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Editorial: America's Nervous Breakdown

Laura Knight-Jadczyk
02/10/2006

Recently it has come to my attention that there are a number of so-called "Historical Revisionists" who have taken up the idea that Adolf Hitler was a "good guy" and that, as one of them wrote to me recently, "we now need an American Leader like Hitler."

I am dismayed by such naivete, but not entirely surprised. For anyone who studies the nature of evil and its origins in psychological pathology, it is not a surprise that persons who are not fully familiar with this problem can be so easily taken in. It is, however, a perennial problem, and until normal people learn this most essential thing about our world, they are helpless, and there is no hope for change for the better. The fact is: we ALREADY have an American leader like Hitler.

I frequently get emails and letters from readers who simply cannot understand how psychopaths - and other related or similar psychological deviants - can move into positions of power, how they can "put one over" on so many people. It strikes the average person as preposterous that even they can be taken in by a deviant. As I wrote in my blogpost, "The Cult of the Plausible Lie":

"Our culture agrees on the signs of lying. Ask anyone how to tell if someone is lying and they will tell you that they can tell by "lack of eye contact, nervous shifting, or picking at one's clothes." Psychologist Anna Salter writes with dry humor: "This perception is so widespread I have had the fantasy that, immediately upon birth, nurses must take newborns and whisper in their ears, "Eye contact. It's a sign of truthfulness." [Anna C. Salter, Ph.D.]
The problem is, if there is a psychopath - or those with related characteropathies - who doesn't know how to keep good eye contact when lying, they haven't been born. Eye contact is "universally known" to be a sign of truth-telling. The problem is liars will fake anything that it is possible to fake, so in reality, eye contact is absolutely NOT a sign of truth telling.
The practiced liar: a category of liar that even experts find it difficult to detect.

Problem is, even when dealing with people who are not practiced liars, such as college students who have volunteered for a research study of lying, most observers are not as good as they think in detecting deception. The research shows consistently that most people - even most professional groups such as police and psychologists - have no better than a chance ability to detect deception. Flipping a coin would serve as well. [Anna C. Salter, Ph.D.]

The fact is, MOST psychopaths are not like Hannibal Lecter or Patrick Batemen, the Harvard educated banker with murderous proclivities as portrayed in "American Psycho." Most psychopaths are not physically violent, though they most certainly do extensive damage to the soul of their victims.

All of us have many encounters with other people in our lives; most of these encounters are stimulating and encourage us to do our best. There are other kinds of encounters that always and inevitably, in one way or another, lead to destruction. This is accomplished by individuals who are quite charming, often evoking feelings of admiration or protectiveness and even "instant likeability" in their victims. These are individuals who give the right impression, who look and sound like superior specimens of humanity, and carefully conceal the dark side of their nature; a side that is deceitful and manipulative in ways difficult for a normal person with conscience to even conceive. They are capable of infiltrating any kind of social or organizational group, creating a "power base of helpers" in a covert way that escapes all but the most careful scrutiny, and ultimately generating confusion, tumultousness, bad feelings, and eventual destruction of the social ties holding the normal people together.

The destructive personality traits of the psychological deviant - the psychopath in particular - are so well hidden that they are virtually invisible to most of the people with whom they interact. They often tell others how ambitious they are to achieve a particular goal, and they will include a hard-luck story about how they have overcome incredible odds to achieve something remarkable, (growing up poor or underprivileged, or abused as a child), but over time, it will be noticed that they are actually quite lacking in conscientiousness, diligence, and hard work. Somehow, they always manage to create a "support team" that does the actual work for them while they take the credit.

Psychopaths are quite adept at weaving stories that are very emotionally stimulating. They can do this with a fantastic, deft touch, restraining a furtive tear, or clearing a cracking voice at the right moment, so that even the most practical of normal humans is taken in and convinced that here is the "real thing," a noble human being who needs my help, my support, my all.

They are master manipulators, able to sense with ease what their target wants and needs to hear. Personal interactions are where they excel because they are so skilled at telling exquisitely acted stories that may, indeed, contain some elements of truth. They can tell these stories so impressively that normal due diligence is cast aside as being insulting to such a noble and oppressed character.

Psychopaths are masters of rising to the top in any field or organization. They know how to worm their way into the good graces of those at the top, and how to get those who work alongside them to carry the load for them and be happy doing it! They deliberately seek to build emotional attachments between themselves and those with power thus making sure that they have guardians and boosters to their "careers."

The fact is that the most pronounced traits of the psychopath just happen to be traits that American Capitalistic society values: egocentricity, lack of concern for others, superficiality, manipulativeness, an ability to "play the game" better than others. Looking at these characteristics in isolation is a big mistake, we are told by Prof. Robert Hare, an expert on psychopaths. Yes, many of these characteristics are valuable for accomplishing all sorts of different things - politics, business, show biz - for example. These characteristics can lead to productive output. But it is when they are combined with the hidden part of the psychopath that they become disastrous.

People might say that a psychopath is "charismatic", "high profile", "gets things done", and that is exactly the impression that they wish to create and are able, with preternatural cunning, to do so.

The fact is, to a psychopath, the entire world is one big feeding trough and they are going to get in and get it all and they'll do whatever it takes to accomplish this, including playing weak and defenseless, maintaining an incredible cover of lies for as long as necessary, and using anybody and everybody, including their own family members.

Psychopaths live their lives incognito: outside they are often lawyers, politicians, entertainers, religious leaders, military leaders, union leaders, media moguls, artists and critics; and most often they are at the top. They are persuasive, charming, charismatic, and easily able to make masses of people like them. They are fun to be around because they are everything that the usually neurotic, guilt-ridden, normal human wishes he could be. It can take a long time before anyone figures out that there is really something missing, that the image is not the reality.

Inside, the psychopath is really insincere, arrogant, untrustworthy, manipulative, insensitive to the thoughts and feelings of others, remorseless, shallow, irresponsible (blames others for anything and everything that goes wrong), impatient, unreliable, selfish, parasitic, and quite willing to take shameless advantage of the goodwill they manipulatively engender in those individuals they intend to use to get to the top. They treat all people, including their families, like objects and can do incredible damage to anyone who crosses them or frustrates their goals. And, the horrifying fact is, most of them never get caught.

We live in a high speed, high pressure world where a lot of the traditional social structures that used to contain and protect us have been stripped away. Many of us are involved in virtual interactions with others and this presents its own set of problems. As the old-fashioned way of doing things is forced to change with the times, pressures for speed, technology, new systems, create a sort of frontier capitalistic reality where ideas and information are the new commodities.. Psychopaths thrive in this type of chaotic, high-pressure world. In the realm of ideas as commodity, there's no shortage of opportunities for psychopaths to rise to the top.

The 9-11 Truth Movement, Historical Revisionism, Alternative Media are part of this Frontier. Such venues are ripe for takeover by people who are high-energy and fast-moving, two of the characteristics of psychopaths that rise to the top. Psychopaths are impulsive and thrive on stimulation; they require it. They can do many things at once, though they often do not finish them, but leave that to their "lackeys." It also happens that things may move so fast that no one notices how they change and shift their position according to the wind of the moment.

Psychopaths are more likely to join organizations that offer them the possibility of getting to the top such as those that are formed on the basis of "cutting edge" ideas, or even revolutionary ideas, because in such an environment, often in a distressed state due to attacks from the outside, it is easier for them to hide. They are able to do this because the kinds of things they say and do under such stresses are the kinds of things the organization seems to want: they are able to pour on the charm, the charisma, to command respect, be larger than life; all things that are natural to the psychopath. Neurotic, guilt-damaged people easily mistake such traits as true leadership abilities, especially when the psychopath builds everyone up with their carefully crafted false stories about how they have suffered to pursue the goal! Never forget that psychopaths are great storytellers and they can weave disjointed facts in so seamlessly, bringing it to such a dramatic conclusion that it almost seems like a vision.

The fact is, the Truth vacuum in our society - the lack of official Truth - has created opportunities for psychopaths to be suddenly cast as great heroes and saviors; someone who can offer us transformational visions of the future. Everyone is searching for meaning, for Truth, for something solid to stand on, and what is so disturbing is the way we are looking more and more to psychopathic types as being above the rest of us, offering charismatic ideals and greater and more glorious visions. The appetite of the masses of people for leadership, even if it is a false leader, as long as he has a good story, is disturbing. It reveals to us that people have become reluctant to look at the truth, that they have become inculcated in denial of reality in favor of the 30 minute drama with a resolution after four commercials.

The psychopathic leader is an interesting study. The persona of the great leader - the archetype - is one of mercurial highs and lows; dramatic achievements and equally dramatic betrayal and losses. The leader is expected to have strong views and to be absolutely confident of his rightness; to make demands of others, to have high expectations that his ideas will serve as the vision for others who will follow him. A real leader has to be a driven individual, ambitious for a certain goal, and with sufficient ego to sustain themselves in times of set-back and betrayal. That's what the masses of people want and need from a leader, and it just happens to also be the very thing that is easiest for a psychopath to fake and generally their motivation is not Truth, but rather envy and rivalry. Nothing is wrong with any aspect of leadership if the views are based on Truth, if the goal is sincere and truly for the good of many others, if the followers are treated with understanding and compassion. [...]

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Editorial: Torture and fascism

Monday, October 02, 2006
Dave Neiwert
Orcinus


[Nazi torture implements. From Museum of World War II.]


It wasn't exactly a coincidence that my Adbusters piece earlier this year on fascism and the American right ran in the magazine's issue on torture. Though the piece doesn't specifically discuss torture, the subject of the piece -- "Is right-wing America becoming fascist?" -- constitutes the bottom line of the ramifications of the emergence of the United States as a bona fide torture state.

It's not that torture is unique to fascism. It has, after all, been around since the Dark Ages, and remained alive as a component of theocratic and feudal states for centuries. Certainly it has always been a commonplace feature of communist regimes as well, with the Soviets and Chinese providing abundant examples. What can be said generally is that torture is a feature of totalitarianism, regardless of its content.

But it occupies a unique position in the fascist ideological hierarchy, which is, after all, not so much a cohesive ideology but a multifaceted pathology. What makes fascism so potent on a personal level is its psychosexual component, expressed mostly as a desire to purge "unhealthy" elements through eliminationist violence, including the control of the body of the Other, and the ability to inflict purgative pain and suffering on that body. (For more on this, see Klaus Theweleit's study of this aspect of fascism, Male Fantasies, especially Vol. II.)

Nazi Torture


Fascists are particularly fond of torture because it represents such a complete expression of the fascist will to power. So when a nation adopts torture as an officially condoned policy -- as the United States has just done -- it immediately raises the specter that, indeed, it may be descending into the fascist abyss.

Tristero made this point the other day in typically straightforward fashion. And while I'm not quite ready to reach his conclusion -- that we are now living in a fascist state -- I do think that Sept. 28, 2006, will wind up as a benchmark date in our gradual but steady march toward that end.

It's not just the legalization of torture that raises this specter; it's how it came about. Namely, this policy was adopted, and sold both to the public and Congress, specifically as (A) a response to an insurmountable threat so great that it required "going beyond" the previously accepted norms of wartime behavior, (B)an express capitulation to the wartime powers of President Bush, contingent upon his superior judgment and instincts, ceding him illimitable powers beyond any known precedent, and (C) a bit of pre-election political theater specifically designed to portray liberals and Democrats as likely sympathizers who were "soft" on terrorists, and played that way by the president himself.

There really was only one hope of derailing this legislation, and it was contingent on the profoundly moral aspect of the torture question, to wit: Is torture an American value? Similarly, is it a Christian value?

Certainly we heard some voices -- notably Hillary Clinton's -- making a forceful case that torture is antithetical to American values. And we heard from a handful of liberal Christians decrying torture as anathema to their values as well. But they were too few and received too little attention from a media prone to playing down these issues.

In contrast, the Christian right was wholly silent on the moral aspects of torturing terrorist suspects, and instead offered up such homilies to the torture bill as this from Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition:
"We need to clarify this policy for treating detainees," said Rev. Sheldon. "As it stands right now, the military and intelligence experts interrogating these terrorists are in much greater danger than the terrorists. Civil suits against our military personnel are tying their hands as they try to get vital information which will save the lives of our young military people and the innocent."

"Our rules for interrogation need to catch-up with this awful new form of war that is being fought against all of us and the free world. The post-World War II standards do not apply to this new war.

"We must redefine how our lawful society treats those who have nothing but contempt for the law and rely on terrorizing the innocent to accomplish their objectives. The lines must be redrawn and then we must pursue these criminals as quickly and as aggressively as the law permits.

"And since this debate is, at its very core, about preserving the traditional value of prosecuting injustice and protecting the innocent, TVC will score this vote in both the House and the Senate. We encourage all of our supporters and affiliated churches to contact their elected representatives and let them know we support President Bush's efforts to update our methods of interrogating terrorist detainees in order to provide greater protection for our troops and the innocent."

As it happened, of course, it was precisely this twisted version of "traditional values" which carried the day -- and carried the nation over the edge of the abyss.

What's noteworthy about these exhortations, and all the similar defenses raised on behalf of the legislation, is how thoroughly they reflect key components of the fascist pathology. Consider, if you will, Robert O. Paxton's nine "mobilizing passions" of fascism described in his Anatomy of Fascism (and detailed here) as a kind of descriptive checklist:
-- a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

Check. The rationale for accepting torture is predicated on the claim that terrorism represents a uniquely malevolent existential threat to America.
-- the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual to it;

Check. The thrust of the Bush torture bill was that individual civil rights needed to be subordinated to the cause of "protecting" the larger public.
-- the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against the group's enemies, both internal and external;

Check. It's OK to torture terrorists, according to the Republican proponents of the law, because they killed 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, just in case you forgot. All the government wants to do is keep them from doing it again, and any means at our disposal is jusitifiable to achieve that end.
-- dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

Check, at least to the extent that the torture law is being justified as a matter of "preserving our way of life," and defending against alien terrorists, while the legislation's opponents are dismissed as treasonous liberal sympathizers.
-- the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

Check, at least to the extent that torture is a form of exclusionary violence intended to weed out "terrorist" elements and preserve the purer community.
-- the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny;

Check, Big Time. It is astonishing, really, just how broad-ranging are the powers President Bush will have acquired if this legislation survives its inevitable court tests. Moreover, the public is constantly admonished not to question Bush's basic decency when it comes to granting him powers typically only granted to totalitarians. Of course he wouldn't apply these powers to ordinary citizens. And five years ago, he similarly assured us that of course he wouldn't seek wiretaps without a warrant.
-- the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;

Check. Double megadittoes, Rush.
-- the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;

Check. Torture is specifically part of an aesthetic of violence, and is the ultimate expression of the desire to impose your will upon another.
-- the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess in a Darwinian struggle.

Check. Damn the Geneva Conventions, foll torture ahead! Moral and legal restraints? Phah! They are inconsequential when it comes to dealing with evil terrorists who respect neither the law nor morality. Our lack of morality is justified by theirs.

The utility of torture to fascist states can be found in other studies of the phenomenon. It's clear that legal torture reflects a disdain for the importance of human rights, identification of scapegoats, and an obsession with national security, all components of Lawrence Britt's 14 common characteristics of fascism. Likewise, it's a clear-cut expression of the fascist contempt for the weak, as well as the distrust of reason and celebration of action for action's sake, all attributes of fascism as described by Umberto Eco.

The appearance of legal torture as part of the American landscape is a profound change, and certainly signals the approach of the totalitarian state, though it may not herald its actual arrival. And considering that a right-wing regime is involved, discussing the specter of fascism is not only appropriate but necessary.

Even if it does not signal the actual arrival of fascism, it's the clearest warning sign of its approach yet. Torture is a quintessentially fascist act; codifying it means that the massive brick in the wall that it represents has been plunked into place. And it's the kind of brick that can be the cornerstone of a massive national pathology of apocalyptic proportions.

After all, they have always had ways of making us talk. Now they have the legal power to do so too.

Note, if you will, how I concluded the Adbusters piece:
To the extent that the nation finds itself in the throes of a real crisis of governance; that we demand utter fealty to the national identity, even at the expense of civil liberties, democratic institutions, or democracy itself; that we identify liberalism as the root of all evil in America, as a domestic enemy little distinguishable from those from abroad; that we justify acts of monstrousness by pointing to our own victimhood; that we rely on the "strength" and instincts of our leaders instead of their wisdom and powers of reason, and grant them near-totalitarian powers (particularly in "wartime") in the process; that we allow violence to become part of the political landscape; and that we pursue an insane apocalyptic vision of world domination -- then, to that same extent, we put flesh to the fascist bones and make it real.

Sadly, the nation took a signficant step towards fulfilling many of the conditions described in that warning. We now not only live in a torture state, but to become that we have suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus and granted the president unprecedented powers to decide the fate of anyone it chooses to designate an "enemy combatant." And in bulldozing its way to victory, the administration and its propagandists ceaselessly identified liberals with the enemy.

The chief reason we can say that this is not yet genuine fascism is because the latter only arises in a democracy in a state of crisis, following a significant period of decay. There has not yet been a real crisis of governance, which is most likely to arise in our system of democracy as a constitutional crisis.

Unfortunately, this administration seems determined, in its mad rush to power, to spark just such a crisis.

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Editorial: Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006)

Molly Ivins
TruthDig
09/29/06

AUSTIN, Texas - Oh dear. I'm sure he didn't mean it. In Illinois' Sixth Congressional District, long represented by Henry Hyde, Republican candidate Peter Roskam accused his Democratic opponent, Tammy Duckworth, of planning to "cut and run" on Iraq.

Duckworth is a former Army major and chopper pilot who lost both legs in Iraq after her helicopter got hit by an RPG. "I just could not believe he would say that to me," said Duckworth, who walks on artificial legs and uses a cane. Every election cycle produces some wincers, but how do you apologize for that one?

The legislative equivalent of that remark is the detainee bill now being passed by Congress. Beloveds, this is so much worse than even that pathetic deal reached last Thursday between the White House and Republican Sens. John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The White House has since reinserted a number of "technical fixes" that were the point of the putative "compromise." It leaves the president with the power to decide who is an enemy combatant.

This bill is not a national security issue-this is about torturing helpless human beings without any proof they are our enemies. Perhaps this could be considered if we knew the administration would use the power with enormous care and thoughtfulness. But of the over 700 prisoners sent to Gitmo, only 10 have ever been formally charged with anything. Among other things, this bill is a CYA for torture of the innocent that has already taken place.

Death by torture by Americans was first reported in 2003 in a New York Times article by Carlotta Gall. The military had announced the prisoner died of a heart attack, but when Gall saw the death certificate, written in English and issued by the military, it said the cause of death was homicide. The "heart attack" came after he had been beaten so often on this legs that they had "basically been pulpified," according to the coroner.

The story of why and how it took the Times so long to print this information is in the current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review. The press in general has been late and slow in reporting torture, so very few Americans have any idea how far it has spread. As is often true in hierarchical, top-down institutions, the orders get passed on in what I call the downward communications exaggeration spiral.

For example, on a newspaper, a top editor may remark casually, "Let's give the new mayor a chance to see what he can do before we start attacking him."

This gets passed on as "Don't touch the mayor unless he really screws up."

And it ultimately arrives at the reporter level as "We can't say anything negative about the mayor."

The version of the detainee bill now in the Senate not only undoes much of the McCain-Warner-Graham work, but it is actually much worse than the administration's first proposal. In one change, the original compromise language said a suspect had the right to "examine and respond to" all evidence used against him. The three senators said the clause was necessary to avoid secret trials. The bill has now dropped the word "examine" and left only "respond to."

In another change, a clause said that evidence obtained outside the United States could be admitted in court even if it had been gathered without a search warrant. But the bill now drops the words "outside the United States," which means prosecutors can ignore American legal standards on warrants.

The bill also expands the definition of an unlawful enemy combatant to cover anyone who has "has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." Quick, define "purposefully and materially." One person has already been charged with aiding terrorists because he sold a satellite TV package that includes the Hezbollah network.

The bill simply removes a suspect's right to challenge his detention in court. This is a rule of law that goes back to the Magna Carta in 1215. That pretty much leaves the barn door open.

As Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident, wrote, an intelligence service free to torture soon "degenerates into a playground for sadists." But not unbridled sadism-you will be relieved that the compromise took out the words permitting interrogation involving "severe pain" and substituted "serious pain," which is defined as "bodily injury that involves extreme physical pain."

In July 2003, George Bush said in a speech: "The United States is committed to worldwide elimination of torture, and we are leading this fight by example. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes, whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit."

Fellow citizens, this bill throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems it necessary - these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law.

I'd like those supporting this evil bill to spare me one affliction: Do not, please, pretend to be shocked by the consequences of this legislation. And do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.

To find out more about Molly Ivins and see works by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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Editorial: Republican Torture Laws Will Live in History

By Larisa Alexandrovna
AlterNet
October 2, 2006.

If we learned anything from the Nuremberg trials it is that citizens are responsible for what their government does in their name. The right wing of Congress, which has shed any last vestige of being anything remotely conservative in substance or American in spirit, has, like a deranged peacock, proudly shown the world that it can and did "happen here." The passing of the pro-torture bill is a full handover of everything democratic into the arms of fascism.

Before Bush has even signed his pro-torture, anti-humanity bill into law, his legal framer and torture apologist Alberto Gonzales is already cautioning the judiciary:

"Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is defending President Bush's anti-terrorism tactics in multiple court battles, said Friday that federal judges should not substitute their personal views for the president's judgments in wartime."


Instead of continuing with this farce called checks and balances, why not simply declare the "It has happened here" amendment for the Congress to rubber stamp and the president to tack on to the Constitution as a pre-emptive measure against dictatorial power.

Something along the lines of:

Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration, initiate amendments to the Constitution providing (a), that the President shall have the authority to institute and execute all necessary measures for the conduct of the government during this critical epoch; (b), that Congress shall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to the attention of the President and his aides and Cabinet any needed legislation, but not acting upon same until authorized by the President so to act; and (c), that the Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them to be unconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts of the President, his duly appointed aides, or Congress.


Our founding fathers are spinning in their graves at the thought of how Bush -- the deranged man-child; Cheney -- the most criminally corrupt government official to have ever been put into office; and Rummy -- a war criminal even before the war in Iraq have together burned the Constitution while the nation watched Survivor.

Quite simply put, if there were a moment's doubt that this nation was heading for a fascist take-over, then watching the United States Congress make legal that which in WWII the United States heroically fought to make immoral should be the final proof.

The expediency with which the fascists have taken apart democracy in America can only be ascribed to years of practice; from Nixon to Iran Contra, these madmen should have been imprisoned, not pardoned. But as they attacked and abused the nation anew and pushed the envelope further, they were always pardoned. Now what is there to stop this madness, after no one is left standing in the way of the criminal gang running the country like the Mafia?

So, while rushing to give unprecedented power to a man who has already abused the limited power that he had, the latest indignity is an international incident; and its victims are not only Iraqis, but every citizen of every nation being held or who will be held in detainment facilities across the globe, tortured, raped, and even murdered at the pleasure of a criminally insane Executive and his henchmen whom he bought or threatened into selling their souls.

The Last Nail by the Numbers:

Speaking in abstractions and using politically loaded terms like "terrorist" does this country little service and shields the truth from the hard facts of actual bodies.

I reported last November that since the start of US aggressions in Afghanistan and Iraq, roughly 70 thousand men, women, and children had been detained and in many cases tortured. Of the 35,000 detained in Iraq, only 638, or roughly 2%, were ever tried for any crime. The rest were either quietly let go or died in custody.

A document leaked to me a year ago from sources with a conscience at US Central Command (CENTCOM) indicated that this total of 35,000 does not even represent the full count of people detained, nor does it address every single US facility around the world or the additional extraordinary renditions we have engaged in.

Does anyone actually think that any Republican who voted for the pro-torture, pro-rape, pro-mutilation bill has actually looked at the numbers, or better still, talked to the living victims? Somehow I think that the closest these dilettantes got to the horror of it all was the lemon chicken lunch they sat down to while visiting the "public" area of Gitmo.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said recently, "Well, Alan, I think it really does reflect that we are in an age and an era post-9/11, where we're talking about a new sort of opponent, a new sort of the war criminal, somebody who right now we call then enemy combatants, but the sort of people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who's down in Guantanamo Bay now, who allegedly and likely did mastermind the plot that killed 3,000 Americans."

According to Mr. Frist's second brilliant public diagnosis (the first being of course Terri Schaivo), the people detained, or " the opponents," are either guilty of plotting to kill Americans or have already done so in the past. Senator Frist can tell this just from judging them by their appearance.

Mr. Frist, are you really going to tell the American people that 638 convictions were worth the detainment, torture, rape, and in some cases murder of roughly 35,000 people in Iraq alone? Remember, these numbers are a year old and only a fraction of the total.

And if our intention is to save 3,000 American lives, something this administration has already failed to do, from another possible 9/11, then why did we send to their deaths an additional 3,000 American soldiers in order to secure only 638 convictions -- even assuming that number is a credible representation and that they were convicted on evidence, not confessions via torture?

What does this accomplish and how can it possibly be justified?

And if we are, in general, aiming at saving lives, then why did we kill roughly 100,000 Iraqis and thousands upon thousands of Afghanis in order to secure 638 possibly dubious convictions?

Again, why are Mr. Frist's "opponents" innocent people he has never met, never talked to, never heard of? What does this accomplish?

Sorry Mr. Frist, but unless you can account for each and every soul, and conduct legal and credible trials, you cannot presume to put to death or assign to relentless torture so many innocent lives, at least not morally or under what will no longer be domestic law.

Changing this law excuses Mr. Frist and his gang from nothing, other than domestic charges of criminal conduct. It does not excuse him or his President from international law, because we are and were signatories to Geneva and other treaties when Bush violated those laws.

Nor will history excuse Mr. Frist, Mr. Bush, and especially Mr. Cheney for anything, not one drop of blood, not one lie, not one crime.

Can you say without any doubt that there are no innocents being tortured?

Are the Republicans in Congress who voted for this savagery willing to say that 638 convictions were worth this many casualties? If they are willing to make into law the mass slaughter, the mass detainment, the total antithesis of everything America fought for during WWII, then they had better be able to say, on the record, that they are certain that not a single innocent life has been compromised and not a single innocent soul tortured. And they had better say on the record that 638 convictions were worth nearly 3000 US soldiers. But cowards simply cast a vote and walk away. They don't have to see their victims or witness the suffering they have caused. They can simply change the channel and watch another reality show.

Every member of Congress who voted to violate basic human decency and leave something as sacrosanct as the Geneva Conventions up to Executive interpretation, even after the Executive has already broken both domestic and international law, is first and foremost a criminal accomplice in every act of murder, rape, and torture committed under the banner of the American flag.

Members of Congress who voted to support this act of violence -- premeditated, organized, and systemic -- are accessories after the fact and enablers of crimes against humanity, period. The right wing has won no moral victory nor any legal battle. They have not won a show of strength on national security over the Democrats. Instead, the entire country has lost any moral standing in the world, and members of Congress who voted to legalize savagery have sold their souls and this nation's dignity for a political prize.

The world must know that the citizens of this nation do not support what their government is doing in its name, not for 638 convictions -- even if they are legitimate -- not for greed, not for power, not for any reason. Members of Congress who voted to become criminal accomplices of tyranny may find it clever that they can pass laws to absolve themselves and their leader of high crimes, but history will not. They will be judged by the world, and by the future, in the harshest possible light and as no different than the Nazis or any other brutal and murderous regime.

The mask of Christianity does not lessen such evil, because the Nazis, too, enjoyed their Christian pomp and circumstance.

I see no difference between this statement:

"We have a feeling that Germany has been transformed into a great house of God, including all classes, professions and creeds, where the Führer as our mediator stood before the throne of the Almighty." -- Joseph Goebbels


and the one below:

Why is this man [George W. Bush] in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this."

--Lt. General William G. Boykin

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Editorial: Signs Economic Commentary for October 2, 2006

Donald Hunt
Signs of the Times
October 2, 2006

Gold closed at 603.60 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 1.5% from $594.90 at the close of the previous Friday. The dollar closed at 0.7890 euros Friday, up 0.9% from 0.7817 for the week. That put the euro at 1.2674 dollars compared to 1.2792 at the previous week's close. Gold in euros would be 476.25 euros an ounce, up 2.4% from 465.06 for the week. Oil closed at 62.91 dollars a barrel Friday, up 4.4% from $60.28 at the end of the week before. Oil in euros would be 49.64 euros a barrel, up 5.3% from 47.12 for the week. The gold/oil ratio closed at 9.59, down 2.9% from 9.87 at the end of the previous week. In U.S. stocks the Dow closed at 11,679.07 Friday, apparently close to a record or something, up 1.5% from 11,508.10 at the close of the previous Friday. The NASDAQ closed at 2,258.43 (nowhere NEAR a record), up 1.8% from 2,218.93 at the close of the week before. In U.S. interest rates, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.63%, up four basis points from 4.59 for the week.

Friday was the end of the third quarter of 2006, so let's look at the quarterly and year-to-date numbers. Gold fell 2.1% from $616.20 to $603.60 for the quarter but rose 16% from $519.70 for the year so far. The dollar rose 0.9% from 0.7819 euros to 0.7890 for the quarter, but fell 7.0% from 0.8440 euros for the year. Oil fell 17.4% from $73.85 a barrel to $62.91 for the quarter, but rose 3.1% from $61.04 for the year. In euros, oil dropped 16.3% from 57.74 to 49.64 euros an ounce for the quarter and dropped 3.6% from 51.43 for the year. Gold in euros dropped 1.2% from 481.78 euros an ounce to 476.25 for the quarter but rose 8.6% from 438.60 for the year. The gold/oil ratio rose 15.0% from 8.34 to 9.59 for the quarter and 12.7% from 8.51 for the year. The Dow rose 4.7% from 11,150.22 to 11,679.07 for the quarter and 9.0% from 10,717.50 for the first three quarters of 2006. The NASDAQ rose 4.0% from 2,172.09 to 2,258.43 for the quarter and 2.4% from 2,205.32 for the year. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note dropped 51 basis points from 5.14% to 4.63% for the quarter but rose 24 basis points from 4.39 for the year.

Here are charts of the trends going back to the beginning of 2005:

Dollar vs Gold

Dollar vs Oil

Dollar vs Euro

Euro vs Oil

Gold vs Oil

Gold and oil are up for the year but down for the third quarter of 2006. The dollar fell against 7% against the euro for the year 2006 to date, but has held steady in the third quarter. U.S. stocks are up for the year and the quarter, while long-term interest rates have risen for the quarter but fallen sharply for the year.

The third quarter, then, has seen encouraging numbers for the U.S. imperial economy, despite the larger context of massive debt-fueled imbalances and disastrous news on the military front.

The past week saw the release of numbers showing a clear slowing of the U.S. economy. But the stock market seemed to view that as good news for interest rates. The mainstream media saw more evidence that a "soft landing" (sounds nice, doesn't it?) can be achieved:

Wall Street demands, what slowdown?

by Claire Gallen
Sat Sep 30, 11:25 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - To judge by the excitement on Wall Street, the US economy is in the rudest of health. The paradox is that the economy is posting some of its slowest growth rates in five years.

After relying for years on a booming housing market to generate wealth, US consumers are curbing their spending. With property sales and prices now sagging, one of the props to a post-2001 expansion has been removed.

However, according to analysts, other props remain that will limit the downside to the world's biggest economy heading into the final quarter of 2006.

Corporate earnings have remained strong and cash-rich companies are in sound financial shape, "and that's one of the best bits of news for the US economy", Global Insight chief economist Nariman Behravesh said.

Even if some domestic sectors like housing are slowing, foreign demand for US goods is building as growth in Europe and Japan finally picks up. And if the residential market has cooled, commercial property is as strong as ever.

A robust outlook for earnings has lifted Wall Street to levels last seen during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. A widespread belief that the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates steady for the time being has helped.

On Friday, the Dow Jones index of blue-chip shares finished at 11,679.07, in sight of its all-time closing high of 11,722.98 reached in January 2000.

Once the Internet mania collapsed, the US economy slipped into recession in 2001. The current housing downturn has led some observers to fret anew about the "R" word.

But according to Behravesh, those fears are misplaced.

"If you really look at all recessions, we never had a housing-led recession. A recession is exacerbated by the housing downturn," he said.

"What happens is that the Fed is worried by inflation, they raise rates and it kills the economy -- and housing."

The US central bank does have plenty to worry about on the inflation front. Even as national growth has waned from 5.6 percent in the first quarter to 2.6 percent in the second, price pressures have continued to build.

Data out Friday showed the core inflation rate linked to consumer spending, excluding food and energy prices, rose to 2.5 percent on an annualised basis in August, the biggest monthly rise April 1995.

Years of sky-high oil prices would appear now to be feeding through to the wider US economy, as companies feel emboldened to pass on price rises to their customers.

But Friday's figures also showed household incomes rising faster than spending, Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors noted.

"Clearly, the consumer spending binge is coming to an end. With households dipping into savings for over a year, that is not surprising," he said.

"That plays into the Fed's argument that a moderating economy will restrain inflation."

Most of the betting on Wall Street is that the Fed, after calling off a long-running campaign of rate hikes in August, will hold pat for some months before cutting borrowing costs next year.

"Oil prices have been tripling, and my guess is that the signs of inflation are all related to this, and this is a very unusual thing," JP Morgan Chase managing director Jim Glassman said.

"The Fed is gradually coming to the view that that's not an inflation story," he said.

If the central bank does switch its bias to cutting rates, Wall Street can be expected to shrug off any anxiety over consumer spending to extend its record-breaking rally.

"If inflation is not an issue, it allows the markets to respond more promptly to any signs of (economic) weakness," Glassman said, noting that corporate profits were growing fast enough to outstrip any housing downside.

Can the news really be this good? Maybe, but only if you put blinders on and ignore the world political situation. Those who can't ignore the reckless policies of the U.S. imperial leadership and the consequent fiscal and trade imbalances can take little solace in the hopes of a soft landing or even of a short, mild recession. Our fates over the next year or two will not be determined by purely economic factors.

And even those who can put the blinders on politically feel unease about military quagmires, climate change, and eroding standards of living. According to the Center for American progress, the situation for the middle class is worse than it has been in recent memory:

Middle-class families in worse shape than ever, study finds

Typical families have not stashed enough money; struggling to pay for home, insurance, and education according to Center for American Progress.

September 28 2006

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The typical double-income family is worse off financially than ever, a study released Thursday said, warning that few Americans have saved enough to brace for financial setbacks.

Middle-class families are struggling to pay for a home, health insurance, transportation and their children's college with wages that have not kept pace with higher prices, according to the study by a think tank headed by a former top aide to President Bill Clinton.

The middle class's financial condition has been a key issue ahead of the November elections, as Democrats warn that this group is fast losing economic ground amid skyrocketing prices and tax cuts that offer them little benefit.

"In our estimates, it's becoming harder for families to afford what we consider a typical middle-class lifestyle," said economist Christian Weller of the Center for American Progress, the political think tank headed by John Podesta, a former Clinton chief of staff.

Weller cautioned that while Americans are taking on more debt to cover higher costs, wages have not kept pace.

The majority of Americans have not socked away enough money to brace for financial setbacks such as a job loss or a medical emergency.

According to the study, less than a third of all American families have accumulated income equaling three months of their wages. The trend is particularly pronounced among the 60 percent income distribution that makes up the middle class: those with dual incomes earning from $18,500 to $88,030 a year.

From 2001 to 2004, the proportion of middle-class families that has saved three months' worth of income dropped to 18.3 percent from 28.8 percent, the study said.

Higher prices for a range of things - including health care, energy, transportation, food and education - have put Americans in this position as corporate profits have risen, the study said.

It said, that five years into the current economic recovery, average job growth is one-fifth that of previous business cycles and wages are flat when inflation is factored into the equation.

To maintain day-to-day consumption, families have taken on a record amount of debt, equal to 126.4 percent of disposable income in the first quarter of 2006, according to the study.

Commenting on the study, SEIU Labor Union President Andy Stern said, "Of the total amount of our economy and income, we have the greatest share going to profits in modern history and the least amount going to wages in modern history."

"For most working Americans, things are far worse than any time certainly in recent history and at a time of an incredibly growing economy." said Stern, whose union represents 1.1 million health care workers.

Why then, the good news on the financial pages and the sense of foreboding everywhere else? Because the future may actually be looking good for those who own the economy. The savings from lower wages paid to the middle classes in the developed countries have gone straight to corporate profits. The interest paid on consumer debt goes straight to the hands of the owners as well. Furthermore, the loss of our liberties from the phony war on terrorism can only help them exploit us more.

Paul Craig Roberts spells it out:

As Jobs Leave America's Shores...
The New Face of Class War

By Paul Craig Roberts
September 30 / October 1, 2006

The attacks on middle-class jobs are lending new meaning to the phrase "class war". The ladders of upward mobility are being dismantled. America, the land of opportunity, is giving way to ever deepening polarization between rich and poor.

The assault on jobs predates the Bush regime. However, the loss of middle-class jobs has become particularly intense in the 21st century, and, like other pressing problems, has been ignored by President Bush, who is focused on waging war in the Middle East and building a police state at home. The lives and careers that are being lost to the carnage of a gratuitous war in Iraq are paralleled by the economic destruction of careers, families, and communities in the U.S.A. Since the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, the U.S. government has sought to protect employment of its citizens. Bush has turned his back on this responsibility. He has given his support to the offshoring of American jobs that is eroding the living standards of Americans. It is another example of his betrayal of the public trust.

"Free trade" and "globalization" are the guises behind which class war is being conducted against the middle class by both political parties. Patrick J. Buchanan, a three-time contender for the presidential nomination, put it well when he wrote that NAFTA and the various so-called trade agreements were never trade deals. The agreements were enabling acts that enabled U.S. corporations to dump their American workers, avoid Social Security taxes, health care and pensions, and move their factories offshore to locations where labor is cheap.

The offshore outsourcing of American jobs has nothing to do with free trade based on comparative advantage. Offshoring is labor arbitrage. First world capital and technology are not seeking comparative advantage at home in order to compete abroad. They are seeking absolute advantage abroad in cheap labor.

Two recent developments made possible the supremacy of absolute over comparative advantage: the high speed Internet and the collapse of world socialism, which opened China's and India's vast under-utilized labor resources to first world capital.

In times past, first world workers had nothing to fear from cheap labor abroad. Americans worked with superior capital, technology and business organization. This made Americans far more productive than Indians and Chinese, and, as it was not possible for U.S. firms to substitute cheaper foreign labor for U.S. labor, American jobs and living standards were not threatened by low wages abroad or by the products that these low wages produced.

The advent of offshoring has made it possible for U.S. firms using first world capital and technology to produce goods and services for the U.S. market with foreign labor. The result is to separate Americans' incomes from the production of the goods and services that they consume. This new development, often called "globalization," allows cheap foreign labor to work with the same capital, technology and business know-how as U.S. workers. The foreign workers are now as productive as Americans, with the difference being that the large excess supply of labor that overhangs labor markets in China and India keeps wages in these countries low. Labor that is equally productive but paid a fraction of the wage is a magnet for Western capital and technology.

Although a new development, offshoring is destroying entire industries, occupations and communities in the United States. The devastation of U.S. manufacturing employment was waved away with promises that a "new economy" based on high-tech knowledge jobs would take its place. Education and retraining were touted as the answer.

In testimony before the U.S.-China Commission, I explained that offshoring is the replacement of U.S. labor with foreign labor in U.S. production functions over a wide range of tradable goods and services. (Tradable goods and services are those that can be exported or that are competitive with imports. Nontradable goods and services are those that only have domestic markets and no import competition. For example, barbers and dentists offer nontradable services. Examples of nontradable goods are perishable, locally produced fruits and vegetables and specially fabricated parts of local machine shops.) As the production of most tradable goods and services can be moved offshore, there are no replacement occupations for which to train except in domestic "hands on" services such as barbers, manicurists, and hospital orderlies. No country benefits from trading its professional jobs, such as engineering, for domestic service jobs.

At a Brookings Institution conference in Washington, D.C., in January 2004, I predicted that if the pace of jobs outsourcing and occupational destruction continued, the U.S. would be a third world country in 20 years. Despite my regular updates on the poor performance of U.S. job growth in the 21st century, economists have insisted that offshoring is a manifestation of free trade and can only have positive benefits overall for Americans.

Reality has contradicted the glib economists. The new high-tech knowledge jobs are being outsourced abroad even faster than the old manufacturing jobs. Establishment economists are beginning to see the light. Writing in Foreign Affairs (March/April 2006), Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve vice chairman Alan Blinder concludes that economists who insist that offshore outsourcing is merely a routine extension of international trade are overlooking a major transformation with significant consequences. Blinder estimates that 42-56 million American service sector jobs are susceptible to offshore outsourcing. Whether all these jobs leave, U.S. salaries will be forced down by the willingness of foreigners to do the work for less.

Software engineers and information technology workers have been especially hard hit. Jobs offshoring, which began with call centers and back-office operations, is rapidly moving up the value chain. Business Week's Michael Mandel compared starting salaries in 2005 with those in 2001. He found a 12.7 per cent decline in computer science pay, a 12 per cent decline in computer engineering pay, and a 10.2 per cent decline in electrical engineering pay. Marketing salaries experienced a 6.5 per cent decline, and business administration salaries fell 5.7 per cent. Despite a make-work law for accountants known by the names of its congressional sponsors, Sarbanes-Oxley, even accounting majors, were offered 2.3 per cent less.

Using the same sources as the Business Week article (salary data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers and Bureau of Labor Statistics data for inflation adjustment), professor Norm Matloff at the University of California, Davis, made the same comparison for master's degree graduates. He found that between 2001 and 2005 starting pay for master's degrees in computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering fell 6.6 per cent, 13.7 per cent, and 9.4 per cent respectively.

On February 22, 2006, CNNMoney.com staff writer Shaheen Pasha reported that America's large financial institutions are moving "large portions of their investment banking operations abroad." Offshoring is now killing American jobs in research and analytic operations, foreign exchange trades, and highly complicated credit derivatives contracts. Deal-making responsibility itself may eventually move abroad. Deloitte Touche says that the financial services industry will move 20 per cent of its total costs base offshore by the end of 2010. As the costs are lower in India, the move will represent more than 20 per cent of the business. A job on Wall Street is a declining option for bright young persons with high stress tolerance as America's last remaining advantage is outsourced.

According to Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, even McDonald jobs are on the way offshore. Augustine reports that McDonald is experimenting with replacing error-prone order takers with a system that transmits orders via satellite to a central location and from there to the person preparing the order. The technology lets the orders be taken in India or China at costs below the U.S. minimum wage and without the liabilities of U.S. employees.

American economists, some from incompetence and some from being bought and paid for, described globalization as a "win-win" development. It was supposed to work like this: The U.S. would lose market share in tradable manufactured goods and make up the job and economic loss with highly educated knowledge workers. The win for America would be lower-priced manufactured goods and a white-collar work force. The win for China would be manufacturing jobs that would bring economic development to that country.

It did not work out this way, as Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach, formerly a cheerleader for globalization, recently admitted. It has become apparent that job creation and real wages in the developed economies are seriously lagging behind their historical norms as offshore outsourcing displaces the "new economy" jobs in "software programming, engineering, design, and the medical profession, as well as a broad array of professionals in the legal, accounting, actuarial, consulting, and financial services industries". The real state of the U.S. job market is revealed by a Chicago Sun-Times report on January 26, 2006, that 25,000 people applied for 325 jobs at a new Chicago Wal-Mart.

According to the BLS payroll jobs data, over the past half-decade (January 2001 - January 2006, the data series available at time of writing) the U.S. economy created 1,050,000 net new private sector jobs and 1,009,000 net new government jobs for a total five-year figure of 2,059,000. That is seven million jobs short of keeping up with population growth, definitely a serious job shortfall.

The BLS payroll jobs data contradict the hype from business organizations, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that offshore outsourcing is good for America. Large corporations, which have individually dismissed thousands of their U.S. employees and replaced them with foreigners, claim that jobs outsourcing allows them to save money that can be used to hire more Americans. The corporations and the business organizations are very successful in placing this disinformation in the media. The lie is repeated everywhere and has become a mantra among no-think economists and politicians. However, no sign of these jobs can be found in the payroll jobs data. But there is abundant evidence of the lost American jobs.

During the past five years (January 01 - January 06), the information sector of the U.S. economy lost 644,000 jobs, or 17.4 per cent of its work force. Computer systems design and related work lost 105,000 jobs, or 8.5 per cent of its work force. Clearly, jobs offshoring is not creating jobs in computers and information technology. Indeed, jobs offshoring is not even creating jobs in related fields.
U.S. manufacturing lost 2.9 million jobs, almost 17 per cent of the manufacturing work force. The wipeout is across the board. Not a single manufacturing payroll classification created a single new job.

The declines in some manufacturing sectors have more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing during war than with a "supereconomy" that is "the envy of the world." In five years, communications equipment lost 42 per cent of its work force. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37 per cent of its work force . The work force in computers and electronic products declined 30 per cent. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25 per cent of its employees. The work force in motor vehicles and parts declined 12 per cent. Furniture and related products lost 17 per cent of its jobs. Apparel manufacturers lost almost half of the work force. Employment in textile mills declined 43 per cent. Paper and paper products lost one-fifth of its jobs. The work force in plastics and rubber products declined by 15 per cent.

For the five-year period, U.S. job growth was limited to four areas: education and health services, state and local government, leisure and hospitality, and financial services. There was no U.S. job growth outside these four areas of domestic nontradable services.

Oracle, for example, which has been handing out thousands of pink slips, has recently announced two thousand more jobs being moved to India. How is Oracle's move of U.S. jobs to India creating American jobs in nontradable services such as waitresses and bartenders, hospital orderlies, state and local government, and credit agencies?

Engineering jobs in general are in decline, because the manufacturing sectors that employ engineers are in decline. During the last five years, the U.S. work force lost 1.2 million jobs in the manufacture of machinery, computers, electronics, semiconductors, communication equipment, electrical equipment, motor vehicles, and transportation equipment. The BLS payroll jobs numbers show a total of 69,000 jobs created in all fields of architecture and engineering, including clerical personnel, over the past five years. That comes to a mere 14,000 jobs per year (including clerical workers). What is the annual graduating class in engineering and architecture? How is there a shortage of engineers when more graduate than can be employed?

...All of the occupations with the largest projected employment growth (in terms of the number of jobs) over the next decade are in nontradable domestic services. The top ten sources of the most jobs in "superpower" America are: retail salespersons, registered nurses, postsecondary teachers, customer service representatives, janitors and cleaners, waiters and waitresses, food preparation (includes fast food), home health aides, nursing aides, orderlies and attendants, general and operations managers. Note than none of this projected employment growth will contribute one nickel toward producing goods and services that could be exported to help close the huge U.S. trade deficit. Note, also, that few of these job classifications require a college education.

Among the fastest growing occupations (in terms of rate of growth), seven of the ten are in health care and social assistance. The three remaining fields are: network systems and data analysis with 126,000 jobs projected, or 12,600 per year; computer software engineering applications with 222,000 jobs projected, or 22,200 per year; and computer software engineering systems software with 146,000 jobs projected, or 14,600 per year.

Assuming these projections are realized, how many of the computer engineering and network systems jobs will go to Americans? Not many, considering the 65,000 H-1B visas each year (bills have been introduced in Congress to raise the number) and the loss during the past five years of 761,000 jobs in the information sector and computer systems design and related sectors.

Judging from its ten-year jobs projections, the U.S. Department of Labor does not expect to see any significant high-tech job growth in the U.S. The knowledge jobs are being outsourced even more rapidly than the manufacturing jobs. The so-called "new economy" was just another hoax perpetrated on the American people.

If outsourcing jobs offshore is good for U.S. employment, why won't the U.S. Department of Commerce release the 200-page, $335,000 study of the impact of the offshoring of U.S. high-tech jobs? Republican political appointees reduced the 200-page report to 12 pages of public relations hype and refuse to allow the Technology Administration experts who wrote the report to testify before Congress. Democrats on the House Science Committee are unable to pry the study out of the hands of Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. On March 29, 2006, Republicans on the House Science Committee voted down a resolution (H.Res. designed to force the Commerce Department to release the study to Congress. Obviously, the facts don't fit the Bush regime's globalization hype.

...Clearly, engineering and computer-related employment in the U.S.A. has not been growing, whether measured by industry or by occupation. Moreover, with a half million or more foreigners in the U.S. on work visas, the overall employment numbers do not represent employment of Americans.

American employees have been abandoned by American corporations and by their representatives in Congress. America remains a land of opportunity ­ but for foreigners ­ not for the native born. A country whose work force is concentrated in domestic nontradable services has no need for scientists and engineers and no need for universities. Even the projected jobs in nursing and school teaching can be filled by foreigners on H-1B visas.

The myth has been firmly established here that the jobs the U.S. is outsourcing offshore are being replaced with better jobs. There is no sign of these jobs in the payroll jobs data or in the occupational employment statistics. When a country loses entry-level jobs, it has no one to promote to senior level jobs. When manufacturing leaves, so does engineering, design, research and development, and innovation itself.

On February 16, 2006, the New York Times reported on a new study presented to the National Academies that concludes that outsourcing is climbing the skills ladder. A survey of 200 multinational corporations representing 15 industries in the U.S.and Europe found that 38 per cent planned to change substantially the worldwide distribution of their research and development work, sending it to India and China. According to the New York Times, "More companies in the survey said they planned to decrease research and development employment in the United States and Europe than planned to increase employment."

The study and the discussion it provoked came to untenable remedies. Many believe that a primary reason for the shift of R&D to India and China is the erosion of scientific prowess in the U.S. due to lack of math and science proficiency of American students and their reluctance to pursue careers in science and engineering. This belief begs the question why students would chase after careers that are being outsourced abroad.

The main author of the study, Georgia Tech professor Marie Thursby, believes that American science and engineering depend on having "an environment that fosters the development of a high-quality work force and productive collaboration between corporations and universities." The dean of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks the answer is to recruit the top people in China and India and bring them to Berkeley. No one seems to understand that research, development, design, and innovation take place in countries where things are made. The loss of manufacturing means ultimately the loss of engineering and science. The newest plants embody the latest technology. If these plants are abroad, that is where the cutting edge resides.

The denial of jobs reality has become an art form for economists, libertarians, the Bush regime, and journalists. Except for CNN's Lou Dobbs, no accurate reporting is available in the "mainstream media."

Economists have failed to examine the incompatibility of offshoring with free trade. Economists are so accustomed to shouting down protectionists that they dismiss any complaint about globalization's impact on domestic jobs as the ignorant voice of a protectionist seeking to preserve the buggy whip industry. Matthew J. Slaughter, a Dartmouth economics professor rewarded for his service to offshoring with appointment to President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, suffered no harm to his reputation when he wrote, "For every one job that U.S. multinationals created abroad in their foreign affiliates, they created nearly two U.S. jobs in their parent operations." In other words, Slaughter claims that offshoring is creating more American jobs than foreign ones.

How did Slaughter arrive at this conclusion? Not by consulting the BLS payroll jobs data or the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics. Instead, Slaughter measured the growth of U.S. multinational employment and failed to take into account the two reasons for the increase in multinational employment: (1) Multinationals acquired many existing smaller firms, thus raising multinational employment but not overall employment, and (2) many U.S. firms established foreign operations for the first time and thereby became multinationals, thus adding their existing employment to Slaughter's number for multinational employment.

ABC News' John Stossel, a libertarian hero, recently made a similar error. In debunking Lou Dobbs' concern with U.S. jobs lost to offshore outsourcing, Stossel invoked the California-based company, Collabnet. He quotes the CEO's claim that outsourcing saves his company money and lets him hire more Americans. Turning to Collabnet's webpage, it is very instructive to see the employment opportunities that the company posts for the United States and for India.

In India, Collabnet has openings (at time of writing) for eight engineers, a sales engineer, a technical writer, and a telemarketing representative. In the U.S. Collabnet has openings for one engineer, a receptionist/office assistant, and positions in marketing, sales, services and operations. Collabnet is a perfect example of what Lou Dobbs and I report: the engineering and design jobs move abroad, and Americans are employed to sell and market the foreign-made products.

Other forms of deception are widely practiced. For example, Matthew Spiegleman, a Conference Board economist, claims that manufacturing jobs are only slightly higher paid than domestic service jobs, so there is no meaningful loss in income to Americans from offshoring. He reaches this conclusion by comparing only hourly pay and leaving out the longer manufacturing workweek and the associated benefits, such as health care and pensions.

Occasionally, however, real information escapes the spin machine. In February 2006 the National Association of Manufacturers, one of offshoring's greatest boosters, released a report, "U.S. Manufacturing Innovation at Risk," by economists Joel Popkin and Kathryn Kobe.16 The economists find that U.S. industry's investment in research and development is not languishing after all. It just appears to be languishing, because it is rapidly being shifted overseas: "Funds provided for foreign-performed R&D have grown by almost 73 per cent between 1999 and 2003, with a 36 per cent increase in the number of firms funding foreign R&D."

U.S. industry is still investing in R&D after all; it is just not hiring Americans to do the research and development. U.S. manufacturers still make things, only less and less in America with American labor. U.S. manufacturers still hire engineers, only they are foreign ones, not American ones.

In other words, everything is fine for U.S. manufacturers. It is just their former American work force that is in the doldrums. As these Americans happen to be customers for U.S. manufacturers, U.S. brand names will gradually lose their U.S. market. U.S. household median income has fallen for the past five years. Consumer demand has been kept alive by consumers' spending their savings and home equity and going deeper into debt. It is not possible for debt to forever rise faster than income.

The United States is the first country in history to destroy the prospects and living standards of its labor force. It is amazing to watch freedom-loving libertarians and free-market economists serve as apologists for the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility that made the America of old an opportunity society.

America is seeing a widening polarization into rich and poor. The resulting political instability and social strife will be terrible.


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Editorial: Putting Party Before Predators: Why Didn't GOP Leaders Stop Foley?

By Cenk Uygur
HuffingtonPost.com
October 1, 2006

Is there anything these Republicans won't cover up? Duke Cunningham took millions of dollars in bribes. The people who were buying him off bought him a yacht called the Duke-Stir. He had a bribe menu on Congressional letter head. How many ethics investigations? Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Bob Ney took gifts and favors from Jack Abramoff.

He has confessed and is about to go to prison. How many ethics investigations? Zero. None. Not one.

Then there is Hastert's shady land deal. Bill Frist's insider trading. Tom DeLay's money laundering. The list goes on and on. Every one of them had their ass covered by the rest of their Republican colleagues, crooks, whatever you want to call them.

When Joel Hefley, a conservative Republican from Colorado, had the temerity to actually do an ethics investigation of Tom DeLay -- he was removed. Can't have it. You can't have any ethics investigations in a place with no ethics. The house will fall in.

Well, now it has. Because they've gone too far. This time they covered for a sexual predator. Mark Foley, Republican of Florida, was caught sending very explicit sexual messages to 16 and 17 year old boys who worked as pages for Congress.

Actually, he was caught by a fellow Republican, Rodney Alexander, because one of the pages worked for Rep. Alexander and turned Foley in. So, what did the Republicans do about it? Absolutely nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

They covered it up. Because it's what they do.

The Republican Protection Racket stepped in and made the story go away. There was no public apology to the boys that were sexually harassed. No criminal investigation. No ethics investigation. Not a word.

The Republican leadership knew for most of the year. In all that time, while other kids could have been exposed, while they knew of several instances of sexual advances toward underage boys -- they did nothing!

Now, they feign outrage. Why weren't they outraged when they first found out about it? They're not outraged because young boys were jeopardized. They're outraged now because they're jeopardized.

But it gets worse. They left Foley in charge of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus. Come on!

If you put it in a movie about a corrupt Congress, I wouldn't believe it. It's too over the top. You'd walk out of the theater saying, "That's too much. No one would do that." Apparently they would and they did.

Remember this is the same Republicans who spent 140 hours investigating Bill Clinton's Christmas card list. I'm not kidding. They even started an investigation into his cat. If you put it in a movie, no one would believe it.

Not one investigation into what's gone wrong with the war in Iraq, the $9 billion dollars missing in Iraq, why a CIA agent's name was leaked, why Osama bin Laden hasn't been caught or any of the corruption scandals. But they spent 140 hours on the Clinton Christmas list (it turns out they were just Christmas cards, in case you were wondering). They're not even trying to appear fair. They think there's nothing you won't let them do. They're in charge and they can get away with anything.

Now in this case, I think sex scandals are a dime a dozen. Mark Foley resigned. I'm not that interested in that story. He could have been a Democrat, a Republican or a Federalist. Every party has people that do terrible things. This isn't about that.

This is about a Republican Party so corrupt there's nothing they wouldn't cover up to protect their own. If that means your money is misspent or stolen, fine. If that means some Congressmen commit illegal acts to get rich off your back, fine.

Apparently, it also means if your kids are exposed to a sexual predator while they are supposed to be learning about our government, even that's fine.

But it's not fine. Not by a long shot. Read what the Congressman wrote to an underage boy that was working in the House of Representatives (the Congressman is Maf54):

Xxxxxxxxx (8:04:04 PM): normal clothes

Xxxxxxxxx (8:04:09 PM): tshirt and shorts

Maf54 (8:04:17 PM): um so a big buldge

Xxxxxxxxx (8:04:35 PM): ya

Maf54 (8:04:45 PM): um

Maf54 (8:04:58 PM): love to slip them off of you

Xxxxxxxxx (8:05:08 PM): haha

Maf54 (8:05:53 PM): and gram the one eyed snake

Maf54 (8:06:13 PM): grab

Xxxxxxxxx (8:06:53 PM): not tonight...dont get to excited

Maf54 (8:07:12 PM): well your hard

Xxxxxxxxx (8:07:45 PM): that is true

Maf54 (8:08:03 PM): and a little horny

Xxxxxxxxx (8:08:11 PM): and also tru

Maf54 (8:08:31 PM): get a ruler and measure it for me

Xxxxxxxxx (8:08:38 PM): ive already told you that

Maf54 (8:08:47 PM): tell me again

Xxxxxxxxx (8:08:49 PM): 7 and 1/2

Maf54 (8:09:04 PM): ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Maf54 (8:09:08 PM): beautiful

Xxxxxxxxx (8:09:38 PM): lol

Maf54 (8:09:44 PM): thats a great size

Xxxxxxxxx (8:10:00 PM): thank you

Maf54 (8:10:22 PM): still stiff

Xxxxxxxxx (8:10:28 PM): ya

Maf54 (8:10:40 PM): take it out

Xxxxxxxxx (8:10:54 PM): brb...my mom is yelling

Maf54 (8:11:06 PM): ok

Xxxxxxxxx (8:14:02 PM): back

Maf54 (8:14:37 PM): cool hope se didnt see any thing

He was supposed to be protecting him. He was Chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus!

After all this, they still covered for him. They didn't even take him off the Exploited Teen Caucus. They left him in charge.

Because they don't care. They don't care about anybody but themselves. They are driven mad with power. Their only goal is to stay in power. Now, the question is, are you going to let them get away with it? Are you going to let them keep that power, knowing what they've done with it?

Cenk Uygur is co-host of The Young Turks, the first liberal radio show to air nationwide.


ORIGINAL
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Editorial: Sixth Anniversary of al-Aqsa Mosque Intifada Passes Still Unresolved

by Stephen Lendman
1 October 2006

September 28 marked the sixth anniversary of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem (the Noble Sanctuary for Muslims and Temple Mount for Jews and Christians) that caused the eruption of the al-Aqsa Intifada still raging today with Palestinians on the painful receiving end of most of it. From that time till now, the Israeli Defenses Forces (IDF) committed unending and egregious war crimes and breaches of international law against defenseless Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. Instead of abating, the assaults have intensified over the past year. They especially escalated dramatically after the June 25 incident at an Israeli military post near Kerem Shalom crossing, southeast of Rafah, resulting in the killing of two IDF soldiers, injuring several others and capturing a third still held. The clash followed a series of bloody June Israeli attacks on Gaza including the widely reported beach shelling that killed eight Palestinians and injured 32 others including 13 children.

The IDF "Operation Summer Rain" response was just another deadly chapter in how Israel is allowed to get away with any excuse it uses to attack the defenseless Palestinians. Beginning in late June, that assault was swift, brutal, disproportionate to the minor incident that took place, and is still ongoing over three months later unabated. Israel followed its attack and re-invasion of Gaza by closing all border crossings and sealing off the territory to restrict movement in and out including for humanitarian supplies such as food and medicine. The IDF also began shelling northern Gaza with hundreds of rounds of artillery shells daily; it launched round-the-clock attacks by F-16 fighter jets and helicopter gunships firing air-to-surface missiles and dropping one-ton bombs on civilian targets; it conducted mock air raids; and it had its aircraft break the sound barrier over Gaza at low altitudes inflicting eardrum shattering sonic booms to terrify the population. The terror tactics traumatized children the most.

In addition, the IDF targeted and destroyed Palestinian government buildings including the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of National Economy as well as the office of the Palestinian Prime Minister who was forced into hiding to prevent being targeted for extra-judicial assassination. Other facilities were destroyed as well including a number of educational institutions, the electricity generation plant providing nearly half of Gaza's electrical power, other electricity networks and transmitters, the main water pipe for the Nusairat and al-Boreij refugee camps, six bridges linking Gaza City with the central Gaza Strip, many roads, and the government compound in Nablus. The IDF also destroyed hundreds of donums (each one about 1,000 square meters) of agricultural land and hundreds of houses in indiscriminate-like acts of banditry against vulnerable civilians helpless to stop it and to make it easier later to seize more Palestinian land for settler developments or whatever other purposes the Israelis want to use it for.

All the while, Israel continues building its separation/annexation wall inside the West Bank on other seized Palestinian land. It's doing it in defiance of the July, 2004 World Court in the Hague ruling that its construction is "contrary to international law....destroyed and confiscated (property and greatly restricts Palestinian movement, and it) severely impedes the exercise by the Palestinian people of (the) right of self-determination." The Court ruled construction must end at once, its existing portion be taken down, and affected Palestinians must be compensated for their losses. In its decision the Court cited binding international law under the Hague Regulations of 1907 (dealing with the laws of war and war crimes) and the Fourth Geneva Convention (relating to the protection of civilians in time of war). As it ignores all binding UN resolutions against it, Israel refused to comply with this one by the World Court and continues building its wall on confiscated Palestinian land in open defiance of the rule of law and all international norms of propriety.

In addition, Israel has tried to destroy the democratically elected Hamas-led government by seizing and arresting 31 of its Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) members including the Speaker, Deputy Speaker and Secretary. Later the Deputy Speaker was released. Also, eight ministers including the Deputy Prime Minister, were arrested. Three of them, including the Deputy Prime Minister were later released, but the others are still in administrative custody. They're being held in detention along with about 10,000 other Palestinians arrested forcibly. Most of them are being held administratively and indefinitely without charge and are subjected to abuse and torture according to Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights monitoring group B'Tselem.

Israel's assault against the Palestinians in June didn't just erupt because of a minor border incident. Israeli General Yoav Galant, in charge of Gaza, revealed in a candid interview he gave it was planned earlier, and the IDF had been preparing for it by training for a large-scale incursion and reoccupation of the Strip. It all stems from the Palestinians having made an unacceptable choice in the legislative elections held in January, 2006. They were expected to return the supine and subservient Fatah-led government to power led by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and traitor to his own people for having sold out to Israeli and US interests years ago for the special privileges he gets in return. Fatah lost because the people were so fed up with years of institutionalized corruption under its rule, they voted it out and democratically elected a majority Hamas-led government they had far more faith in. This was intolerable to the Israelis, the Bush administration and the European Union (EU) that refused to recognize the new leadership. They responded by cutting off all international aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and supported Israel's refusal to hand over what it owes the PA from the taxes it collects from the Palestinian people. The plan was to starve the government and people into submission, and it did it by creating a severe economic crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) preventing salaries from being paid and causing a state of extreme deprivation that's grown worse throughout the year and especially after the late June resumption of open and intense conflict.

The long-suffering Palestinians have paid a terrible price throughout this period and for decades earlier while the world community ignores their desperate plight and is complicit in causing it. World leaders are comfortable remaining shamelessly silent while innocent people are made to suffer painfully while the IDF's overwhelming force is allowed to operate with impunity. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) on the ground in the OPT has painstakingly documented the daily toll of pain and suffering. It reported 237 Palestinians were killed in Gaza alone including 53 children and 13 women since June 25. In addition, the PCHR reported 821 Palestinians, including 220 children and 35 women, were wounded. The numbers continue mounting daily as does the human suffering overall.

In total, according to PCHR reports, over the past year, 504 Palestinians have been killed including 93 children and 14 women, 138 of them by targeted extra-judicial executions against 90 targeted persons that also killed 48 others. Covering the entire six years of the al-Aqsa Intifada, PCHR reports 3859 Palestinians have been killed including 585 by extra-judicial assassinations that targeted 376 persons and killed 209 others nearby including 71 children.

Over the past year, the IDF intensified its operations in the OPT, especially in Gaza from which the Israelis staged a media event withdrawal (under its "disengagement plan") in August and September, 2005 evacuating 8,500 settlers from 21 settlements. In fact, no withdrawal took place. The Gaza Jews were merely resettled on other seized Palestinian land in the West Bank, and the IDF just redeployed away from the settlements they were guarding to new positions on the border. Gaza continues to be sealed off, it remains the world's largest open-air prison, and the IDF freely reenters the Strip on any pretext as it did there and in the West Bank with brute force after June 25. The beleaguered Palestinians know no peace or relief as the IDF continues assaulting them daily inflicting an intolerable amount of pain and suffering on them.

This is part of Israel's long-standing imperial and racist policy of collective punishment and ethnic cleansing to destroy the Palestinian identity and prevent the people from ever having a viable sovereign state of their own under a government of their own free choice. Israel's plan is to make life in Palestine so intolerable, the people there will choose to leave voluntarily to seek refuge wherever they can find it in other Arab states. Israel could then seize their land and advance toward its eventual goal of a greater "Eretz Israel" Zionists believe belong to them that includes the ancient lands of "Judea" and "Summaria," the West Bank biblical parts of Israel the Palestinians claim as their homeland. Despite the overwhelming oppression and hardships inflicted on them, the Palestinians have resisted for decades and courageously defended their rights - but at a great cost in lives lost, land seized, homes and other facilities destroyed and continuing human misery some independent observers believe is as great as or even greater than anywhere else in the world.

An Account of the Last Six Years Under Occupation

The PCHR documents how bad things have been just in the last six years since the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada. IDF daily attacks over that period included the following:

-- Hostile incursions into the OPT

-- Mass killings and home and property demolitions

-- Frequent extra-judicial assassinations of targeted Palestinian resistance and political leaders

-- Destruction of the Palestinian economy that's threatened with total collapse from an economic embargo and withholding of tax payments to the Palestinian Authority (PA)

-- Creation of a serious risk of infectious disease from a lack of clean water and little or no sanitation because of the collapse of the sewage system

-- Destruction of a viable Hamas-led PA through imprisonments and destruction of their civil and security facilities

-- Using Palestinians as human shields during IDF operations in the OPT

-- Closing Rafah and other border crossings in Gaza cutting off essential traffic both ways including for humanitarian supplies like food and medicine

-- Harassing Palestinian fishermen preventing them from earning a living

-- Storming Jericho Prison and arresting senior Palestinian political leaders

-- Harassing and humiliating Palestinians at military checkpoints including those in ambulances prevented or delayed from getting critically needed treatment

-- Unwarranted and illegal deportations of targeted Palestinian activists from their own country

-- Continued illegal construction of the separation/annexation wall on seized Palestinian land in the West Bank in violation of the World Court and international law Israelis never respect

-- Willfully killing Palestinian civilians including women and children

-- Indiscriminately attacking and shelling Palestinian civilian areas using warplanes, helicopters, tanks and other powerful weapons including illegal ones

-- Denying Palestinians their basic human rights to health care, education, freedom of movement, work to support themselves and their families, and imposing a tight siege on the OPT shooting to kill those violating it or on the streets when curfews are in effect

-- Making mass arbitrary arrests without cause resulting in about 10,000 Palestinians illegally held in detention and subjected to grievous abuse and torture

-- Closure of charitable societies in the West Bank

-- Permitting deliberate and systematic attacks by Israeli settlers living on seized Palestinian land against Palestinian civilians in their own homeland

The Collective Numerical Toll of the Last Six Years on the Palestinian People Through September 28

From September 29, 2000 through September 28, 2006 the toll is as follows as documented by the PCHR:

-- 3,859 Palestinians killed overall - 2137 in Gaza and 1722 in the West Bank

-- 724 children killed overall - 430 in Gaza and 294 in the West Bank

-- 119 women killed - 58 in Gaza and 61 in the West Bank

-- 376 extra-judicial executions

-- 19 medical personnel killed

-- 10 journalists killed

-- 45 killed by illegal Israeli settlers with impunity

-- 22,927 Palestinians injured (many severely) - 12,927 in the West Bank and 10,000 in Gaza

-- 36,852 donums of land destroyed

-- 2,831 complete home demolitions and 2,427 partial ones

-- 677 industrial facilities destroyed

Conclusions

Justice delayed is justice denied, and for the long-suffering Palestinians the denial has lasted nearly six long and deadly decades. They've been the victims of genocide in slow motion aided by the indifference of the world community that has a large share of the guilt for failing to forthrightly say "no mas" - this no longer will be tolerated and must end. If world leaders won't act, when then will enough people of conscience and mass civil society stand together and do it for them demanding Israel be held accountable for its actions and that there must be an end to what never should have been allowed to begin in the first place.

Today the state of the Palestinian people is so dire and the need for relief so urgent, the world no longer can wait. Nearly six decades of unending persecution capped by the last six years of it becoming especially intolerable can only lead to one eventual unjust ending if not stopped too unacceptable even to imagine - the destruction of a courageous and oppressed people with a proud legacy going back hundreds of years.

A Jewish/Palestinian conflict never existed until the founding of Zionism in the late 19th century. It was structured on the myth that ancient Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land" and "God gave this land to the Jews." It's pure rubbish and ignores the wealth of historical and archeological evidence that civilization flourished in present-day Israel/Palestine at least 1,000 years before any Jews arrived. From that time till the duplicitous British after WW I promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine, for their own self-serving interests, Jews and Palestinian Arabs lived mostly in peace.

The key turning point destroying any chance for coexistence came on November 29, 1947 when the UN General Assembly passed a resolution supporting the establishment of a Jewish state. It voted to partition Palestine to create one for the Jews and the other for the majority Palestinian population. At the time, the Jews were a minority one-third of the population and owned 6% of the land. The partition unfairly gave them 55% of it and led to the 1948 Israeli war of independence the Palestinians didn't want but couldn't avoid. The outcome gave the Israelis 78% of the land, half again as much as the UN mandate, and squeezed the Palestinians even more in what became known as "al Nakba" or "The Catastrophe." Things would never be the same again and now are as bad or worse than any other time since that war and the one in 1967 when the Israelis occupied all the land now known as the OPT.

Today in the Middle East, Israel is a modern prosperous state and a nuclear power making it virtually omnipotent in the region. No Arab state can or would dare challenge it, and the Palestinians are virtually helpless against a hostile and powerful occupier intent on their destruction as a people. When will the world community or enough people of conscience act to stop what will eventually happen if they don't. It's long past the time to end the "last taboo" of failing to speak out and act forthrightly against Israeli crimes and demand they end - or else Israel will be made to pay a stiff price for not complying. It's also long past the time Israel be held to account for what it's done to an innocent people wanting only to live in peace on the land rightfully belonging to them. If not now, when will justice ever be served. Tomorrow may be too late.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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Police State USA


RIP, Bill of Rights, RIP

The Nation
Sun Oct 1, 2006

On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of 120,000 Japenese civilians, 2/3 of whom were US citizens, in military camps across the western half of the country. Effectively stripping Japanese Americans of virtually all constitutional protections (including rights to property, trial by jury and habeas corpus), 9066 is now widely decried as one of the darkest moments in US history. In 1988, Congress passed Public Law 100-383, which apologized to Japanese internees, provided reparations and created a public education fund to "inform the public about the internment of such individuals so as to prevent the recurrence of any similar event."

Congress should have enrolled in its own re-education program.
By passing the Military Commissions Act (a.k.a. the torture bill), Congress has granted the Bush administration extraordinary powers to detain, interrogate and prosecute alleged terrorists and their supporters. Anyone anywhere in the world at any time may be summarily classified an "unlawful enemy combatant" by the executive branch, seized and detained indefinitely in military prisons. As Bruce Ackerman points out in the LA Times, the definition of "unlawful enemy combatant" includes those who "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States" (by say, writing a check to a Middle East charity) and may extend to US citizens. Thanks to the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, US citizens at least appear to retain habeas corpus rights, a foundation of Western jurisprudence. Foreign nationals do not; the Act explicitly denies them the writ of habeas corpus (the right to be charged and tried and the right to appeal any convictions in a court of law).

These wartime powers rival and exceed those assumed by Roosevelt during WWII. Even worse, unlike the case of Executive Order 9066, Congress has given President Bush the stamp of legislative authority. In this context, perhaps the most craven vote cast for the torture bill came from Senator Arlen Specter. Though he believes the bill to be "patently unconstitutional on its face," he voted for it anyway because he hopes "the court will clean it up." But there's no reason to believe the courts will act in such a manner.

As Ackerman points out, the Korematsu case, which validated Japanese internment, still stands as precedent. Since September 11, federal courts and the Bush administration have used Korematsu-like language to define a state of emergency and justify racial profiling. (And wing-nuts like Michelle Malkin have argued that racial profiling and detention of Japanese during WWII was justified, as is profiling and detention of Arabs in the war on terror). As Ackerman argues "congressional support of presidential power will make it much easier to extend the Korematsu decision to further mass seizures."

Moreover, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court case that temporarily jeopordized Bush's extra-judicial detentions, specifically cited lack of Congressional approval. Now Congress has given him this approval.

For those who believe that mass internment can never happen again, the US now holds 14,000 detainees in prisons in
Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan and other undisclosed locations. 14,000 people who can be held indefinitely, without a fair trial, by secret evidence to which they have no access or that may be obtained by what most consider torture. 14,000 and counting.

Never again is now.



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Criticize Bush = Domestic Terrorism

Huffington Post
02/09/2006

There are two ways in which you -- citizen or non-citizen, resident of Topeka or Timbuktu -- can become an "unlawful enemy combatant."

The first way is if you engage "n hostilities" or "purposefully and materially support" hostilities. This sounds reasonable enough until you realize that no-one has the slightest clue what it means to "purposefully and materially support" hostilities. Do you need to intend to aid the hostilities? Or is it enough to intend to give the support? Would purposely giving to a charity that then gave money to Hamas count, even if you knew nothing about the Hamas? What about writing an editorial that gave "aid and comfort" to the enemy -- say, by criticizing the Administration's Iraq policy?
"Checks and balances" has a nice ring. But it's a currency that doesn't go a long way in Washington today.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006, of MCA, passed by the House and Senate is a wholesale assault on the idea of a limited government under law.

It will be taken by the Bush Administration as a blank check to torture, to detain indefinitely without just cause, and to trample the values that win America respect in the world. From tomorrow, counter-terrorism is the "land of do as you please" for the President and the wise men of the Defense Department -- those savants who brought you Iraq, the gift that keeps on giving (at least if you're a jihadist).

The MCA comprehensively assaults two ideas: The idea of checking executive power by laws. And the idea of a separate branch of government ensuring those limits are respected. These are the basic tools of accountability. The MCA frontally attacks both of these -- although only time will tell whether it succeeds.

How does the Military Commissions Act assail checks and balances? Consider the key issues of detention and torture.

The MCA says nothing explicit about the detention power. Indeed, I would argue that nothing in the legislation ought to be read to imply

Here's how the Addington play for detention power will work. The opening definition of the Act describes elaborately what an "unlawful enemy combatant" is. Why? The term is a neologism. The laws of war do not use or define this term. Indeed, it is a mutation of a phrase used in a subordinate clause of a 1942 Supreme Court opinion. Nothing else in the Act directly turns on this definition--although only an "alien unlawful enemy combatant" can be subject to trial by military commission. So why bother with the elaborate definition? And why extend the definition to U.S. citizens as well as non-citizens?

Back in 2004, the Supreme Court, in the now well-known Hamdi v. Rumsfeld decision, stated that an "enemy combatant" captured in hostilities could be held for the duration of those hostilities. The Court made very clear it was talking about only the limited context of the ground war in Afghanistan, not some amorphous and unending "war on terror." But Addington et al. will, however, take Hamdi's sanction of detention--and extend it far, far beyond Hamdi. It will be a detention power that applies anywhere and anytime.

There are two ways in which you -- citizen or non-citizen, resident of Topeka or Timbuktu -- can become an "unlawful enemy combatant."

The first way is if you engage "n hostilities" or "purposefully and materially support" hostilities. This sounds reasonable enough until you realize that no-one has the slightest clue what it means to "purposefully and materially support" hostilities. Do you need to intend to aid the hostilities? Or is it enough to intend to give the support? Would purposely giving to a charity that then gave money to Hamas count, even if you knew nothing about the Hamas? What about writing an editorial that gave "aid and comfort" to the enemy -- say, by criticizing the Administration's Iraq policy?

The second way is -- if it's even possible -- more dangerous: You are designated an enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal -- the Potemkin proceedings jerry-rigged at Guantánamo -- or you are designated by "another competent tribunal" created by the Defense Secretary.

It's the latter that catches in the throat, because the MCA does not define what Rumsfeld's "competent tribunal" must look like. Rummy himself with the always-fair-and-impartial Addington? Five Syrian torturers (like the ones to whom the U.S. sent the hapless Canadian Maher Arar)? A bunch of guys who flip coins for your liberty? Sure, why not? The MCA doesn't stop the executive from using any of these, provided Rumsfeld gave them power and hence made them "competent."

At least for non-citizens, moreover, that would be that: For the first time in U.S. history, an Act of Congress singles out a group of persons--non-citizens--and deprives them of any right to challenge their detention wherever they are picked up. No non-citizen would, the MCA seems to say, be able to challenge this detention. And while citizens are certainly entitled to a hearing, the Government will fight tooth and nail to make sure this hearing doesn't allow any effective inquiry into the facts on which a detention is based. So no judicial review -- and no accountability.

The same dynamic is at play in the anti-torture rules. The MCA alters a criminal statute called the War Crimes Act, which imposed criminal sanctions for certain violations of the laws of war.

Until recently, the United States could proudly point to a long history of supporting a universal ban on torture, and to a strong record in ensuring that those who in fact tortured did not escape accountability. No longer. Now a gamut of horrendous kinds of treatment will be non-criminal -- and, the Bush Administration will argue, within the discretion of the President.

Start with the substantive anti-torture rules themselves (which cover both torture and the lesser "cruel and inhuman" treatment). The MCA contains an incredibly complex and convoluted set of definitions. Despite all the cant about clarity, the rules no longer in plain English -- as they were in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions -- and they are so full of holes they might have been tortured themselves.

Here are three examples of the duplicitous ambiguity of the MCA when it comes to torture and abuse.

First, "cruel and inhuman" treatment is defined as acts that cause "severe or serious" pain. We know "severe" is worse than "serious" because "severe" is used to define torture (yes, we'll get there in a moment). But then "serious pain" is defined as "bodily injury" that causes "extreme physical pain." So "serious" pain is only "extreme" pain? Isn't extreme worse than serious? It would seem so--but the MCA is deliberately confusing and circular.

And why the reference to bodily injury? Does that mean that hypothermia and long-time standing and those other wretched "enhanced" techniques more fitting for Stalin's gulags than American facilities are not criminal? Well, yes, I reckon it does.

Second, in another convoluted section, "serious mental pain" is defined in terms of "non-transitory" harms. Thus, if a CIA agent threatens to kill a detainee, or to rape his spouse and his children -- all long-recognized as forms of torture -- that's not torture; it's not even the lesser "cruel and inhuman" treatment.

Finally, the torture statute itself. Almost unnoticed, the Bush Administration has gutted the no-torture rule. It has added the requirement that a person "specifically" intend to cause the pain that amounts to torture. This technical change--foreshadowed in the August 2002 OLC memo -- has tremendous implications. It means that any government agent who says his goal was to get information, and not to cause pain, hasn't tortured no matter how bad the things he does. If the person water-boards or knee-caps a person, or buries them alive, if it's to get information -- well, that's just dandy.

Once again, it's not just the substantive rules that have been assailed: It's also the mechanisms to ensure the rules are followed. Under the MCA, there is no accountability for torture. The MCA cuts off courts' power to hear claims of torture by aliens held as "unlawful enemy combatants." And it vests the President with power to interpret the relevant laws of war. So if he says that "cold cell" and sexual abuse are not "cruel and inhumane," that's the end of the matter.

There are two reasons for hope. First, any reading of the Act that reaches an untrammeled detention power may be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court in the 2004 case of Rasul v. Bush -- in what one day will be called "famous footnote 15" -- strongly hinted that even non-citizens captured overseas have Due Process rights. Combined with another clause of the Constitution called the Suspension Clause, this means the unchecked detention power and the jurisdiction-strip are likely unconstitutional.

Second, even if the War Crimes Act has been amended, the Due Process Clause also ought still to protect detainees held overseas: Torture is un-American. It's also unconstitutional--and that doesn't change depending on where it's done. Moreover, the law of war, embodied in the Geneva Conventions, is clear: There is no "specific intent" requirement for torture. Countries -- whether it's the United States or North Korea -- cannot unilaterally define down the rules against torture.

"Unchecked and unbalanced" government -- I argue at length in a forthcoming book-- is antithetical to American government. The MCA is also anathema to our best traditions. We must hope it is our traditions that win, and not the selfish partisan posturing that animated this week's votes.



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A soul defying, tacit approval of torture: how did we come to this?

By Phil Rockstroh
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Sep 29, 2006

"True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that False Self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality . . . and through this death a rebirth, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer." --R. D. Laing

The pathology of American culture is as ubiquitous as its strip-mall ugliness. It is abundantly evident, in almost every aspect of contemporary life. From the predatory (to the point of psychopathic) practices of its morally scurvy pirates at the helm of the corporate/governmental ship of state, down to the pandemic enervation and proliferate anomie of its galley slaves languishing in their soulless cubicles -- from the genitalia-devoid mascots at Disney World to the genitalia-obsessed torturers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo -- the soul-sickness spreads before us like George W. Bush's taunting, executioner's smirk.

Ronnie Laing's profound dictum leaves us confronting many poignant questions regarding the true nature of the psychic lives of us so-called ordinary citizens of The United States of America and our ability to function within this corrupt and crumbling empire. In short, is it sane to be able to adapt to an insane culture?

Moreover, it begs the following question. If an individual's conformity to group, cultural, and national pathology is rewarded -- thereby encouraging the formation of the "False Self" -- how might one, stranded within the dysfunctional dynamic, resist it all and begin to work towards an awareness of their own essential nature, then perhaps arriving at an individual reckoning involving how to live, flourish, and subvert the life defying demands of the present era.

First off, what engenders the formation of the False Self? Laing grasped: When we were children, authority, in the form of parents, educators, clergy, loomed before us. Alternatively menacing and comforting, these powerful figures could just as easily have crushed us as comforted us.

Tragically, all too often, they perpetrated the primary. Hence, to accommodate the overwhelming demands of authority, we learned how to curry favor from these baffling, seemingly implacable forces by the creation of a cipher persona, a False Self, a tricky and/or obsequious, tap-dancing, little apple polisher, who strives to garner approval and acceptance, thereby avoiding punishment, rejection and scorn, by means of the reflexive subjugation of his true nature.

The victims of False Self adaptation are the quintessence of the corporate/consumer citizen. Although, they're presence is far from benign: While they are compelled to show an agreeable face towards unyielding authority, this trope merely serves to mask a mind seething with misplaced resentments and shallow subterfuge. Doesn't this read like a personality profile of Condoleezza Rice or any other member of that present day Executive Office cast of Lord of the Flies known as the Bush administration?

This process of metaphysical identity theft begins in childhood. Then, as now, the presence of individuality-decimating authority can create irreconcilable anxieties within us, because the actions and activities of authority figures seem as overwhelming and unpredictable as nature itself.

Now add this to the already haunted landscape of childhood -- our present day government's campaigns of perpetual fear mongering, plus the dominate corporate culture's modus operandi of commercial exploitation -- and we're left with one freaked out populace - one comprised of both children and alleged adults.

Consequently, this fear-ridden existence has rendered us a society of grotesques: In the present day United States, children have grown as fat as steroid-fed, corporate-farmed livestock; this has transpired because we overfeed them a diet consisting of steroid-fed, corporate-farmed livestock, as well as a myriad other variations of nutrient-devoid, calorie-laden faux food dispensed at a mall's food court, through a drive-thru window, or out of a cardboard box delivered by a franchised junk food chain.

Our motives for doing this shouldn't be a mystery to us: We habitually shovel high fat, high carbohydrate, high sugar-content junk into their grousing gobs, in a desperate, futile attempt to stuff down the boredom, the anxiety, the lassitude they suffer due to their confinement inside the commercially branded, repressed, empty, holographic facsimile of childhood we have created for them.

This is the reason why our children overeat like neurotic domestic pets. As is the case with housebound, bored, anxious domestic animals, what do they have to look forward to but dinner? Accordingly, the corporate food industry provides plenty (at a bloated profit, of course) of junk food -- the table scraps fallen from the table of the ruling elite of our fat-ass empire -- in order to keep them (and all the rest of us) obese, obedient, and anxiously waiting by our master's table for more.

And these proto-fascist, behavioral control tricks are not just for kids. Corporate Capitalism has left us Americans psychologically arrested in a pathetic simulacrum of childhood where our inchoate fears of being preyed upon by our (so-called) protectors (whom we internally and accurately recognize as monsters) are displaced into compulsive consumerism (including overeating) and a reflexive fear of outsiders.

If we were to awaken to this subterfuge, we would apprehend: Our individual uniqueness is being robbed from us on a daily basis due to our enslavement to a mindless system that lives for no other reason than it lives -- a system that eats its fatted young (giving new meaning to the term consumer economy) -- and exists only to perpetuate itself -- a system that has become a soul-devouring monster -- the embodiment of Alan Ginsburg's Moloch.

Why do we accept this soul-defying situation? For most of us, the price we would have to pay for confronting authority would be far too prohibitive; hence, we learn it is acceptable (as well as politically useful to our power mad leaders) to displace our anger and fear upon outsiders. Ergo, the so-called Clash of Civilizations is unloosed and slouches, by way of the Washington Beltway, to Iraq, Iran and beyond to be born.

This is the manner that we as a society came to believe we can "compromise" on acts of torture committed in our name and not fear the loss of our souls as a result of our complicity. Although, the loss of our national soul would only prove redundant: Years ago, we decided our souls, both individual and national, were somewhat less than useful to us -- and not nearly as compelling as a new widescreen, plasma TV and the like -- hence they were discarded into the reeking landfills of this toxic country like an old appliance.

These actions are what the corporate/military/consumer empire demands of us: For it does not take long for us to learn which aspects of our personalities are accepted and rewarded, and, conversely, which ones will be punished and scorned. In essence, the roles we're expected to play in exchange for being loved, fed, clothed, and sheltered.

This exchange insures us that we're given a "safe" place within the community -- not cast out into the wilderness and fed to the wolves. This fear is not an outrageous fantasy: It is, in fact, a primal memory. Due to the fact, numerous forms of infanticide were once common practices in nearly all cultures, including the act of abandoning outcast children to die in the wilderness.

Moreover, this knowledge still lingers within our psyches, where the memories of such terrors still howl just beyond the tree line of our waking awareness, instilling within us the terror of ridicule, of failure, of being ostracized. Far too many of us succumb to these fears and begin playing the roles circumscribed by their families, communities, and cultures. Tragically, their true selves, for all practical purposes, were smothered in their cribs.

In itself, the False Self, as well as other varieties of habitual self-centeredness, is a variety of imprisonment. The world is spread before the cell of the self, yet we prisoners cannot leave the confines of our small, self-involved anxieties; therein, mind, heart and imagination become atrophied by a lack of experience, empathy and spontaneity. The bars of the cage might be invisible, yet the sense of confinement is palpable across our corporatized culture. Ergo, a collective numbness and apathy levels upon the land - and ultimately our desensitization to genocide and torture.

To begin to free oneself from the bondage of the False Self, one must become aware of one's own fraudulence. That being: the awareness of one's desperate machinations before exploitive authority.

Self-knowledge can provide us with a point of entry to the act of empathy. Yes, even extending it towards one as loathsome as George W. Bush. Years ago, the sorry ass son of a bitch put on a mask (its contours, both menacing and ridiculous) in a vain attempt to shield himself from being crushed by power. Imagine having his parents: that soulless cipher of a father and blood-freezing Medusa of a mother. Try to imagine the psychological carnage involved. It's the same trauma we experience daily due to our own powerlessness against the dictates of the corporate state and its threats, both implied and overt, to cast us into the howling wilderness of financial ruin, poverty, and homelessness.

(A caveat: The proffering empathy to Dick Cheney would be pushing the parameters of empathy to the breaking point: Upon being subjected to Cheney's glowering, reptilian aura, even Mahatma Ghandi would be reaching for a pair of brass knuckles.)

Even in this fear-ridden era, there are some among us -- types such as nonconformists, creative thinkers, and artists -- who welcome (rather than cower before) the metaphorical wolves (that are recognized, each to each, as fellow outcasts). Instead of being eaten by the wolves, they are suckled and raised by them.

Nourished by their outsider status, the creative spirit thrives when freed from the constraints of a mindless adherence to groupthink. The dark terrain of societal abandonment becomes their natural habitat: they howl at the moon; they reject the daylight world of bland consensus; they learn to see in the dark, apprehending their own interior darkness and, as a result, gain an understanding into the hearts of darkness beating within those in power.

The wilderness of political activism, of poetry, of art becomes their home: they don't clean-up nicely for polite company; they don't let themselves be bred down (as a few domesticated wolves did) to yapping Toy Poodles, in exchange for a few food scraps.

Yes, when you're looking at a Toy Poodle -- you're looking at a former wolf, as when your looking at the corporate press corps, you're looking at folks whose ancestors long ago were journalists.

One moment, you're loping through the woods, snout held high, smelling the scent of fresh game on the wind, then the next thing you know -- you're being led around on a leash and collar, encrusted with tacky rhinestones and you're salivating at the sound of an electric can-opener. One moment, you're a child, entranced in play, hardwired to eternity -- the next thing you know, you're sitting at work and your passions, hopes, and yearnings have been shrunk down to Toy Poodle-sized agendas . . . You're truckling for your boss's approval; you're counting the minutes until break time, when you can devour some junk food. Like a domesticated pet, or an unfortunate animal incarcerated in a zoo, you are no longer a noble animal - you're a Thing That Waits For Lunch.

To resist, we must cast off the fear of being an outcast. I remain hopeful: There is yet a molecule or two of the wild wolf left within us cringing, cloying Toy Poodles.

One must always remember this: We human beings are of nature too. Accordingly, within us lies an indomitable self, encoded with the grace and fury of the natural world, and, if acknowledged and respected, it will awaken and arise. Then the real dogfight begins: The fur will fly, as we fight, fang and claw, to retake our own essential natures, and, by extension, begin the struggle to restore health, imagination and empathy to a nation of cage-accepting, torture-countenancing sick puppies.



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The secret buried in the Torture Bill [VIDEO] - Bush Admin shielded from War Crimes...

by Evan Derkacz
September 29, 2006

Buried deep within the torture bill is this:

... no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien detained by the United States who--

'(A) is currently in United States custody; and

'(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.'.

(b) Effective Date- The amendments made by subsection (a) shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply to all cases, without exception, pending on or after the date of the enactment of this Act which relate to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of detention of an alien detained by the United States since September 11, 2001.


In English: Any war crime committed by the Bush administration since 9/11 cannot be prosecuted.

Nice job congress.

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.




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The list of Shame - Who voted Yea and Nay on torture and detention...

by Evan Derkacz
September 29, 2006

"Yea" means you support torture and detention. Democrats are in bold RED.





YEAs ---65
Alexander (R-TN)
Allard (R-CO)
Allen (R-VA)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burns (R-MT)
Burr (R-NC)
Carper (D-DE)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Coleman (R-MN)
Collins (R-ME)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Craig (R-ID)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
DeWine (R-OH)
Dole (R-NC)
Domenici (R-NM)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Frist (R-TN)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hagel (R-NE)
Hatch (R-UT)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Lieberman (D-CT)
Lott (R-MS)
Lugar (R-IN)
Martinez (R-FL)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Roberts (R-KS)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Salazar (D-CO)
Santorum (R-PA)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Smith (R-OR)
Specter (R-PA)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Stevens (R-AK)
Sununu (R-NH)
Talent (R-MO)
Thomas (R-WY)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Warner (R-VA)

NAYs ---34

Akaka (D-HI)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Biden (D-DE)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Byrd (D-WV)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Chafee (R-RI)
Clinton (D-NY)
Conrad (D-ND)
Dayton (D-MN)
Dodd (D-CT)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feingold (D-WI)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Harkin (D-IA)
Inouye (D-HI)
Jeffords (I-VT)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Kohl (D-WI)
Leahy (D-VT)
Levin (D-MI)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murray (D-WA)
Obama (D-IL)
Reed (D-RI)
Reid (D-NV)
Sarbanes (D-MD)
Schumer (D-NY)
Wyden (D-OR)



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Republicans the real cut-and-run cowards - GOP runs from nation's creed when going gets tough

by Bob Geiger
September 29, 2006

Republicans have become so accustomed to using the phrase "cut and run" that they probably mumble it while sleeping and their childlike leader, George W. Bush, babbled it again yesterday, saying at yet another GOP fundraiser that "the party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run."

That takes a ton of nerve coming from a Chickenhawk like Bush, who used Daddy's connections to avoid Vietnam and then went AWOL from his cushy stateside post. But we've heard that empty phrase from the cretins in the right-wing of the Republican party so many times that it barely even registers any longer.
They like to question the courage and patriotism of Democrats for being unwilling to shed more American blood and waste billions more on a pointless war, that the country was lied into and that's made us far less safe and more despised throughout the world. Aside from the fact that the majority of Americans no longer support the Iraq war -- and, thus, they must all be cut-and-run defeatists as well -- it is the Republicans who have shown themselves to be the lily-livered cowards among us.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their whole craven cabal are scared stiff -- and they want us to all be very afraid as well. How frightened are they? They're so afraid that they are willing to go against everything this country stands for, in a blind panic that they think will somehow protect their sorry asses from the big, bad terrorist bullies.

They are so damn scared that they're willing to take a country that was founded on individual liberty and turn it into a police state -- all out of fear.

So they respond to Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda attacking our country -- and, according to Bush, "our way of life" -- by putting their collective tails between their legs and abandoning the very core principles crafted by the founding fathers to embody "our way of life."

I didn't realize it at the time, but the hideous losses we suffered on 9/11 would truly test our national character more than any event of my lifetime. Do we stick with the values and hard-learned lessons of our past in the face of these new challenges or do we let Osama bin Laden truly ruin our country by becoming a shadow of the nation we have always been?

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), arguing against the Bush torture bill that passed both the House and the Senate this week, said it quite well yesterday:

"What has changed in the last five years that our Government is so inept and our people so terrified that we must do what no bomb or attack could ever do by taking away the very freedoms that define America? Why would we allow the terrorists to win by doing to ourselves what they could never do, and abandon the principles for which so many Americans today and through our history have fought and sacrificed?"


Whether he's in a cave, a nice hotel in Karachi or a CIA safe house, bin Laden must be laughing himself silly over the crisis of heart, soul and character he has so easily inflicted on the Bush Administration and, thus, our country.

It's trivial for a nation to stand by its creed when times are easy. But it's times like these, when circumstances and conditions are tough, that give us the real test of our national strength, courage and resolve.

Under Republican leadership, we are failing that test in the most miserable and pathetic way.

A great nation uses a horrendous event like September 11 to reinforce the things that have always made us the envy of the world and that, at least until our recent history, made us, in our best moments, the standard to which other countries aspired. A people of character suck it up and strive to remain a beacon of hope, equity and civil rights, while fighting those who attack us as strongly as we can.

The only thing Bush and his team of sissies have been right about is saying that we're not a nation that cuts and runs -- which is why all Americans should hate how our chicken-hearted, reactionary government has consistently done exactly that ever since we were attacked.

What we've seen happen in the last five years is not something that should invoke pride or flag-waving jingoism in Americans. We've watched a president and vice president whose lies have become so commonplace that they seldom even make the news. We've watched as our military men and women are killed or maimed in a war that has nothing to do with terror and everything to do with Bush and his mindless supporters selling fear to suit their ideological and financial agenda.

We've seen a world go from loving us on September 12, 2001 - many governments declared "we are all Americans today" - to us becoming a global pariah, with nary a friend who believes in our word or the promise of our deeds. We saw astounding pictures come back from Abu Ghraib, in which prisoners under our watch were tortured and, in some cases, killed.

And just this week, we have watched the Republican-led Congress affirm that all of that -- and more -- is just fine with them. At the same time, we have become willing to let the president mortgage our present and our children's financial future to spend money on a war that did not need to be fought, while ruining a reputation that previous generations worked so hard to build.

So tell every Republican you know that they can take their 'cut and run' garbage and shove it.

In the face of challenge and terror, George W. Bush and the Republican party have continued to debase our nation's spirit and trash the values that have made us great. In other words, the Republicans are allowing a few terrorists to change the very essence of our country and make us so afraid that we no longer even know who we are -- or what we stand for.

When the going has gotten tough, and our nation's heart and soul are on the line, it's the cowardly Republicans who have truly cut and run.

Bob Geiger is a writer, activist and Democratic District Leader in Westchester County, NY. You can reach Bob at geiger.bob@gmail.com and read more from him at BobGeiger.com.



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US warns charities on any links to terror groups

Reuters
Sep 29, 2006

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Treasury Department warned charities on Friday to be sure they are not even indirectly funding activities that build support for terrorist organizations, making explicit reference to groups with Arab or Islamic connections.

"The Treasury has maintained an open and robust dialogue with the charitable community, notably the Arab-American and Islamic-American community, on how to best safeguard charitable giving from misuse by terrorists," the Treasury said in a statement.

In an annex to the guidelines, the department for the first time cautioned that charitable activities could build public support for terrorist groups, even if they don't channel funds to terrorist organizations.
"Terrorist abuse also includes the exploitation of charitable services and activities to radicalize vulnerable populations and cultivate support for terrorist organizations and activities," the Treasury said.

Charities should check to see whether grantees or employees are on lists of groups or individuals identified by the U.S. government or under U.N. Security Council resolutions.

If a charity finds that any of its grantees or employees are suspected of activities relating to terrorism, the charity should provide that information to the Treasury Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the statement said.



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John McCain's last human parts replaced [VIDEO] - Torture candidate has 'come up with a good product'

by Evan Derkacz
September 29, 2006

How do you lie and manipulate? You just do. You just stand up on the senate floor and lie.
First video, McCain a week ago saying that there will be no waterboarding (i.e. torture).

Second video is McCain on the senate floor, voting against amendments that would prohibit waterboarding and saying that he looks forward to following the Geneva Conventions. Don't hold your breath Mr. McCain (our soldiers who are captured and subjected to this will have to do enough of that).

The third is a scene from Jacob the Liar, via Howie Klein, depicting waterboarding.

And, finally, the answer: Presidential ambitions. Sucking up to the Christian Right. Making peace with torture. A man once tortured turns into a torturer. If there is a better definition of tragedy, I'd like to see it in comments.

Here's a snippet from Wikipedia on McCain's torture in Vietnam which not only is now okay with him, but also puts the lie to the effectiveness of torture:

Once McCain arrived at the Hanoi Hilton, he was placed in a cell and interrogated daily. When McCain refused to provide any information to his captors, he was beaten until he lost consciousness.

When the North Vietnamese discovered his father was the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Command, (CINCPAC), in charge of all US forces in Vietnam, he was offered a chance to go home, in an effort to embarrass the American military. Senior POWs had ordered there would be no return home unless all POWs were permitted to, and McCain, as did most POWs, followed orders, and refused to be repatriated back to the United States.

McCain signed an anti-American propaganda message which was written in Vietnamese, but did so only as a result of torture (to this day, he cannot raise his arms above his head, due to his two broken shoulders from the severe beatings administered by the North Vietnamese).


Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.



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Local official in South Carolina city says bad parents should be sterilized

22:34:17 EDT Sep 30, 2006
Canadian Press

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) - A City Council member, reacting to a video store holdup believed to have been carried out by children, says parents who can't properly care for their kids should be sterilized.
"We pick up stray animals and spay them," Larry Shirley said in a story published Saturday by The Post and Courier of Charleston. "These mothers need to be spayed if they can't take care of theirs. Once they have a child and it's running the street, to let them continue to have children is totally unacceptable."

Shirley's comments come after police say a video store was held up by a group of children, including a 14-year-old girl suspected of wielding a BB gun that looked like a pistol.

The holdup happened about 9 p.m. Wednesday at a video rental store. A 14-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy were charged as juveniles with armed robbery. A nine-year-old boy was not charged because police said he was too young. He was released to his mother.

"What we've got is a failure in society, whether it's in Mount Pleasant with yuppie parents or whether it's on the East Side with poor crackhead parents," he said, referring to areas in and around Charleston.

State Senator Robert Ford, a Charleston Democrat, agreed that the crime highlights a societal problem but dismissed Shirley's suggestion to sterilize people as "crazy."

"What Larry Shirley needs to talk about is getting City Council to provide some recreational facilities and activities for these kids and creating an atmosphere conducive to a normal society," said Ford, also a former councilman.



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Americans should scrutinize government actions, says Zinn

by Sherry Fisher - October 2, 2006

If we lived in a culture that really taught history, Americans would be less vulnerable to government deception.

That's the view of historian and political activist Howard Zinn, who spoke at Storrs on Sept. 26. The lecture was co-sponsored by nearly a dozen University groups.

"If you know history - that is, orthodox history - you'd know how many times presidents have lied to the public," he told the audience that packed the Student Union Ballroom.
Zinn, a professor emeritus in the political science department at Boston University, is a legendary American liberal.

He is perhaps best known for his book, A People's History of the United States, which presents American history through the eyes of those he believes are outside the political and economic establishment.

His talk, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: Equality in America," is also the title of his memoir.

Zinn said Americans need to "interfere" with the government. "With a war going on and kids going hungry, you can't pretend to be neutral and detached," he said.

"We're in a situation today where a small group of men have taken over the country. They have gotten us into wars. They've taken the wealth of this country and squandered it on military actions."

Zinn said it is not human nature, as some believe, to become involved in wars.

"You have to work at it," he said. "One reason they get away with it is there's no free press to do the job. An independent press scrutinizes and investigates what the government is doing."

He charged that the news media play the role of "yes men" to the government, instead of doing what a free press should do in a democracy.

He gave Iraq as an example: "Here's a small country that's been devastated by wars and economic sanctions, and they're a threat to us?" he asked, calling the treatment of Iraq in the media a propaganda assault by the government and the press.

When former Secretary of State Colin Powell gave evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the press "went for it" Zinn said.



"It was all lies, but the press did not investigate and ask questions.

"What is it about our culture that makes our population believe television and newspapers?" he asked.

"I argue that it has to do with the loss of history, or historical amnesia. It's as if we were born yesterday. Anyone can get up behind a mike and get us into a war."

He said the 1846 Mexican-American War was not justified.

Although President James Polk alleged that Mexico had "shed American blood on American soil," Zinn said the real motive was different: "If you knew history," he said, "you'd know he wrote in his diary, 'It would be nice to have California.'"

The United States has historically invaded countries "to help and free them," Zinn said with sarcasm, citing the history of U.S. relations with Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Panama.

"History helps us see the deceptions of government," he said.

One of the largest lies Americans are told is that "we have something in common with the government," he said, noting that phrases like "national interest," "national security," and "national defense" perpetuate that belief.

"National defense means we're defending the nation," he said. "If you're sending an army thousands of miles away, it's hard to call it national defense."

He said Communism formerly played the role that terrorism does today.

"We took it and exaggerated it," he said.

"The Russians never caught up in the arms race. After the Cold War, the U.S. government realized they overassessed the danger. We built up the military against a threat that wasn't that real."

Zinn said that in spite of what he called "government control of the airwaves and media," the American people "do have power. They may appear powerless at first, but when people join in and don't lose hope, it brings change."



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We Miss You, Paul Wellstone

By David Morris
AlterNet
October 1, 2006

Four years ago this month, one of our biggest political assets was taken from us. Today, more than ever, American politics suffers from his absence.
Four years ago this month Paul Wellstone was taken from us. Today, more than ever, American politics suffers from his absence.

A few days ago, Senate Democrats agreed not to filibuster a bill allowing the President to detain indefinitely, even for life, any alien, whether in the United States or abroad, whether a foreign resident or a lawful permanent resident. The bill denies prisoners the right to challenge their detention in court.

Why would Democrats allow 51 Senators to eliminate one of the fundamental pillars of free societies? I imagine it was because their pollsters told them a vigorous opposition would lose them votes in the upcoming election as Republicans pummeled them for being soft on terrorism.

Paul would have filibustered. That would almost certainly have delayed a Senate vote until after the election, enabling Americans to more clearly demonstrate how they stand on the 800-year old right of habeas corpus.

Three weeks before he died, Paul voted against war in Iraq. At the time, his opponent was aggressively accusing Paul of being weak on national security. Polls told Paul a vote against war would lose him the election. But as he told the Washington Post two days after the vote, "I think people want you to do what you think is right." He then added, in typical Wellstone fashion, "how would I have had the enthusiasm and the fight if I had actually cast a vote I didn't believe in? I couldn't do that."

A few days later Paul delighted in the fact that his vote resulted in a surge of support among Minnesotans, a surge that almost certainly would have led to his reelection.

Paul knew how to filibuster. Single-handedly, his filibusters prevented a remarkably inequitable bankruptcy bill from being passed while he was in the Senate.

And he knew how to speak truth to power. When Exxon, the number one oil company, gobbled up number two Mobil, and the number one grain company, Cargill devoured runner-up Continental Grain, and the number one bank, Citicorp snapped up Travelers Insurance, the silence from Washington was deafening. The New York Times observed, "scarcely a politician of any stripe headed for the cameras" to question "whether the deals were good for the country, for workers or for consumers."

Except one. "Senator Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota Democrat is among the few in Congress still exercised about the concentration of corporate power".

In 1996, Wellstone was among the very few who voted against the Telecommunications Act. He argued it would lead to concentrated ownership. He was right. Over the next 22 months, more than 1,000 radio stations were sold. Some 450 owners left the field. Single companies now dominate local radio broadcasting.

In 1996, Paul bravely voted against ending the nation's commitment to the poor. Again, he was the only politician running for reelection who did so. "If you want to reduce poverty, stop scapegoating people," he said. "Start focusing on a good education and a good job."

Paul Wellstone proposed as well as opposed. For example, when the United States tried one more time to join the rest of the industrialized world in making access to medical care a right, not a privilege, Wellstone helped organize a grassroots coalition that gained considerable support in Congress in favor of a system similar to Canada's 30 year old program: a single insurer, local control, and private suppliers.

But it was in his opposition that he most clearly demonstrated both his character, and his uniqueness. On this anniversary of his death, we sorely miss his courage and leadership.

David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Minneapolis, Minnnesota and director of its New Rules project.



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EU hopes to conclude pact on air passengers' data with U.S.

www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-02 04:21:23

BRUSSELS, Oct. 1 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) said on Sunday it hoped to conclude a pact on air passengers' data with the United States at the EU justice ministers' meeting, to be held in Luxembourg on Oct. 6.

On Saturday, the EU and the United States failed to reach an agreement on the air passengers' data before Oct. 1, the time frameset by the European Court of Justice in its ruling of May 30, 2006.
However, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff sent on Saturday a draft agreement to European Commission (EC) Vice-President Franco Frattini and Finnish Minister for Foreign Affairs Erkki Tuomioja.

The draft agreement "may be discussed during the Oct. 6 meeting of the Council of Justice and Home Affairs Ministers in Luxembourg in the hope of having an agreement the same day," said a written statement issued by the EC, the EU's executive arm.

The statement said Frattini and Chertoff "have agreed that the negotiations will continue in a constructive atmosphere with a view to concluding an agreement as soon as possible."

"Much progress has already been made," the EC stressed, adding that "it is in the interests of all concerned, travelers, airlines, law enforcement agencies and data protection authorities, that a new agreement is concluded as soon possible."

According to the statement, Frattini is "in regular contact" with Chertoff and agrees on the need to reach a rapid and satisfactory agreement.

In the meantime, the EC urged the United States to continue to apply the safeguards for the air passengers data until such time as a new agreement is reached so as to minimize the risk of legal uncertainty and disruption to EU-U.S. flights.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States and the EC reached an agreement, under which European airlines supply U.S. authorities with information on passengers entering the United States, including their name, address, payment details and telephone numbers.

In May this year, the European Court of Justice struck down the existing deal on a legal technicality in May but gave the EU and the United States until Oct. 1 to replace it.



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Police State USA - Part 2


Woman accused of supporting terror group

By DAISY NGUYEN
Associated Press
Sat Sep 30, 2006

LOS ANGELES - A naturalized U.S. citizen from Iran who was found in Iraq was indicted Friday on charges of providing support to a terrorist organization that seeks to overthrow the Iranian regime, federal prosecutors said.

Zeinab Taleb-Jedi, 51, then a resident of Herndon, Va., went to Iraq in 1999 to attend a training camp run by the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said in a statement.

MEK, also known as the People's Mujahedin of Iran, and its affiliates were deemed foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department in 1997. The designations bar anyone in the United States from providing material support.
The group was founded in Iran in the 1960s and moved to Iraq in the early 1980s to base its activities against Iran's government. The group had sided with Iraq in its 1980-88 war against Iran.

The State Department says the MEK groups were funded by
Saddam Hussein, supported the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and are responsible for the deaths of Americans in the 1970s.

Taleb-Jedi was discovered by coalition forces at a camp called Ashraf Base about 40 miles northwest of Baghdad, the U.S. attorney's office statement said. It was unclear when.

U.S. forces took control of the camp and sent many members back to Iran on condition that they leave MEK, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the attorney's office.

"An investigation reveals that she played an active role at the camp," Mrozek said.

Taleb-Jedi was indicted by a federal grand jury in New York City on one count of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. She faces up to 15 years in federal prison if convicted.

She was being prosecuted in New York because her plane landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport on March 31 upon her return from Iraq. The case was handled by Los Angeles-based prosecutors who have been involved in MEK-related investigations since the 1990s.

She was assigned a public defender in New York and released on bond.

Taleb-Jedi immigrated to the United States from Iran in 1978 and became a U.S. citizen in 1996, the government said. Her aliases include Nayer Taleb-Jedi or Nire Taleb-Jedi, according to the two-page indictment.

The attorney's office did not release any information on the woman's occupation.

Some members of Congress in recent years have advocated the group's removal from the terrorism list because of its stance against the Iranian regime and because it doesn't pose a direct threat to the U.S.



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Humiliation at 33,000 feet: Top British architect tells of terror 'arrest'

The Independent
01 October 2006

Seth Stein is used to jetting around the world to create stylish holiday homes for wealthy clients. This means the hip architect is familiar with the irritations of heightened airline security post-9/11. But not even he could have imagined being mistaken for an Islamist terrorist and physically pinned to his seat while aboard an American Airlines flight - especially as he has Jewish origins.
Yet this is what happened when he travelled back from a business trip to the Turks and Caicos islands via New York on 22 May. Still traumatised by his ordeal, the 47-year-old is furious that the airline failed to protect him from the gung-ho actions of an over-zealous passenger who claimed to be a police officer. He has now instructed a team of top US lawyers to act for him.

The London-based interiors guru, whose clients have included Peter Mandelson and the husband-and-wife design team Suzanne Clements and Ignacio Ribeiro, said he felt compelled to speak out to protect other innocent travellers from a similar experience.

"This man could have garrotted me and what was awful was that one or two of the passengers went up afterwards to thank him," said Mr Stein. He has since been told by airline staff he was targeted because he was using an iPod, had used the toilet when he got on the plane and that his tan made him appear "Arab".

"I was terrified but am fortunate in that I was able to contact a lawyer. Yet someone else who is not assertive could be left completely traumatised."

The incident highlights the increased likelihood of innocent passengers being picked on because they are perceived as "suspicious" or "foreign-looking", especially following the alleged plot to blow up airliners with liquid explosives.

Earlier this month, a plane from London to Washington DC made an emergency landing, escorted by fighters, after passengers alerted crew to the behaviour of a female traveller. It later emerged she had suffered a panic attack. And in August, two innocent Asian students were escorted off a flight from Malaga to Manchester because other passengers thought they were terrorists.

In Mr Stein's case, he was pounced on as the crew and other travellers looked on. The drama unfolded less than an hour into the flight. As he settled down with a book and a ginger ale, the father-of-three was grabbed from behind and held in a head-lock.

"This guy just told me his name was Michael Wilk, that he was with the New York Police Department, that I'd been acting suspiciously and should stay calm. I could barely find my voice and couldn't believe it was happening," said Mr Stein.

"He went into my pocket and took out my passport and my iPod. All the other passengers were looking concerned." Eventually, cabin crew explained that the captain had run a security check on Mr Stein after being alerted by the policeman and that this had cleared him. The passenger had been asked to go back to his seat before he had restrained Mr Stein. When the plane arrived in New York, Mr Stein was met by apologetic police officers who offered to fast-track him out of the airport.

Mr Stein said: "The other passengers looked and me and said, 'What did you do?' It was so humiliating. The fact is he [the police officer] was told I was OK and should have left me alone. The airline had a duty of care. I've got to travel to the US soon, but I'm paying an extra £500 to travel in business class."

American Airlines apologised to Mr Stein, who was born in New York, but withdrew an initial offer of $2,000 compensation on the grounds it would be an admission of liability. In a letter dated 30 May, the airline said it had done everything possible to try and protect Mr Stein.

It read: "Unfortunately, as in any public gathering, there may be occasions when a conflict arises between people or when one individual's actions bother another... As our crew members may not always be witness to the inappropriate acts of a particular passenger, there may be a limit to what our crews can do to improve behaviour that is perceived as a nuisance."

In a twist to the story, Mr Stein has since discovered that there is only one Michael Wilk on the NYPD's official register of officers, but the man retired 25 years ago. Officials have told the architect that his assailant may work for another law enforcement agency but have refused to say which one.



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US sends air passenger-data draft agreement to EU

by Paul Harrington
AFP
Sun Oct 1, 2006

BRUSSELS - US and EU officials are hoping to avoid a legal vacuum threatening to disrupt transatlantic travel after failing to reach agreement on the transfer of airline passenger data before a court deadline passed.

European negotiators flew out of Washington on Saturday after the US side introduced fresh requirements which were not within their mandate to accept, EU sources said Sunday.

However transatlantic airlines continued Sunday to hand over the information required by the US authorities, regardless of any legal vacuum, according to airline spokesmen.
Both the US and EU sides stressed that they were close to an agreement and that discussions would continue this week, with EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini and US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff likely to speak by telephone on Sunday.

"There is no deal. It's a shame because we are 90 percent there," EU spokesman Jonathan Todd told AFP in Brussels on Sunday. "The EU team has flown out of Washington but talks will continue this week."

Finnish EU presidency spokesman Marko Ruonala echoed that "we are close to a deal" but added that "some new elements" introduced in the talks had hampered completion of an agreement.

"The presidency will consult other member states and negotiators will come back to the issue" later this week, he added, without specifying a timetable.

The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, will also take up the matter.

A spokesman for transatlantic carrier Air France assured that the lack of an agreement had had "no impact on Air France flights to the United States".

"In the absence of an agreement by September 30, and like all the other airlines, we are continuing to transmit the passenger data," he said.

Asked about the possible illegality of doing so he voiced the safety in numbers principle. "It's what all the other airline companies are doing."

Chertoff remained upbeat, saying that the US side had sent an initial draft to the Europeans which he felt satisfied fulfilled their fundamental data protection requirements.

"I am pleased to announce that following our negotiations with representatives of the European Union, I have initialed a draft formal US/EU agreement regarding the sharing of Passenger Name Record data," Chertoff said in a statement from Washington on Saturday.

"We expect that planes will continue to fly uninterrupted and our national security will not be impeded," he added.

"The proposal ensures the appropriate security information will be exchanged and counter-terrorism information collected by the department will be shared, as necessary with other federal counter-terrorism agencies."

US Homeland Security Department spokesman Jarrod Agen described the EU announcement that the talks had broken up without agreement as "not accurate".

However the expiration of Saturday's deadline, set by the European Court of Justice, leaves transatlantic air travel in a legal limbo.

In the name of the "war on terror", US authorities in 2003 demanded that airlines transmit their passengers' personal data to US security officials for all US-bound flights.

Airlines must provide the US authorities with dozens of details about passengers and crew -- including credit card information, addresses and telephone numbers -- 15 minutes before departure of a flight.

In its ruling in May, the European Court of Justice objected to the way the original agreement was reached in 2004, but not what was contained in it. It set a deadline of September 30 for a new deal to be reached.

Now if European airlines don't provide the info required by the US authorities they could be denied entry to the States. If they do then they would be breaching EU rules.

EU and US negotiators had resumed last-gasp talks in Washington on Saturday aimed at avoiding any air traffic chaos.

The two sides are trying to reach agreement on the PNR data after Europe's top court quashed their previous accord on a legal technicality but allowed them to continue using it until September 30.

The talks have stumbled previously over US demands that the content of the agreement also be renegotiated, something Brussels is reluctant to do.



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FBI worries about an Osama-mobsters link

By PAT MILTON
Associated Press
October 1, 2006

WASHINGTON - The FBI's top counterterrorism official harbors lots of concerns: weapons of mass destruction, undetected homegrown terrorists and the possibility that old-fashioned mobsters will team up with al-Qaida for the right price.

Though there is no direct evidence yet of organized crime collaborating with terrorists, the first hints of a connection surfaced in a recent undercover FBI operation. Agents stopped a man with alleged mob ties from selling missiles to an informant posing as a terrorist middleman.
That case and other factors are heightening concerns about a real-life episode of the Sopranos teaming with Osama bin Laden's followers.

"We are continuing to look for a nexus," said Joseph Billy Jr., the FBI's top counterterrorism official. "We are looking at this very aggressively."

The new strategy involves an analysis of nationwide criminal investigations, particularly white collar crime, side by side with intelligence and terrorist activity.

"We have developed an ability to look harder and broader in a greatly enhanced way to see if there is any crossover," Billy said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Organized crime syndicates could facilitate money transfers or laundering, human smuggling, identification fraud or explosives and weapons acquisitions, officials said.

The options are many for terrorists groups.

There are the five reputed La Cosa Nostra families in New York, Russian criminal enterprises from Brighton Beach in the New York borough of Brooklyn to Moscow, and the emerging Asian crime syndicates that operate in many Islamic countries with al-Qaida offshoots.

A contract study produced recently for the Pentagon and obtained by the AP warned that the potential for organized crime assisting terrorists is growing.

"Although terrorism and organized crime are different phenomena, the important fact is that terrorist and criminal networks overlap and cooperate in some enterprises," the study said. "The phenomenon of the synergy of terrorism and organized crime is growing because similar conditions give rise to both and because terrorists and organized criminals use similar approaches to promote their operations."

The traditional mafia has highly developed networks for acquiring goods and services and money, all for a price.

The mob's potential interest in helping a terrorist has nothing to do with ideology or sympathy but with greed, said Matt Heron, head of New York FBI's organized crime unit.

"They will deal with anybody, if they can make a buck," Heron said. "They will sell to a terrorist just as easily as they would sell to an order of Franciscan monks. It's a business relationship to them."

"If the mob has explosives and a terrorist wants them and they have the money, they could become instant friends," he said.

Pat D'Amuro, a retired senior FBI official and now chief executive of Giuliani Security, said a Mafia boss once acknowledged that the mob would help terrorists.

"I am aware of a high-level Mafia figure, who was cooperating with authorities, being asked if the Mafia would assist terrorists in smuggling people into Europe through Italy," D'Amuro said. "He said, 'The Mafia will help who ever can pay.'"

Officials said they have no specific evidence that such a relationship has been cemented. But concerns were heightened last year after an Armenian immigrant was arrested in New York for allegedly leading a plot to sell military weapons to an FBI informant posing as a middleman for terrorists.

Arthur Solomonyan had claimed to be able to deliver shoulder-fired missiles from his connection in Russian organized crime to the informant, who claimed to have ties to al-Qaida, federal prosecutors said. Solomonyan and 17 others in New York, Florida and California were charged in the case.

Solomonyan is scheduled for trial this month. His lawyer, Seth Ginsberg, said he plans to "vigorously contest" the charges and call the government's confidential informant to the stand to challenge his motives. The Italian, Russian, and Asian mafia remain active, particularly in New York, even though the government has successfully prosecuted numerous figures in recent years.

In the past three years, well over 100 associates from all five La Cosa Nostra families have been arrested in New York, Heron noted.

While the potential of a gangster-terrorist marriage is on the FBI's radar, homegrown terror cells and weapons of mass destruction are also big concerns for those in the FBI given the job of stopping the next terrorist attack.

"We are not only aware that they want to come across the ocean to attack us but they may be physically here developing in our own homeland," Billy said.

The Internet has become the new Afghanistan, allowing terrorist sympathizers to promote their radical ideas and to recruit and train followers right their home computers. That makes it far more difficult for investigators to identify them.

Billy said his biggest concern remains weapons of mass destruction. While Hezbollah and Hamas are more defined terrorist groups, with a territorial focus and a political platform, al-Qaida is more unpredictable.

"We know they were trying to acquire it prior to 9/11, bin Laden's own words said that," said Billy. "What makes us think they are still not trying?"

Comment: Only a few days after the passing of the Military Commissions Act, they are already talking up "homegrown terrorists"...

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Autopsy: 110 rounds shot at Fla. suspect

AP
Sat Sep 30, 2006

LAKELAND, Fla. - Officers fired 110 rounds of ammunition at the man suspected of killing a sheriff's deputy, according to an autopsy and records released by the sheriff's office Saturday.
Angilo Freeland - who was suspected of fatally shooting the deputy after being pulled over for speeding Thursday - was hit 68 times by the SWAT team members' shots, the examination showed.

He also was suspected of wounding a deputy and killing a police dog.

Freeland's death ended a nearly 24-hour manhunt that forced schools to lock down and families to stay indoors as about 500 officers scoured the woods.

The wounded deputy had pulled Freeland over for speeding and became suspicious of his identification. The suspect got nervous and bolted into the woods, officials said.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said he was not concerned by the number of shots fired.

"You have to understand, he had already shot and killed a deputy, he had already shot and killed a K-9 and he shot and injured another deputy," Judd said by phone Saturday. "Quite frankly, we weren't taking any chances."

Ten SWAT officers surrounded Freeland on Friday as he hid beneath brush and a fallen tree in a rural area. Authorities say he raised the gun belonging to the deputy he had killed, prompting nine officers to fire.

"I suspect the only reason 110 rounds was all that was fired was that's all the ammunition they had," Judd said. "We were not going to take any chance of him shooting back."

The SWAT officers who shot Freeland have been placed on paid administrative leave, standard procedure in all police shootings.

Also released Saturday were autopsy results for the deputy, Vernon Matthew Williams, 39, which showed he had been shot eight times. He was not wearing a protective vest, but shots hit him in his right leg and behind his right ear, among other places.

Diogi, his German shepherd police dog, was also killed. The dog had been shot once in the chest.

Authorities said deputy sheriff Doug Speirs, also 39, was fired at several times and shot once in the leg. A sergeant and an officer from the Lakeland Police Department were also fired at, authorities said.



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The Sexually Explicit Internet Messages That Led to Fla. Rep. Foley's Resignation

Brian Ross, Rhonda Schwartz & Maddy Sauer Report
ABC News
September 29, 2006

Florida Rep. Mark Foley's resignation came just hours after ABC News questioned the congressman about a series of sexually explicit instant messages involving congressional pages, high school students who are under 18 years of age.

In Congress, Rep. Foley (R-FL) was part of the Republican leadership and the chairman of the House caucus on missing and exploited children.

He crusaded for tough laws against those who used the Internet for sexual exploitation of children.
"They're sick people; they need mental health counseling," Foley said.

But, according to several former congressional pages, the congressman used the Internet to engage in sexually explicit exchanges.

They say he used the screen name Maf54 on these messages provided to ABC News.

Maf54: You in your boxers, too?
Teen: Nope, just got home. I had a college interview that went late.
Maf54: Well, strip down and get relaxed.

Another message:

Maf54: What ya wearing?
Teen: tshirt and shorts
Maf54: Love to slip them off of you.

And this one:

Maf54: Do I make you a little horny?
Teen: A little.
Maf54: Cool.

The language gets much more graphic, too graphic to be broadcast, and at one point the congressman appears to be describing Internet sex.

Federal authorities say such messages could result in Foley's prosecution, under some of the same laws he helped to enact.

"Adds up to soliciting underage children for sex," said Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent and now an ABC News consultant. "And what it amounts to is serious both state and federal violations that could potentially get you a number of years."

Foley's resignation letter was submitted late this afternoon, and he left Capitol Hill without speaking to reporters.

In a statement, he said he was "deeply sorry" and apologized for letting down his family and the people of Florida.

But he made no mention of the Internet messages or the pages.

One former page tells ABC News that his class was warned about Foley by people involved in the program.

Other pages told ABC News they were hesitant to report Foley because of his power in Congress.

This all came to a head in the last 24 hours. Yesterday, we asked the congressman about some much tamer e-mails from one page, and he said he was just being overly friendly. After we posted that story online, we began to hear from a number of other pages who sent these much more explicit, instant messages. When the congressman realized we had them, he resigned.



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Foley e-mails 1st reported in fall '05

By DEVLIN BARRETT
Associated Press
September 30, 2006

WASHINGTON - Rep. Thomas Reynolds, head of the House Republican election effort, said Saturday he told Speaker Dennis Hastert months ago about concerns that a fellow GOP lawmaker had sent inappropriate messages to a teenage boy. Hastert's office said aides referred the matter to the proper authorities last fall but they were only told the messages were "over-friendly."
Reynolds, R-N.Y., was told about e-mails sent by Rep. Mark Foley and is now defending himself from Democratic accusations that he did too little. Foley, R-Fla., resigned Friday after ABC News questioned him about the e-mails to a former congressional page and about sexually suggestive instant messages to other pages.

The boy who received the e-mails was 16 in the summer of 2005 when he worked in Congress as a page. After the boy returned to his Louisiana home, the congressman e-mailed him. The teenager thought the messages were inappropriate, particularly one in which Foley asked the teen to send a picture of himself.

The teen's family contacted their congressman, Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., who then discussed the problem with Reynolds sometime this spring.

"Rodney Alexander brought to my attention the existence of e-mails between Mark Foley and a former page of Mr. Alexander's," Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in a written statement Saturday.

"Despite the fact that I had not seen the e-mails in question, and Mr. Alexander told me that the parents didn't want the matter pursued, I told the speaker of the conversation Mr. Alexander had with me," Reynolds said.

Hastert said he does not remember talking to Reynolds about the Foley e-mails, but did not dispute Reynolds' account.

"While the speaker does not explicitly recall this conversation, he has no reason to dispute Congressman Reynolds' recollection that he reported to him on the problem and its resolution," Hastert's aides said in a preliminary report on the matter issued Saturday.

The report includes a lengthy timeline detailing when they first learned of the worrisome e-mail in the fall of 2005, after a staffer for Alexander told Hastert's office the family wanted Foley to stop contacting their son. Alexander's staffer did not share the contents of the e-mail, saying it was not sexual but "over-friendly," the report says.

Hastert's aides referred the matter to the Clerk of the House, and "mindful of the sensitivity of the parent's wishes to protect their child's privacy and believing that they had promptly reported what they knew to the proper authorities," they did not discuss it with others in Hastert's office - including, apparently, their boss.

After the issue was referred to the clerk, it was passed along to the congressman who oversees the page program, Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill.

Shimkus has said he learned about the e-mail exchange in late 2005 and took immediate action to investigate.

He said Foley told him it was an innocent exchange. Shimkus said he warned Foley not to have any more contact with the teenager and to respect other pages.

Democrats charged Reynolds did far too little and said more digging should be done.

"Congressman Reynolds' inaction in the face of such a serious situation is very troubling, and raises important questions about whether there was an attempt to cover up criminal activity involving a minor to keep it from coming to light before Election Day," said
Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Karen Finney.

New York Democrats hoping to unseat Reynolds blasted the congressman, saying they call into question the Republican's values.

"Mr. Reynolds knew about these allegedly inappropriate e-mails from a fellow congressman to a minor for months and didn't lift a finger," said Blake Zeff, a spokesman for the state Democrats.



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Carved-up Map of Turkey at NATO Prompts US Apology

By Suleyman Kurt, Ankara
zaman.com
Friday, September 29, 2006

A map prepared by a retired U.S. military officer that sketches Turkey as a partitioned country was presented at the NATO's Defense College in Rome, where Turkish officers attend.

The use of the map at a conference meeting by a colonel from the U.S. National War Academy angered Turkish military officers.

Turkish Chief of Staff Gen. Yasar Buyukanit called the U.S. Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Pace, and protested the incident. U.S. military authorities admitted the mistake, for which they apologized to Turkey.

Click for larger image

According to the reports, the incident took place on Sept. 15.

An American colonel who came to the Defense College for a conference began a lecture on technology.

However, a few minutes later he presented a map that showed Turkey as separated, and included an "independent Kurdistan" on Turkish territories.

In reaction to the U.S. colonel's elaboration on the map, previously characterized by U.S. authorities as not reflective of the American view, the Turkish officers left the conference room.

The Belgian commander of the College was then informed about the incident.

The commander reacted, saying that academic freedom did not mean everybody could say anything he wanted, and cited the incident as unacceptable.

Turkish officers also briefed Ankara about the developments relevant to the incident.

The U.S. State Department assured Ankara that the map did not reflect the official American view, and denounced it as unacceptable.

The new Middle East map, prepared by retired Col. Ralph Peters and published in the Armed Forces Journal in June, had sparked reactions in Ankara.

Comment: This is a very interesting faux pas by the US government. It is very possible that this map does indeed reflect the official American view, yet what is most interesting about this US plan for the Middle East is not that Turkey will lose territory but that Israel is slated to be forced to return to its pre-1967 borders! Is there an old-fashioned 'switcheroo' in the works?

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Woodward: Bush lied [VIDEO]

by Evan Derkacz
October 1, 2006

In this clip from Sunday night's 60 Minutes, Bob Woodward is welcomed aboard the train that left the station about 3+ years ago.

Still, it's significant that a man with such cred goes on TV and effectively says that Bush lied.

In this clip, Woodward points to recently declassified info from our own intelligence agencies that puts the lie to years of Bush spin.

Again, welcome aboard Mr. Woodward. Coulda used you earlier but glad you could make it...

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.




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Michael Shea and "Red State"

Friday, September 29, 2006
Dave Neiwert
Orcinus

I had lunch the other day with Michael Shea, the independent filmmaker whose first solo work, Red State, deserves a national audience. I describe it here. We got on nicely, since it seemed we both were operating from a similar wavelength.

Michael agreed to do a regular interview with me, so the next day, we talked by phone. Here's the result.
What I wanted to talk about, after watching the film, was the odyssey you underwent. When you describe it to people who haven't seen the film, or even those who have, how do you sum it up? How do you explain what you encountered en route during this trip?

I sometimes struggle with synthesizing it all into a few sentences. I guess that the best way I can put it is that I went out and came face to face with an emerging theocracy in America, an emerging theocratic worldview, based on certain people's conception of Christianity here.

But it's not just theocratic, it also ties into issues like race and white privilege. There was a lot of talk, I thought, about defending what we've got, that sort of thing.

Certainly, if I were to attempt to psychoanalyze my experience, I would say that there are a lot of people who don't like America changing to a multicultural society, and are afraid of where we're going as a country culturally, and want it to stop, want it to reverse to a simpler time. The '50s seem to be a big iconic time for them. They just want life to be how they feel it once was.

Sort of this mythical Golden Era that actually never existed, right?

Yeah, exactly. These people seem to long for this time that from my understanding never existed.

Or if it existed, it also had certain features that I don't think any of us would accept today, including all the racial prejudice. And yet that was kind of explicitly what at least one of your interviewees [Gladys Gill] seemed to long for.

Yeah, absolutely. There were people -- Gladys in particular -- who were longing for a time when white people could pretty much do what they wanted institutionally, and the other people -- women and minorities -- knew their place.

It seemed like there was a trajectory to the interviews too, where initially a lot of the interviews, except for Dennis Mansfield, were people who were reachable. As you say later in that clip from the radio show you were on, some of these people you can't help but be impressed by their dignity and decency, even when they're suckering for the whole morals/values schtick that conservatives have mastered.

The film and my experience definitely kind of illustrates that that has happened -- that people are being marketed their worldview. And they are almost using their decency against them, in a way. They are preying upon the notion of this golden time, and they're preying upon people's nostalgia and longing for that to get them to oppose other groups.

It seems like the key to that has been this propaganda mill has been pretty incessant out there in rural America for the last 15 years -- you know, Rush Limbaugh and all his wannabees. You kind of noted the effect on one of your interviewees -- someone who had voted Democratic for years but didn't like Democrats now because they were just too liberal, but couldn't say why thought so.

I felt like I was speaking with people who were, for lack of a better term, parroting the media they were consuming -- Rush Limbaugh, local conservative talk radio which is similar to him, Fox News -- that there is indeed a concerted effort, and it's very well organized and intricate and total, to convince these people to think they want, to respond the way that they want them to.

I mean, look at the gay marriage issue. In a time when American soldiers are dying in various places around the globe, I went out to talk to people about the state of the country and why they voted for whom they voted for, and most of them want to talk about gay marriage. Which couldn't possibly really affect their lives. But it's become the issue for them, and that was absolutely based on the marketing campaign that the administration and its media arm put forth.

They wrap themselves in this blanket of morality and value, but at their core they are deeply amoral. I think that's been revealed by the torture issue.

That was one of the main conflicts for me personally was that I was having trouble reconciling any notion of morality with many of the folks that I spoke with. While they were waving about this moral superiority, this moral high ground.

And then there were people at the other end of the spectrum, the people who were clearly theocratic authoritarians -- kind of glassy-eyed ideologues almost. Those people just seem to me impossible to reach.

One of the great contradictions of my experience was that I would be talking to people and having a great time with them, enjoying them as people -- when we were talking about a ball game or the weather or our trip or whatever. But when we'd move into the political arena, I often felt like I wasn't speaking to a human being anymore, I was listening to the recitation of the programming.

It looked in at least a moment there like -- I couldn't tell whether you were dumbfounded or upset, maybe both, with the fellow you interviewed at the giant cross memorial. The associate pastor.

I was actually upset. I'd been doing it for a long time at that point, and you know, I had just been hearing this hatred being put forth as faith, and I couldn't take it anymore. I was quite upset with that gentleman. He was advocating torture and saying that God would advocate that. Yeah, I was angry.

You talk about how people like that scare you, and I think that's true for a lot of people, that they would scare us.

It is scary. It's chilling. I think there's that phrase, "the dead eye" -- to be looking into someone's eyes and to see no humanity there, to see no compassion for others. It's scary. It freaked me out. I talk about that in the film, how I would be at times freaked out by these people, and how I struggled with that.

Because of the gay marriage issue, the film became kind of a gay rights film in a way, and that wasn't my intention. But for me the logic of the gay marriage issue is just so easy to digest that I couldn't believe that I couldn't have a conversation with folks and have them agree.

It seems like if you try to talk logic with these people, especially on an issue like gay marriage, they often just shut down. Logic and reason are no longer operative things.

It certainly isn't logic the way you or I would understand it. I'd guess you could, if you were being generous, a logic borne of their faith. But it certainly wasn't logic as I know it.

I guess the lingering question is: What next? Now that we have this kind of insight into the state of the nation, how should we act? What should we be doing?

I made the film without any knowledge of where it was going to end, and of where to go after. And in many ways, I still am in that place. I think it's truly for us to begin asking these questions. Calling things what they are and then trying to see what makes sense from there.

First of all, we have to recognize and repeat that there are people who arguably are in power in this country, and that they have been put in power by these people who are inclined to think theocratically. What are going to do about that?

Well, I guess what I would tell you is that my film, I hope it can have some impact on Republicans. And by Republicans I mean these people who were Republican before the theocrats took power, the people who were Republican for economic reasons. People who were Republican and might have been just fine with the Clinton economy. I think there is room to have these people, these Republicans, see the danger posed by the folks that they're sharing this party with. And I think we ought to do all that we can do to educate them on what their party has become.

I didn't think of Republicans as wrong dangerous 20, 30 years ago. I thought at that time I disagreed with them, but I don't know that they were necessarily dangerous to our way of life. I think the Republican Party has become dangerous to our way of life, and that we need to act as if that were the case.

It seems that what the film also did -- at least what I came away from it with -- was this sense you were also pointing to ways that we can find common ground with some of these people. I think when we speak from a moral center of our own, we do well -- and I think the torture issue is a perfect example of that. I think the reason that a lot of people don't vote Democrat now is that they don't believe we have a moral center.

I think that's absolutely right. I think that morality, and values, have not been heeded by the left, because we've bought into this language that make radical Christians the "values voters" -- as if we don't have values of our own. And I think that that kind of propaganda that uses language is something that the left has really been asleep about. In the way that the word "liberal" was demonized, that's an example of what has happened in many different areas, with many different words and phrases.

In the film, I proclaim that I am a liberal. And I'm proud of being a liberal. Liberals are responsible for nearly all the cultural growth that we've had. We need to take it back. We can't allow our values and our society to become marginalized just because of the propaganda being put forth by the other side.

Part of what I was looking for in my project was two kinds of understanding, like I said. While I don't feel I found a way to have the common ground with the Christianists, that doesn't mean there isn't possibility for common ground with some on the right. We need to find a way to peel away some of those votes, and then we can begin repairing the damage that's been done.



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Man Charged With Killing Wife, 4 Kids

By BRUCE SMITH
AP
Oct 1, 2006

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. - A man was charged Sunday with murdering his wife and her four children in a domestic dispute at their home, authorities said.

Michael Simmons, 41, appeared at a bond hearing via video link from the Charleston County jail on Sunday and was ordered held without bond on five counts of murder.

Officers discovered the bodies, including that of a 6-year-old, on Saturday after a witness saw the bodies in the home and called police, according to a police affidavit. Simmons was captured as he tried to drive from the scene.
The victims had been shot with a handgun sometime between 3 a.m. and 5:45 a.m., the affidavit said. Simmons was not the children's father, Charleston County Coroner Rae Wooten said.

Simmons and Detra Rainey Simmons had been married for more than a year, authorities and her relatives said.

"This appears to have been a domestic situation that turned deadly," said Spencer Pryor, a North Charleston police spokesman.

Melba Rainey Thompson said her sister worked at a hospital, was attending nursing school and was undergoing the second phase of chemotherapy for colon cancer.

"Her children were always there for her to comfort her when she went through the pain," Thompson said.

The coroner had earlier identified the victims as Detra Rainey, 39, and her children William Rainey, 16, Hakiem Rainey, 13, Malachia Robinson, 8, and Samenia Robinson, 6. Rainey Simmons had a fifth child, 21-year-old Christan, who attends Southern University in Louisiana, relatives said.

The family belonged to St. Andrews Episcopal Mission, where the children attended vacation Bible school and sang in the choir, relatives said.

"Words can't express the impact this has had on our family," relative Gene Fanning said at the bond hearing. "It's a devastating loss. We want him held fully accountable for his actions."

Fanning said later that Simmons was disabled and unemployed.

The jail did not have any attorney information for Simmons.

Monique Singleton, who lives across the street in the subdivision of about two dozen mobile homes, said that four children lived in the home and that her children occasionally played with them.

"They were nice people; they seemed fine," she said.



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'They just started stomping me, and stomping me'

By KOMO 1000 New Radio
September 29, 2006

EVERETT - A young mother is recovering from injuries and is now in hiding after she was yanked out of her car and beaten by a mob of teenagers.

Joani Barreto-Ashby feels lucky to be alive. She has a black eye and is covered in bruises after a mob pulled the young mother from her car and savagely beat her.

"I just got ripped out and I said, 'my son!' And they said, 'I don't give a (expletive).' And they just started stomping me and stomping me and stomping me," she said.
It happened around noon on Thursday on 4th Avenue West in Everett. This area is already the focus of police after two murders and a stabbing just this year.

Joani says she was pulling into a parking lot at her mother's apartment complex with her 10 month hold son in the back. But the entrance was blocked by a large group of teenagers from Mariner High School, which was across the street.

"Right when I pulled up, (there was) profanity. They wouldn't move," Joani said. "They said they are on their own time."

She hit her horn. That's when witnesses say the group turned violent.

"And when I looked over, three girls pulled me out by my hair, and all the sudden I just have six girls on top of me stomping on me, kicking me," she said.

Some people nearby broke up the fight. Police came and two girls were arrested.

"These kids, that's their motto," said Miguel Ashby, Joani's brother. "They try to jump you. They are like a mob almost."

But an hour and a half later, the mob spotted her again up the street picking up her 4-year-old at pre-school. By then, the mob was over 50 teenagers.

"As soon as they got to me, they said, 'You're going to get what you have coming to you,' " Joani said.

Joani was knocked to the ground and beaten again. The pre-school called police, and Joani was rescued.

But she still wonders,"What if they had stomped me in my face or my head or something? I didn't even know. I don't even know what I did. All I did was honk to get them out of my way."

Snohomish County sheriff's deputies arrested three girls. Two will face assault charges.

Neighbors say the mob of teenagers always hangs out around Mariner High School, and Joanie is afraid they will attack her again if they see her.



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Zionism on the Move


Focus: Chilling message of the 9/11 pilots

The Sunday Times
October 01, 2006
Yosri Fouda

Two bearded young men laugh and joke for the camera. They appear relaxed, well groomed, intelligent; they might be high-achieving students quietly celebrating an exam success. They look at a piece of paper and laugh some more.

What is so funny? Certainly not the piece of paper. There is Arabic script on it. Easily decipherable is the word "al wasiyyah". This means "the will".


Watch the video

It is the handwritten last testament of Ziad Jarrah, the lighter-haired and better-looking of the two young men. A well educated, middle-class Lebanese, he has been studying in Germany. So has his dark-haired companion, Mohammed Atta, also middle class and university educated, but born in Egypt. Atta has his will, too. Unsmiling, both men read them to camera.

These images are part of a videotape, nearly an hour long, that was filmed at Osama Bin Laden's lair in Afghanistan 6½ years ago. They are revealed today for the first time, and they are a missing chapter in the searing story of the attacks on America on September 11, 2001.

Atta led the team of 19 suicide attackers and flew American Airlines flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Jarrah piloted United Airlines flight 93. His assigned target was Capitol Hill, but the plane crashed.

ATTA and Jarrah have never been pictured together before. Indeed, a key element of their tradecraft was that they steered clear of each other. They were leading figures in the September 11 story, not only because they flew the planes but also because they apparently had everything to live for. Unlike most of the other hijackers, who were mainly provincial Saudi fundamentalists, Atta and Jarrah fitted easily into western society.

To the Germans who knew them in Hamburg they seemed entirely normal. The tape explains this mistake. It would be hard to look less homicidal - until the camera pulls back and reveals that Atta is sitting next to an AK-47.

So the tape not only fills a gap in the story of September 11 but also provides chilling proof of the difficulty of fighting Islamic terrorism: these two "normal", happy, unthreatening individuals turned out to have an explosive effect on the history of the 21st century.

The unedited video was passed to The Sunday Times through a previously tested channel. On condition of anonymity, sources from both Al-Qaeda and the United States have confirmed its authenticity. It has no sound - and lip-readers have failed to decipher it, according to a US source - but the images speak loudly for themselves.

The tape not only features Atta and Jarrah. It also gives a rare and intriguing sight of Bin Laden with his inner court.

It opens with 100 or so Al-Qaeda hardcore members sitting on the ground in the open air, obviously expecting something to happen. Among them are several children.

A very tall man surrounded by three armed bodyguards arrives in a sedate, presidential manner. It is Bin Laden, dressed in white from head to toe with an all-enveloping, light brown robe. He looks serene as he makes his way to a makeshift podium and beings to speak into a microphone.

The date recorded on this section of the video is January 8, 2000. That makes the occasion Eid al Fitr, the end of Ramadan.

There are a few recognisable faces among the audience, including Ramzi Binalshibh, Atta's Hamburg flatmate who was later to become the co-ordinator of the September 11 attacks. And among the bodyguards is Abu Jandal, who was the only one with the authority to put two bullets in Bin Laden's head if he was about to fall into enemy hands.

In the background are the tall mud-red walls of an impressive compound. It is clear that the location is part of a complex of about 80 buildings called Tarnak Farm in the desert near Kandahar airport. It was Bin Laden's clan base during his Afghan sojourn - where he lived with his family and the inner core of Al-Qaeda.

American intelligence knew all about Tarnak Farm. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, "CIA officers were able to map the entire site, identifying the houses that belonged to Bin Laden's wives and the one where he himself was most likely to sleep".

Less than two years before the video was recorded, the CIA had a plan to work closely with some of the local tribes to grab Bin Laden as he slept. It was a clear-cut, well rehearsed "perfect operation", according to Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA Bin Laden unit at the time. But it was never executed and there is still controversy in America about who cancelled it.

TEN days after Bin Laden's Eid speech, according to the date on the film, Atta and Jarrah read their martyrdom wills to the camera. This proof of their presence in Afghanistan at that time is just about the final main piece of the jigsaw: Atta, the man who decided zero hour on September 11 is for the first time on video, getting ready to record his "martyrdom" will.

Investigators have pieced together most of Atta's life from his childhood as the son of a lawyer in Giza, northern Egypt, to the moment he boarded flight 11 - except for an unexplained absence from Hamburg in early 2000. The date on the tape perfectly corresponds with this.

Those who have been closely following the story had little doubt where Atta had been. Binalshibh told me, "Afghanistan, what else?" when I asked him during a secret meeting four years ago. But in their painstaking efforts to find the proof that connected the dots, US investigators and, especially, their German counterparts, have struggled with little more than circumstantial evidence and presumed facts.

This played nicely into the hands of conspiracy theorists, both in the Muslim world and in the West. Now the investigators have the proof, and only the flakiest of anti-American fantasists can go on claiming that Bin Laden, Atta, Jarrah and co had no hand in September 11.

We can now even reveal Atta's itinerary. On November 29, 1999 he boarded Turkish Airlines flight TK1662 from Hamburg to Istanbul, Turkey, where he changed to flight TK1056 bound for Karachi, Pakistan. From there he would have crossed into Afghanistan by road, most probably through Quetta. On the return journey, he left Karachi on February 24, 2000 by flight TK1057 to Istanbul where he changed to flight TK1661 to Hamburg. Five months later he entered the United States to start flight training.

Unedited, the extraordinary footage also gives us a glimpse into the superficially ordinary character of the man who would later spearhead the devastating terrorist attack.

Wearing western clothes - black trousers and a dark brown, zip-collared sweater with zigzag stripes - Atta appears uncomfortable putting on a typical Pashtun hat.

He gives a how-do-I-look glance at the camera. The hat goes off, on, off and he throws it away with wry smile. Ready now. He crosses his legs and picks up his handwritten will.

Cool, gathered and deliberate, Atta reads to camera for 10 minutes before the tape cuts to a collector's item: Atta and Jarrah together for the first time on camera.

With his stylish glasses, the handsome Lebanese is wearing a white, Saudi-style robe but appears to have western clothes on underneath.


Smiling, laughing and exchanging remarks, they discuss Jarrah's will as he holds it - a superb set-up shot. Jarrah then gets his seven-minute exclusive appearance to tell the camera his last words.

THE significance of even a single frame of any of the September 11 pilots in Afghanistan could not be overestimated, let alone the sudden appearance of nearly 6,000 frames of the two most important and most puzzling hijackers.

Distinctively the black sheep of the whole lot - plotters and hijackers - Atta and Jarrah came from the two most liberal Arab countries, both from the heart of their respective communities, both from middle-class families, both intelligent, pleasant and trusted wherever they went, and both with impressive educational track records. Jarrah went to a Christian school in Beirut; Atta advanced his English at The American University in Cairo.

Then they both had ambitions beyond what they thought their countries could offer. They both went to Germany; Atta in 1992 to end up preparing a masters degree in city planning; and Jarrah in 1996 to end up preparing his in aeronautical engineering.

Again, they both could not cease to impress. So much so that Professor Dittmar Machule, who taught Atta at the Technical University in Harburg, a quiet suburb of Hamburg, still cannot understand what happened to the brilliant student he used to pick to fill in for him in seminars whenever he was busy.

While they lived in Hamburg, Atta and Jarrah were never meant to be seen together in one place at the same time, almost certainly on instructions.

Atta lived with other members of the Hamburg cell in a small flat while Jarrah was kept apart in a nicer part of Hamburg, living with a girlfriend and drinking alcohol. Yet in Afghanistan they appear at ease in each other's company.

When in mid-2000 they travelled to Florida, they were separate once again - even though they enrolled at flying schools that stood virtually next to each other.

If the appearance of this video solves one mystery, the big question about both Atta and Jarrah is still with us: how on earth did such impressive young men with everything to live for develop such a mindset? Neither was mad and neither was brainwashed. If anything at all they were both the antithesis of such naive and easy explanations.

One would confidently argue that someone of the calibre of Mohammed Atta would have been incapable of being brainwashed.

When Atta taped his will, he was not yet the leader of the hijackers. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the organiser of the plot, had earmarked two other men - Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar - as his spearhead and had sent them to flight school in California. But he quickly changed his mind.

His protégés failed to live up to his expectations. One flight instructor actually called them "dumb and dumber".

Much more importantly, Atta's exceptional abilities had just been discovered.

The perfect soldier was here and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could not have asked for more. I would even argue that had not Atta accidentally appeared on Khalid's radar, the "aeroplanes operation", as it is known to Al-Qaeda, may never have stood a chance of success.



  • Yosri Fouda is the chief investigative reporter for Al-Jazeera Television Pictures: The Sunday Times Tarnak Farm, near Kandahar, where Mohammed Atta's video was shot, has a special place in the history of Al-Qaeda: it was once Osama Bin Laden's personal kingdom within Afghanistan.
    Exclusively Arab, it was home for Bin Laden's wives and children, as well as for the elite fighters being trained for special operations. And, as we now know, for a few weeks in early 2000 it was home to Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers.

    The farm, which covered about 100 acres, lay on a patch of desert about three miles south of Kandahar airport. It had originally been constructed by the Afghan government as an agricultural co-operative.

    A mud-brick wall was built 10ft high to create a compound; inside there were about 80 one and two-storey buildings, including dormitories, storehouses, a small mosque and a building that Bin Laden converted into a medical clinic for his family and followers.

    US intelligence knew Bin Laden, already a wanted terrorist, used Tarnak as his base, and in spring 1998 the CIA's Counterterrorist Center began working on a plan to capture him at the compound, partly with the help of Afghan tribal fighters.

    Afghans scouted and mapped the farm, and the CIA photographed it from space. The plan called for about 30 fighters to assemble at a staging post before driving to a second position a few miles from Tarnak.

    From there the main raiding party would walk to the farm, arriving at 2am and avoiding minefields by crawling through drainage ditches. A second group would make its way towards the front gate, taking out the two guards as the main party attacked the group of huts where Bin Laden's wives slept.

    The plan was to bundle Bin Laden into a Toyota Land Cruiser and drive him to to a cave complex 30 miles away already stocked with food and water.

    However, getting the plan accepted at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, was not straightforward. It was known that dozens of women and children lived in the compound, and security chiefs feared there would be many casualties.

    By June 1998, much to the disappointment of the field officers responsible for devising the plan, nobody at a senior level within the CIA seemed willing to support it. Nor was there any support within the White House.

    The plan was called off shortly afterwards. CIA abandoned plan to snatch Bin Laden from Afghan farm

    Atta's journey to mass murder

    September 1, 1968 Born in Kafr el-Sheikh in the Nile delta, Egypt

    October 1986 Joined Cairo University to study town planning; graduated in 1990

    July 24, 1992 Arrived in Germany on a cultural exchange programme

    November 23, 1992 Registered for a master's degree in urban planning at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg

    End 1997 Thought to have travelled to Afghanistan for the first time, staying close to the compound of Osama Bin Laden near Kandahar

    November 1, 1998 Moved into an apartment in Germany with other members of what later became known as the Hamburg cell. Many Al-Qaeda members lived in this apartment at various times; the September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed visited repeatedly. Ziad Jarrah, the flight 93 pilot with whom Atta is pictured above, moved close by at about the same time

    November 29, 1999 Atta flew from Istanbul to Pakistan. From there he travelled to Afghanistan

    January 2000 At Bin Laden's Tarnak Farm he is filmed laughing and joking with Jarrah while filming his last will and testament

    March 2000 From Germany, Atta contacted 31 US flight schools to discuss pilot training

    June 3, 2000 Entered US for the first time

    July 2000 Atta enrolled at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida. Jarrah trains at a flight school nearby

    November 2000 Both earned their instrument certificates from the FAA

    December 29, 2000 Atta practised on a Boeing 727 simulator in Miami

    January 4, 2001 Atta flew to Spain to co-ordinate with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key Al-Qaeda planner, returning to America a week later

    April 11 2001 Atta rented an apartment in Coral Springs, Florida, and assisted with the arrival of other hijackers

    July-September 2001 Atta made eight or nine flights around America, some to meet other hijackers, some to carry out reconnaissance

    August 28, 2001 Atta and other hijackers buy flight tickets for September 11

    The other hijackers



  • Nineteen men hijacked four planes. They acted in teams of five, except on United Airlines 93, which had four hijackers led by Jarrah

  • Fifteen of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates. Atta came from Egypt, while Jarrah came from Lebanon. Only Atta and Jarrah were highly educated


  • Four weeks before the attacks Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, had been arrested, ostensibly on immigration charges, after the FBI became suspicious about his pilot training


  • He later denied knowing about the September 11 attacks, but did plead guilty to conspiring to hijack planes. He is serving life in a US prison


  • It is thought that 18 of the 19 terrorists recorded video wills. Before this weekend only five had come to light and none from the four pilots
    The attacks and the toll

  • United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center towers on the morning of September 11, 2001. A total of 2,602 people died in the towers and on the ground

  • American Airlines flight 77, carrying 64 people, crashed into the Pentagon shortly afterwards: 125 people died on the ground

  • United Airlines flight 93 is thought to have been heading for Capitol Hill. But it crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Forty crew and passengers died

  • There were no survivors from any of the planes, which were carrying 265 people. In total, the September 11 attacks are thought to have killed 2,973 people, although some others are still listed as missing

    Comment: This doesn't "prove" anything, even if the tape is genuine. A crime like 9/11 needed patsies. If the goal was to make Islamic fundamentalsits take the blame, then the patsies would have to fit the profile.

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    Iran crisis overshadows Israeli-Palestinian dispute as Rice visits Mideast

    by David Millikin Sun Oct 1, 9:38 PM ET

    WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has left on a tour of the Middle East with the looming nuclear crisis with Iran likely to overshadow timid efforts to rekindle the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, analysts say.
    Rice arrives today in Saudi Arabia for talks with King Abdullah, then flies to Egypt for a day of meetings before heading to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

    The US came under strong pressure to take a more active role in trying to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks after being seen to favor Israel too heavily in its devastating response to attacks by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah in July.

    European and moderate Arab allies, whose support is key to US plans for Iraq, Lebanon and Iran, see the festering Israeli-Palestinian stalemate as feeding instability and radicalism across the region.

    But Washington's main allies in relaunching the process, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, are seen as too politically weak at home to guarantee the concessions both sides need to make to reach their goal of creating a stable Palestinian state.

    Abbas, a soft-spoken businessman who has never achieved the authority of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, has been undermined by the victory in Palestinian elections early this year of the radical Islamic movement Hamas.

    The group, which still officially seeks Israel's destruction, took control of the Palestinian legislature in March, prompting Israel, the US and Europeans to cut essential financial aid to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

    Abbas has been trying to draw Hamas into a unity government that would meet international conditions of recognizing Israel's right to exist, rejecting violence and accepting past peace agreements.

    But so far the Islamic group has balked.

    Olmert has also been unable to fill the shoes left empty when his predecessor,
    Ariel Sharon, was felled by a massive stroke in January.

    His political standing plummeted following the war in Lebanon, in which Israel's once all-powerful military was unable to inflict a clear defeat on Hezbollah guerrillas despite a destructive month-long air and ground offensive.

    Under attack for his conduct of the war, Olmert has shelved a plan to move ahead with the Palestinians by withdrawing from parts of the West Bank following a similar pullout from Gaza last year.

    "There's pressure on the US administration to at least go through the motions of trying to revive the peace proccess," said Haim Malka, a Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

    "But fundamentally the gaps between the Israelis and Palestinians are so far apart at this point that there's really very little chance of any meaningful process," he said.

    Washington is well aware of the obstacles, and State Department spokesman Sean McCormack stressed that the Israeli-Palestinian issue "is not the sole focus of (Rice's) trip".

    "She's going into this trip with the idea that she's going to talk about the full agenda of issues that are before leaders in the region" including Lebanon, Syria's destabilizing role, Iraq and Iran, he said.

    President George W. Bush's focus on the war in Iraq and on confronting Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program is likely to keep the Israeli-Palestinian track on a diplomatic back burner, said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution.

    "I don't think the administration can have Iran and Iraq as priorities and at the same time be effective on the Arab-Israeli peace process," Telhami said.

    "The view at the White House is that that Arab-Israeli effort is needed in part to solidify an anti-Iran coalition," he said.

    The US plan to impose sanctions on Iran for ignoring an August 31 UN deadline to halt its uranium enrichment activities has stalled due to strong opposition from Russia and China and unease among key European allies.

    As European-led negotiations with Iran drag on with little sign of concessions from Tehran, Washington needs the backing of its few Arab allies to step up the pressure.

    "What they will try to do is strengthen the Israeli front with moderate Arab states -- Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan -- in terms of Iran, which is of grave concern to the Gulf states," Malka said.

    For this, the highlight of Rice's trip will be a meeting with foreign ministers from the six-state Gulf Cooperation Council plus Egypt and Jordan, reportedly planned during her stop in Cairo.



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    More on Thursday Night's Israel Lobby Debate in N.Y.

    Philip Weiss
    MondoWeiss

    The waterboarding administered to Mearsheimer over "shoddy scholarship" seemed to me further proof of the existence of the "lobby." The shortcomings in Mearsheimer and Walt's paper are that they drew broad conclusions on the basis of scarce press reports about this or that scarcely-seen event, and so there was an element of supposition about their conclusions. But since when is reliance on published reports rather than on "original" research and interviews a disqualifier for publication? With some passion, and the feeling of being marginalized, Shlomo Ben-Ami attacked Mearsheimer for leaving Israel out of the paper as a living entity. He's right. But 1, the paper's not about Israel. And 2, more to the point, why does this work have to attain such a high bar, in terms of breadth-the quality Ben-Ami saw as lacking-in order to broach the issue? I guess the paper had to be perfect to be published. And that's the problem. Nothing is perfect, so nothing can be published. When in reality, democratic debates are filled with speculation and interpretation. In a word, intellectual freedom. The discourse has none of that here.
    As I went downtown on the subway Thursday I wondered whether I wasn't going to seem a fool for how excited I'd been in the days leading up to the debate. Then when I got there that selfconsciousness vanished, because the excitement was so palpable. The lines snaked all around Cooper Union. This had to do in part with the security measures to prevent anyone from blowing the place up, but more to do with the stormsurge of interest. All the tickets had been sold, and there were a couple hundred people on a line just to get extra seats. I had bought an extra ticket, and impetuously gave it to a girl on the line.

    The hall was subterranean. You went down into one of the great spaces of New York, with arched wings of dressed brownstone going off the columns to the walls, and then the pleasure was the pleasure of intellectual seriousness. Later I learned that the Great Hall was the place where the NAACP and the women's suffragists' movement was born. I saw a great number of people I half-know, and it was evident that the ideas that Walt and Mearsheimer put forward are of tremendous interest to many serious people. Lewis Lapham was sitting behind me, Ham Fish was a row away. I saw Adam Shatz of the Nation, Michael Massing of NYRB, Mary Kay Wilmers, the editor of the LRB, and so on. Even my wife had come. It's hard to get her out.

    Today I wonder how much of this debate I will remember years from now, and wonder if it won't be the moment in which Rashid Khalidi gave Dennis Ross his microphone because Ross's had failed, and then Ross said a little too smoothly he always tried to empower Palestinians, and Khalidi said, with a kind of ingenuousness, "I would give you the shirt off my back, but it's too small." LRB had, smartly, interspersed the two sides at the two tables; despite all the fighting, there was a feeling of community, sustained when Shlomo Ben-Ami stayed after the debate with his three "adversaries" to answer the unending questions from the hardcore.

    The first half hour was spent attacking the scholarship of the LRB paper, then the next hour and a half was spent arguing about the dimensions of the lobby.

    The waterboarding administered to Mearsheimer over "shoddy scholarship" seemed to me further proof of the existence of the "lobby." The shortcomings in Mearsheimer and Walt's paper are that they drew broad conclusions on the basis of scarce press reports about this or that scarcely-seen event, and so there was an element of supposition about their conclusions. But since when is reliance on published reports rather than on "original" research and interviews a disqualifier for publication? With some passion, and the feeling of being marginalized, Shlomo Ben-Ami attacked Mearsheimer for leaving Israel out of the paper as a living entity. He's right. But 1, the paper's not about Israel. And 2, more to the point, why does this work have to attain such a high bar, in terms of breadth-the quality Ben-Ami saw as lacking-in order to broach the issue? I guess the paper had to be perfect to be published. And that's the problem. Nothing is perfect, so nothing can be published. When in reality, democratic debates are filled with speculation and interpretation. In a word, intellectual freedom. The discourse has none of that here.

    Two friends of mine faulted Mearsheimer for reading from testimonies about the lobby rather than offering a synthesis. Having seen him a few times, I thought he was back on his heels, yet it is understandable to me. He was under attack from the first second, in Yankee Stadium no less, in the first open debate of his ideas. He was without his co-author, Steve Walt (who had important family obligations in Boston), and Walt, of Harvard, knows the court of the east coast in ways that Mearsheimer, who is more of a tough outsider, does not. The most vicious charges were leveled at Mearsheimer--you are alleging a "cabal," Martin Indyk kept saying--and yet the author wasn't given any more time than anyone else in which to respond.

    After the debate a friend of mine confronted Indyk in the hallway outside. "I was leaving and couldn't resist giving him a piece of my mind," my friend reports. "I've never laid eyes on the guy before, except on television occasionally. I told him that his vicious and snide remarks had backfired with the audience and that if he had treated his adversaries with respect, he would have fared better. He looked rather taken aback and vanished into an elevator."

    Let's dwell on the "cabal" charge. Indyk was saying that Mearsheimer was guilty of anti-Semitic stereotype. Tony Judt blasted Indyk when he said that social scientists are called upon to observe reality, not decide whether what they're observing fills some bigot's ideas or not. Both Khalidi and Judt would say that the paper did not go far enough. Again I'll refer to Judt's bold statement about the NYT Op-Ed page requiring him to state he was Jewish when he wrote in support of Walt and Mearsheimer last April. This is tragic. If you think that only 1.3 percent of Americans are allowed to speak out on this issue&#%151;the lobby, whatever it is-we're in bad shape. I know: the Holocaust; if non-Jews express themselves, the next thing you know the Jews will be kicked out of Century and Cosmos Club and the U.S. Senate and there will be camps. Our discourse is being held hostage by these old ways of thinking.

    Khalidi made a similar contribution, saying how rare it was for Palestinian voices to be included in public debate. And if Walt had been there, I imagine this confessional spirit might have freed him to tell of the special pressures that have come to bear on him at Harvard, the financial blackmails to the institution that have arisen from his speaking his mind (I mentioned these threats in the Nation last spring), and the ways in which his own burgeoning career, at 51, has been potentially punctured by his stance.

    We're not talking about a cabal. We're talking about a thousand acts of devotion by American Jews who care about Israel and have most of them not been there. This simply cannot be divorced from an understanding of the culture of power, and the role of Jews in the establishment. Ross and Indyk were two of several Jews on the Clinton team negotiating at Camp David. (According to Clayton Swisher's book, The Truth About Camp David, there was only one Arab-American in the big team.) This morning on Meet the Press, the two Ohio Senate contenders, Mike DeWine and Sherrod Brown, argued all about terrorism, and the word Israel came up once, as a source of grievance, but there was no mention of the Occupied Territories, let alone the denial of democracy to over 1 million Palestinians there. As for my commenters who talk about the clash of civilizations, I agree with you, Islam needs to break on through to modernity; but if you think we can ignore these questions, you're nuts. But as Meet the Press demonstrates, our leadership cannot discuss them openly. American presidents have been against the settlements but done nothing really to stop them. And Congress is bought and paid for by AIPAC, a point that even Indyk and Ross seemed to concede, even as they claimed that an American President could act with complete freedom.

    I repeat a metaphor from my last blog. It's the elephant in the room, and here are 6 blind men coming out of the room, and telling you what they know about it....

    That would be my takeaway from the debate: Our journalism is broken. There are 100 books about Iraq out now, from people who have been there. There is not 1 book out about the Israel lobby. Walt and Mearsheimer essentially performed a journalistic function, and did what journalists would call a clip job-assembling previously-published reports before making large conclusions. A basic function of democratic society is completely kaput here. I did a front page magazine story for the NYT on the gun lobby. Never has there been one on the Israel lobby. There aren't TV documentaries on it; 60 Minutes and Ted Koppel are not trying to pin down Abe Foxman about his mission or Malcolm Hoenlein about whether he called Clinton during Camp David, let alone going near AIPAC. Our society's lens is simply not turned on these institutions in anything like the way it ought to be.



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    Palestinian Territories on brink of volcano: Deputy Premier

    UPDATED: 09:30, October 02, 2006

    Deputy Prime Minister of Hamas-led government Nasser al-Sha'er said on Sunday the Palestinian Territories were on the brink of volcano after deadly factional clashes in Gaza Strip.

    "The Palestinian cause will pay the price if the situation remained in this way," al-Sha'er warned, adding that if civil war erupted, "we won't be able to retreat."
    Four Palestinians were killed on Sunday in armed clashes between Hamas militants and members of security services who took to the streets demanding for delayed salaries.

    Al-Sha'er called on the protesters not to resort to weapons or violence and keep their strike peaceful. Hamas says it would stop the strike by force, accusing security forces of attacking "public and private priorities."

    Al-Sha'er, who was released last week from Israel, stressed that forming a national unity government would be the only way to end the crisis.

    However, al-Sha'er admitted it was difficult for the Hamas-led government to secure salaries, saying the problem of salaries was "economic and political."

    The government faces economic sanctions and western aid cutoff for its political platform based on Hamas charter that calls for removing Israel from the map.

    Meanwhile, al-Sha'er appealed for all factions to work hard and save the situation by stopping provocative statements.



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    The ethnic cleansing of Palestine

    zmag.org
    02/10/2006

    In this controversial new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe uses recently declassified archival sources to investigate the fate suffered by the indigenous population of 1940s Palestine at the hands of the Zionist political and military leadership, whose actions led to the mass deportation of over a million Palestinians from their cities and villages, over 400 villages wiped from the map, and hundreds of civilians dead. [...]




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    Israeli army forces storm northern Gaza Strip

    xinhaunet
    02/10/2006

    The tanks moved amid machine gunfire from air cover, but there were no reports on casualties among the Palestinians who live in makeshift houses near the border. The residents reported that tanks took up positions on hills inthe area while bulldozers began working on the ground.




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    Israeli forces arrest a young Hebron resident while another is brutally attacked by Israeli settlers

    China Daily
    02/10/2006

    Palestinian residents of the Tel Rumeida neighborhood are all-too-familiar with violence from nearby Israeli settlers. Resident Hana Abu Haikal told PNN that Israeli settlers have repeatedly vandalized her water pipes, leaving several homes in the neighborhood without water for weeks at a time. She added, "The Israeli forces do not even attempt to prevent such attacks."




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    7 Palestinians dead, 75 hurt in Hamas-Fatah clashes in Gaza

    Haaretz
    01/10/2006

    Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, of Hamas, spoke with Abbas by telephone late Sunday evening and called for joint action to end the violence between their respective parties, as well as the need to return to national unity government talks, Haniyeh's office said in a statement.




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    Palestinians suspect Israeli agents

    Khalid Amayreh
    09/18/06

    Palestinians suspect Israeli agents of being behind the fire-bombing of Churches. Palestinian nationalist and Islamic leaders on Sunday strongly condemned fire-bombing attacks against a few churches in the West Bank, calling the incidents "suspicious" and "incompatible with Palestinian and Islamic culture." Three churches in Nablus, Tulkarm and Tubas in the northern West Bank have been attacked with fire-bombs by unknown perpetrators resulting in minor damage.
    The mayor of Tubas, where a small Greek Orthodox Church was attacked, accused "suspicious elements," a reference to Israeli Shin Bet (Israel's chief domestic intelligence agency) agents of " having embarked on this ugly act and criminal act."

    "It is either Israeli collaborators or some overzealous fools upset by the remarks of the Pope," said Iqab Darghmeh (Abu Ahmed), in a telephone interview.

    Darghmeh and Muslim notables, including representatives of Fatah, Hamas and civic leaders visited the church Sunday morning to show solidarity with the small Christian community in the town.

    "Christians here are not a separate sect. They are our flesh and blood. They are our brothers. An attack on their churches is an attack on Islam and the Palestinian people."

    The fire-bombings have been widely condemned by religious and political leaders throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

    Sheikh Muhammed Hussein, the highest-ranking Muslim clergyman in East Jerusalem described the bombing as "immoral, unethical and injurious to Palestinian unity."

    "Those who perpetrated these acts don't represent the Palestinian people. They are a gang of ignoramuses and fanatics, or suspicious elements." In the Palestinian political lexicon, "suspicious elements" is an allusion to Israeli collaborators and informers.

    Earlier, the Mufti of Ramallah, Jamal Bawatneh, called on all Palestinians to inform on any person seen attacking or vandalizing Christian churches and property.

    "I urge our people to inform on any person carrying out a crime against people and property. Failing to do so amounts to treason and complicity, " read a statement issued by the Palestinian Interior Ministry in Gaza.

    Hamas condemns vandalism

    Meanwhile, the Islamic Resistance group, Hamas, strongly condemned attacks on churches in parts of the West Bank, calling such attacks "criminal and harmful to the Palestinian cause."

    "I am sure that Israel is enjoying this. Israel always wants to create problems and divisions between Muslims and Christians. And those who committed these acts are only serving Zionist propaganda and goals," said Yousuf Ibrahim, a Hamas spokesperson in the Bethlehem region.

    "I am nearly certain that at least some of the perpetrators are Israeli agents."

    On Sunday, the Palestinian Authority (PA) Interior Minister, Sa'eed Siyam, ordered the security apparatus to step up security measures around churches in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

    Pope's remarks condemned

    Muslim and most Christian religious and secular leaders did condemn anti-Islam remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI in Germany on 14 September.

    The Pope, quoting a medieval Byzantine emperor as saying that "Show me just what Muhammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

    The remarks drew angry but mostly non-violent reactions from across the Muslim world, with Muslim leaders calling on the Pope to apologize for offending Muslim sensibilities.

    Some Muslim scholars interpreted the remarks as "a declaration of war on Islam."

    "When you say that Islam is evil, you are not only de-legitimizing it, but encouraging open war on its followers," said the Supreme Sharia Judge in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Sheikh Taysir Tamimi.

    The pope more or less apologized during a Sunday mass.

    "I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims.

    "These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought."





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    Unity hopes fade as infighting leaves 8 Palestinians dead

    BEN LYNFIELD AND IBRAHIM BARZAK
    Mon 2 Oct 2006

    EIGHT people were killed and the Palestinian cabinet building was set on fire yesterday in the worst outbreak of fighting between the rival Fatah and Hamas groups since the latter was elected to govern.

    Hamas militiamen's efforts to break up anti-government protests sparked running street battles across the Gaza Strip, and activists from the opposition Fatah group retaliated by torching the cabinet building in Ramallah on the West Bank.
    The violence dampened already fading hopes of a national unity government being formed by the two groups that could end crippling economic sanctions.

    The trouble flared as Israel withdrew the bulk of its remaining troops from Lebanon after its war with Hezbollah.

    The pull-out, which did not include part of the eastern village of Rajar, for which security arrangements have still to be negotiated, was confirmed by United Nations' troops, who have been taking up positions in southern Lebanon in support of the country's army, in accordance with UN Security Council resolution 1701. But Dan Halutz, the Israeli army's chief of staff, warned his forces would strike again if Hezbollah sought to rebuild its positions near the border.

    General Halutz also raised the prospect of a broad ground offensive in Gaza to try to stop Palestinian militants from firing homemade rockets into Israel.

    However, the ordinary people of Gaza were yesterday trying to avoid getting caught in the crossfire of fighting between Hamas and Fatah that continued for most of the day.

    "This is forbidden in Islam - we are in the holy month of Ramadan," said Majed Badawi, 33, who managed to escape uninjured after his car was hit by gunfire.

    "It's a shame on Hamas, who call themselves real Muslims, and a shame on Fatah as well. Why are they fighting and over what? We are victims because of both of them."

    The fighting started yesterday morning in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, where dozens of police gathered outside the Bank of Palestine to demand back-wages.

    The clashes later spilled over to an area near the president's residence. Hamas militiamen scrambled up to the rooftop of the nearby agriculture ministry and began firing rocket-propelled grenades and rifles at the Fatah presidential guard.

    In response to the violence, Fatah protesters marched to the cabinet building in Ramallah pelted it with stones, broke in and set the second floor on fire.

    Fatah and Hamas officials blamed each other.

    "Nothing can justify this violence," said Tawfik Abu Khoussa, a Fatah spokesman.

    Ghazi Hamad, a spokesman for the Hamas government, said the violence was "regrettable" but insisted the Hamas force had been acting with restraint when it was attacked. "The protest today was beyond acceptable legal norms and turned truly into lawlessness," he said.

    Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian prime minister and a member of Hamas, later spoke by telephone to Mahmoud Abbas, the president and a Fatah member, and called for joint action to end the violence and return to talks over the national unity government.

    In Lebanon, meanwhile, people celebrated the withdrawal of the Israelis.

    "This is a great victory for the Lebanese in the south and for Hezbollah; we will organise a great party," said Hamed Faris, a farmer from Marun ar-Ras, just north of the border with Israel.

    More than 1,200 Lebanese people, mostly civilians, and 162 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed during the 34-day war in the summer.



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    Time to talk peace

    Shulamit Aloni
    Published: 09.24.06, 00:28

    In a few months, we will mark 40 years of "enlightened" occupation by our famed army in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. Israel pretends to be an enlightened state and signatory of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which rules that "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies" (Israel ratified the Convention in 1951.)

    Over the years we deported, robbed land and stole water, destroyed crops, uprooted trees, turned every village and town into a detention camp, and set up hundreds of communities on land that doesn't belong to us.
    We allowed the settlers to make a living by providing them with huge amounts of money (more than 5 times per capita compared to residents of southern development towns.)

    We paved roads for Jews only, a case of blatant apartheid, while defending it using witty Jewish self-righteousness in the absence of fair and public reporting of the budgets involved, deeds committed, expropriation of land, and disregard for vandalism.

    Morality, justice, law and order stopped at the Green Line. Lawlessness prevailed right under the noses and protective and soothing hand of the IDF and police, as lawbreaking settlers made their own laws undisturbed, and at times with the kind help of authorities.

    Every illegal settlement enjoys water, hydro, and a paved road. The permanent residents, the natives, which the Israeli regime had to take care of, became seemingly non-existent. As if they are there but not there at the same time. The government only notices them if they bother it by filing complaints.

    It's no wonder that the leader of a political movement in Israel and a Knesset member can declare that we should expel the Palestinians (and also Israel's Arab citizens) in order to take over what is still left to them.

    But as we usually present it - we're the victim while they're the murderers with blood on their hands. We never report the number of Palestinians we murdered from the sky and killed by fire - women, children, the elderly, whole families, thousands of them.

    No wonder they hate us

    Aerial bombings kill wanted suspects, while eliminating many civilians - yet the hands of the pilot are "clean" of any blood. After all, the victims were killed at the press of a button while their killers returned home safely. None of them committed suicide to kill wanted suspects, who by the way are not a "ticking bomb" and no evidence exists against them.

    At times it appears that the IDF, particularly during the last, needless Lebanon war, turns the Gaza Strip into live-fire training grounds for all army branches. Is it a wonder they hate us, and is it a wonder they elected Hamas in free elections, the same Hamas whose establishment we encouraged in order to undermine the PLO?

    Many peace-making windows were opened over the years. We hindered all of them, because we coveted the whole of the Territories. We had the Oslo agreements. Twenty countries, which in the past had no ties with us, recognized Israel. We had welfare, international ties were blossoming, peace was at our gates - but we didn't want to make concessions.

    Rabin was murdered for the sake of the settlers, and the job of burying peace-making attempts was completed by Ehud Barak with his "There's nobody to talk to!" spin. In order to establish himself in power, Barak also allowed Arik Sharon to visit Temple Mount with armed escorts, even though he was asked by Arafat the night before not to allow this due to the frustration and fury among Palestinians.

    Now, another possibility for dialogue has opened. Yet our government is again turning its back on it. They don't know how to and don't want to talk. Just now we brutally destroyed half of Lebanon at an immense cost and turned a million civilians into refugees in their own country.

    Another superb achievement by the IDF and government of Israel. We're willing to resort to any provocation and blow any incident out of proportion, just to hold on to the regular pretext that "There's nobody to talk to", and that we don't talk to terrorists.

    Kahane won

    Yet the acts we undertake by starving, curfews, deportations, the theft of water and land, false arrests, and targeted killings - all those are, of course, not terror, because the acts are undertaken by a national army through the power of a decision made by legitimate government.

    Wonderful, it turns out we forget the fascist states (including Stalin's USSR) that were very legitimate according to their own logic, while committing a plethora of terror acts.

    The time has come for the government of Israel to start talking peace, and end the excuses for disqualifying and boycotting Palestinian representatives. The use of arms does not have to be the first reaction. Starvation, imprisonment, and expropriation by an occupying force attest to an unwillingness to reach an agreement and an addiction to greed.

    This is reminiscent of Benny Elon comments: "We'll embitter their lives so that they transfer themselves elsewhere."

    One cannot escape the impression that the racist and brutal declarations by Effie Eitam gave public expression to government policy over the years. We must note that the courts - the defenders of law and order, including the High Court of Justice - were partners to the developments that led to the legitimization of parties and Knesset members reminiscent of the racist, crude words uttered by MK Eitam.

    In fact, it appears that Meir Kahane won, and we continue in his path - we don't talk, but rather, only kill, raze homes and roads and bridges, cut off electricity, fill prisons with women and children and elected officials, because all of them are the "terrorists" while we, the Jewish state, need to be defended from them. We're always the ultimate victim.

    As Golda Meir said: "I don't forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill them." There you go, she's the killer, yet she's the victim.

    For our sake, the citizens of Israel, and for the sake of brining peace and quiet - government leaders, start talking and keep doing it until you reach an agreement.

    Unruly sons will be brought back into the country, we'll be respecting UN decisions and international conventions, we'll earnestly memorize the universal human rights declaration and our own declaration of independence, we'll rehabilitate our soul, and we'll attempt to establish a democratic country governed by the law and justice. Shana Tova.



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    Independent Lawmaker warns of large-scale Israeli operation in Gaza

    China Daily
    01/10/2006

    "The Israeli threat to invade Gaza Strip proves plotted intentions by the occupation to disrupt Palestinian efforts to form a national unity government," said Mustafa al-Barghouti, a well-known lawmaker representing the National Initiative party.




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    War of Terror


    Putin accuses Georgia of terrorism, hostage-taking

    By Michael Stott
    Reuters
    October 1, 2006

    MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin accused Georgia on Sunday of "state terrorism with hostage-taking" in unusually harsh language suggesting a tough Russian response to Georgia's arrest of four Russian officers last week for spying.

    Russian troops stationed in Georgia were put on alert and ordered to use force if their bases came under threat, the commander of Russian forces in the South Caucasus said.

    Putin's comments followed an urgent meeting with armed forces chiefs, top ministers and the heads of intelligence services outside Moscow to discuss the worsening crisis between the two former Soviet states.
    "As a result of his meeting with permanent security council members, the president termed the actions of Georgia's leadership as an act of state terrorism with hostage-taking," said a statement on the presidential Web site www.kremlin.ru.

    Georgia's Foreign Ministry reacted by calling statements from Moscow "an explicit threat to use a military force."

    Since the row broke last week, Russia has pulled out its ambassador from Tbilisi, evacuated dozens of officials and stopped issuing visas to Georgians.

    Putin did not say what additional measures Russia might take but his use of the terms "hostage-taking" and "terrorism" suggested a tough response. Moscow has traditionally taken an uncompromising stance to whatever it sees as terrorism.

    But after making his tough statements, Putin told the Defense Ministry to continue a long-planned pull-out of Russian troops from Georgia, news agencies quoted his spokesman Alexei Gromov as saying.

    Russia's Defense Ministry said on Saturday it was suspending the scheduled withdrawal, because its troops' security could not be fully guaranteed when they crossed Georgia. Russia is to pull out its troops from two local bases by the end of 2008.

    The commander of Russian troops in the region that covers Georgia, Major-General Andrei Popov, told reporters his forces had been issued with instructions on how to defend their bases if necessary.

    "All military units have been put on alert and ordered to take adequate measures in case of a threat, including shoot-to-kill," Popov said.

    'BERIA'S POLITICAL LEGACY'

    Putin also compared Georgia's moves against the officers to the actions of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's feared secret police chief, saying they were "a sign of the political legacy of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria."

    Beria, an ethnic Georgian like Stalin, ran the NKVD secret police which purged millions of Soviet citizens in the 1930s and 1940s and supervised Moscow's atomic bomb program.

    Georgian parliamentarian Giga Bokeria, a close ally of President Mikhail Saakashvili, called Putin's statement "an act of open aggression and hysteria."

    "Russia just cannot stand the fact that Georgia is an independent country," he told Reuters.

    EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and the 56-member
    Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have urged a solution.

    Putin will discuss the situation in Georgia with Russia's main political parties later this week, Gromov said.

    WORSENING RELATIONS

    Although the arrest of the army officers last Wednesday was the trigger for the latest row, relations between Russia and its small southern neighbor had been steadily worsening for months.

    Russia dislikes Saakashvili's openly pro-Western policies, including seeking NATO membership, and his criticism of Moscow.

    Georgia accuses Russia of stoking separatist sentiment in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two regions of Georgia which broke free from central rule in the early 1990s and want to join Russia. Saakashvili wants to bring them back under his sway.

    Georgian authorities said Putin had met the leaders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia on Saturday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Putin was working from Sochi last week.

    Asked about the accusations, a Kremlin spokesman said: "We can neither confirm nor deny this information."

    However both Abkhaz leader Sergei Bagapsh and Eduard Kokoity of South Ossetia were on a list of "foreign guests" at an investment forum in Sochi on Friday that was attended by Putin.

    Russian moves against Georgia are likely to cause considerable financial hardship in its poor southern neighbor.

    Georgia is a nation of only 5 million people where many families rely on remittances sent back by relatives or friends working in Russia. The country also depends on Russia for gas and electricity supplies.



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    Pakistan spy agency behind Mumbai bombs - police

    By C.J. Kurrien
    Reuters
    Sat 30 Sep 2006

    MUMBAI - Indian police said on Saturday they had found evidence that Pakistan-based Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out the July 11 bombings in Mumbai and Pakistan's military spy agency was behind the plot.

    Pakistan and Lashkar swiftly rejected the accusations. A Pakistani foreign ministry spokeswoman called them baseless and irresponsibile.

    The bombings of rush-hour commuter trains and stations in India's financial hub, which killed 186 people and wounded hundreds more, was one of the country's worst attacks.
    In the immediate aftermath, investigators blamed disaffected Indian Muslims with links to old foe Pakistan, and named Lashkar-e-Taiba as a prime suspect.

    On Saturday, Mumbai's police chief said his team had cracked the case and found solid evidence as a result of what he called one of India's biggest and most widespread investigations.

    "We have solved the July 11 bombings case. The whole attack was planned by Pakistan's ISI and carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba and their operatives in India," A.N. Roy, Mumbai's police chief, told a news conference.

    ISI or the Inter-Services Intelligence agency is Pakistan's military spy agency while Lashkar is a frontline Islamist group fighting against Indian rule in the disputed region of Kashmir.

    Although Lashkar was banned by Pakistan in early 2002, security analysts suspect it is still in favour with the ISI.

    "These blasts were executed very professionally and with high precision and were well planned," Roy said.

    "But we made slow progress, used scientific methods, followed every small lead ... it has been a beautiful piece of highly professional investigation."

    PAKISTAN DENIAL

    Pakistan reacted angrily to Roy's announcement.

    Tariq Azim Khan, Pakistan's Minister of State for Information, called it India's knee-jerk reaction in blaming Pakistan for militant acts when there are several groups running insurgencies within India.

    "India has always chosen this path of pointing fingers at Pakistan without evidence," he said. "If they have any evidence, they should provide us evidence and we will carry out our investigations."

    A spokesman for Lashkar also denied involvement.

    "We reject the Indian allegations. They have named us in an effort to cover up their own failure and security lapses," said Irbaz Khan by telephone from an unknown location.

    The Indian announcement came a day after Mumbai police said they had arrested four more people in connection with the seven blasts that ripped through commuter trains and platforms.

    The arrests took the total number in custody for alleged roles in the blasts to 15, Roy said. He said that at least 12 Indian men and 11 Pakistanis were involved in the bombings.

    While all the 12 Indians were in custody, one Pakistani man was killed in the blasts, another was shot dead in a gun battle with Mumbai police and the rest had either returned to Pakistan or were at large in India, he said.

    Many among the Indians alleged to be involved had visited Pakistan several times and had trained at Lashkar bases in Bahawalpur town in Punjab province, close to the India-Pakistan frontier, Roy said.

    TESTING PEACE PROCESS

    One of the Pakistani men brought about 15-20 kg (33-44 lb) of RDX explosives to make the bombs in Mumbai which were kept in pressure cookers, placed inside bags and covered with newspapers or umbrellas after being left to explode through timers.

    Funds to carry out the attack also came from Pakistan via a Lashkar operative in Saudi Arabia, Roy said.

    The first lead came from tracking telephone conversations. A call from a Mumbai man to an Indian village near the India-Nepal border talking about the blasts led to one of the first arrests of a man from the village, he said.

    Two weeks ago, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agreed on the sidelines of a Non-Aligned summit in Havana to resume a peace process which India had frozen following the Mumbai attacks.

    Some Indian analysts said they expected New Delhi to remain committed to the peace process but step up pressure on Pakistan to crack down on groups like Lashkar.

    "This is not a setback. India can't afford to close shop," said C. Raja Mohan, strategic affairs editor at the Indian Express newspaper.

    "In fact, this will be a test for the joint mechanism set up to fight terrorism and see whether it will work," he said referring to an agreement in Havana to set up a joint agency to tackle terrorism.

    Comment: the strong links between the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, and the CIA are a matter of public record, and there is clear evidence that the ISI wa involved in the attacks of 9/11.

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    US ally Pakistan is supporting al-Qaeda

    BBC News
    01/10/2006

    President Pervez Musharraf has angrily rejected allegations that Pakistan's intelligence service has indirectly helped the Taleban and al-Qaeda.

    In a BBC TV interview, Gen Musharraf said Pakistan was doing an "excellent job" in tracking down militants.

    The claims are in a document written by a researcher working for the UK's defence ministry.

    It says Pakistan is on the edge of chaos and that the Iraq war had helped extremists recruit people.

    The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) paper says Pakistan's intelligence service, ISI, indirectly backs terrorism by supporting religious parties in the country.
    But an MoD spokesman said "the academic research notes quoted in no way represent the views of either the MoD or the government".

    Gen Musharraf spoke to the BBC's Newsnight programme ahead of a meeting in Washington with US President George W Bush and Afghan leader Hamid Karzai.

    He said that he was "fully satisfied" with Pakistan's co-operation in the fight against terrorism.

    "There is perfect co-ordination going on - intelligence and operational co-ordination at the strategic level, at the tactical level," he said.

    And he rejected the suggestion in the report that the ISI should be dismantled.

    "I totally, 200% reject it. I reject it from anybody - MoD or anyone who tells me to dismantle ISI.

    "ISI is a disciplined force, breaking the back of al-Qaeda. Getting 680 people would not have been possible if our ISI was not doing an excellent job."

    'Recruiting sergeant'

    The Pakistani president rejected allegations by the Afghan leader that Pakistan was not doing enough to fight extremism in its border region, calling Mr Karzai someone who "can't even get out of his office".

    He also refused to withdraw his statement that then US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the stone age" unless it co-operated with America in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks.

    "I don't withdraw the claim at all," he said. "Why should I withdraw it now that Mr Armitage is denying it?"

    The research paper is understood to have been written by a man with a military background who is linked to the UK's Secret Intelligence Service.

    On Afghanistan, the paper said the UK went in "with its eyes closed", and revealed that a secret deal to extricate UK troops from Iraq so they could focus on Afghanistan failed when British military leaders were overruled.

    The paper also said that the Iraq war had "acted as a recruiting sergeant for extremists across the Muslim world".

    Comment: Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, is America's middle man for the control and manipulation of bogus "Islamic terrorism". Wake up and smell the cordite!

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    Russian Bombers Penetrate N. American Buffer Zone, Intercepted by U.S., Canadian Jet Fighters

    MosNews
    30.09.2006

    A new U.S. push for greater Russian military openness collided with Cold War habits last week as Russian long-range bombers flew within 15 miles of U.S. airspace off Alaska, Denver Post website reported.

    Fully-armed U.S. fighter jets responded, intercepting the two bombers.

    The Russian Tu-95 bombers on a training exercise Thursday penetrated a North American buffer zone, said a statement Friday from Maj. Gen. Brett Cairns, operations chief for Colorado Springs-based North American Aerospace Defense Command.
    But the bombers stayed within international airspace.

    The U.S. response "was appropriate," said Adm. Timothy Keating, commander of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command.

    "We have a near-sacred responsibility to protect and defend the United States and Canada against any and all threats. We will not waver in this responsibility," Keating said.

    Four U.S. F-15 fighters, supported by two Canadian CF-18 fighters, found and intercepted the bombers. A U.S. pilot snapped a photo of the silvery Russian craft with a red star on its tail.

    U.S forces, too, have been conducting training exercises over Alaska and Canada.

    Russian authorities confirm that pilots of the bombers made visual contact with the U.S. pilots during recent test flights, but they claim there were also regions where the bombers flew unnoticed.

    "During the flights, part of a test of long-range aircraft, the bombers' crews saw NATO fighters, which were flying parallel to them in their airspace," Russian Air Force spokesman Alexander Drobyshevsky told Interfax news agency.

    "But there were also segments of flights, including close to Alaska, where our planes were flying unaccompanied," he added.

    The encounter happened despite a new initiative led by Keating to get Russian commanders to notify U.S. officials more fully about training missions.

    Better communications are necessary "to develop better ways to understand each other's concerns and common issues and to ensure safety of flight for aviators from both countries," Keating said.

    He hosted Russian Lt. Gen. Igor Khvorov, commander of Russia's long-range bombers, in Colorado in December. Keating planned to visit Russia this fall to pursue this initiative, but that trip was postponed, NORAD spokesman Mike Kucharek said.

    It was unclear whether Russian military officials notified U.S. officials directly of Thursday's bomber flights. But U.S. officials knew about Russia's training exercises from scanning media reports from Russia, Kucharek said.

    Russian commanders had announced an exercise in Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic regions Sept. 26-30 involving 70 bombers and the test-firing of 18 cruise missiles.

    NORAD forces charged with deterring, preventing and defeating threats to North America planned to practice maneuvers at the same time. Since Sept. 11, 2001, all NORAD patrols have been conducted using fully armed fighters.

    During the Cold War, U.S.- Soviet confrontation led to close encounters of this sort, with fighters scrambled to intercept and eye opposing forces. But that's been uncommon in recent years.

    "They were flying a route. Obviously we were monitoring those flight routes," Kucharek said. "We had to watch to see what they were doing."



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    Thai junta names ex-army chief as new premier

    by Griffin Shea
    AFP
    Sun Oct 1, 2006

    BANGKOK - Thailand's junta has appointed a former army chief to become the prime minister, as they imposed a constitution that gives the military a stranglehold over the new government.

    The military says that General Surayud Chulanont, 63, will only lead the country for one year, until elections promised for October 2007.

    But under the constitution unveiled earlier Sunday, the junta will have the power to sack the prime minister and to play a powerful role in reshaping Thai politics.
    "General Surayud agreed to accept the position," coup leader General Sonthi Boonyaratglin told reporters.

    "The next prime minister will need to sacrifice for the people, and General Surayud is truly a good man," he added.

    Surayud's appointment still requires the approval of the nation's revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who he was due to meet at 4:00 pm (0900 GMT).

    But the approval was considered a formality as the monarch has already endorsed the coup.

    Surayud's powers as premier will be sharply checked by the junta, which has enshrined itself in an interim constitution that the king approved earlier Sunday.

    The charter formalizes the junta's role in government by placing them on a new Council for National Security, which will oversee the nation's security affairs and has the power to sack the prime minister.

    The military will also appoint all 250 members of the new parliament, and will approve all members of a new assembly tasked with writing a permanent constitution for Thailand before the promised elections.

    The charter bars political parties from participating in the drafting of the constitution, and grants the military complete amnesty for the coup.

    Sonthi said the junta had to remain in place to encourage national unity after months of turmoil surrounding Thaksin's government.

    "National unity may seem abstract, but we have to make it as tangible as possible to make the Thai people have a greater sense of patriotism," he told reporters.

    The interim charter and the prime minister were announced 12 days after the military's bloodless September 19 takeover. The junta had promised to set up a civilian government within a fortnight.

    The appointment of Surayud places a prominent military man in a post that Sonthi had earlier said would go to a civilian, although Sonthi and other junta members have repeatedly said they consider retired officers as civilians.

    But their choice of Surayud means they will have to overcome at least the perception that the premier's office has become little more than an extension of the military.

    That concern has already been voiced by the United States, Thailand's top trade partner and a close ally which last week suspended 24 million dollars in military aid in protest at the coup.

    Surayud, a career military man, had previously spoken out against the military playing a role in Thai politics after troops under his command shot dead more than 50 pro-democracy protesters in 1992.

    He became army chief in 1998 and was credited with professionalising the armed forces. Surayud later clashed with Thaksin and was sidelined in a less powerful post, before he retired in 2003.

    He now sits on the Privy Council, the king's inner circle of advisors, but will quit that post in order to become prime minister.

    The junta has justified the takeover by saying military intervention was needed to weed out systemic corruption under Thaksin's administration.

    The generals say they want a permanent constitution that would strengthen the powers of institutional watchdogs to prevent the abuses that they say marred Thaksin's five years in office.

    Thaksin's ouster came after months of political turmoil following his family's tax-free sale of nearly two billion dollars in stock in the telecoms firm that he founded.

    The junta has moved swiftly to investigate alleged corruption under Thaksin, who is staying in exile in London. The junta says he has no immediate plans to return home.

    Sonthi said Sunday that four top aides to Thaksin, who were detained shortly after the coup, had been released. They were freed one day after Sonthi strengthened the powers of his new anti-corruption panel.



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    Chavez accuses Bush of attempts to oust him

    www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-02 12:23:27

    CARACAS, Oct. 1 (Xinhua) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday lashed out at U.S. President George W. Bush, saying he had been attempting to oust him by using every possible means.
    Bush had told his followers, including some assassins, that they could do whatever was effectual to remove him from office, said Chavez at a campaign rally on Sunday.

    He added that Bush had expressed his intention to see him ousted before his term as U.S. president expired.

    Chavez vowed to win the Dec. 3 elections and resume his tenure until 2021. He was reelected in 2000 for a six-year term following his first election in 1998.

    On Sept. 23, Chavez, speaking before the UN General Assembly, called Bush the "devil," a "liar" and a "tyrant" at the same podium where Bush stood the day before.

    U.S.-Venezuela tensions have been escalating over the past year, and Chavez has increased his anti-U.S. rhetoric.



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    French Could Replace British As Top US Ally

    Tyler Morning News
    28/09/2006

    British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been a key part of the Bush administration's alliance in leading the global war on terror, so his impending exit from that role has created much speculation.

    Europe is the most important source of allies for the United States, and a recent poll, "Transatlantic Trends 2006" released in September by the German Marshall Fund, said 57 percent now consider American leadership undesirable.

    Thus, loss of the support of Blair is being anticipated as an event that could have major implications for U.S. foreign policy. The British leader and President Bush have been supportive on a wide range of issues over the past six years, including missile defense and fighting Libya's quest for weapons of mass destruction as well as troop commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    This steadfast support of U.S. policy by Blair has not been well received by many members of his Labor Party colleagues, noted Helle Dale, a foreign policy expert at The Heritage Foundation. It has been tolerated, however, because Blair has managed to maintain high polling numbers.

    Since the arrival of Conservative leader David Cameron last year, however, Blair's fortunes have started to change, Dale said. Cameron has been trying to move the Tories toward the middle, of past the middle in some views, of British politics. The result has been to give the Tories a substantial lead over Labor in opinion polls.

    In response, a revolt developed in the left wing of the Labor Party over Blair's support for the U.S. position on the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Labor MPs demanded Blair's resignation, and the prime minister declared he would step down sometime in the coming year.

    Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown is expected to be Blair's successor, and very little is known about his views on foreign policy.

    Cameron, who looms as a future prime minister prospect, has tried to establish a position different from both his Tory predecessors and from that of Blair, Dale said. In a recent speech, Cameron said, "Britain does not need to establish her identity by recklessly poking the United States in the eye, as some like to do. But we will serve neither our own, nor America's, nor the world's interests if we are seen as America's unconditional associate in every endeavor."

    Thus the future strong support of America in the global war on terror by Britain under Blair's leadership has become an uncertainty in the near future.

    But that might not be reason for panic, Dale suggested, because there also could be major implications for U.S. foreign policy in the election of a new French president next spring.

    French presidential contender and Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy was in Washington a few days ago. Judging by his remarks, France could become a major ally in the future, potentially replacing Britain in that role, "which would be a surpassingly strange turn of events," Dale said.

    Speaking at the French-American Foundation, Sarkozy mentioned "the friendship between our two peoples," and talked in glowing terms about the heroes of Sept. 11, and about America's success as an immigration country and as a world leader and its leadership in the arts and sciences.

    He also suggested that the virulent anti-American sentiment in the French media and among "a portion of the French elites" arises from envy. Current French President Jacques Chirac denounced Sarkozy's speech as "lamentable."

    There is no way to anticipate how Sarkozy's approach will be received by French voters.

    But with speculation that Britain may be on the verge of taking a different path, the notion that the United States again could wind up looking to "America's oldest ally" as a new partner has "stranger than fiction" potential.



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    U.S. military withdrawal end of an era in Iceland

    By Sarah Edmonds
    Reuters
    September 30, 2006

    KEFLAVIK NAVAL AIR STATION, Iceland - The United States withdrew its last 30 military personnel from Iceland on Saturday as it shut a naval air base that in its Cold War heyday was the sixth largest town in the island nation.

    The closure leaves Iceland without home-based defences and ends a U.S. military presence that has continued, with a brief late 1940s hiatus, since World War Two.
    In a low-key ceremony before a U.S. Navy jet bore the remaining base residents back to the United States, a handful of U.S. military personnel faced Icelandic police as the Icelandic and American flags snapped briskly in the wind.

    Both flags were lowered, and base commander Captain Mark Laughton presented the folded Stars and Stripes to the U.S. ambassador. Icelandic police then sent their country's flag back up its flagpole to fly alone.

    The island nation of 300,000 has no army of its own and while most residents sounded unworried about the lack of visible defences, some expressed concern at the swift U.S. withdrawal.

    Iceland learned in March that the base was to close.

    "I think that says something about what they think about defending us," said Johann Stefansson, who owns a pizza restaurant in the town of Keflavik.

    U.S. officials said this was the inevitable end of the Cold War chapter in the U.S.-Icelandic relationship. The two countries have signed an agreement that includes a U.S. promise to rush to Iceland's aid if needed.

    "The kind of dangers that the people ... at the base worked to counter are no longer critical in the 21st century," U.S. Ambassador to Iceland Carol van Voorst said, adding that the two nations would still work closely to combat terrorism and crime.

    "If we had something of a conventional threat, I can tell you we'd be here fast," she added. "We have very mobile and agile forces now and we can move men and materiel very fast."

    COLD WAR TOWN

    In an interview with Reuters on Friday, Icelandic Prime Minister Geir Haarde expressed similar confidence.

    "We don't perceive a threat from any other country in the old sense," he said.

    "(U.S.) fighters can get up here pretty fast," he said, then added: "Of course obviously longer than before, but still I am sure sufficient in case there is a danger."

    The base on this windswept Icelandic peninsula housed some 6,000 at its peak, including military, families and local staff. From 1980 to 1991, its fighters intercepted some 130 Soviet bombers a year.

    After his second summit with Mikhail Gorbachev ended in disappointment in 1986, U.S. President Ronald Reagan celebrated Keflavik's importance in a speech there.

    Before Saturday's ceremony, U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Randy Weirs, commander of the Iceland Defense Force, drove through empty streets that once hummed with activity.

    The base is a town in itself, complete with a primary school with a 650-student capacity, a high school, fast-food restaurants and the only baseball fields in Iceland.

    Iceland is looking at ways to re-use the residential buildings, perhaps as a campus or health facility, while businesspeople are eyeing the hangars and service buildings for commercial development.



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    Iraq: American Colony


    Iraq al-Qaeda chief jail mystery

    By Magdi Abdelhadi
    BBC Arab affairs analyst
    Thursday, 6 July 2006, 09:57 GMT 10:57 UK

    A prominent Cairo lawyer says the Egyptian man identified by the US as the new al-Qaeda leader in Iraq has been in jail in Egypt for seven years.

    The lawyer, Mamdouh Ismail, who has represented Egyptian Islamists for many years, says he met the man days ago in a jail on the edge of Cairo.
    He says the apparent contradictions in information may be part of a disinformation campaign by both sides.

    However, independent verification is virtually impossible.

    Picture released

    This is a murky story, just like a great deal of the information involving counter-terrorism operations and the work of the intelligence services.

    Mamdouh Ismail is a veteran Egyptian lawyer who was once an Islamist activist and an associate of Osama Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, before he left Egypt.

    Mr Ismail says that the apparent contradictions in the information on who succeeded Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq is possibly part of a disinformation campaign.

    Following the killing of Zarqawi in Iraq last month, the US military there released the picture of an Egyptian man they said was the successor.

    Maj Gen William Caldwell, the US military spokesman in Iraq, said at the time: "This is Ayyub al-Masri, probably the person who's going to be responsible for al-Qaeda in Iraq.

    "Ayyub al-Masri is a senior al-Qaeda in Iraq operative. We know he is responsible for facilitating the movement of foreign fighters from Syria into Baghdad itself. We know al-Masri has been a terrorist since 1982, beginning with his involvement in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad."

    The mystery militant

    But according to Mamdouh Ismail, a security source within the Egyptian interior ministry has disclosed that al-Masri is in fact the nom de guerre of an Egyptian militant by the name of Sharif Haza.

    Mr Ismail says that the American assertion could not possibly be true.

    "Three days ago, I was in Turah jail," he said.

    "There I met Sharif Haza and he laughed a lot about what is being said about him out there.

    "He told me that he has been in jail for many years now and that he has no relationship whatsoever with al-Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden"

    Mr Haza has been in jail for seven years on terrorism charges, says Mr Ismail.

    The question of the identity of the successor to Zarqawi took another twist a few days ago when Osama Bin Laden said in an audio message that a man by the name of Abu Hamza al-Muhajir was the new leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

    Mr Ismail says no-one has heard of al-Muhajir.

    He adds that the names being released by the Americans and Bin Laden, are probably part of disinformation campaigns from both sides, whose sole purpose is to confound each other.



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    Iraq shuts down Baghdad with curfew

    By Peter Graff
    Reuters
    Sat Sep 30, 2006

    BAGHDAD - Iraq's government imposed a one-day curfew on the capital Baghdad on Saturday without explanation, ordering all cars and pedestrians off the streets.

    The U.S. military said it had arrested a man at the home of the leader of the main Sunni political bloc on suspicion of planning a series of car bomb attacks on the Green Zone, the vast government and diplomatic compound in the city center.
    "Coalition Force personnel detained an individual at the residence of Dr. Adnan al-Dulaimi in Baghdad September 29. The detained individual is suspected of involvement in the planning of a multi-vehicle suicide operation inside Baghdad's International Zone," the military said in a statement.

    It said the man may have been linked to al Qaeda, and the plan might have been to use suicide vests to attack the Green Zone. U.S. forces did not enter Dulaimi's house, but searched a security trailer there and the suspect's car, it said.

    Dulaimi is the leader of the Iraqi National Accordance front, the largest Sunni Muslim political bloc in parliament.

    Although the sudden imposition of the curfew was not officially tied to the arrest, the curfew was announced on state television late on Friday an hour after a report on the raid at Dulaimi's house, suggesting there may have been a link.

    Iraq has seen a surge in violence this week with the start of the holy month of Ramadan. Sectarian killings have risen sharply and continuously since February, with more than 6,500 people slain in the last two months, according to U.N. data.

    As dawn broke, streets in the center of the capital were quiet. U.S. helicopters periodically flew overhead.

    The curfew would remain in place until 6:00 a.m. (0200 GMT) on Sunday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office said. The U.S. military said the curfew was the Iraqi government's decision, and such measures were effective in the past.

    TORTURE

    The massive surge in sectarian killings since February has been marked by dozens of corpses being found nearly every day dumped in the streets of Baghdad, bound, tortured and shot.

    Sunni Arabs say some of the killings are carried out by Shi'ite death squads with links to the government and police. Increasingly, U.S. officials have backed up such claims.

    One senior U.S. military official this week said police had allowed death squads to re-enter areas already cleared by U.S. forces in a seven-week-old crackdown in the capital.

    Washington's ambassador to Iraq threatened to cut off funding for the Iraqi police if the government does not punish police officials for torture and human rights violations.

    Zalmay Khalilzad said in an interview with the New York Times that he had faith in the motives of Iraq's new Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani, in charge of the police since June.

    But he said U.S. officials were reviewing programmes under a law named for Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy that bans U.S. funding for armies and police forces that violate human rights.

    "There is a Leahy Law that affects support if the terms of the law are not observed and implemented, and he (Bolani) has assured us that he will do so," Khalilzad said.

    Outside Baghdad, a suicide car bomb targeting an Iraqi army checkpoint in the northern town of Tal Afar killed two people and wounded 30. Other bombs struck in Mosul and Kirkuk in the north and in Iskanderiya south of Baghdad.

    In Washington, where Iraq has become a crucial political issue ahead of a congressional election in November, the U.S. Congress voted to block the Bush administration from building permanent bases in Iraq or taking control of its oil sector.

    Those provisions were contained in a bill which authorised $70 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the middle of the next fiscal year. Congress has now approved about $507 billion for the two wars, most spent in Iraq.

    The Baghdad curfew came at the end of a week of clashes and bombings which began with the start of Ramadan. U.S. commanders say the week saw a record number of suicide bombings.

    On Friday gunmen killed the brother-in-law of the chief judge in former leader Saddam Hussein's genocide trial and badly wounded his sister and nephew.

    It was at least the fourth killing closely connected to the U.S.-sponsored court, raising questions about Iraq's ability to conduct fair trials in a nation on the verge of civil war.



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    Twenty-six workers kidnapped in Baghdad

    AFP
    Sun Oct 1, 2006

    BAGHDAD - Gunmen in three vehicles have kidnapped 26 workers at a food plant in southwest Baghdad, the interior minister said.

    The gunmen were all wearing civilian clothes and rounded up every worker in the factory, known for making kibbeh, a kind of meatball, in Baghdad's lower income Amil neighborhood Sunday.
    Mass kidnappings happen frequently in Baghdad for both political and criminal motivations, though in this case authorities believe the motive was for money.

    "It was criminal endeavor because they also stole three large refrigerators," said Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf.

    The breakdown in security in the violence-prone streets of Baghdad has resulted in a rampant kidnapping industry with ransoms in the neighborhood of tens of thousands of dollars.



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    British army chiefs want to pull all troops out of Iraq immediately

    Guardian
    29/09/2006

    Take UK troops out of Iraq, senior military told ministers

    Army chiefs wanted to move forces to Afghanistan but were prevented for political reasons

    Senior military officers have been pressing the government to withdraw British troops from Iraq and concentrate on what they now regard as a more worthwhile and winnable battleground in Afghanistan.
    They believe there is a limit to what British soldiers can achieve in southern Iraq and that it is time the Iraqis took responsibility for their own security, defence sources say. Pressure from military chiefs for an early and significant cut in the 7,500 British troops in Iraq is also motivated by extreme pressure being placed on soldiers and those responsible for training them.

    "What is more important, Afghanistan or Iraq?" a senior defence source asked yesterday. "There is a group within the Ministry of Defence pushing hard to get troops out of Iraq to get more into Afghanistan."

    Military chiefs have been losing patience with the slow progress made in building a new Iraqi national army and security services. Significantly, they now say the level of violence in the country will not be a factor determining when British troops should leave.

    The debate has been raging between different groups in the MoD and has involved the chiefs of staff as well as the permanent joint headquarters, based in Northwood, north-west London, defence sources say. Army chiefs have expressed concern about opinion polls showing the increasing unpopularity of the war and the impact on morale and recruitment.

    Political arguments, including strong US pressure against British troop withdrawals, have won, at least for the moment. US generals in Iraq privately made it clear they were deeply unhappy about British talk of troop reductions and complained that the British seemed interested only in the south of the country.

    The debate within the MoD is unusual: arguments about the size and shape of the defence budget are common, but arguments about the merits of military deployments overseas are much rarer.

    The fierce debate at the highest military and political levels in the MoD is reflected in a passage of a leaked memo written by a staff officer at the Defence Academy, an MoD thinktank. It reads: "British armed forces are effectively held hostage in Iraq - following the failure of the deal being attempted by COS [chief of staff] to extricate UK armed forces from Iraq on the basis of 'doing Afghanistan' - and we are now fighting (and arguably losing or potentially losing) on two fronts."

    The MoD, which is downplaying the significance of the memo, said yesterday it was written by a naval commander, the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the army, and that it was reporting views from a variety of military sources.

    Hopes for early and large cuts in the number of British troops deployed in southern Iraq have been dashed repeatedly. A year ago, the MoD predicted that the number of British troops there would have fallen by now to 3,000, fewer than half the current total.

    Military commanders now accept that the number of British troops in southern Iraq will probably stay at their present level, at least until early next year. Major General Richard Shirreff, the new commander of British troops there, was determined to launch what may be the last major operation in Iraq by British troops. He launched Operation Sinbad, with Iraqi forces, in a move designed to rid Basra of serious criminals and corrupt officials. The operation, involving about 3,000 British troops, is expected to continue until February.

    A significant cut in Britain's military presence in Iraq could coincide with the run-up to the election of a new British prime minister. "We can and will run both [Iraq and Afghanistan] - for a period of time," a defence official said last night.

    The defence secretary, Des Browne, has recently stressed the importance the government attaches to Afghanistan and to beating the Taliban and a growing number of jihadists there. Speaking before a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Slovenia, he said yesterday Nato had to "step up to the plate to meet our collective commitment to support the government and people of Afghanistan". Britain has nearly 5,000 troops in the country.

    The Nato ministers agreed on a plan to donate surplus military equipment to Afghanistan's armed forces but their offers of extra troops did not meet Nato commanders' target of 2,500, officials said.



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    The Growing Iraq Resistance Movement in the U.S. Military

    By Peter Laufer
    AlterNet
    September 30, 2006

    One of the biggest 'pockets of resistance' to the war in Iraq is U.S. soldiers who refuse to fight on moral and ethical grounds.
    On Sept. 26, Peter Laufer, author of, "Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq" (Chelsea Green, 2006) spoke at Rep. Lynn Woolsey's (D-Calif.) Iraq forum, "The Mounting Costs of the U.S. Military Occupation of Iraq and Lost Opportunities," on the growing number of American soldiers turning against the U.S. military mission in Iraq on moral and ethical grounds. The following is the text of his testimony.

    Congresswoman Woolsey, thank you for this opportunity to speak about a critical matter I've been studying. What I want to share with you are the thoughts and experiences of some of the brave men and women I've met over the past year. It has been an honor for me to meet these soldiers, Americans on the front lines of what may be their most important battle: a fight for our country's soul.

    One of the things that's surprised me most as I returned from travels around the U.S., up to Canada, and over to Germany talking with soldiers opposed to the Iraq war is how few civilians know about the growing resistance within the military to Bush policy in Iraq.

    Over and over, when people asked me what I was working on and I told them of the collected stories of opposition, I heard comments like "There are soldiers against the war? I didn't know that."

    The tragedy of civilian deaths in Iraq is devastating. U.S. troops assigned to the kind of duty that leaves innocent civilians damaged and destroyed are also victims. The escalating number of troops returning from the war suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is proof.

    One soldier after another told me about their being devastated by orders that put them in the position of disobeying, or of shooting what they feared were noncombatants.

    These soldier's stories are critical to hear. Their credibility cannot be impugned. They volunteered for the military. They've seen it from the inside.

    Consider Darrell Anderson. I met with him in Toronto. He deserted after fighting in Iraq rather than face another deployment there.

    In addition to taking shrapnel from a roadside bomb -- an injury that earned him a Purple Heart -- Darrell told me he often found himself in firefights.

    Darrel described a Baghdad street battle that scarred him -- and scared him about himself. He was in an armored vehicle. Other soldiers were riding on the outside, when it came under attack from an enemy armed with rocket-propelled grenades. One of the soldiers riding outside was hit and injured severely. Darrell told me the scene still returns to him in the nightmares he suffers every night. "I look at him and he is bleeding everywhere. He's spitting up blood." Someone had to take his place on the outside, Darrell realized. "Me, I'm gung-ho. I go up there. There're explosions. They tell us if you're under attack, you open fire on anybody in the streets. They say they're no longer innocent if they're there. I take my weapon and I find someone running. I point and I pull my trigger, but my weapon is still on safe."

    By the time Darrell clicked it over to fire, he realized he was about to shoot a kid who was running away from the violence, a kid he was by then sure was not part of the battle. But what was most traumatic for him were his own emotions. "I'm angry. My buddy is dying. I just want to kill." He told me he realized then he had become a different man, changed by the pathology of war and the suffering of the innocents. "When I first got there, I was disgusted with my fellow soldiers. But now I'm just the same. I will kill innocent people, because I'm not the person I was when I got there." The attack ebbed, and Darrell survived it, as did the running boy.

    A timely example of how the war is tearing at the conscience of the troops came in an email I received the other day from a conflicted soldier. He is an army reservist, a counterintelligence agent who served in Afghanistan, where he was awarded two Bronze Star medals for his valor.

    "My unit may be deploying to Iraq in January, and I am contemplating not going," he wrote. "This is somewhat complicated by not being a conscientious objector, which limits my options." This reservist requested my assistance steering him toward sources that can provide him with credible information about the alternatives open to him and the ramifications of refusing orders.

    More and more soldiers with the pedigree of my email correspondent are considering destroying careers and enduring prison time because they oppose the Iraq war. Imagine the courage it takes for a soldier -- such as the reservist who requested a referral -- to reject the mission, and instead respond to the calls of conscience and say no to the Iraq war.

    The fact that both the Marines and the Army are faced with dipping into the Ready Reserve to force soldiers back to Iraq is another indication that more and more soldiers are opposed to the war. What will be important to watch now is how many refuse this recall to active duty.

    In his Sept. 11 speech a few weeks ago, President Bush again invoked the names of the soldiers dead in the Iraq War. He claimed again, as he has so many times before, that the war must go on so that their sacrifice is not wasted, and he noted that over a million and a half Americans have enlisted in the services since the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

    What do those volunteers think today? We could use a poll that asks them all. In the meantime, I've tallied the feelings of some of them.

    Meet Joshua Key, combat-hardened from his Iraq time, now a deserter in Canada seeking refugee status. He misses his family and he blames the Bush administration. "I blame them because they made me do it. You can lie to the world; you can't lie to a person who's seen it. They made me have to do things that a man should never have to do, for the purpose of their gain -- not the people's -- their financial gain."

    George W. Bush is culpable for crimes in Iraq, according to Joshua Key. "He'll pay for it one day. On the day he goes to prison, I'll go sit in prison with him. I say if he goes to prison -- George Bush -- I'll go sit in prison with him. Let's go. I'll face it for that music. But that ain't never going to happen." And Joshua Key laughed a bitter, bitter laugh in his basement apartment in Toronto.

    Meet Steven Casey, still susceptible to recall from the Inactive Ready Reserve after his time fighting in Iraq. He says he'll never put his uniform back on. "You'll see me on the news. I won't be back. I'll be a statistic of a guy who doesn't show up." His voice is quiet as he says it again, "I'm not coming back." Steven Casey says he's going to college, an education he'll pay for with the money the Army guaranteed him when he enlisted. "I did get what I was promised," he says about his benefits package. "I got everything they said I was going to get," he says about the tuition money. "I got a hunk of money for school, and with that I got social anxiety and I got this cool skin rash that I'm never going to get rid of. I've got a social disorder. I yell at my wife. I don't think I won. There are a lot of things that came with this that are irreparable and I'm going to have the rest of my life." He talks about anger and anxiety. He wonders if he's suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, if he's facing a lifetime of prescription drugs and psychiatrists. "I wish I could make it all go away, to be honest with you. But I can't. I should have worked at McDonalds and found a way to pay for my tuition."

    Meet Clifton Hicks, who returned from fighting in Iraq to apply for and receive an honorable discharge based on his conscientious objection to war he developed in Iraq. It's a war, says Clifton Hicks, fought for the "filthy rich too cowardly to do it themselves" who want more money, fought by "us, the masses of uneducated fools killing each other."

    Soldiers such as these -- who have been on the ground in Iraq, awarded medals for their valor, seen and done things unimaginable to most of us -- offer us some of the best news reports of this war. I believe the stories from these soldiers can help us understand what is wrong in Iraq.

    Thank you for the opportunity to share these stories here today.



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    Iraq close to capture al-Qaida top leader

    www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-01 19:26:40

    BAGHDAD, Oct. 1 (Xinhua) - The Iraqi government said on Sunday that its security forces are close to capture or killing of the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq Abu Ayyub al-Masri.

    "I can say we are very close to Abu Ayyub al-Masri and we say to him your days are numbered," said Iraqi National Security Advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie.
    "My message to Iraqis in Ramadan is that it is so close, we will bring you the good news of Abu Ayyub al-Masri either killed or handcuffed to be brought before the Iraqi justice system," al-Rubaie told the news conference, in which a video tape of al-Masriteaching followers how to build a car bomb was shown.

    The video tape showed al-Masri in a white T-shirt was talking to the camera as he explained how to compose a car bomb.

    Rubaie said that the video was found in Youssifiyah, some 20 km south of Baghdad.



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    Mother Nature


    Meteor reported in Yakima area

    2 October 2006

    YAKIMA, Wash. The flurry of calls began around 9 p.m. _ reports of a meteor in the skies over Yakima.
    Asia (AH-sha) Guerrero called The Associated Press to report what looked like a meteor. She said it seemed to be headed toward the city's Terrace Heights area.

    "It looked like a shooting star," she said, but closer. "It absolutely fell to the ground."
    Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike O'Connor said skies were clear and there were no reports of aircraft in trouble in the area. He said he'd gotten about eight calls about it at the agency's Renton office.

    O'Connor says -- quote -- "It sounds like somebody might be seeing a meteor."

    A dispatcher at the Yakima County sheriff's office said two sightings had been reported by area officers.

    ---

    A police officer in Union Gap who declined to give his name said he saw "something bright in the sky ... kind of like fireworks but up high, and then it went away."

    63-year-old Mary Cline of Selah says what she saw was -- quote -- "just like a big bright light and it had a tail on it, kind of like a comet, but not real long."

    Cline added -- quote -- "It seemed to be really close."

    She said she didn't hear it land, and that she only saw the bright light -- "White, with a little bit of blue" -- for a few seconds.



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    Meteor reported over Yakima area; FAA says no planes in trouble

    Sunday, October 1, 2006 · Last updated 10:27 p.m. PT

    YAKIMA, Wash. -- Several people reported seeing a meteor streak through the sky Sunday night over Yakima.
    Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike O'Connor said he received about eight calls about it, but no reports of any aircraft in trouble.

    A dispatcher with the Yakima County Sheriff's Office said one woman and an area police officer spotted a bright object shooting across the sky.

    "It was just like a big bright light, and it had a tail on it - kind of like a comet, but not real long," Mary Cline, 63, told The Associated Press.

    Cline said she saw it near a warehouse in Selah, a town about five miles north of Yakima. "It seemed to be really close. It seemed like it was just right over the roof of the warehouse."

    Asya Guerrero, 21 of Yakima, called the AP to say she spotted an object that looked like a shooting star, only much closer, headed toward the city's Terrace Heights area.



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    Millions of anchovies die on Spain beach

    By HAROLD HECKLE
    Associated Press
    Fri Sep 29, 2006

    MADRID, Spain - Millions of anchovies - a protected species in Europe - have died in northern Spain after an unexplained mass beaching, officials said Friday.

    The fish, all juveniles, were found stranded along large stretches of Colunga beach, 35 miles east of the port city of Gijon, a normally pristine seaside landscape in the verdant province of Asturias.
    "More than three tons have been found so far, and our main - untested - hypothesis at the moment is that they tried to flee from predators and accidentally beached," said Luis Laria, chief coordinator of a marine protection unit working with the government.

    Laria said a European Union moratorium on fishing anchovies along the northern Atlantic coast of Spain and the western coast of France has been in place for two months. Less rigorous fishing restrictions had been used for the previous two years.

    These anchovies are considered susceptible to extinction and are therefore closely monitored by scientists, according to Spain's Environment Ministry.

    Although anchovies are exported from elsewhere in the world, including Peru and Chile, Laria said anchovies from the Atlantic off Spain and France are the most valued and expensive because of their flavor, derived from their nutrient-rich environment.

    If the beached specimens had grown to full maturity, they would have represented more than 100 tons of potential breeders.

    "It's a bit of a disaster," said Laria. "We can't fish them because they're so rare, and now they've killed themselves."

    Laria said that experts had studied the dead anchovies and found no evidence of toxic chemicals that could have caused the beaching. "The likelihood is that a shoal tried to swim away from hungry dolphins or tuna."

    A factor that may have disoriented the fish is unusually high water temperatures off Colunga in the high 70s, Laria said, adding that such a mass beaching of anchovies is unprecedented in northern Spain.

    A cleanup team was dispatched Friday to begin scooping up the dead fish to avoid further unwanted environmental side-effects.



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    Tropical Storm Xangsane batters Vietnam

    By DINH TRAN TRUNG HAU
    Associated Press
    Sun Oct 1, 2006

    DANANG, Vietnam - Tropical Storm Xangsane barreled across central Vietnam on Sunday, leaving at least six people dead, hundreds injured and tens of thousands of homes damaged, officials said.

    Heavy rains are expected to continue for several days and could unleash floods and landslides across the region, national weather center director Bui Minh Tang said.

    The storm, which killed at least 76 people and left about 69 missing in the Philippines last week, hit Vietnam's coastal city of Danang Sunday morning and caused widespread blackouts, officials said.
    Xangsane, downgraded from a typhoon just before it hit Vietnam, killed at least four people in Danang, a city of 770,000 people, said local disaster official Huynh Van Thang. At least 5,500 homes were destroyed or damaged in the city.

    About 435 people were injured in Danang, said Trinh Luong Tran, director of the city's public health department.

    In neighboring Quang Nam province, a woman was killed by falling debris, said deputy provincial governor Nguyen Ngoc Quang. Another 61,000 people, including nearly 500 foreign tourists from hotels in the ancient town of Hoi An, were evacuated.

    In Quang Tri province, one person was killed by lightning, officials said.

    More than 14,000 homes were destroyed or damaged and 43 people were injured in Thua Thien Hue province, said provincial disaster official Phan Thanh Hung.

    In Danang, many houses had their tin roofs blown off, and tin sheets could be seen hanging over trees and electricity cables.

    National carrier Vietnam Airlines said it canceled 48 domestic flights Sunday, and train service was interrupted, stranding thousands.

    In the Philippines, nearly 40,000 people fled their homes in Manila and in 15 northern and central provinces. Damage to infrastructure, crops and livestock topped $7.2 million and the figure was likely to rise as more reports come in, the civil defense office said.



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    Scientists: St. Helens eruption slowing

    By PEGGY ANDERSEN
    Associated Press
    Fri Sep 29, 2006

    SEATTLE - Two years after Mount St. Helens began its low-key eruption, a process that has extruded tons of rock into the crater left by the volcano's deadly 1980 blast, scientists say the mountain seems to be slowing down.

    But they're making no predictions about when the activity will end.

    "Volcanoes throw you a lot of curve balls. I've been humbled enough not to call the pitch till it's over the plate," said Cynthia Gardner, scientist in charge at the Cascades Volcano Observatory, a U.S. Geological Survey facility about 50 miles from Vancouver, Wash., and 150 miles south of Seattle.
    The southwest Washington mountain is going through another "dome-building" phase within its crater.

    The volcano's May 18, 1980, eruption killed 57 people, sent superheated mud down the Toutle River Valley, flattened forests for miles and spewed ash across the state and, eventually, around the globe. It also reduced the 9,677-foot mountain to 8,363 feet, and replaced its symmetrical, snow-covered cone with a gaping crater.

    The blast was followed by a period of dome building that ended in 1986.

    The current flow of magma began in October 2004 after weeks of low-level seismic activity. For the first year it averaged more than 3 cubic yards, about two big pickup truck loads, per second, Gardner said. The extruded rock has been piling up brittle new structures, which then collapse onto the crater floor and form the foundation for the next gush of lava.

    Since October 2005, the extrusion rate has slowed to less than 1.3 cubic yards per second, Gardner said. Since April, "we're in the half-cubic-yard range," she said.

    But confirming a trend "takes a long time, because a lot of these are very small changes," she said.

    Seismic readings, which had ranged above magnitude 3, have also dropped over the past year, Gardner said. The rate of deformation - the swelling or shrinking of the volcano's flanks - also has slowed, but in very small amounts, she said.

    "We're not seeing anything ... that tells us we're in store for a change in eruptive style in the near future," she said. "Right now it looks like we'll be continuing with fairly benign rock extrusion and rockfalls that can send ash over the crater rim."

    There's no telling when, or if, the activity could ratchet up again. "A lull's OK, as long as it's not another 18 years. I don't have that much time left in my career," Gardner said.

    The current eruptive phase followed 18 years of silence.

    A drumfire of seismic rumblings began on Sept. 23, 2004. A plume of ash and steam on Oct. 1, 2004, confirmed that an eruption was under way. Magma appeared in the crater 10 days later.

    The Johnston Ridge Observatory about five miles from the peak was closed Oct, 2, 2004, due to safety concerns. It reopened the following May 6.

    This summer, a hiking trail to the edge of the crater was reopened by the U.S. Forest Service.

    "This is a great opportunity. I think people need to understand that this is so rare, that you can actually go up and see something like this - even for scientists," Gardner said.

    Mount St. Helens, the youngest and most active of the Cascade Range volcanos, has a history of leveling and rebuilding itself. Scientists say the mountain that stood before 1980 was just 4,000 years old - the blink of an eye in geologic time.

    There had been eruptions in the St. Helens area for hundreds of thousands of years, but for centuries they only produced small lava domes.



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    Natural gas blast kills man in Kansas

    AP
    Sat Sep 30, 2006

    MOUND VALLEY, Kan. - A construction crew ruptured a natural gas line on Friday, leading to an explosion that killed an employee and forced evacuations, authorities said.

    A crew from Double J Pipeline Construction was replacing pipe in a rural area when workers struck the gas line, said Jim Cook, Labette County emergency management director.
    The victim was a 70-year-old man from Oklahoma, said Labette County Sheriff William Blundell.

    About 50 people within a mile of the blast, including construction workers and residents, were evacuated, officials said. Southern Star Natural Gas Co. shut off gas to the area, and firefighters contained the blaze.

    Gas service to about 275 customers was disrupted, said Southern Star spokeswoman Gayle Hobbs.

    Double J was working on behalf of Admiral Bay Resources Inc. of Colorado, a gas production company with wells in the Mound Valley area.

    Robert Carington, chief financial officer for Admiral Bay, declined to comment.



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    New evidence indicates the universe egg-shaped

    www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-01 03:36:44

    LOS ANGELES, Sept. 30 (Xinhua)-- Using a microwave probe of U.S. space agency NASA, scientists said they have evidence that the universe has a shape somewhat akin to an egg, rather than the expected round.

    This would explain some curious anomalies over the universe's expanse, the scientists reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.
    The researchers reached the conclusion by observing the universe with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which was launched by NASA in 2001 to measure fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation.

    The measurements of the probe agreed with a conventional spherical model of the observable universe, said the researchers. But when the data were measured on the largest scale, for instance taking in the entire night sky, the radiation was too low.

    The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data have confirmed the anomaly concerning the low quadrupole amplitude compared to the best-fit Lambda-cold dark matter prediction, the researchers wrote in their paper.

    "We show that by allowing the large-scale spatial geometry of our universe to be plane symmetric with eccentricity at decouplingor order 10-2," they added.

    "The quadrupole amplitude can be drastically reduced without affecting higher multipoles of the angular power spectrum of the temperature anisotropy."

    These anomalies may signal "a nontrivial cosmic topology" that is different from the sphere, indicated the researchers led by Leonardo Campanelli of the University of Ferrara in Italy.

    They found that the radiation discrepancies disappeared if the universe was shaped like an ellipsoid, with an eccentricity of about one per cent.



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    Big Pharma


    British regime manipulated by blackmail and bribery by drugs corporations

    Guardian
    28/09/2006

    Documents show how companies try to get new medicines fast-tracked

    Multinational drug companies have been lobbying ministers in an attempt to subvert the independent appraisal process and get their expensive new medicines approved for large-scale use in the NHS, the Guardian can reveal.

    Over the eight months from October to May this year, senior executives from 10 drug companies met ministers to press for favourable decisions on their products. The executives were highly critical of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice), an independent expert body set up to decide which drugs are cost-effective for use in the NHS.
    Documents obtained by the Guardian under Freedom of Information legislation reveal that:

    - The world's biggest drug company, Pfizer, warned ministers that it could take its business elsewhere. "Pfizer ... noted that there is complacency in some quarters of Whitehall regarding their continued investment in the UK," the minutes of the meeting record.

    Ministers later agreed to a special meeting where six companies could lobby for their drugs for Alzheimer's disease.

    - Two companies lobbied ministers for wider access by patients to their drugs, both of which were later turned down by Nice on the grounds that they were not effective enough and too expensive.

    The pharmaceutical industry is a major contributor to the UK economy. Its total investment in research and development was more than £3.4bn in 2004, which, a Whitehall briefing note points out, "represents around a quarter of the UK's total manufacturing industry expenditure".

    Decisions by Nice, set up seven years ago, are crucial for the companies. It decides whether a drug should be universally available to patients in the NHS. Chaired by Prof Sir Michael Rawlings, Nice draws on scientific experts and consults doctors, patients, drug companies and the Department of Health. The government invariably accepts its final recommendations. Although ministers say they cannot influence Nice, the documents reveal a constant stream of high-level visitors from drug companies.

    Manufacturers, led by Pfizer, have been complaining to ministers about Nice's position on their controversial Alzheimer's drugs. Originally Nice decided to allow them, then it reversed its position, saying they should be used only for a minority of patients with moderate disease.

    At a meeting in October with the minister, Pfizer executives made it clear they "were unhappy with the Nice decision ... and thought their processes were flawed". They requested a special meeting with ministers where all the companies making Alzheimer's drugs could put their case.

    The documents prepared by civil servants for the Pfizer meeting outline the wealth and scale of the US company, which in 2004 had revenue of $52.5bn (£28bn) and a net income of over $11bn.

    But, Pfizer executives warn the minister, it could always take its business elsewhere. "Pfizer ... noted that there is complacency in some quarters of Whitehall regarding their continued investment in the UK," the minutes record. "Pfizer asked for more public support from the government for a robust pharmaceutical industry in the UK and more consultation/dialogue with the government."

    The subsequent meeting with all the companies took place in December. The minister, Jane Kennedy, was confronted by eight managing directors, vice-presidents and senior executives from six drug companies. The executives lobbied hard for the Nice ruling to be overturned by the government.

    A memo reports the summing-up of Johnson & Johnson's vice-president David Brickwood: "Nice should take into account what the companies see as the overwhelming views of patients, carers and clinicians on the efficacy of the drugs."

    In a statement, Pfizer said it "regularly meets with key stakeholders, including government ministers, to keep them up to date with issues relating to our business". A variety of topics were discussed, it said.

    "Nice and health technology assessment remains a topical issue coupled with the proposed ban on medicines for mild Alzheimer's disease. We believe this is the wrong decision and have appealed along with other manufacturers of anti-dementia medicines."

    In February, Eli Lilly lobbied hard for its drug Alimta, designed to treat the asbestos-linked cancer mesothelioma. Its executives gave a presentation to Ms Kennedy, incorporating newspaper cuttings claiming that cancer victims were dying for want of the drug. The minister agreed that there should be a high-level meeting between her ministry and the Department for Work and Pensions.

    But in June, Nice said there was insufficient evidence to show that Alimta was better than other cheaper treatments, recommending that the NHS should not use it. A Lilly spokesman said it was legitimate for the company to make representations to the DoH but it was not seeking to undermine Nice. "We are fully engaged and committed to the Nice process," he said

    Pressure was brought to bear on ministers by another company, Johnson & Johnson, over its bone cancer drug Velcade. A briefing for Ms Kennedy before a meeting with the company's executives in November says: "Johnson & Johnson have written to the Department of Health numerous times over the past 12 months about Velcade." The company wanted its drug fast-tracked for approval by Nice.

    Velcade was one of the five drugs Nice was asked by ministers to handle through its new fast-track procedure. But Nice's appraisal committee has given a preliminary opinion that it is not suitable for use in the NHS.

    A Johnson and Johnson spokesman said the company was not trying to "unduly influence" Nice but it was legitimate to seek to persuade ministers to speed up the appraisal of Velcade. The company did not want to comment on its lobbying over Alzheimer's drugs.

    In May, the health minister Andy Burnham met Peter Dolan, then chief executive of Bristol-Myers Squibb and chairman of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the powerful industry body in the US, which has been highly critical of Nice.

    Richard Marsh, director of external affairs at Bristol-Myers Squibb, who also attended the meeting, told the Guardian that his company had wanted to raise a number of issues, including Nice, with the minister.

    "Companies have a legitimate interest in getting the best for their products and getting a positive appraisal by Nice. Where they have an opportunity to raise issues with ministers, they can do that ... It may be that Nice has genuinely got a blind spot about something and a legitimate point can be made to ministers. I don't think the Nice process is necessarily undermined. It is up to the minister what they do with that information." He added that companies wanted to invest in countries with a "favourable environment".



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    Flashback: Glaxo chief: Our drugs do not work on most patients

    By Steve Connor, Science Editor
    08 December 2003

    A senior executive with Britain's biggest drugs company has admitted that most prescription medicines do not work on most people who take them.

    Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), said fewer than half of the patients prescribed some of the most expensive drugs actually derived any benefit from them.

    It is an open secret within the drugs industry that most of its products are ineffective in most patients but this is the first time that such a senior drugs boss has gone public. His comments come days after it emerged that the NHS drugs bill has soared by nearly 50 per cent in three years, rising by £2.3bn a year to an annual cost to the taxpayer of £7.2bn. GSK announced last week that it had 20 or more new drugs under development that could each earn the company up to $1bn (£600m) a year.

    Dr Roses, an academic geneticist from Duke University in North Carolina, spoke at a recent scientific meeting in London where he cited figures on how well different classes of drugs work in real patients.

    Drugs for Alzheimer's disease work in fewer than one in three patients, whereas those for cancer are only effective in a quarter of patients. Drugs for migraines, for osteoporosis, and arthritis work in about half the patients, Dr Roses said. Most drugs work in fewer than one in two patients mainly because the recipients carry genes that interfere in some way with the medicine, he said.

    "The vast majority of drugs - more than 90 per cent - only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people," Dr Roses said. "I wouldn't say that most drugs don't work. I would say that most drugs work in 30 to 50 per cent of people. Drugs out there on the market work, but they don't work in everybody." [...]




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    Flashback: Revealed: how drug firms 'hoodwink' medical journals

    December 7, 2003
    The Observer

    Pharmaceutical giants hire ghostwriters to produce articles - then put doctors' names on them

    Hundreds of articles in medical journals claiming to be written by academics or doctors have been penned by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies, an Observer inquiry reveals.

    The journals, bibles of the profession, have huge influence on which drugs doctors prescribe and the treatment hospitals provide. But The Observer has uncovered evidence that many articles written by so-called independent academics may have been penned by writers working for agencies which receive huge sums from drug companies to plug their products.

    Estimates suggest that almost half of all articles published in journals are by ghostwriters. While doctors who have put their names to the papers can be paid handsomely for 'lending' their reputations, the ghostwriters remain hidden. They, and the involvement of the pharmaceutical firms, are rarely revealed. [...]




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    Money Matters


    Stocks fall after 4-day rally

    By Vivianne Rodrigues
    Reuters
    Fri Sep 29, 2006

    NEW YORK - Stocks fell on Friday, halting a four-day rally, as investors sold to lock in profits after the Dow industrials touched a record high and Wall Street rounded out its best third quarter in nine years.
    Top gainers this week, such as Caterpillar Inc. and Altria Group, were among Friday's biggest decliners. That offset a jump in some technology companies, such as Research In Motion Ltd. and Hewlett-Packard Co.

    Merck & Co. also fell after the drugmaker said on Friday it would delay seeking approval for a cholesterol drug.

    The Dow Jones industrial average briefly rose to 11,741.99, just shy of the all-time high of 11,750.28 set on January 14, 2000.

    "Stocks were up every day this week and they were bound for a drop," said Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at Miller Tabak & Co. in New York. "No doubt, some investors thought stocks got overbought as the quarter wrapped up."

    The Dow Jones industrial average fell 39.38 points, or 0.34 percent, to end at 11,679.07. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index slipped 3.30 points, or 0.25 percent, to finish at 1,335.85. The Nasdaq Composite Index declined 11.59 points, or 0.51 percent, to close at 2,258.43.

    For the July-September quarter, the Dow rose 4.74 percent and the S&P 500 advanced 5.17 percent. The Nasdaq rose 3.97 percent. Both the Dow and the S&P 500 had their best September since 1998.

    "It's been a great week, a great month and a great quarter," said Jim Awad, chairman of Awad Asset Management in New York. "It's natural to see a bit of a pause, if not some selling, after" this "type of performance."

    For the week, the Dow gained 1.49 percent, while the S&P 500 advanced 1.60 percent and the Nasdaq climbed 1.78 percent.

    Caterpillar, the biggest drag on the Dow, slid 1.2 percent, or 79 cents, to $65.80 and Altria declined 0.6 percent, or 42 cents, to $76.55 on the New York Stock Exchange.

    Merck's stock fell 0.4 percent, or 16 cents, to $41.90 on the NYSE.

    Shares of H-P rose 2 percent, or 72 cents, to $36.69 on the NYSE a day after Chief Executive Mark Hurd testified at a congressional hearing about boardroom leaks. Argus Research analyst Wendy Abramowitz said "positive interpretations" of the hearings were underpinning the stock. It was H-P's biggest advance in more than two months. The stock was the top gainer in both the Dow and the S&P 500, which helped cushion their declines on Friday.

    Shares of Research in Motion jumped 19.3 percent, or $16.59, to $102.65 on Nasdaq a day after the maker of the BlackBerry handheld wireless e-mail devices reported a higher-than-expected second-quarter profit. On Friday, brokerage Deutsche Bank raised its rating on the stock.

    The stock was the Nasdaq's biggest gainer.

    Friday's economic data included a report that showed business activity in the U.S. Midwest unexpectedly rose in September, according to the National Association of Purchasing Management-Chicago's index.

    The University of Michigan's final reading on consumer sentiment in September exceeded both the mid-month reading and August's final reading.

    Trading was moderate, with about 1.47 billion shares changing hands on the NYSE, below last year's daily average of 1.6 billion. On Nasdaq, trading was heavier, with 1.88 billion shares traded, above last year's daily average of 1.80 billion.

    Decliners outnumbered advancers across the board, with about three stocks falling for every two that rose on both the NYSE and the Nasdaq.



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    Iran lashes out at new U.S. sanctions bill

    www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-01 18:53:09

    TEHRAN, Oct. 1 (Xinhua) -- Iran on Sunday lashed out at a new U.S. bill of sanctions on entities or countries that provide goods or services for Iran's weapons programs, local Fars News Agency reported.

    Warning Washington against taking "any further steps on its present path," Iranian Parliament Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel said that the U.S. sanctions bill indicated that Washington was still following the same approach towards Tehran and was not inclined towards revising its policies.
    He made the remarks at an open session of the Iranian parliament on Sunday.

    The top lawmaker said that the measure proved that U.S. officials "had not yet taken a good lesson from the present conditions dominating the world."

    "Such sanctions are more detrimental to the United States than Iran," said Adel, adding that his country was "well familiar with and used to experiencing sanctions."

    U.S. President George W. Bush on Saturday signed into law a new sanctions bill called Iran Freedom Support Act after the U.S. Senate passed it earlier Saturday.

    The Iran Freedom Support Act would sanction any entity that contributes to Iran's capability of acquiring chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

    The legislation formalizes existing economic sanctions against Iran that have been in effect since 1979 and says that the United States shall not reach agreements with governments that are assisting Iran's nuclear program or transferring weapons or missiles to Iran.

    The U.S. sanctions against Iran have remained since the takeover of the U.S. embassy by Iranian radicals in 1979.

    Moreover, Washington has been seeking to impose sanctions on Iran through the UN Security Council on the grounds that Iran develops a nuclear weapon program under the cover of a civilian program.

    Iran, however, has denied the charge, saying its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.



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    Russian oil grab 'puts western supplies at risk'

    Terry Macalister
    The Guardian
    Monday October 2, 2006

    A former government adviser has warned it is "only a matter of time" before BP or Shell faces a bid from a Russian state-owned group such as Gazprom which could threaten western oil supplies.

    Professor Peter Odell, an energy economist, says ExxonMobil is also vulnerable to a Chinese takeover as the large UK and American stock-listed oil groups lose their influence in global markets.

    "A Chinese bid for Exxon and/or Chevron and/or a Russian bid for Shell and/or BP, backed by funds provided by the wealthy member countries of Opec seem likely to be only a matter of time.
    "With the 'majors' gone there will be concern in the main OECD countries for the future security of supplies," he said in an unpublished speech to Opec ministers in Vienna last month.

    Professor Odell, who was an adviser to Tony Benn, the UK energy minister in the late 1970s and has since worked for a host of different foreign governments, said he was not being alarmist or deliberately controversial. "Latest figures show the western oil majors are losing their leadership of the global oil system and now have only 9% or 10% of the world's reserves. They appear unable to win new production rights except as minority partners in state-run systems," Mr Odell says.

    The Russian gas group Gazprom is keen to expand its sphere of influence outside its home country and told the Guardian earlier this year it would like to buy a British energy company.

    The treatment by Russian officials of Shell at Sakhalin-2 and BP on the Siberian Kovykta field has also been interpreted as the Kremlin manoeuvring in the energy sector for political ends.

    Alexander Ryazanov, chief executive of Gazprom's oil arm Gazprom Neft, said that the unit's healthy cashflow and help from its parent would make it easy to find up to $25bn (£13.3bn) to take a 50% stake in the joint venture, TNK-BP.

    The Chinese - and the Indians - meanwhile have been using state-owned companies to expand abroad to secure supplies for their energy-hungry industries.

    Professor Odell foresees a return to state-owned companies in the west too, along the lines of Norway's Statoil and Austria's OMV which have also been expanding fast.

    He predicts a "new British National Oil Corporation, a revived Petro-Canada and a deprivatised Total in France and Belgium". The publicly quoted companies such as Shell and BP have not helped their own plight in the eyes of those countries with expanding needs for oil, says Professor Odell, a Briton who currently works at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

    He believes western oil companies have endangered their own survival by skimping on investment and using their cash for share buybacks and "extortionate" executive remuneration packages.

    Professor Odell is considered to be quite conservative but he is a sceptic about the world running out of oil fast. "The ultimate physical sufficiency of global oil and gas resources is not in doubt so that one can ignore the present-day Jeremiahs," he told Opec ministers.

    He believes the need for better order in global markets will eventually lead to the creation of a United Nations International Energy Organisation which will include input from Opec and others.



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    Odds n Ends


    Brazil's Gol Airlines plane missing near Amazon, 155 missing

    AFP
    Sat Sep 30, 2006

    BRASILIA - Rescue teams searched for a Brazilian GOL airline Boeing 737-800 with 155 people aboard that went missing during a flight from the Amazon jungle to Brasilia.

    Authorities were trying to establish whether the airliner had collided with a Legacy executive jet whose pilot made an emergency landing Friday in Cachimbo, near the area of northern Brazil where the Boeing was reported missing.
    "At this moment, we don't have any information that would indicate that the plane has either crashed or made an emergency landing," Jose Gomes Ferreira, a spokesman for Brazil's Aeronautical Command told Globo television Saturday.

    Earlier, Defense Minister Waldir Pires said the Legacy was seriously damaged in what appeared to be a collision. "The collision was, presumably, with the GOL Boeing," he told Bandeirantes television.

    But the National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) said there was no evidence to support that "hypothesis."

    "It is not possible to state that there is a link between the incident that forced the crew (of the Legacy) to make an emergency landing at the Cachimbo airport and the disappearance of the GOL aircraft," ANAC said.

    Dozens of anxious relatives and friends of those missing gathered at the airports of Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and Manaos seeking information about their loved ones.

    The Boeing was reported missing Friday in a densely forested area 200 kilometers south of Cochimbo.

    "Landing there would be a high-risk operation, but amazing things can happen in aviation, so we keep hoping," said Jose Carlos Pereira, president of the Infraero company that runs Brazilian airports.

    Officials said there were 149 passengers and six crew members aboard the GOL airliner.

    Two Radiobras journalists, three aviation officials and several staffers of the Aeronautics Ministry were among the passengers, according to ANAC.

    As airborne search parties searched for the missing jetliner during the night, dozens of relatives of the missing passengers and crew rushed to Brasilia's airport hoping to get information about the fate of their loved ones.

    Civil aviation authorities said Flight 1907 of the GOL discount carrier was reported missing several hours after leaving the Amazonian city of Manaus on Friday, on a flight headed to Brasilia and then on to Rio de Janeiro.

    Brazilian Air Force planes and helicopters headed to the crash area, using infrared equipment to look for signs of the missing jetliner, searchers waited for daylight to conduct a visual search.

    Local hospitals were put on full alert.

    Created in 2001, GOL is Brazil's leading discount carrier. Its 53 planes service some 50 domestic destinations as well as neighboring Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.

    Brazil's deadliest air accident occurred in June 1982, when 137 people were killed as a Boeing 727 of the VASP airlines crashed against a hillside as it prepared to land in the northeastern city of Fortaleza in June 1982.

    The occupants of the Legacy were unharmed after the emergency landing, according to Embraer, the aircraft's Brazilian manufacturer. Local media said the plane was to be delivered to a US client.



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    Lula leads Brazilian presidential race

    www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-02 10:54:32

    BRASILIA, Oct. 1 (Xinhua) -- Brazil's incumbent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva led Sunday's race but still fell short of the simple majority needed for his outright win in a single round of vote, partial results showed.
    With almost 90 percent of the ballots counted, Lula garnered 49.28 percent of the votes, while his opponent, former Sao Paulo Governor Geraldo Alckmin, got 40.95 percent.

    Vote counting is delayed in Sao Paulo, Brazil's most populous state, where polls indicated that Alckmin led the presidential race. That means it is still unclear whether Lula will be re-elected in the first round.

    Lula has to win more than 50 percent of the votes to win outright on Sunday and avoid going into a runoff on Oct. 31.

    The polls opened on Sunday for some 126 million eligible voters to elect a president, 513 federal representatives, 27 senators, 27 state governors and 1,059 state deputies.

    Lula, 60, had enjoyed a comfortable lead in previous opinion polls, but his support dropped in the last days of campaigning amid public anger over a scandal involving members of his party.

    A former trade union leader, Lula is highly popular among millions of impoverished Brazilians, largely thanks to his administration's emphasis on social programs aimed at narrowing the country's enormous income gap.

    Alckmin, a 53-year-old physician, is favored by the business community and wins support from middle class Brazilians who are outraged by a series corruption scandal involving close aides of Lula.

    Alckmin officially announced his presidential candidacy in March 2006, and secured a second place in previous opinion polls. He was attempting to gather the necessary votes to force a run-off with Lula.



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    Scientists find more efficient cloning method

    By Maggie Fox
    Reuters
    Sun Oct 1, 2006

    WASHINGTON - U.S. researchers said on Sunday they had found a more efficient way to clone mice, and said their experiment solved a basic question about cloning science -- whether it truly is possible to clone animals from mature cells.
    Dolly the sheep made headlines around the world in 1997 because she was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell -- a cell taken from a grown animal. Animals had been cloned using cells from fetuses and embryos, but not grown animals.

    But some scientists argued that truly mature tissue is too old to be re-generated, and that Dolly and the hundreds of cloned cattle, pigs and other creatures that followed here were in fact created using stem cells or stem-like cells by accident.

    These master cells of the body retain an ability to form various tissues, and they are not always easy to pick out from the cells around them.

    Dr. Jerry Yang of the University of Connecticut noted that cloning is still very difficult to do. Only about 2 or 3 out of 100 tries generally works.

    "This was seen as circumstantial evidence that it was stem-like cells that succeeded in cloning," Yang said in a telephone interview.

    "The question is important because the success rate for reproductive cloning is still quite low."

    Yang, Dr. Tao Cheng, of the University of Pittsburgh, and colleagues cloned mice using fully differentiated, or mature, white blood cells called granulocytes.

    Writing in the November issue of Nature Genetics, they said they used somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus from a cell of the animal to be cloned is injected into an egg whose nucleus has been removed.

    This process works very poorly in mice and usually a two-step procedure is needed -- first growing tiny embryos, then removing their embryonic stem cells to generate mouse pups.

    Yang's team tried cloning using the blood cells at various levels of development -- from the stem cells stage through full maturity, called full differentiation.

    "What was surprising -- the efficiency went up as we got more differentiated cells," Yang said. "That was very, very surprising, very shocking to us."

    Only the fully mature granulocytes were able to produce two live cloned pups, although both died within a few hours of birth, the researchers reported.

    "Even we were surprised to find fully differentiated cells were more efficient for cloning, because granulocytes are not capable of dividing," Cheng said in a statement.

    "In fact, we repeated our experiments six times just to be sure. Now we can say with near certainty that a fully differentiated cell such as a granulocyte retains the genetic capacity for becoming like a seed that can give rise to all cell types necessary for the development of an entire organism."

    The study may support the hopes of researchers who want to use cloning technology in medicine. Supporters of so-called therapeutic cloning want to some day be able to take a single cell from a patient, perhaps a skin cell, and use it to generate tailor-made tissue or organ transplants.

    To do so, fully mature cells must maintain the ability to regress in this way and be reprogrammed.



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