no planes that were capable of making such a noise.
Kevin Graham, garage workshop owner in Rolleston - 22km southwest of Christchurch - told NZPA when he heard the boom his first thought was it was a September 11 anniversary attack.
"I don't frighten very easily, but I was just about sh**ing myself."
Mr Graham said he was inside his workshop at the time the boom hit.
"I've been talking to my wife at Addington and she had run outside because she thought the stand was going to collapse. And I ran outside because I thought my place was going to collapse as well."
Mr Graham said he could feel the shock waves in the air so thought it was close, but a truck driver had reported to a local rep he had seen a meteorite fall from the sky into a field in Hinds, 19km southwest of Ashburton.
He said the sound was like a CNG tank exploding.
"It started off with a little boom then a real massive boom. And I mean massive - like the daddy of all booms."
The noise was so loud it shook the garage, he said. "I was wondering what happened and I thought 'Oh, September 12', because we're a day ahead of the States.
"As you do, because everyone is talking about it at the moment."
Hanmer Springs police officer Senior Constable Chris Hughey likened a meteor shooting across the skies over Canterbury today to Haley's Comet which he saw when it last passed near Earth in 1986.
Mr Hughey said he saw the meteor to the south of the North Canterbury resort town just before 3pm and it appeared to be coming in on a 30deg angle travelling west to east.
"All it looked like was a vapour trail from a plane coming in at huge altitude," he said.
"It was a crystal clear day here in Hanmer and it appeared to have a red ball or something at the front. Then it split into about three and just disappeared."
Mr Hughey said he did not hear the loud sonic boom that was heard in Christchurch and elsewhere.
"We didn't have the explosion. It wasn't that overly startling from here, but it was something I've never seen before."
Mr Hughey said he'd seen a few small meteors "coming in here and there" over the years but nothing like today's one. . ."never coming in on that angle.
"I've seen them going horizontally across the sky.
"I've never seen one coming virtually straight down like that.
"It just disintegrated at great altitude. It was moving, too. I don't know what speed they come in at, but it was going."
Mr Hughey said the show lasted no more than a few seconds.
"I called a radio station and told them to expect a few calls," he said. "I don't think they believed me."
The Press and NZPA
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Mysterious light streaks across Washington sky
By JIM FORMAN
KING 5 News
Monday, September 11, 2006
SEATTLE - Around 7:30 p.m. Monday, KING 5 News' phones started to ring as viewers reported seeing a ball of flames shooting across the skies of Western Washington.
The calls came in mostly from Pierce and Kitsap counties.
Michael Witig and his wife were out barbecuing when they saw something streaking through the sky. They kept rolling as the fiery tail grew behind the mystery object.
KING 5 News contacted the Air Force, FAA, National Weather Service and other local authorities, but could not immediately find an explanation for what streaked across the sky and what was caught on tape.
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Flashback: Fireball sparks plane crash alert
Monday, 21 August 2006, 11:25 GMT 12:25 UK
A meteor shower sparked fears a large aircraft was crashing into the sea off the Hebrides.
The Maritime and Coastguard Agency in Stornoway received dozens of calls on Friday night about a fireball falling from the sky.
Lifeboat crews in the Western Isles were alerted as emergency services prepared for a large scale disaster.
However, the cause of the fireball was linked to meteor shower Kappa Cygnid which peaked at the weekend.
A coastguard spokesman said: "We received numerous 999 calls with around 40 alone on Friday night.
"People were reporting seeing something like a plane going down with a tail of smoke behind it.
"It would have been a shooting star from meteor activity."
Five meteors
The spokesman added: "We discussed the situation with RAF Kinloss and other sources and concluded it was meteor activity.
"We got calls from all over such as Stoer on Skye and from Barra to Barvas."
Kappa Cygnid is active between 15-22 August.
Five meteors can be seen in an hour but it can also result in bright yellow-blue fireballs, according to the British Astronomical Association's website.
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Flashback: Fireball Seen Over Texas
August 3, 2006
A police dashboard camera caught a fireball streaking through the night over central Texas Tuesday night.
Some say they saw the object split into several pieces before it died out.
One astronomer believes it was a meteor, though some others say it might have been space junk re-entering the atmosphere.
So far, no word from NASA, which tracks space junk.
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Flashback: Fireball sightings stretch to Wyoming
RONA JOHNSON COLUMN
Posted on Sat, Jun. 24, 2006
On June 2, Dayne LaHooe was driving on a gravel road through Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming when something caught his eye.
"It was the most spectacular thing I've ever seen - I have never seen anything like it before," he said. LaHooe called after he read my June 10 column in the Herald about the fireball that streaked across the sky June 2.
"It shot across the sky and looked like it landed right behind the Tetons," he said.
LaHooe, who works in Jackson Hole, Wyo., figured it was about 9:30 p.m., because the stars hadn't even come out yet.
He didn't say much to anyone about it because he thought they wouldn't believe him. But he did tell his girlfriend and her father. Then, as luck would have it, his girlfriend's father, who lives in the Twin Cities, was driving through this area and somehow came across my column and sent it to LaHooe.
From Minnesota
Errol and Chris Johnson, who are from Chewelah, Wash., were in Roseau, Minn., on June 2. They were celebrating Errol's uncle Glen Johnson's 86th birthday. It was about 11:30 p.m. and Errol and about five other family members were sitting in the breezeway of his uncle's home when they heard some distant booming noises.
"My wife said it sounded like a baseball bat hitting the side of the house - like a sonic boom, I thought," he said. Johnson decided to go outside to see if there was anything going on.
"Almost immediately, I saw two large fireballs with tails fly by, moving from the south-southeast as they appeared to descend to the north," Errol said.
He called to the other family members to come, but the meteor was out of range by the time they got outside.
Johnson and his wife didn't hear anything more about the fireball until after they had returned to Washington.
"My aunt and uncle sent a thank you card and they sent along your article," he said. That's when Johnson called me.
Using Google Earth, Johnson was able to find the exact longitude and latitude of where he was standing when he saw the fireballs, which were 48 degrees, 50 minutes, 34.68 seconds north latitude and 95 degrees, 45 minutes, 38.84 seconds west longitude.
"As far as the angle off of the horizon, I am thinking I had to be looking up about 60 to 75 degrees as I looked directly east," he said.
Over in N.D.
At the same time that Johnson saw the fireball, Leann Weber was in a tractor cultivating a field about 3 miles north of Cando, N.D. It was about midnight and there was no moon.
"All of a sudden, the sky just lit up," Weber said.
She said the fireball stayed in the sky for about a minute.
"As it was falling, you could see debris coming off it and it started breaking apart," she said. "I've never seen anything like it, and probably will never see any like it again. I guess it's a good reason to keep cultivating late at night."
Weber, who works at the Herald as a copy editor, was reminded of the sighting when she was reading my column the night before it appeared in the Herald.
If you read my column June 10, you know that I was sitting in University Park in Grand Forks during the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life when I saw the fireball.
It's fun to hear from people who saw the fireball, but I still haven't received any photos - hint, hint. And it would be really cool to find out if anyone has found any pieces of the meteorite.
I have to apologize to anyone who has been trying to e-mail me lately. My e-mail address has been missing an "r" for the last month and wasn't caught until this last week. I haven't been ignoring your e-mails, I just haven't received them.
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Flashback: Fire in the sky: A bright fireball that blazed over the Northland on Friday night
BY STEVE KUCHERA
Duluth NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
7 June 06
The mysterious light seen over the Northland on Friday night was an especially bright meteor seen in at least two states and Canada.
"Anyone who saw it should count themselves as lucky -- they are probably not going to see another one like that in their lifetime," Scott Young said.
Young is an astronomer and manager of the planetarium and science gallery at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg. The museum is collecting reports of sightings of Friday's fireball, which traveled from south to north over the Northland about 11:35 p.m. Friday.
"We have a couple hundred e-mails, and my receptionist is taking phone calls as quick as they come in," Young said. "I'm sure thousands of people saw it, because it went right over our cottage country area."
Using information from witnesses and the mathematical process of triangulation, the museum hopes to determine the fireball's exact path.
"That intersects the ground at some point, and that's where you go look for pieces," Young said.
If the museum is able to triangulate the fireball's path, it will publish the results so residents can look for its remains. Young believes it likely that parts of the fireball survived their fiery plunge.
"There was a sonic boom heard over the Lake of the Woods area, and that generally means that it has penetrated very low into the atmosphere," he said. "If it does that, then generally pieces can survive."
According to NASA, as many as 4 billion meteors enter the Earth's atmosphere every day, many at speeds about 45 miles per second. Friction with the air causes them to glow. Most meteors are just specks of dust that burn up in a brilliant streak of light.
Fireballs are different. They can weigh pounds -- large enough to illuminate a long path through the sky. Some fireballs, called bolides, explode with a loud, thunderous sound.
Friday's fireball broke into several pieces, witnesses said.
"It broke up into two pieces -- one big ball and one little ball," said Tim Leseman of Eveleth.
Many people who saw Friday's fireball compared it to fireworks traveling horizontally rather than vertically. From any spot, it was visible for as long as 15 seconds.
"Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have been enough time for anyone to take a picture," Young said.
The fireball was seen from places as far afield as Brandon, Manitoba (more than 100 miles west of Winnipeg), northwestern Lake of the Woods (where it appeared to pass directly overhead), Orr, Eveleth, Duluth, the Lake Mille Lacs area and Danbury, Wis.
"Everyone generally thinks it was just over the trees or just over the hills, but when a meteor like this is actually visible, it's usually 20 to 40 kilometers (12 to 25 miles) above the Earth," Young said. "It's way, way up there."
A meteor's chemical makeup and temperature determine what color its glow will be. Many witnesses described Friday's fireball as being green or bluish-green in color (common for a stony meteor), turning to red near the end of its flight.
Chris Magney of Duluth saw the fireball as he walked in the University of Minnesota Duluth area.
"I just looked up, and right there in front of me I saw what looked like a firework," he said. "It was giving off some kind of trail. It wasn't an evenly spaced trail. It was kind of sparking off parts. It looked to be kind of bluish-green."
The fireball was larger than past meteors he's seen.
"This was probably one-eighth or one-tenth the size of the moon -- much larger than any background star," he said. "Just because of the light intensity it must have been pretty hot, whatever it was. It was moving as fast as the shooting stars I've seen."
He watched as it appeared to follow an arc, vanishing over the northwestern horizon.
Leseman was letting his dog out when he happened to look up to the west as the fireball blazed past. It was in sight for perhaps 10 seconds.
"It was the size of the moon and it was moving slowly from south to north," he said. "It was very bright with a long tail, and it looked like it was rolling as if it was burning up.... I got a huge chill watching it."
STEVE KUCHERA can be reached at (218) 279-5503, toll free at (800) 456-8282, or by e-mail at skuchera@duluthnews.com.
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Flashback: Fireball: Object in sky nets 100 calls
By ADAM CLAYTON
Winnipeg Sun
The Manitoba Museum has been flooded with phone calls from people who spotted a strange object in the sky.
Resident astronomer Scott Young said the museum has received at least 100 calls about an eerie green light that appeared in the sky on Friday night. Young believes the object was either a small asteroid or a chunk of comet that shattered into several pieces after burning up in the Earth's atmosphere.
"The receptionist is doing nothing but answering calls and taking numbers right now and I think I'm up to 180 e-mails," he said. "Lots of people saw it."
Eyewitnesses from Dryden to Brandon and as far south as Duluth, Minn., have reported seeing the object.
EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS SOUGHT
Ufology Research of Manitoba, a Winnipeg-based independent centre that collects data on Canadian UFO reports, is assisting the museum in gathering eyewitness accounts to determine the object's flight path. Spokesman Chris Rutkowski said he's received more than a dozen calls so far.
"They all report seeing a brilliant blue or green light moving through the sky with a long tail," he said. "There may have been somebody who captured it on a cellphone camera."
Young said the end point of the object's flight path is somewhere in northwestern Ontario. It's not known whether any pieces reached the ground.
"The first step is to figure out the trajectory and where pieces might come down," he said. "If it's a reasonable place to go looking, then we'll look for pieces," he said.
People can send an e-mail to skyinfo@manitobamuseum.ca or call 956-2830.
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Big Mama's Revenge
Experts Downplay Fla. Earthquake Fears
By PHIL DAVIS
Associated Press
Sep 12, 2006
TAMPA, Fla. -- Floridians can go back to worrying about hurricanes.
Scientists said Sunday's magnitude 6.0 earthquake that rattled windows from southwest Florida to Louisiana was rare, and a seismic jolt powerful enough to do damage or unleash a tsunami on the U.S. Gulf Coast is unlikely.
"Hurricanes are always going to be a bigger threat than earthquakes in Florida," said Eugene Schweig, a Memphis, Tenn.-based U.S. Geological Survey geologist who specializes in East Coast earthquakes.
Florida is an unlikely spot for an earthquake because it is far from the boundaries of the massive tectonic plates that make up the Earth's crust. California, on the other hand, is perched atop the intersection of the Pacific and North American plates. On Monday alone, scientists had recorded 23 earthquakes in California by 4 p.m. None were strong enough to be noticed by residents.
"People in Florida haven't awakened and found themselves in the same boat as people in Los Angeles," said Jeffrey Park, a professor of geology and geophysics at Yale University.
But that doesn't mean the Sunshine State can count on shake-free living. And damage is possible.
"Earthquakes are possible anywhere and Florida is no exception," Schweig said. "There is always the possibility of an earthquake in the place you don't expect it."
The epicenter of Sunday's earthquake was about 260 miles southwest of Tampa, about 18 miles beneath the Gulf of Mexico. As of Monday afternoon, the agency had received more than 5,500 reports of shaking, mostly from Florida's panhandle and west coast.
The reports noted the intensity of the shaking was "light." No major damage was reported. Many people didn't even notice it.
The earthquake was not powerful enough to trigger a tsunami. But Park said that doesn't mean Gulf Coast residents can ignore the threat.
"If there were a massive magnitude 7.0 earthquake, I'd advise people to get off the beach," Park said. "You'd probably still be safe in Disney World."
Sunday's earthquake was the largest in the eastern Gulf of Mexico in 30 years.
Only one earthquake has caused notable damage in Florida. In January 1879, St. Augustine residents reported heavy shaking that knocked plaster off the walls.
A November 1952 temblor prompted a resident of Quincy to report the shaking "interfered with the writing of a parking ticket," the USGS said.
A 1991 University of Florida study reported seismic activity strong enough to be felt on land in 1978 when tremors strong enough to rattle windows were reported in Polk County.
Sunday's temblor was a rare "midplate" earthquake where pent up energy from faraway plate collisions is released in random spots. There is no way to tell where the earthquake will strike. Scientists are intrigued by Sunday's temblor because the USGS recorded a magnitude 5.2 earthquake in the same spot on Feb. 10.
Neither earthquake caused damage, primarily because the epicenter was so far from land.
Park was not surprised the USGS received reports Sunday of weak shaking from as far away as Winston Salem, N.C., more than 760 miles from the epicenter of the quake. He said energy travels more efficiently in tectonic plates far from friction areas.
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Flashback: 6.0 Magnitude Earthquake In Gulf Of Mexico
By Mitch Traphagen mitch@observernews.net
Sep 10, 2006, 11:24
The U.S. Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center is reporting a 6.0 magnitude earthquake has occurred in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 250 miles WSW of Anna Maria, Florida. Tremors were reportedly felt in the Tampa Bay Area and as far north as Georgia. The quake occurred at the epicenter at approximately 10:56 a.m. Sunday morning. The quake was updated from 5.8 magnitude.
The following information has been released by the U.S. Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center:
A strong earthquake occurred about 250 miles (405 km) south-southwest of Apalachicola, Florida at 8:56 AM MDT, Sep 10, 2006 (10:56 AM EDT in Florida). The magnitude and location may be revised when additional data and further analysis results are available. This earthquake was felt in parts of Florida, Georgia and Alabama. No reports of damage or casualties have been received at this time.
Florida is not considered a high hazard for earthquakes and occurrences are rare. Among the worst reported were near St. Augustine in 1879 which caused damage to structures. Florida is also somewhat susceptible to large earthquakes occurring elsewhere.
More recently, small earthquakes were reported off Merritt Island in 1973 and in Daytona in 1975.
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Flashback: 5.2 Earthquake Dead Center In Gulf Of Mexico - Precursor to a New Madrid Big One?
By Elaine Meinel Supkis
February 2006
A mid-sized earthquake shook the Gulf of Mexico today. This is where it is geologically pretty stable. It is also right next to the huge salt domes where much of the oil and gas is being extracted. A retired geologist, Mr. Jack M. Reed, theorized there has to be a hidden tectonic plate segment in this spot and it is not only geologically active but is responsible for triggering the New Madrid Quakes.
I found this after writing my article! It is just too cool. This geologist predicted correctly! From the American Association of Petroleum Geologists:
The New Madrid seismic zone in Missouri has long intrigued scientists because, according to conventional geologic theory, large earthquakes clustered in a tectonically quiet region are difficult to understand.
But at least one AAPG member is challenging the crowd.
New Orleans independent geologist Jack M. Reed believes the origin of the earthquakes lies beneath the Gulf of Mexico.
That's not all.
Reed, a retired Texaco geologist-geophysicist who has been studying the region's geology for over 40 years, says the accepted theory of a quiet geologic evolution of the Gulf of Mexico Basin is fundamentally flawed and needs to be revised.
According to him, the Gulf was and is tectonically active -- and it is the likely origin for not only the New Madrid seismic activity, but also for the Middleton Place-Summerville seismic zone near Charleston, S.C.
I grew up around geologists working with my dad on siting observatories. One puzzle they all liked to chew over at leisure is the riddle of the New Madrid Fault. It made no sense.
Today's earthquake, no small one, was an eye-opener which is why, the minute I saw it in today's data, I jumped on it.
From the good geologist:
"This northeast trending earthquake zone appears to connect with the northeast trending Monroe Uplift, the LaSalle Arch and, possibly, to an active seismic zone located in and around Sabine Lake on the Texas-Louisiana border," he said.
This complex of doming and seismic centers is similar to another Cretaceous age triple juncture located in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico Basin. Doming of the DeSoto Canyon High during the Jurassic to Cretaceous created this triple juncture, which includes the Cretaceous Shelf Edge, the Suwannee Strait and the West Florida Escarpment.
If the New Madrid seismic zone is indeed part of a triple juncture, he continued, there should be an expression of this limb trending along a line in a northeast direction.
So Reed conducted a study using data from the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center and the USGS map "Earthquakes in the Conterminous United States." He only studied earthquakes measuring at least magnitude 5, and found that while most of the earthquake centers are random with no alignment, there is a well-defined earthquake trend extending northeastward from the New Madrid seismic zone across the United States to Canada, where it joins with the St. Lawrence River seismic zone.
Within the boundaries of this earthquake alignment there are:
Sixty-one seismic points that have a magnitude of 5 and greater.
Several large earthquakes dating to the early 1800s, all measuring over magnitude 8, all occurring within a couple of months of each other, all centered in a northeast trending line.
The two 5+ earthquakes that occurred earlier this year in northern New York state and southern Indiana.
"There is definitely some form of movement occurring along this trend," Reed said, "and it appears to be active today."
Well, it really was active today! I bet he is happy as a lark, seeing more evidence his personal theory is correct. I hope this gets good coverage for it is a major geological "find"! Indeed. Congratulations, Mr. Reed! Take a bow.
Click here for raw data. Click here for the earthquake world map. I have noticed over the last year or so, many earthquakes like to happen at 10.0 km. Whether under water or on land. It is like the earth's crust has this blanket on top that operates independent of the lower layers. Some of our nastiest quakes occur at this depth, the earth's blanket being shaken and tugged like Mother Nature is straightening out the bed.
The geology where this happened is interesting because it isn't all that prone to earthquakes. Just last week, I noted there was a much gentler earthquake right in New Orleans just when tornadoes were hitting that poor city! The New Madrid Fault has been shaking a bit, lately. As if it were trembling, waiting for something.
The continental shelf falls rapidly where today's quake happened and maybe the entire Mississippi valley is ready for some serious alterations. The Mid-Atlantic ridge had a 4.6 mag earthquake right next to Iceland which is the volcanic island erupting out of the northern end of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. It, too, was at the interesting depth of 10.0km. Santiago, Chile, had a 4.2 quake at pretty much the same time. I noted this morning that the earth was very quiet for the previous 24 hrs and said to myself, "There are going to be some interesting shakes today," for these quakes are tending to swarm across great distances, like the earth is shuddering still from the side effects of the big blow out last winter.
The geological stability of this part of the Gulf is very important for us since we have deep drilling going on there and if the earth shifts, the various layers shift at different rates so a pipe going straight down can get displaces and cease working as a well.OCSBBS:
There have been significant new discoveries (such as Great White, Trident, Chinook, St. Malo, and Cascade) in the ultra-deep waters of Walker Ridge and Alaminos Canyon. These discoveries open up a whole new geologic play with exciting potential.
Industry has made great technological achievements in recent years. Examples include polyester mooring, composite risers, cell spars, and 15,000-psi subsea trees.
There was a 51 percent increase in the number of producing deepwater projects over the past 2 years.
Deepwater production has risen more than 100,000 barrels of oil per day (BOPD) and over 400 million cubic feet per day (MMCFPD) each year since 1997. (Production volumes were only available through 2002 at the time of writing due to the production data lag.)
Subsea gas production has increased 90 percent since December 2000.
Since the start of 2000, new deepwater drilling has added over 4.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE).
We aren't awash in gas or oil, much of this deep water drilling simply replaces well heads that are beginning to fail.
From Priweb.org:
Just onshore, in south eastern Texas and southern Louisiana, the flowage of salt domes has been the predominant mechanism for creating traps for oil. Salt of Jurassic age occurs here. When it is put under immense pressure by overlying rocks, this salt, which is less dense than the rocks surrounding it, will begin to flow upward. As it does so, it displaces, folds, and faults the rocks around it. In this way, traps can be created.
The Louann Salt is more than 200 million years old, and is located at great depths along the Gulf of Mexico's shoreline. In some places, however, this salt has moved due to the enormous pressure being put on it from the rocks above.
This all takes us back to the beginning, namely, the great Permian age when living things began to rapidly evolve and creatures crawled out of the teeming seas and plants colonized the earth and the atmosphere filled with oxygen and it all came crashing down, as we talked about, this week.
The great salt flats covered over all the rich plant and animal life, the hot seas evaporated in the various shallow seas, tons of salt built up over millions of years as the planet slowly readjusted and life forms began to slowly recolonize the previously dead regions. All that stuff is what we are pumping out today and you might say, the ghosts of these once living creatures are now looming over us all.
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Flashback: Rock 'n Roll! Earthquake Swarm in the Virgin Islands
earthboppin.net
3 Mar 06
3.6 2006/03/03 14:36:36 19.113 -63.991 5.0 55 km ( 34 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
4.4 2006/03/03 13:09:31 19.060 -63.681 39.3 77 km ( 48 mi) ENE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
3.8 2006/03/03 10:07:34 19.160 -63.900 15.5 65 km ( 40 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
3.8 2006/03/03 09:53:32 19.257 -63.597 21.7 96 km ( 60 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
3.7 2006/03/03 03:39:31 19.122 -63.931 8.3 60 km ( 37 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
3.8 2006/03/02 23:51:35 19.147 -63.803 5.0 71 km ( 44 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
3.7 2006/03/02 23:45:36 19.139 -63.791 15.1 72 km ( 45 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
5.3 2006/03/02 23:35:44 19.358 -63.787 24.8 89 km ( 56 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
3.3 2006/03/02 08:25:53 19.427 -68.082 43.7 111 km ( 69 mi) NE of Higüey, Dominican Republic
3.4 2006/03/01 12:38:24 18.855 -68.701 58.2 26 km ( 16 mi) N of Higüey, Dominican Republic
3.2 2006/03/01 06:44:57 18.084 -67.878 101.2 72 km ( 45 mi) WSW of Stella, PR
3.2 2006/03/01 01:35:28 18.135 -64.249 5.0 30 km ( 19 mi) SSW of West End, British Virgin Islands
Comment: Back on February 10, a 5.2 earthquake struck in the Gulf of Mexico about 160 miles South of New Orleans.
According to Elaine Meinel Supkis:
This is where it is geologically pretty stable. It is also right next to the huge salt domes where much of the oil and gas is being extracted. A retired geologist, Mr. Jack M. Reed, theorized there has to be a hidden tectonic plate segment in this spot and it is not only geologically active but is responsible for triggering the New Madrid Quakes.
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Study: greenhouse gases warm oceans, making hurricanes stronger
www.chinaview.cn 2006-09-12 11:21:21
BEIJING, Sept.12 (Xinhuanet) -- Hurricane breeding grounds in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans are being warmed by greenhouse gases, probably making hurricanes stronger in coming decades, according to a new study.
The study was published online Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The scientists, led by Ben Santer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Calif., used 22 climate models to investigate the possible causes of a rise in sea surface temperatures (SST) of up to 0.67 C in the Atlantic and Pacific tropics from 1906 to 2005.
Each computer model was run several times to work out how much the SST would have warmed with or without rising levels of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.
"We've used virtually all the world's climate models to study the causes of the SST changes in hurricane formation regions," Santer said.
They found that tiny particulates from volcanos and sulphates from industrial plants blocked the sun, and so cooled the oceans. But the effect was overcome by the rise in greenhouse gases, which led to warmer oceans.
"The important conclusion is that the observed SST increases in the regions cannot be explained by natural processes alone," said Tom Wigley, co-researcher of the study, from the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The best explanation for these changes has to include a large human influence."
"It is important to note that we expect global temperatures and SSTs to increase even more rapidly over the next century," Wigley says.
Hurricanes are a complex phenomena that are influenced by a variety of physical factors, such as SSTs, wind shear, water vapor, and atmospheric stability. The increasing SSTs in the Atlantic and Pacific hurricane formation regions are not the sole determinant of hurricane intensity, but they are likely to be one of the most significant influences.
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America At Home And Abroad
No Mercy
By Sheila Samples
09/11/06 "Information Clearing House"
"Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions,
and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment." ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
A year after triumphantly declaring that work in the Gulf Coast region would be "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen," after promising that "Americans will look back at the response to Hurricane Katrina and say that our country grew not only in prosperity, but also in character and justice," George Bush had the audacity to return to New Orleans.
Unbelievable.
Bush wore the same blue photo-op shirt of a year ago, with sleeves rolled up to show he meant business. With his trademark nod and wink, he said he accepted full responsibility for the government's breakdown in responding to the devastation -- a breakdown which cost many additional lives. After adding that he'd learned his lesson, Bush then launched into his incoherent, all-too-familiar babble that help is on the way.
As I listened to Bush articulate (sic) his "vision" of a "bright dawn" emerging over New Orleans -- watched him peer off in the distance at the brigades of Saints that only he could see "marching home," I wondered if he gave any thought to the bodies of the lost still lying trapped in the debris so close to where he was standing. I wondered if the desperate families who remain broken and scattered throughout the country could see his lofty vision through their tears as they received notices from FEMA that their housing benefits are terminated, their utilities assistance cut off, their insurance claims denied.
In the last five years, George Bush and the greedy corporate mobsters who surround him have taught people throughout the world a lot about prosperity, character, justice -- and about racism. Those innocents who have a right to expect justice in their lives and character in their leaders hit free-market's blind-eyed and cold-shouldered wall in New Orleans. Too late, too many learned that, in George Bush's world, prosperity is for those who can afford it. In George Bush's world there is no safe haven for the poverty stricken or the dispossessed if they are Black -- especially if they are Black.
When Bush speaks, I never know if I'm laughing or crying. I keep hearing strange hyena-like barks of laughter, yet tears stream down my cheeks. Bush is big on role-playing wherever he goes, and -- disregarding the anguished cries of American citizens still pleading for help -- he said his role in New Orleans is "to encourage entrepreneurship." He's excited about his Go Zone legislation, which will give corporations and small businesses tax incentives to invest in the area. Bush said, "the people of this region are looking to corporate America to see if they're here for the long haul...New Orleans is going to rise again," he told business leaders, "and by planting your corporate flag here now and contributing to this city's rebirth, you'll gain some loyal customers when times get better..."
Yep. Plant them corporate flags, boys, 'cause the south's gonna rise again. In all its racist glory.
Strange that the general consensus seems to be FEMA stumbled and fell into the pit of its own incompetence. I hate to be a party pooper, but there's no way any government agency could be so woefully inept on every front. When you consider that martial law was declared immediately; that police, miltary, and armed contractor troops were immediately on site -- not to retrieve bodies floating in the water nor to bury those who lay dead in the streets, but to keep the hungry and thirsty victims from stealing food and water -- when you consider that from 8,000 to 10,000 residents of the St. Bernard Housing Project were immediately locked out of their homes, and FEMA immediately built a formidable iron fence around the project and padlocked it so they could not return; that all national, even worldwide, efforts to help were seamlessly blocked -- it's difficult not to come to the conclusion that FEMA's response was immediate, and thorough as well.
For example, in the Sept. 5, 2005 Daily Kos, diarist DavidNYC posted just a few of what he said were FEMA's "rank failures." Could be, but after turning away experienced firefighters, turning back WalMart supply trucks, preventing the Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel, blocking the Red Cross from delivering food to starving refugees, barring morticians from assisting with the dead, turning back a five-mile-long, 500-boat citizen flotilla which arrived to take the stranded, the injured, the ill and the frail to safety, refusing to use a Navy ship in the area with a 600-bed hospital and medical staff on board, infuriating Chicago's mayor by refusing massive aid while accepting just one truck, and ordering first responders "not to respond," I'd have to say it's possible to conclude that FEMA was up and running and Michael "Brownie" Brown did, indeed, do a heckuva job.
This is America. We don't withhold food and water from starving citizens. We don't turn our backs on human beings in this country who are pleading for help, drowning -- crying out for mercy... Or so we thought. However, if the onslaught and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina taught us nothing else, it is that the middle and lower segments of our society are little more than collateral damage when the destruction of their lives and property serves a political agenda...
The glee with which pundits, media propagandists and politicians pounced on the opportunity offered by the Katrina disaster to rid the city of its poverty population, especially those who owned homes on valuable real estate, is sickening. Baton Rouge Republican Rep. Richard Baker chortled to lobbyists about the more than 1,700 people killed and hundreds of thousands of others displaced, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
House Speaker Dennis Hastert agreed. With breathtaking indifference to the plight of property owners and displaced families, Hastert said, "It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that's seven feet under sea level....It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed."
It is obvious that the "bright dawn" Bush sees rising over the Big Easy is, in reality, a "white dawn" -- a smaller, whiter city with fewer poor folks. In their brilliant synopsis of the sheer opportunistic evil permeating New Orleans reconstruction, Adolph Reed and Stephen Steinberg write in the Black Commentator, "...the Housing Authority of New Orleans has shut down its public-housing operations, and informed landlords of people assisted by federal rent vouchers that government rent subsidies for impacted units have been suspended indefinitely."
The authors point out the obvious -- "If public housing and affordable housing in New Orleans are not rebuilt, if rent subsidies are withheld, then what 'choice' do people have but to relocate elsewhere? The certain result will be 'a smaller and stronger New Orleans,' depleted of its poverty population."
Thus, if the government has anything to do with it, those airlifted and taken by bus from the area, families split, parents separated from their children, will relocate elsewhere -- permanently. They are no longer welcome in a city where not Saints, but private corporations, developers and Bush's beloved "entrepreneurs" are marching in...
At least one person was a bit uneasy about the prospect of so many evacuees relocating in her state, even if they were better off. Former first lady Barbara Bush, the current president's mother, looked at the black sea of humanity packed into the relentless heat of the Houston Astrodome, and commented, "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle) - this is working very well for them."
Yes. Being crammed into an arena in unfamiliar surroundings with no food, water or possessions is just another ho-hum day in the life of the poor, and always good for a chuckle, isn't it? Is there anything about the demons and trolls who run this country that is not totally incomprehensible, raging mad -- desperately absurd? Not a single one appears to possess the character -- the ethical "gravity" it would take to bring them down to reality from their fantastical delusions.
Which brings us back to FEMA. Bush said FEMA had learned its lesson and would be "ready" for the next disaster. No doubt. The next time Bush declares martial law, Halliburton's KBR should have the detention facilities, for which it received a $385 million contract in January, ready and waiting. According to a KBR release, the camps call for preparing for "an emergency influx of immigrants or to support the rapid development of new programs" in the event of other emergencies, such as "a national disaster." Under emergency plans already in existence, the power exists to suspend the Constitution and turn over the reins of government to FEMA. State and local governments will be under military control.
Is there hope for American citizens like those in New Orleans whose lives have been, continue to be, destroyed by cruel indifference? Yes, of course, but it will take citizens like you and me to stand up for what we know is right, to repair our shredded Constitution, and breathe new life into our comatose Bill of Rights.
We were warned every step of the way. We have been insulted and deceived, our courts dismantled, our Congress neutered, our children murdered in an illegal, genocidal war, our elections stolen, our tax dollars wasted. Today, we are stranded on our own rooftops, pleading for a November 2006 rescue.
Well, help is not on the way. It is up to us. We must check the voting records of every single Congressperson and of every single Senator -- Republican and Democrat. Those who violated their oath to protect the U.S. Constitution from enemies within must be shown no mercy. They are devoid of character and of virtue. In concert with the man in the blue photo-op shirt with the sleeves rolled up, they maliciously turn the other way while sending American citizens to their deaths. They are disloyal -- treasonous. Together, they have disgraced this great nation. They must go.
Only then will the wounds inflicted from New York to New Orleans to Iraq begin to heal.
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Where Americans live can affect how long they live
The Associated Press
Published: September 12, 2006
The longest-living Americans can expect to survive decades longer than the worst off - and the explanation is far more complex than poverty, says a startling report on the nation's health disparities.
It turns out that where U.S. residents live, combined with race and income, plays a huge role in whether they die young, says a study issued Monday that contends the differences are so stark it's as if there are eight separate Americas instead of one.
Worse, the gaps in lifespan have persisted over 20 years, despite efforts to tackle them, concluded Dr. Christopher Murray of the Harvard School of Public Health.
"That's pretty devastating," said Murray, who published the exhaustive analysis in the online science journal PLoS Medicine. "Whatever it is that we're doing isn't working. That's a wakeup call."
Leading the nation in longevity are Asian-American women who live in Bergen County, New Jersey, outside New York City, and typically reach their 91st birthdays, concluded Murray's county-by-county analysis.
On the opposite extreme are American Indian men in swaths of South Dakota, who die around 58.
Millions of the worst-off Americans have life expectancies typical of developing countries, lamented Murray. The Asian-American women can expect to live 13 years longer than low-income black women in the rural South. That is like comparing women in wealthy Japan to those in poverty-ridden Nicaragua.
Compare those longest-living women to inner-city black men, and the life-expectancy gap is 21 years. That is similar to the life-expectancy gap between Iceland and Uzbekistan.
Health disparities are widely considered an issue of minorities and the poor being unable to find or afford good medical care. But Murray's government-funded study shows the problem is far more complex, and that geography plays a crucial role.
"Although we share in the U.S. a reasonably common culture ... there's still a lot of variation in how people live their lives," he explained.
The longest-living whites were not the relatively wealthy, which Murray calls "Middle America." They are edged out, by a year, by low-income residents of the rural Northern Plains states in the Midwest, where the men tend to reach age 76 and the women 82.
Yet low-income whites in Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley in the South die four years sooner than their Northern neighbors.
"If it's your family involved, these are not small differences in lifespan," Murray said. "Yet that sense of alarm isn't there in the public."
"If I were living in parts of the country with those sorts of life expectancies, I would want ... to be asking my local officials or state officials or my congressman, 'Why is this?'"
This more precise measure of health disparities will enable federal officials to better target efforts to battle inequalities, said Dr. Wayne Giles of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which helped fund Murray's work.
The CDC has some county-targeted programs - like one that has cut in half diabetes-caused amputations among black men in Charleston, South Carolina, since 1999, largely by encouraging physical activity - and the new study argues for more, Giles said.
"It's not just telling people to be active or not to smoke," he said. "We need to create the environment which assists people in achieving a healthy lifestyle."
Murray analyzed mortality data between 1982 and 2001 by county, race, gender and income. He found some distinct groupings that he named the "eight Americas:"
_Asian-Americans, average per capita income of $21,566 (€16,964), have a life expectancy of 84.9 years.
_Northland low-income rural whites, $17,758 (€13,968), 79 years.
_Middle America (mostly white), $24,640 (€19,382), 77.9 years.
_Low-income whites in Appalachia, Mississippi Valley, $16,390 (€12,892), 75 years.
_Western American Indians, $10,029 (€7,889), 72.7 years.
_Black Middle America, $15,412 (€12,123), 72.9 years.
_Southern low-income rural blacks, $10,463 (€8,230), 71.2 years.
_High-risk urban blacks, $14,800 (€11,642), 71.1 years.
Longevity disparities were most pronounced in young and middle-aged adults. A 15-year-old urban black young man was 3.8 times as likely to die before the age of 60 as an Asian-American, for example.
That is key, Murray said, because this age group is left out of many government health programs that focus largely on children and the elderly.
Moreover, the longevity gaps have stayed about the same for 20 years despite increasing national efforts to eliminate obvious racial and ethnic health disparities, he found.
Murray was surprised to find that lack of health insurance explained only a small portion of those gaps. Instead, differences in alcohol and tobacco use, blood pressure, cholesterol and obesity seemed to drive death rates.
Most important, he said, will be pinpointing geographically defined factors - such as shared ancestry, dietary customs, local industry, what regions are more or less prone to physical activity - that in turn influence those health risks.
For example, scientists have long thought that the Asian longevity advantage would disappear once immigrant families adopted higher-fat Western diets. Murray's study is the first to closely examine second-generation Asian-Americans, and found their advantage persists.
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Ambassador: U.S. to cut dues if UN fails to reform
www.chinaview.cn 2006-09-12 11:04:05
NEW YORK, Sept. 11 (Xinhua) -- The United States would consider cutting back on its dues if the United Nations failed to conduct reforms by the end of this year, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said on Monday.
Bolton made the remarks in response to a question after addressing a symposium on the future of the United Nations sponsored by the Hudson Institute.
"Is good management and lack of corruption too much to ask for?" he asked, saying the world body was "severely challenged from a management and accountability point of view."
Washington, which now pays about a quarter of the UN budget, had set a goal of "complete concentration on the reform process" through the end of 2006, said the ambassador.
"So I think what we need to do is wait until we reach the end of the year and then make an evaluation. And I think our determination and our objectives are very clear to all of the other UN members, and I think they can calculate the stakes if reform does not succeed," he added.
In naming Bolton as his UN ambassador last year, U.S. President George W. Bush asked him to lead a major overhaul of the United Nations following findings of widespread mismanagement and corruption in the oil-for-food program for Iraq.
The oil-for-food operation, which began in December 1996 and ended in 2003, was aimed at easing the impact of UN sanctions on ordinary Iraqis, imposed after Saddam Hussein's troops invaded Kuwait in 1990.
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Czech Govt Under Fire Over US Missile Plans
AFP
09/09/2006
Less than a week after taking office, the Czech Republic's new minority government is embroiled in a major political row with opposition parties over a US project to base missiles on Czech territory.
Washington wants to deploy 10 interceptor missiles and a radar in Europe to reinforce its defences against the threat of a ballistic missile attack from North Korea or Iran, and currently has its eye on either the Czech Republic or Poland as the favoured home for the new system.
The Czech Republic's new right wing Civic Democrat government, which finally took office on September 4 after three months of political wrangling in the wake of June elections, wholeheartedly backs the US scheme. Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek has already declared in a television interview that he is "absolutely in favour" of Czech participation.
His foreign minister Alexandr Vondra, a former Czech ambassador to Washington, has made similarly upbeat noises. Almost immediately after taking office he said the missile shield would "reinforce Euro-Atlantic links" and boost his country's security at a time when "certain threats from Iran cannot be underestimated."
But the country's second biggest party, the Social Democrats, along with the Communists are resolutely opposed to the plan.
And if the latest opinion polls are to be believed, most Czech citizens seem to back the left. A recent poll by the Stem organisation showed that 51 percent of the population found the project "unacceptable" and 61 percent thought it should be put to a referendum.
The missile issue has become the country's hottest post-election talking point, with politicians of all colours making daily comments on the question.
Outgoing Social Democrat premier, Jiri Paroubek, has voice his opposition to the project in line with an internal poll of party members.
The Communist Party, which called for an exit from NATO's military structures ahead of the elections, has launched a petition against the US plan, with the party claiming more than 15,000 signatures. The Communists this week also presented a constitutional proposal for a national referendum on the issue.
But despite the findings of the opinion polls, few Czechs have actively taken part in the small number of pacifist or anti-American demonstrations that have been organised in opposition to the missile scheme.
Nevertheless, many people here see any type of US installation as a form of foreign military occupation, sparking painful memories of the seven-year German occupation of the country before and during World War II and the later Soviet presence, according to the local press.
Supporters of the project have, for their part, called into question the validity of the latest opinion polls and complain that people have been misinformed about the missile shield. They point to one Internet site, for example, which claimed the system would disturb television reception and air traffic control. In a bid to scotch such rumours, the Czech foreign ministry this week attempted to stimulate a public discussion about the plans by holding a conference entitled "Why the Czech Republic should take part in the MD (missile defence) project."
On the same day, the US embassy in Prague launched an Internet site aimed at educating Czechs about the project. The site points out that the missile shield "can integrate with emerging NATO concepts for a missile defence system," aimed at protecting Europe and not threatening Russia, which has attacked the plans.
Washington says it is waiting for a "positive signal" from Prague before making a formal request, but it is still carrying on parallel negotiations with Poland.
Unfortunately for the Americans, public opinion in Poland does not seem any more keen on the scheme.
The United States is likely to take a final decision about the location of the missile shield before the end of the year, perhaps after a NATO summit in Riga scheduled for November 28 and 29, according to US diplomatic sources here.
But even if it does choose the Czech option, the final signing of an agreement would require clearance from the lower house of parliament. That is something which in the current political context, with left and right wing factions each having 100 seats, looks unlikely.
With opinions so deeply divided over the issue, Topolanek's Civic Democrat government could just find itself remembered as one of the most short-lived administrations in the Czech Republic's short history.
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Peak Oil? Ask Ahmadinejad, Or Morales, Not Harper Or Calderon
Peak oil theories wrong, says ExxonMobil boss
September 11, 2006
News.com.au
THE world has an abundant supply of oil, and high petrol prices are just the reality of a globally traded commodity, ExxonMobil Australia chairman Mark Nolan said today.
Mr Nolan used his speech to the Asia Pacific oil and gas conference in Adelaide today to debunk the theory of peak oil, which suggests oil supplies have peaked and will dwindle over the next 20 years.
Such predictions, he said, had been around since the 1920s, particularly at times of high oil prices.
"The fact is that the world has an abundance of oil and there is little question, scientifically, that abundant energy resources exist," Mr Nolan said.
"According to the US Geological Survey, the earth currently has more than three trillion barrels of conventional, recoverable oil resources.
"So far we have produced one trillion."
Mr Nolan said the oil industry had always underestimated the extent of global resources and the ability of technology to both extend the life of existing oil and gas fields and find new ones.
"We should not forget that we can recover almost twice as much oil today as when we first discovered it over 100 years ago," he said.
"And when you consider that a further 10 per cent increase in recoverability will deliver 800 billion barrels of oil to our recoverable total, we have every reason to be sure that the end of oil is nowhere in sight."
Mr Nolan said that by 2030, conventional fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) would still account for 80 per cent of the world's energy requirements.
But Mr Nolan said it was very difficult to predict what would happen in the future with both crude oil and petrol prices.
"They are both regionally traded commodities, they are priced by the market, priced by the region," he said.
"The fuel price is ultimately driven by the source of the product, which is the crude price, and of course that is traded regionally and internationally."
Mr Nolan's comments were endorsed by the president of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, Eve Sprunt, who said the proponents of peak oil theory often confused oil reserves with available resources.
"When you are talking about reserves, you are only talking about a very small fraction of the total resource base," she said.
"The reserves are the portion for which the infrastructure is largely in place, the technology is in place and that can be produced at the current oil price.
"But if you are planning for the long-term energy future of your country you need to understand the resource base."
"The whole name of the game is moving resources into the reserves category."
Ms Sprunt said high oil prices also presented opportunities such as the viable development of other fuels.
"It's a time when new alternatives emerge," she said.
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Iranian president to kick off int'l tour Wednesday
www.chinaview.cn 2006-09-12 03:23:50
TEHRAN, Sept. 11 (Xinhua) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will kick off his international tour Wednesday to visit Senegal, Cuba and Venezuela before he attends a UN General Assembly in New York, his official website said Monday.
At his first stop, Ahmadinejad will make a one-day visit to Senegal and hold talks with the African country's officials on bilateral relations and cooperation, the website said.
The Iranian president will then travel to Havana, Cuba, to attend a meeting of Group-15 and a summit of Non-Aligned Movement leaders.
Ahmadinejad's next stop is Caracas, Venezuela. Some new cooperation agreements are expected to be signed between the two countries.
Finally, he is scheduled to arrive in New York to attend the 61st annual session of the United Nations General Assembly.
Ahmadinejad plans to make a speech at the UN General Assembly and meet some leaders of different countries, the website said, without elaborating.
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"Capitalism Has Only Hurt Latin America"
By Evo Morales
Sep 3, 2006, 00:43
Bolivia's President Evo Morales, 46, talks to DER SPIEGEL about reform plans for his country, socialism in Latin America, and the often tense relations of the region's leftists with the United States.
SPIEGEL: Mr. President, why is such a large part of Latin America moving to the left?
Morales: Injustice, inequality and the poverty of the masses compel us to seek better living conditions. Bolivia's majority Indian population was always excluded, politically oppressed and culturally alienated. Our national wealth, our raw materials, was plundered. Indios were once treated like animals here. In the 1930s and 40s, they were sprayed with DDT to kill the vermin on their skin and in their hair whenever they came into the city. My mother wasn't even allowed to set foot in the capital of her native region, Oruro. Now we're in the government and in parliament. For me, being leftist means fighting against injustice and inequality but, most of all, we want to live well.
SPIEGEL: You called a constitutional convention to establish a new Bolivian republic. What should the new Bolivia look like?
Morales: We don't want to oppress or exclude anyone. The new republic should be based on diversity, respect and equal rights for all. There is a lot to do. Child mortality is frighteningly high. I had six siblings and four them died. In the countryside, half of all children die before reaching their first birthday.
SPIEGEL: Your socialist party, MAS, does not have the necessary two-thirds majority amend the constitution. Do you now plan to negotiate with other political factions?
Morales: We are always open to talks. Dialogue is the basis of Indian culture, and we don't want to make any enemies. Political and ideological adversaries, perhaps, but not enemies.
SPIEGEL: Why did you temporarily suspend the nationalization of natural resources, one of your administration's most important projects? Does Bolivia lack the know-how to extract its raw materials?
Morales: We are continuing to negotiate with the companies in question. The current lack of investment has nothing to do with nationalization. It's the fault of the right-wing government of (former president) Tuto Quiroga, who stopped all investment in natural gas production in 2001 because, as he claimed, there was no domestic market for natural gas in Bolivia. We plan to start drilling again. We have signed a delivery agreement for natural gas with Argentina, and we are also cooperating with Venezuela. We have signed a contract to work an iron mine with an Indian company. This will create 7,000 direct and 10,000 indirect jobs. We have negotiated much better prices and terms than our predecessors.
SPIEGEL: But there are major problems with Brazil. Bolivia is demanding a higher price for natural gas shipments. Doesn't this harm your relationship with (Brazilian) President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva?
Morales: Lula is showing his solidarity. He behaves like a big brother. But we are having problems with Petrobras, the Brazilian energy company. The negotiations are very difficult, but we are optimistic.
SPIEGEL: Petrobras has threatened to end all of its investments in Bolivia.
Morales: This isn't coming from the Brazilian government, but from a few Petrobras executives. They print these threats in the press to put us under pressure. Brazil is a major power, but it has to treat us with respect. CompaZero Lula told me that there will be a new agreement, and that he even wants to import more gas.
SPIEGEL: Bolivia doesn't sell natural gas to Chile because the Chileans took away Bolivia's access to the sea in a war more than 120 years ago. Now a socialist is in power in Chile. Will you supply them with natural gas now?
Morales: We want to overcome our historical problems with Chile. The sea has divided us and the sea must bring us back together again. Chile has agreed, for the first time, to talk about sea access for Bolivia. That's a huge step forward. The Chilean president came to my inauguration, and I attended (Chilean President) Michelle Bachelet's inauguration in Santiago. We complement each other. Chile needs our natural resources and we need access to the sea. Under those circumstances, it must be possible to find a solution in the interest of both countries.
SPIEGEL: What influence did Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have on the nationalization of Bolivia's natural resources?
Morales: None whatsoever. Neither Cuba nor Venezuela was involved. I managed the nationalization myself. Only seven of my closest associates knew about the decree and the date. Although I did meet Chavez and (Cuban leader) Fidel Castro in Cuba a few days before the announcement, we didn't talk about nationalization. I had already signed the decree before I departed for Cuba, and the vice president gave it to the cabinet. When Fidel asked me in Cuba how far the project had progressed, I told him that we planned to announce the nationalization in the coming days, but I didn't give him a date. Fidel warned me to wait until the constitutional convention. Chavez wasn't aware of anything.
SPIEGEL: Chavez wants to install a socialism for the 21st century in Venezuela. His ideological advisor Heinz Dieterich, a German, was recently in Bolivia. Do you intend to introduce socialism in Bolivia?
Morales: If socialism means that we live well, that there is equality and justice, and that we have no social and economic problems, then I welcome it.
SPIEGEL: You admire Fidel Castro as the "grandfather of all Latin American revolutionaries." What have you learned from him?
Morales: Solidarity, most of all. Fidel helps us a great deal. He has donated seven eye clinics and 20 basic hospitals. Cuban doctors have already performed 30,000 free cataract operations for Bolivians. Five thousand Bolivians from poor backgrounds are studying medicine at no charge in Cuba.
SPIEGEL: But Bolivian doctors are protesting the Cubans' presence. They say that they deprive them of their livelihood.
Morales: The Bolivian state doesn't pay the Cuban doctors any salaries, so they're not taking anything away from the Bolivians.
SPIEGEL: Do you know how Castro is doing?
Morales: Yes, I spoke with him on the phone today. He has been feeling better for the last two days. He told me that he'll be well enough to attend the summit of nonaligned nations in Havana in September.
SPIEGEL: And he'll give a speech then?
Morales: Certainly. It's an opportunity he won't miss.
SPIEGEL: The Americans are worried that Chavez is gaining too much influence. Aren't you making yourself dependent on Venezuela?
Morales: What unites us with Chavez is the concept of the integration of South America. This is the old dream of a great fatherland, a dream that existed even before the Spanish conquest, and Simon Bolivar fought for it later on. We want a South America modeled after the European Union, with a currency like the euro, one that's worth more than the dollar. Chavez's oil is unimportant for Bolivia. We only get diesel under favorable terms. But we are not dependent on Venezuela. We complement each other. Venezuela shares its wealth with other countries, but that doesn't make us subordinate.
SPIEGEL: The Latin American left is fracturing into a moderate, social democratic current, led by Lula and Bachelet, and a radical, populist movement represented by Castro, Chavez and yourself. Isn't Chavez dividing the continent?
Morales: There are social democrats and others who are marching more in the direction of equality, whether you call them socialists or communists. But at least Latin America no longer has racist or fascist presidents like it did in the past. Capitalism has only hurt Latin America.
SPIEGEL: You are the first Indian president in Bolivian history. What role will indigenous culture play in your government?
Morales: We must combine our social consciousness with professional competency. In my administration, intellectuals from the upper class can be cabinet ministers or ambassadors, as can members of Indian ethnic groups.
SPIEGEL: Do you believe that the Indian peoples have developed a better social model than the white, Western democracies?
Morales: There was no private property in the past. Everything was communal property. In the Indian community where I was born, everything belonged to the community. This way of life is more equitable. We Indians are Latin America's moral reserve. We act according to a universal law that consists of three basic principles: do not steal, do not lie and do not be idle. This trilogy will also serve as the basis of our new constitution.
SPIEGEL: Is it true that all government employees will be required to learn the Indian languages Quechua, Aymara und Guaraní in the future?
Morales: Public servants in the cities are required to learn the language of their region. If we already speak Spanish in Bolivia, we should also be fluent in our own languages.
SPIEGEL: Are the whites treating the Indians better, now that you're in power?
Morales: It's gotten a lot better. The middle class, intellectuals and the self-employed are now proud of their Indian roots. Unfortunately, some oligarchic groups continue to treat us as being inferior.
SPIEGEL: Some critics claim that the Indians in Bolivia are now racist toward the whites.
Morales: That's part of a dirty war the mass media are waging against us. Wealthy, racist businessmen own much of the media.
SPIEGEL: The Catholic Church has accused you of wanting to reform religious instruction. Will there be no freedom of religion in Bolivia?
Morales: I am Catholic. Freedom of religion isn't at issue. But I am opposed to a monopoly when it comes to faith.
SPIEGEL: Some large landowners have threatened violent resistance to the planned land reforms. Whose land do you intend to seize?
Morales: We will expropriate large land holdings that are not being farmed. But we want democratic and peaceful agrarian reform. The 1952 land reform led to the creation of many tiny, unproductive parcels in the Andean highlands.
SPIEGEL: Bolivia is divided into the rich provinces in the east and the poor Andean highlands. There is a strong movement for autonomy in the east. Is the country at risk of breaking apart?
Morales: This is what a few fascist, oligarchic groups want. But they lost the vote over the constitutional convention.
SPIEGEL: Bolivia is an important narcotics producer. Your predecessors had illegal coca plantations destroyed. Do you intend to do the same thing?
Morales: From our standpoint, coca should be neither destroyed nor completely legalized. Farming should be controlled by the state and by the coca farmers' unions. We have launched an international campaign to legalize coca leaves, and we want the United Nations to remove coca from its list of toxic substances. Scientists proved long ago that coca leaves are not toxic. We decided on a voluntary reduction in the amount of acreage being farmed.
SPIEGEL: But the United States claims that the majority of the coca harvest ends up in the cocaine trade.
Morales: The Americans say all kinds of things. They accuse us of not fulfilling the conditions of their development aid. My pro-capitalist predecessor administrations supported the massacre of coca farmers. More than 800 campesinos died in the war on drugs. The United States is using its war on drugs as an excuse to expand its control over Latin America.
SPIEGEL: The American Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, has agents stationed in Bolivia who advise the military and the police in their efforts to combat the drug trade. Will you be sending them home now?
Morales: They're still here, but they are no longer in uniform or armed, as they were before.
SPIEGEL: How is your relationship with the United States? Do you plan to travel to Washington?
Morales: A meeting with (US President) George W. Bush is not planned. I do intend to travel to New York to visit the UN General Assembly. When I was still a member of parliament, the Americans didn't let me into the country. But heads of state don't need a visa to travel to the UN in New York.
SPIEGEL: You broke your nose while playing soccer a few weeks ago. Are you playing less these days?
Morales: Does my nose still look crooked? Playing sports has always been my greatest pleasure. I don't smoke, I hardly drink alcohol and I rarely dance, although I used to play the trumpet. Sports helped get me into the presidential palace. My first position in the union was that of sports secretary. I was head of a soccer club in the countryside when I was 13.
SPIEGEL: Why don't you wear a tie?
Morales: I never wore a tie voluntarily, even though I was forced to wear one for photos when I was young and for official events at school. I used to wrap my tie in a newspaper, and whenever the teacher checked I would quickly put it on again. I'm not used to it. Most Bolivians don't wear ties.
SPIEGEL: Mr. President, thank you for speaking with us.
The interview was conducted by Jens Glüsing and Hans Hoyng and was translated from German by Christopher Sultan.
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New passport rules for Canada, Mexico
AP
Tue Sep 5, 2006
WASHINGTON - If you're thinking of flying or taking a cruise in 2007 that will include destinations in Canada, the Caribbean, or Mexico, you should plan to get a passport this fall.
Under new government regulations, by Dec. 31, travelers to and from the Caribbean, Mexico and Canada - plus Bermuda and Panama - will be required to have a passport to enter or re-enter the United States.
A year later, on Dec. 31, 2007, the requirement will be extended to all land-based border crossings as well.
This is a change from prior travel requirements under which you could go to Canada, Mexico or most Caribbean countries and re-enter the U.S. with a driver's license and birth certificate.
To find out how to get a passport, visit the State Department's travel Web site at http://www.travel.state.gov, or call the U.S. National Passport Information Center at 877-487-2778.
For a list of post offices, town clerk's offices and other facilities where passports are processed, type in your zip code at http://www.iafdb.travel.state.gov/. There are more than 7,700 such locations around the country.
Allow six weeks for processing. Peak domestic passport processing is between January and July, so you'll get your passport more quickly if you apply between August and December. You can also pay for expedited service in an emergency.
If you're 16 or older, the fees for getting a new passport total $97, not including the cost of getting passport photos. For children under 16, the fees total $82. Passport renewals are $67.
The new requirements will not affect travel between the U.S., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. You'll still be able to use your birth certificate and driver's license to travel there and re-enter the U.S. after the new passport rules take effect.
Only about 25 percent of Americans have current, valid passports. But the State Department is experiencing unprecedented demand for passports, due in part to this new regulation. More than 10 million passports were issued during the last fiscal year, and the State Department reports that it is on track to issue over 13 million this year.
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Chirac Censors, Wikipedia too, Baghdad Mourns, UK Is Screwed
Chirac allies on trial over alleged Paris vote-rigging
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Tuesday September 12, 2006
The Guardian
Allies of President Jacques Chirac yesterday went on trial over alleged vote-rigging in Paris while he was mayor.
Fifteen politicians and officials are accused of putting 327 phantom voters on the electoral register ahead of a 1989 municipal election that Mr Chirac's conservative party won. The case is one of a number linked to Paris town hall that have emerged during his presidency.
As president he is immune from prosecution. He is seeking to make a former adviser chief Paris prosecutor, leading opponents to complain he is trying to avoid investigation when he steps down.
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Why is Wikipedia Censoring Me?
by James Bacque
Serendipity.li
In 1989, I published the first in a series of books about the Second World War and its aftermath. The first, Other Losses, showed the tremendous atrocities committed against enemy prisoners in the prison camps of the US and France after 1945. The next, Just Raoul, was a biography of a hero of the French Resistance who saved many refugees from Nazi death camps. The next, Crimes and Mercies, described the full extent of all allied crimes against Germans, plus the wonderful charity work of Canada and the USA in saving 800 million people, including Germans, Japanese and Italians, from starving to death in the hungry years after 1945. The next, Dear Enemy, illuminated the attitudes of the western allies to Germany from 1945 to now.
Wikipedia reviews and criticizes only Other Losses, and in such a biassed way, that I finally tried to correct their many errors. Starting in March, 2006, I tried repeatedly over many weeks to correct the errors, but found that within a day at first, then within hours, and finally within minutes, some Wikipedian editor had expunged my corrections, replacing them with ever more hostile and denigrating allegations. Friends of mine tried also to correct the flawed Wikipedia article, but found the same situation. Finally we decided that Wikipedia was deliberately censoring my contributions, and that it was pointless to continue trying to present the facts on Wikipedia. After Serendipity (already acquainted with censorship at Wikipedia) heard of this situation I was offered the chance to publish the real story, which appears below.
Wikipedia quotes Stephen E. Ambrose as saying that Other Losses is "... spectacularly flawed ..." without saying that Ambrose also wrote that "You have made a major historical discovery which will ... span the oceans and have reverberations for decades, yea centuries to come. You have the goods on these guys ..."
Wikipedia does not say that Ambrose changed his mind only after he was retained by the US Army to lecture at the War College in Pennsylvania. Nor does Wikipedia mention that in his attack on me in the New York Times, he admitted that he had not done the necessary research to reach the conclusions that he published in that same article. Wikipedia fails to mention that the Ambrose it cites as an authority admitted that he had plagiarized several other authors. Wikipedia does not concern itself with the accusations that Ambrose stole work from a graduate student which he published as his own.
Wikipedia ignores my book, Crimes and Mercies, which goes far towards balancing the record of western actions after World War Two. The book shows the great charity extended by the western allies, chiefly Canada and the USA, towards the starving around the world after WW2, including the Japanese and Germans. Saying that the overwhelming majority of professional historians reject my work, and citing as an authority one historian who has never worked in this field, Wikipedia ignores the support given me by the eminent US Army military historian Col. Dr. Ernest F. Fisher, a former Senior Historian of the US Army Center for Military History, Washington. Fisher, a professional historian for decades, wrote the official US Army history of the campaign in Italy. He assisted me for months in researching documents in the US National Archives, wrote the Introduction to my book Other Losses, and has supported me with public statements for the seventeen years since its first publication. He helped me for many months researching in the archives.
Wikipedia does not mention the expert editing, research help and public support given me by the eminent epidemiologist and biostatistician, Dr Anthony B. Miller, former head of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Toronto.
Wikipedia also casts aside the support given my work by Richard Overy, King's College, University of London; Otto Kimminich, University of Regensburg; Dr Alfred De Zayas, author of many books on postwar German history; Prof. Dr. Peter Hoffmann, McGill University, author of the most expert books on the German resistance; Prof. J. K. Johnson, Carleton University, Ottawa; Professor Ralph Raico, University of Buffalo; Prof. Ed Peterson, University of Wisconsin; Prof Ralph Scott, University of Iowa; Prof. Pierre Van Den Berghe, University of Seattle; Prof. Dr Richard Mueller, former head, Department of English, University of Aachen; Prof. Hans Koch, University of York and many others.
Among writers who have approved my work and supported me are Julian Barnes; Nikolai Tolstoy; John Fraser, Master of Massey College, Toronto; John Bemrose of Toronto; Robert Kroetsch, Winnipeg; and many others. My work has been published around in the world in ten languages by Macmillan, Little, Brown, Prima, Ullstein, Editions Sand, McClelland and Stewart, New Press, and many many others.
Finally, the most glaring omission is that the massive and detailed KGB Archives in Moscow have millions of documents whose evidence completely confirms the statistical work in Other Losses. The math is simple: about 1.5 million German prisoners alive in allied prison camps at the end of the war never came home, nor were their deaths reported to the German government, their families, the International Red Cross or the UN. The figure was determined by the Adenauer government in Germany, submitted to the UN, and has never been disputed by anyone. Thus when Other Losses came out in 1989, alleging deaths of about one million in French and American camps, that left about 500,000 to be accounted for. They could have died only in the KGB camps, because there were not half a million prisoners in any other camps in the world. Thus, in effect Other Losses was predicting that when the communists opened the KGB archives, they would show deaths of about 500,000. And lo and behold, when Gorbachev brought down the communist rule, and the archives were opened, I went there, and found the Bulanov Report which showed that 356,687 Germans died in Soviet captivity, plus another 93,900 civilians taken as substitutes for dead or escaped prisoners for a total of 450,587.
This astonishing discovery is not mentioned in Wikipedia, nor by any other of the "professional historians." Except one, Stefan Karner, who went to the KGB archives, saw the evidence piled up in enormous quantities, and said he did not believe it. Instead, he preferred to publish his own "estimates," which confirm the conventional view.
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Grim days for the gravedigger of Baghdad
Hala Jaber
The Sunday Times
September 10, 2006
FOR 23 years Sheikh Jamal al-Sudani has taken it upon himself to bury the bodies of murdered Iraqis - men, women and children - whose families were too afraid to retrieve them from the mortuary slabs of Baghdad.
Until recently they were the victims of Saddam Hussein's pitiless and paranoid regime, which hunted down critics with ruthless efficiency and often dispatched their sons as well to eliminate the risk of revenge.
When Saddam was overthrown three years ago, Sudani thought his workload would ease. But now he is busier than ever and can barely imagine the suffering of those whose grisly remains are being tipped into new mass graves reminiscent of the old tyranny.
In July, which saw the worst sectarian slaughter so far in Baghdad, Sudani collected up to 500 bodies in a single week. There was one particularly dreadful day when he wondered how he would find the strength to carry on.
Arriving at al-Tub al-Adli morgue in the capital, he was asked to remove a coarse cloth sack of heads that had been left on a filthy floor. Among the heads was that of a boy no more than 12 years old. Sudani could see that it had been cut off.
"I felt something snap inside me," he said last week. "My guts were knotted and I started to cry. It was like looking at my young son. He had such an innocent face."
Yet Sudani, a father of three boys - Khaled, 18, Hassanein, 16, and Jaafar, 7 - recovered his composure, reflected on his duty to the dead and returned to his macabre routine.
The sheikh ensures that each of Baghdad's unclaimed bodies is wrapped in six metres of blue plastic and loaded onto a flat-bed lorry for the journey south.
The route is perilous for the drivers of his truck and three escort vehicles. They are Shi'ites but must pass through the so-called "Triangle of Death", the heartland of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and associated Sunni extremists.
"Every time we do the trip we feel that an invisible hand is guiding us," Sudani said. "It is the divine presence of Allah's angels that sees us safely through."
The convoy's destination is usually the holy city of Najaf and the Wadi al-Salam (valley of peace) cemetery. One of the largest graveyards on earth, it is said to have been designated a gateway to paradise by Imam Ali, one of Shi'ite Islam's most revered figures.
Here, within sight of the gilded Imam Ali mosque, the sheikh and a team of helpers wearing white gloves and masks unload the bodies, remove the plastic wrapping and cut the bonds of any whose hands were tied before they were killed.
They wash and disinfect the bodies, then assign a number to each one. Every tormented face is photographed and any distinguishing features are meticulously recorded on a computer in case a loved one should summon the courage to come looking for them.
The bodies are then shrouded in 10 metres of white cotton, carried to the graveside and lain in line to await burial.
The diggers toil relentlessly to prepare for at least two deliveries a week from the sheikh, who brings scores of bodies each time. First a shallow, sloping trench is carved out of the desert soil, then individual holes are dug.
In theory, each hole should be as deep as the digger is tall. But if pressure of numbers makes this impossible, care is taken to ensure that the graves are at least deep enough to keep out wild dogs.
The bodies are heaped in and covered with the mushroom-coloured sand of the desert. In the absence of names, their numbers are marked on a concrete block at the side of the pit and prayers are recited to complete the ceremony.
Mass graves in Iraq have long been associated with Saddam's cruellest campaigns of persecution, from Operation Anfal against the northern Kurds in 1988 - for which the former dictator is now on trial, accused of genocide - to the suppression of an uprising by southern Shi'ites in 1991.
When coalition forces invading three years ago found no weapons of mass destruction, Tony Blair said he hoped that the discovery of such graves would persuade those who doubted the wisdom of removing Saddam "just how brutal, tyrannical and appalling that regime was and what a blessing it is for the Iraqi people and for humankind that he has gone from power".
The mass graves of the post-war period in Najaf and the neighbouring holy city of Karbala are filled by Sudani and others with a care that Saddam's henchmen never showed. Yet they signify atrocities as horrifying as almost anything seen in the pre-war Iraq.
"It is as if Saddam had never left," Sudani said. "In his day people were callously murdered and those I have to pick up from the morgue today are no different. I believe the people carrying out these murders learnt from Saddam. He was the master. But the killers have developed new methods more brutal than before."
The victims of Sunni beheading gangs and the Shi'ite death squads' so-called "driller killers" are piling up at an increasingly alarming rate amid claims that Iraq is entering a civil war.
"How could humans reach this level of violence? What drove them to such a level of inhumanity?" said the sheikh, reflecting the despair of millions clinging precariously to life in cities blighted by terror. "How have we reached the stage where we have hundreds of unclaimed bodies every week?"
Part of the answer lies in the records he has amassed over the years. The strange personal archive maintained by Sudani and his son Khaled at their modest home in the poor Baghdad suburb of Sadr City chronicles each change in the pattern of violence and its devastating impact.
The files created for each month show how the Sunni beheaders held sway when their stronghold of Falluja was stormed by US forces in 2004; how Shi'ite squads armed with electric drills stepped up their activities after an attack on the al-Askari mosque in Samarra last February; and how little difference the killing in June of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, has made to the level of violence.
According to health ministry figures, 3,438 civilians were killed in Iraq in July alone, nearly double the figure for January. A much-heralded security plan for Baghdad, under which US and Iraqi forces aim to secure the city, one area at a time, is cutting the number of murders in some parts of the city but August figures showed the overall toll down by only 17%.
Looking at Sudani's computer records is like peering into a chamber of horrors. A photograph of each corpse he has catalogued glares out from the screen. The sheikh may know nothing about how they led their lives but he possesses intimate knowledge of how they died.
Some of those who were burnt were killed in car bombs, he explains, while others were dowsed with petrol and set alight. Of those who died from asphyxiation, some were strangled and others were suffocated with polythene bags.
"Sometimes people can't believe what they see in these pictures," he said. "Many can't stomach them but I have to live with them, be with them and try to make sense out of them.
"I am very tired but this has become my destiny, my mission. I do not do this out of choice but out of religious obligation."
It was while I was working on an investigation to expose Iraq's new mass graves two months ago that I was warned of a plan to kill me. This newspaper's emergency evacuation procedure swung into action and I had no choice but to abandon my inquiries for the time being. But Sudani's haunting images made me determined that the story should be told.
The sensitive and hazardous nature of Sudani's work has attracted unwelcome attention to him, too. A roadside bomb was recently detonated as his convoy drove through the town of Latifiya in the Triangle of Death. Seven of his men were injured in the attack, which he says was aimed at him.
"The only reason no one was killed was that the vehicles were driving in the middle of the road rather than at the side," he said.
Several death threats have followed in text messages warning him to stop what he is doing or face the consequences. "Leave your job, curtail your movement, we shall kill you very soon," said one text.
He believes his association with the Mahdi army of Moqtadr al-Sadr, the radical Shi'ite cleric, has helped to make him the target of Sunni extremists.
One factor in his decision to ignore the warnings is the satisfaction he senses when a family traces a missing relative through his archive and discovers that he has provided dignified burial.
Often the families are Sunnis who did not collect a body for fear of being kidnapped or killed by Shi'ite militiamen said to watch the morgue. Those who prefer a Sunni burial ground are allowed to exhume the dead.
Sudani makes no religious distinction between those he helps: "The unclaimed victims have no mothers or fathers to cry for them so my men and I become their loved ones and we mourn them as our own."
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Stolen body parts 'sold to NHS'
11/09/2006
BBC News
Potentially contaminated body parts allegedly stolen in the US may have been implanted into British patients, a government agency says.
Over 1,000 body parts were plundered by gangs in New York and then sold for transplants, it has been claimed.
Biomedical Tissue Services, the firm at the centre of the scandal, exported 77 body parts to the UK last year.
NHS regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, said it had alerted 20 NHS trusts.
Late last year, the US Food and Drug Administration ordered a recall of the potentially tainted products and warned that many patients could have been exposed to HIV and other diseases, but insisted the risk of infection was minimal.
New York investigators say death certificates were doctored to make the dead out to have been younger and healthier than they actually were.
The tissue, in the form of skin, bone and tendons, was later sold for use in procedures like dental implants and hip replacements.
Four people have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The body of veteran BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke, who died of cancer aged 95 in March 2004, was reported to have been caught up in the case.
Infected
A spokeswoman for the MHRA said: "It's not to say that the 77 body parts that were brought in came from stolen cadavers or were infected.
"But they did come from Biomedical Tissue Services and we alerted hospitals of this earlier in the year."
She added it was up to individual doctors to decide what to do in regards to removing the implants or deciding it was less risk to leave them in.
The body parts were all pieces of bone which were grafted on to patients needing hip or jaw operations.
The MHRA would not say exactly where in the UK the imported parts were sent because the procedures were unusual enough that the patients involved could be identified.
And the spokeswoman added: "We would say any risk is minimum and this is just a precautionary measure."
Comment: Nothing to worry about folks, it's merely "precautionary". The fact that Britain's national health service appears to be buying body parts from "gangs" is of no cause for concern either. Go back to sleep, and do not let this story prvoke in you any unpleasant ponderings on the state of the alleged evolution of humanity.
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