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Editorial: Misogyny and fascism
Monday, October 23, 2006
Dave Neiwert
Orcinus
- All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. ... What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours. ... Women are by nature instruments of Satan -- they are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation.
-- Malleus maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), published by Catholic inquisition authorities in 1485-86
- The Freikorpsmen hate women, specifically women's bodies and sexuality. It would not be going too far to say that their perpetual war was undertaken to escape women; even the motherly battlefront nurse is a threatening intrusion in the unisexual world of war. This hatred -- or dread -- of women cannot be explained with Freud's all-purpose Oedipal triangulation (fear that heterosexual desire will lead to punishment by the father, homosexual yearnings for the father, or some such permutation of the dramatic possibilities). The dread arises in the pre-Oedipal struggle of the fledgling self, before there is even an ego to sort out the objects of desire and the odds of getting them: It is a dread, ultimately, of dissolution -- of being swallowed, engulfed, annihilated. Women's bodies are the holes, swamps, pits of muck that can engulf.
--Barbara Ehrenreich, from the foreword to Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies
Where are they coming from, these violent men? The right-wing terrorists like David McMenemy. The onslaught of damaged males inflicting violence on women in dramatic and public ways. It all seems so new, so sudden. And yet so familiar.
What is most striking about this seeming trend is how abstract the women victims are for so many of the perpetrators. Both of the deranged school shooters in Pennsylvania and Colorado simply picked the schools at random, and selected girls as their victims retributively, for supposed harm done to them in the past by other females. All of them indicated a long-sweltering rage at women.
Sara wonders, reasonably, if this is something new. It isn't. In many regards, this kind of angry outpouring by would-be controlling males seems new because we haven't seen it, on a large scale, for many years. But this kind of murderous hate in fact has a long and colorful history -- ranging from the Holy Roman Empire to the Nazis.
What has changed are the conditions and the context in which it is happening. Those in turn can give us some ideas how best to confront it.
Western-style misogyny probably has its roots in a Greek/Roman culture that gave women little power, political or otherwise, despite including women in its pantheon of gods. One could also point to the deep psychological roots in the urge to civilize, particularly in the view of nature as wild, harmful, something to be repressed and tamed; as women became identified with nature, the desire to control them took root as well.
But the particular psychological component that creates the twist of murderous misogyny comes from Dark-Age Christianity: the notion of humankind -- and indeed, all of nature --as innately sinful. Because the chief burden for that sin fell on women who already had no power.
As David Stannard, in his study of the North American Native genocide American Holocaust, describes in examining the genocide's roots:
- The idea is hardly a Christian invention, then, that immoderate enjoyment of the pleasures of the flesh belongs to the world of the brute, and that abstinence, modesty, strictness and sobriety are to be treasured above all else. Still, it is understandable why subsequent European thought would regard Greece and Rome as realms of carnal indulgence, since subsequent European thought was dominnated by Christian ideology. And as the world of the Christian fathers became the world of the Church Triumphant, while fluid and contested mythologies hardened into dogmatic theology, certain fundamental characteristics of Christianity, often derived from the teachings of Paul, came to express themselves in fanatical form. Not the least of these was the coming to dominance of an Augustinian notion of sex as sin (and sin as sexual) along with a larger sense, as Elaine Pagels puts it, that all of humanity was hopelessly "sick, suffering, and helpless." As late antiquity in Europe began falling under the moral control of Christians there occurred what historian Jacques le Goff has called la deroute du corporal -- "the rout of the body." Not only was human flesh thenceforward to be regarded as corrupt, but so was the very nature of humankind and, indeed, so was nature itself; so corrupt, in fact, that only a rigid authoritarianism could be trusted to govern men and women who, since the fall of Adam and Eve, had been permanently poisoned with an inability to govern themselves in a fashion acceptable to God.
... The Christian leader ... stood apart from all others by making a public statement that in fact focused enormous attention on sexuality. Indeed, "sexuality became a highly charged symbolic marker" exactly because its dramatic removal as a central activity of life allowed the self-proclaimed saintly individual to present himself as "the ideal of the single-hearted person" -- the person whose heart belonged only to God.
Of course, such fanatically aggressive opposition to sex can only occur among people who are fanatically obsessed with sex, and nowhere was this more ostentatiously evident than in the lives of the early Christian hermits ...
What was noteworthy about this obsession was the ease with which the obsessed blamed the objects of their obsession for the behavior that followed. And though this fanaticism waxed and waned over the subsequent centuries, it remained largely a constant throughout the history of feudal and theocratic European rule.
There was particularly an upsurge of lethal misogyny in the 15th century, embodied in the series of witch hunts that ran rampant for extended periods across the European landscape, claiming thousands of victims. The late Ioan P. Couliano noted that behind the shift in that period to traditional Christian denial of the body and things sexual, there lay the persistent ideology that:
- woman is the blind instrument for the seduction of nature, the symbol of temptation, sin, and evil. Beisdes her face, the principal baits of her allure are the signs of her fertility, hips and breasts. The face, alas, must stay exposed, but it is possible for it to wear a rigid and manly expression. The neck can be enveloped in a high lace collar. As to the bosom, the treatment dealt is closely resembles the traditional deformation of the feet of [Chinese] women, being no less painful and unhealthy ... Natural femininity, overflowing, voluptuous, and sinful is categorized as unlawful. Henceforth only witches will dare to have wide hips, prominent breasts, conspicuous buttocks, long hair.
Eventually the witch hunts subsided in Europe, though they continued to enjoy something of an extended half-life in America. And, as with most historical cycles, murderous misogyny largely subsided until the emergence, in the early 20th century, of fascism, particularly in Europe (though America had its own home-bred brand of fascism, it largely was remaindered to the fringes in the aftermath of the Second World War).
Hitler and Mussolini both were ardent in their sexism: "The Nazi Revolution will be an entirely male event" was one of Hitler's most repeated phrases. Hitler's views on women, in fact, were a core component of the Nazis' mass psychological appeal, and were widespread throughout fascist movements. What was remarkable, perhaps, about the Nazis was the open glee with which they murdered women; they retained the ancient Catholic hatred of female putrefication, but freed from whatever constraints might have existed in the context of a church, they became relentlessly violent.
The German scholar Klaus Theweleit a few years ago examined the literature created in the post-World War I Weimar Germany by the paramilitary Nazis called the Freikorpsmen, and published his findings in a two-volume work titled Male Fantasies.
Theweleit found that, essentially, the fascist psychodrama entailed a wholesale unleashing of male desire, including incest, rape and murder. The fascist mindset entailed reveling in control over the bodies of others, embodied perhaps in their embrace of torture. And at the bloody beating heart of it all was a pathological fear of women.
The Nazis, who envisioned themselves as forging a revolutionary future, had no real place for women except in a secondary role -- as mothers and helpful supportmates. To this extent, their ideal Nazi woman was described thus:
- Therefore a woman belongs at the side of a man not just as a person who brings children into this world, not just as an adornment to delight the eye, not just as a cook and a cleaner. Instead woman has the holy duty to be a life companion, which means being a comrade who pursues her vocation as woman with clarity of vision and spiritual warmth.
-- Paula Siber, "The New German Woman," 1933, from Fascism [1995, Oxford University Press], edited by Roger Griffin
Theweleit describes the resulting pathology thus:
- Men themselves were now split into a (female) interior and a (male) exterior -- the body armor. And as we know, the interior and exterior were mortal enemies. ... What fascism promised men was the reintegration of their hostile components under tolerable conditions, dominance of the hostile "female" element within themselves. ...
As a matter of course, fascism excluded women from the public arena and the realms of male production. But fascism added a further oppression to the oppression of women: When a fascist male went into combat against erotic, "flowing," unsubjugated women, he was also fighting his own unconscious, his own desiring-production. This is clear from the fact that whereas in World War I, the Hohenzollern women had posed as nurses, Hitler concealed his "beloved" from the public. Not only was she useless for the rituals that maintained Hitler's rule, she would have gotten in the way.
Indeed, this is about how Hitler himself spoke regarding women:
- Man's universe is vast compared to that of a woman. Man is taken up with his ideas, his preoccupations. It's only incidental if he devotes his thoughts to a woman. Woman's universe, on the other hand, is man. She sees nothing else, so to speak, and that is why she's capable of loving so deeply.
-- Adolf Hitler, Hitler's Secret Conversations, pp. 344-345.
In his 1989 book Our Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values -- and Our Own, Norwegian scholar Harald Ofstad sums it up:
- The Nazi view of sex roles is based on conventional notions taken to extremes. Sexuality has no intrinsic value; it is only a means of unleashing the power of men and the strength of the nation. Women are instruments.
A real man can never have any deep emotional contact with a woman. Her world is totally at odds with his. Real men can only have meaningful contact with other men, e.g., in such organizations as the SS. There they share the bonds of companionship and loyalty to their leader.
As Ehrenreich, in the foreword to Male Fantasies, explained, the Nazi compartmentalized the women of his world. To fall outside the "acceptable" role for women in Nazi society meant that one was an Enemy. And they reserved some of their most venomous hatred for such women:
- In the Freikorpsman's life, there are three kinds of women: those who are absent, such as the wives and fiancees left behind, and generally unnamed and unnoted in the Freikorpsmen's most intimate diaries; the women who appear in the imagination and on the literal battlefront as "white nurses," chaste, upper-class German women; and finally, those who are his class enemies -- the "Red women" whom he faces in angry mobs and sometimes even in single combat.
Theweleit later describes this latter class in more detail:
- The description of the proletarian woman as monster, as a beast that unfortunately cannot be dealt with merely by "planting a fist" in its "ugly puss," hardly derives from the actual behavior of women in situations such as those described above ... Rather, it can be traced to an attempt to construct a fantastic being who swears, shrieks, spits, scratches, farts, bites, pounces, tears to shreds; who is slovenly, wind-whipped, hissing-red, indecent; who whores around, slaps its naked thighs, and can't get enough of laughing at these men. ... [p. 67]
Women who don't conform to any of the "good woman" images are automatically seen as prostitutes, as the vehicles of "urges." They are evil and out to castrate, and they are treated accordingly. The men are soldiers. Fighting is their life, and they aren't about to wait until that monstrous thing happens to them. They take the offensive before these women can put their horrible plans into practice. [p. 171]
Hitler made an explicit link between "liberal" feminist and suffrage movements -- which even then were working to undermine the traditional disempowerment of women -- and Jews shortly after obtaining the chancellorhood in 1933. The next year he denounced the so-called New Woman as the "invention of Jewish intellectuals." He also urged German women to reject as unnatural the "overlapping of the spheres of activity of the sexes" as embodied in "Jewish intellectualism."
Hitler was fond of complaining about "feminized" Christianity and consistently prescribed a vision of Christ as "a fighter" and of the faith as "manly" and "hard." The Nazis' Christian wing, the Deutsche Christen, likewise railed against how "feminized" the church had become, and argued for a "virile" vision of the faith.
After Hitler's defeat, this pathology again slithered to the fringes. Mostly you could find complaints about "feminized" Christianity from folks like Identity pastor Pete Peters and Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler. The former, in fact, was fond of describing the source of the "feminization" thus:
- The Jewish leaders believe they already control America. Recently, one of them stated publicly: "We have castrated Gentile society, through fear and intimidation. It's manhood exists only in combination with a feminine outward appearance. Being so neutered, the populace has become docile and easy to rule. As all geldings are by nature, their thoughts are not concerned with the future, or their posterity, BUT ONLY WITH THE PRESENT and the next meal." What a perfect "word picture of modern American society. It is the attitude of Christians, who don't want to be involved, and allow Jews, to control the school and often the church. We MUST break these fatal bonds, if we are to remain free.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, however, a lot of this talk -- as well as the vision of the "warrior Jesus" -- has returned with some intensity to the mainstream, though there had already been some seepage from the far right in the previous decade. Much of it, in fact, is closely associated with the increasing prevalence of pseudo-fascist thought as part of our political discourse. As we've well established by now, any American fascism is going to be wrapped in a flag and thumping on a Bible, extolling the virtues of "tradition" that includes sex and gender roles. And that's what we're getting.
It cannot be a mere coincidence, in fact, that while this is occurring, we're seeing more psychotic murders by controlling males whose chief mission seems to be to bring women under control and to avenge the damage done to their own twisted souls.
Stan Goff at Truthdig has been paying attention to the fascist undertow, and he notes:
- The rise of fascistic masculinity prefigures systemic fascism, often in the form of vigilantism. Gun culture is steeped in vigilantism, which is steeped in military lore. Guns in this milieu transcend their practical uses and take on a powerful symbolic significance.
In the last decade, the National Rifle Association (NRA), which has always had close ties with the military, has been taken over from what are considered within the organization as "moderates," that is, those whose message emphasizes peaceful, law-abiding gun use, like hunting (which is not peaceful for the game animals, but that's another issue).
During my service with 3rd Special Forces Group in Haiti in 1994, members of the SFU initiated back-channel communications in support of the right-wing death squad network, FRAPH.
Two of the favored preoccupations of [Steve] Barry, the SFU, Soldier of Fortune, and the NRA were Ruby Ridge, where Vicki Harris, the wife of an ex-Special Forces white supremacist (Randy Weaver), was killed by an FBI sniper with her baby in her arms, and the outrage at Waco against the Branch Davidians.
... My critique of gun culture is a critique of those sectors for which guns have been combined with imaginary enemies and taken on a deeply symbolic value as tokens of a violent, reactionary masculinity that fantasizes about armed conflict as a means to actualize its paranoid male sexual identity.
The problem is that this reaction is far from ab-normal.
There is a kind of interlocking directorate between white nationalists, gun culture, right-wing politicians, mercenary culture (like Soldier of Fortune), vigilante and militia movements, and elements within both Special Forces and-now-the privatized mercenary forces. It is hyper-masculine, racialist, militaristic and networked.
If one simply pays attention to cultural production in the United States, especially film and video games, it is fairly easy to see that the very memes that are the cells within the body of white nationalist militarism are ubiquitous within our general cultural norms. The film genre that most closely corresponds to a fascist mind-set is the male revenge fantasy, wherein after some offense is given that signifies the breakdown of order (usually resulting in the death or mortal imperilment of idealized wives or children) in which Enlightenment social conventions prove inadequate, and the release of irrational male violence is required to set the world straight again. Any reader can list these fantasies without a cue. It is one of the most common film genres in American society.
Arthur Silber (via Avedon at Eschaton) explores this point even further:
- One of the most fascinating parts of Goff's discussion is his focus on the sexual and gender part of this equation: how surpassingly and bloodily violent "masculinity" is glorified and romanticized, in stark and negative contrast to a "weak," "vacillating," and ultimately useless "femininity." To see the popularized version of the "general cultural norms" that Goff mentions, you need only watch the hugely popular television series 24. Courtesy of a friend, I recently watched all of season four. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a more repellent embodiment of vicious, revenge-driven, murderous male fantasies, replete with innumerable bloody deaths and even the noxious idea that torture "works." That last idea is indisputably false, but even Hillary Clinton now repeats the lies that inflict monstrous pain, and that ultimately kill. So much for "opposition" to the rising tide of barbarism. And series like 24 are the manure out of which grows our fascist future.
Much of the outrage directed at 24 (such that can be found) focuses on the regular use of torture, and on the savage notion that torture is "effective" (and that "they deserve it," too, of course). But keeping Goff's broader analysis in mind, it is crucial to appreciate the more complex system that 24 and similar propaganda glorifies, including most especially the system of myths upon which such "entertainment" relies. Tens of millions of Americans are being conditioned every day to view an incomprehensibly violent, utterly arbitrary militarized domestic state as representing "virtue," and indeed a necessary virtue: supposedly necessary to protect us from the enemy, who is now to be found everywhere. Perhaps it's your next-door neighbor. That day, too, may not be all that far away.
Joan Burbick's new book, Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy describes in close-up detail how fear and suspicion of women -- and an unstated desire to inflict violence on them -- is embedded in the gun-toting culture of the American far right. It begins when she's forced to leave a gun show because she's carrying a camera:
- Before I left, I asked the organizer why they enforced rules against cameras. What was the problem? Was it a distrust of government? Did they think I worked for the ATF, the IRS, or the FBI? Was it anger against gun-control groups? Did they think I worked for Sarah Brady's handgun organization, or for Cease Fire, a Seattle-based gun violence prevention group? Maybe it was about hunting and animal rights? Or worse, I could be a PETA worker.
There was a long list of possible reasons for the no-camera policy.
The organizer looked at me hard when I asked the question. Why no cameras? He responded with one word: "Alimony." "What?" I asked. Had I heard right?
"Alimony?"
"Yes, alimony." He then explained that the men inside the gun show didn't want their pictures showing up in newspapers where their ex-wives might see them.
I asked him more questions, but he wasn't in a talking mood. It was about alimony, period. I'd have to leave it at that.
Maybe the organizer thought some ex-wife had hired me to track down her husband and prove that he was handing over for a new hunting rifle what should be her cash. Maybe the organizer actually thought that ex-wives scanned the local papers looking for photos of their former husbands to see if they could catch them spending what was legally theirs.
As someone who's attended a number of gun shows over the years, I'm pretty sure that the main reason no cameras are allowed in gun shows is because illegal transactions -- including the sale of guns to felons -- go on all the time there, often under the table or surreptitiously. And random photos taken can place people there who aren't supposed to be there. Neither sellers nor buyers want to have their pictures taken. And I'm sure no gun-show organizer worth his salt would ever actually admit that, especially not to someone who might be writing about it.
Yet it's telling that the first excuse that the organizer could offer was in an area of common animus: it's all about those ex-wives. Burbick drills down further into the meaning of this animus:
- At later gun shows, I started to pay more attention. Were ex-wives and their demands a threat to some guys at the gun shows? I frequently saw books for sale at the shows such as The Predatory Female by Rev. Lawrence Shannon, whose field guide to dating includes a set of tactics to undermine the supposed Gestapo power of women who rule the divorce and child-custody judicial system. In a radio interview, Shannon said that "victims of the predatory female are strewn all over the nation, writing alimony checks, recovering from gunshot wounds, treating cat scratches, trying to see their children, paying attorney's fees, picking through the detritus of their lives, and struggling to recover from ruined years." The Predatory Female is a collection of warnings about women who prey on the feelings and bank accounts of unsuspecting men. Female predators have their eyes on one thing alone -- money. They marry and divorce to get alimony. They use emotions of love, trust, and care to undermine the sacred contract of marriage. They are the new scourges of secular life, hunting down unsuspecting men to get bucks and tear out their hearts.
Wives were threats. Girlfriends were threats. Women who talked too much were threats. And women who held public office and wouldn't shut up were the scourge of the land. I have also picked up bumper stickers at gun shows that said: I JUST GOT A GUN FOR MY WIFE. IT'S THE BEST TRADE I EVER MADE. Or, handouts detailing the "Top 10 Reasons Handguns Are Better than Women," ending with the number-one reason, "You can buy a silencer for a handgun." I had also seen some pretty vicious materials on Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno at local shows in the '90s. A new fear floated above some of the gun exhibits: judges, lawyers, and voters were giving women too much power, and the women were using that power to take guns away from their husbands, their boyfriends, and their constituents. A gun-grabber lurked in the heart of the liberated woman.
Maybe the no-camera rule was about alimony. In this latest male fantasy about the war between the sexes, I could have been hired by a female predator to shoot pictures at a gun show for a ruthless ex- or estranged wife. I was just part of a new generation of bottom-feeders out to get men, one of the vast army of women intent on misandry, a new word invented to capture this hatred of men by women.
No new words are really needed here, because what we're facing is something very old and familiar, dressed in the well-wrapped flag common to Limbaughesque jingoes, but underneath sporting the spiffy black leather of the fascist set. And because of that, there can be no compromising with it.
Ultimately, this kind of burgeoning pathology comes down to individuals. This is the deeply personal aspect of fascism, which can only exist by tapping into individual psychopathologies that are shared collectively. You can harbor a hatred of women in modern society and find all kinds of support for it, but the germ itself begins much earlier, and springs from ideas and impulses that are buried deep in our psychological hard wiring. Effectively confronting it means overcoming that wiring.
Recognize, first, where it originates: In the twisted, sad view of humanity as innately evil and sick. In the strange mentality that perceives nature -- God's creation itself -- as sinful. In the demented, pathological view of women as lesser humans. These are all ideas we often associate now with our barbaric past, but the truth is that they live on in innumerable ways, especially embedded as they are in popular culture. Why do you think, after all, that a two-hour display of sadism such as The Passion of the Christ could be such an immense crowd-pleaser? Why would a show like 24 draw such immense ratings? Why would slasher films constitute their own moneymaking genre?
The old Catholic misogyny has devolved in our times to the proto-fascist's murderous style of misogyny. Only in the 21st century, instead of being organized, it's just routinely celebrated, as it has been lately in so many American thrillers and horror films. Sure, the psychopaths in them are all scary. But they all have a psychosexual hatred of women. The concept of women as the cause of their psychopathism is embedded in all these entertainments. But when these entertainments are played as mainstream, then the fascist pathology they are about slips into the cultural bloodstream, where it joins, echoes, and nurtures the latent fascism already there, as well as that coming from other sources. Eventually, it announces itself in a thousand atrocities, large and small.
In the end, we talking about confronting a "traditionalism" that is no different from other fine "traditions" long since ended: slavery, torture, cannibalism. Its associated tradition, after all, is white supremacy, which always was about white male supremacy anyway. These are traditions that we have overthrown for good reason.
I don't think we can talk to people who have bought into this mindset in anything like a compromising fashion. That's not to say we can't talk to them. But if we want to deal effectively with this trend, we're going to have to make our own values crystal clear and unremorseful. Whether we do it in a masculine or feminine manner is immaterial. What matters is that we do it unmistakably.
The irrationalism that misogyny embodies, buried deep in our systems, simply can't be dealt with gently. The kind of men -- and women -- who will fall for the new misogyny aren't going to be impressed with compromises and halfway measures. The only thing they understand is "my way or the highway." So those are the options they should be given.
After all, standing up to woman-haters, in the end, means standing up for human values. Fascists don't just hate women.
Burbick notes this herself in a later interview:
- I have been to only one gun show so far that did not display and sell hate materials, either newspapers, books or pamphlets and that was a gun show at the Coeur d'Alene Casino on the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation in Worley, Idaho. But otherwise, every gun show I've attended sold and distributed hate and racist material. Most gun shows I've gone to have book exhibits and some of them are quite extensive.
In addition you can buy and various posters, political bumper stickers, signs you can put up in your yard and in your windows. And you will find the most racist, anti-Semitic, and sexist material. I cringe at some of these. I've walked around and thought, my God, this is over the top.
Gun organizers have told me they'd stop these book exhibits. If they'd stop these book exhibits, then why are these materials still there? I think there is a hate language that a lot of people express with guns.
I've met a number of the kind of men Burbick writes about at gun shows. They're often friendly enough, to a guy anyway, but inevitably they all have a ... thing ... about women. Someone cut their heart out and fed it to the cat, and they've spent the rest of their lives blaming every woman on the planet for it. They love that Led Zep line: "Soul of a woman was created below." Women frighten them because they threaten them. But the threat is largely a figment of their imaginations. And it becomes an excuse, a predicate, for a whole panoply of other hatreds.
I don't have any idea how to deal with this on an organizational scale. All I know about is dealing with it on the personal scale, which is where I think any effective change is going to occur.
So, if it comes up -- and often it doesn't -- I tell people like this that I just don't see my fellow humans as innately bad or sinful or evil or what have you. I think people are innately good and have to learn how not to be, though there is no shortage of people out there teaching them just that. I don't believe we need authoritarian rule to keep us in line. I believe nature is God's creation itself, not something sinful or dirty or wild and in need of taming.
And most of all, I don't think people's intrinsic value as human beings is up to us to judge. I certainly don't think that value is a product of their skin color or religion or sexual preference -- or their sex.
And yes, it's true: I like women. Always have. Always will. Something wrong with that?
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Editorial: The Lancet Study...
Riverbend
Baghdad Burning
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
This has been the longest time I have been away from blogging. There were several reasons for my disappearance the major one being the fact that every time I felt the urge to write about Iraq, about the situation, I'd be filled with a certain hopelessness that can't be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also.
It's very difficult at this point to connect to the internet and try to read the articles written by so-called specialists and analysts and politicians. They write about and discuss Iraq as I might write about the Ivory Coast or Cambodia- with a detachment and lack of sentiment that- I suppose- is meant to be impartial. Hearing American politicians is even worse. They fall between idiots like Bush- constantly and totally in denial, and opportunists who want to use the war and ensuing chaos to promote themselves.
The latest horror is the study published in the Lancet Journal concluding that over 600,000 Iraqis have been killed since the war. Reading about it left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it sounded like a reasonable figure. It wasn't at all surprising. On the other hand, I so wanted it to be wrong. But... who to believe? Who to believe....? American politicians... or highly reputable scientists using a reliable scientific survey technique?
The responses were typical- war supporters said the number was nonsense because, of course, who would want to admit that an action they so heartily supported led to the deaths of 600,000 people (even if they were just crazy Iraqis...)? Admitting a number like that would be the equivalent of admitting they had endorsed, say, a tsunami, or an earthquake with a magnitude of 9 on the Richter scale, or the occupation of a developing country by a ruthless superpower... oh wait- that one actually happened. Is the number really that preposterous? Thousands of Iraqis are dying every month- that is undeniable. And yes, they are dying as a direct result of the war and occupation (very few of them are actually dying of bliss, as war-supporters and Puppets would have you believe).
For American politicians and military personnel, playing dumb and talking about numbers of bodies in morgues and official statistics, etc, seems to be the latest tactic. But as any Iraqi knows, not every death is being reported. As for getting reliable numbers from the Ministry of Health or any other official Iraqi institution, that's about as probable as getting a coherent, grammatically correct sentence from George Bush- especially after the ministry was banned from giving out correct mortality numbers. So far, the only Iraqis I know pretending this number is outrageous are either out-of-touch Iraqis abroad who supported the war, or Iraqis inside of the country who are directly benefiting from the occupation ($) and likely living in the Green Zone.
The chaos and lack of proper facilities is resulting in people being buried without a trip to the morgue or the hospital. During American military attacks on cities like Samarra and Fallujah, victims were buried in their gardens or in mass graves in football fields. Or has that been forgotten already?
We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons - with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?
There are Iraqi women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins once again.
Let's pretend the 600,000+ number is all wrong and that the minimum is the correct number: nearly 400,000. Is that better? Prior to the war, the Bush administration kept claiming that Saddam killed 300,000 Iraqis over 24 years. After this latest report published in The Lancet, 300,000 is looking quite modest and tame. Congratulations Bush et al.
Everyone knows the 'official numbers' about Iraqi deaths as a direct result of the war and occupation are far less than reality (yes- even you war hawks know this, in your minuscule heart of hearts). This latest report is probably closer to the truth than anything that's been published yet. And what about American military deaths? When will someone do a study on the actual number of those? If the Bush administration is lying so vehemently about the number of dead Iraqis, one can only imagine the extent of lying about dead Americans...
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Editorial: The limits of liberty: We're all suspects now
By Henry Porter
The Independent
10/19/06
Identity cards. Number-plate surveillance. CCTV. Control orders. The list of ways in which the Government has sought to manipulate and define the limits of our liberty grows ever longer. Ten years ago, the novelist and polemicist Henry Porter would have felt silly speaking out about human rights in Britain. But that was before the most fundamental assault on personal freedom ever undertaken. Now, he argues, it's time we woke up to reality.
On new year's day 1990, three days after becoming president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel looked his people in the eye and spoke to them as no one had done before. It is difficult to read his words without feeling the vibration of history of both the liberation and the horrors of the regime that had just expired, leaving the Czech people blinking in the cold sunlight of that extraordinary winter.
This is what he said. "The previous regime, armed with its arrogance and intolerant ideology, reduced man to a force of production. It reduced gifted and autonomous people to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, stinking machine whose real meaning was not clear to anyone. It could do no more but slowly and inexorably wear itself out, and all the nuts and bolts too."
That perfectly defines the true tyranny, where the state takes all liberty and bends each individual will to its own purpose. And here is the interesting thing that Havel put his finger on: no matter how brutal or ruthless the regime, the act of depriving people of their freedom starts the stopwatch on that regime's inevitable demise. What he was saying was that in modern times a state can only thrive in the fullest sense when individuals are accorded maximum freedom.
I agree. Individual liberty is not just the precondition for civilisation, not just morally right, not just the only way people can reach their full potential, live responsibly and have fun; it is also a necessity for the health of government. Ten years ago I would have felt silly speaking about liberty and rights in Britain with the very real concern that I have today. But I am worried. And it's not just me. Last month Le Monde asked "Is Democracy Dying in the West?". In the spring of this year Lord Steyn, the distinguished former law lord, made a speech despairing at this Government's neglect for the Rule of Law, which was followed by Baroness (Helena) Kennedy's alarm call in the James Cameron Lecture.
The inescapable fact is that we have a Prime Minister who repeatedly makes the point that civil liberties arguments are not so much wrong as made for another age [my italics]. We have a Government that has ignored the Rule of Law, reduced rights and has steadily moved to increase the centralised power of the state at the expense of the individual.
So I don't feel quite as silly or as alarmist as I might.
The relationship between the state and individual is really at the heart of any discussion about democracy and rights. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union it was the state's mission not just to prevent people from expressing themselves, from moving about freely and unobserved, from pursuing their chosen careers and acting upon their religious and political convictions, but to stop them from thinking freely. It needed to occupy people's thoughts - to take up a kind of permanent residency in the mind of the average citizen. And as the many psychological studies published in the Nineties make clear, this led to psychic disrepair on a massive scale - paranoia, clinical depression, chronic internalised anger and learned helplessness.
We fell morally ill, Havel said in that speech, because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us represented only psychological peculiarities.
Why am I harping on about communism? It died and was buried 17 years ago, at least in Europe and Russia. We're into another century. We've got Google and speed-dating and globalisation and melting ice caps and reality TV and al-Qa'ida and al-Jazeera and Al Gore. We've moved on.
As a character in Alan Bennett's The History Boys says, there is no period more remote in history than the recent past. Indeed, but we need to remember that recent past a little more than we do. For one thing, our knowledge of what existed on the other side of the Iron Curtain meant we valued and looked after our own freedoms much more than we do today.
It is perhaps the absence of an obvious confrontation between freedom and tyranny that allows Tony Blair to say that civil liberties arguments are made for another age. I profoundly disagree with this. It is dangerous arrogance to say that the past has nothing to teach us and that all the problems we face now are unique to our time.
During his speech to the Labour Party conference, Tony Blair said: "I don't want to live in a police state, or a Big Brother society or put any of our essential freedoms in jeopardy. But because our idea of liberty is not keeping pace with change in reality, those freedoms are in jeopardy."
What in heaven's name did he mean by that? Liberty is liberty. You can't update it. You can't divide it. You are either free, or you're not. A society is either just, or it isn't. People have rights or they don't. The rule of law is upheld, or it isn't.
But Blair believes there is nothing that can't be modernised, updated, pared down or streamlined to keep pace with change. And liberty is no exception to the modernising fury which serves as New Labour's only ideological foundation. What the Prime Minister is saying in this cute little Orwellian paradox is that in the particular circumstances of the war on terror and the rash of crime and anti-social behaviour, we must give up freedom to be free.
What an odd idea! Who is to decide which freedoms are essential and which can be sacrificed to make us secure? Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Lord Falconer or the former Stalinist and now Home Secretary John Reid?
"Those who would give up essential liberty," observed Benjamin Franklin, "to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither freedom or safety." That's exactly right because you can't barter one for the other even though that has been the tempting deal on offer from the British and American governments since 9/11. The truth of the matter is that relinquishing our rights in exchange for illusory security harms each one of us, and our children and grandchildren. Because once gone, these rights hardly ever return.
But let's just return to the first part of that statement by Tony Blair - the bit about him not wanting to live in a police state, or a Big Brother society. Don't get me wrong, we do not live in either a police state or a Big Brother society - yet. But there is no Englishman alive or dead who has done more to bring them about.
The trouble is that it's happening so very quietly, so very discreetly that few really see it. You have to concentrate very hard to understand what's going on and put the whole picture together because so much has been buried in obscure corners of legislation.
We used to believe in innocence until guilt was proved by a court. Not any longer. That distinction disappeared when the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act came into force and police started taking innocent people's DNA and fingerprints and treating them as a convicted criminals.
We used to believe in Habeas Corpus. Not any longer. Under terrorism laws, suspects may be held for 28 days without being charged. Now the Home Secretary wants to make that 90 days, and Gordon Brown seems to share that view.
We used to believe that there should be no punishment without a court deciding the law had been broken, and that every defendant had the right to know the evidence against him. Not any longer. Control orders effectively remove both those rights and John Reid said recently that he wanted stronger powers to detain and control, and stronger powers to deport, which would clearly require the UK to derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights.
We used to believe that an Englishman's home was his castle. Not any longer. A pincer movement by the Courts Act 2003 and the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 put paid to the 400-year-old principle that entry into your home could not be forced in civil cases.
We used to believe in the right to be tried by jury. Not any longer. The Government plans to remove trial by jury in complicated fraud cases and where there is a likelihood of jury tampering. It would like to go further.
We used to believe there was a good reason not to allow hearsay evidence in court. Not any longer. The anti-social behaviour order legislation introduced hearsay evidence. The maximum penalty for breaking an Asbo can be up to five years in jail. Hearsay can send someone to jail.
We used to believe in free speech, but not any longer. People have been detained under terrorism laws for wearing anti-Blair T-shirts. Walter Wolfgang was removed from the Labour Conference for heckling Jack Straw about the Iraq war. A woman was charged under the Harassment Act for sending two e-mails to a company politely asking them not to conduct animal experiments. Her offence was to send two e-mails, for in that lies the repeated action that is now illegal. A man named Stephen Jago was arrested for displaying a placard quoting Orwell near Downing Street. It read: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." And a mime artist named Neil Goodwin appeared in court recently charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act for what? Well, doing an impersonation of Charlie Chaplin outside Parliament. His hearing was a grim comedy. Mr Goodwin's statement to the court concluded: "In truth, one of the first things to go under a dictatorship is a good sense of humour."
We used to believe that our private communications were sacrosanct. Not any longer. The Regulatory Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and its subsequent amendments provide such wide terms for the legitimate tapping of phones, the interception of e-mails and monitoring of internet connections that they amount to general warrants, last used in the 18th century under George III.
I could go on because there is much more, but I worry about boring you and I know I am beginning to seem obsessed. There will be many reasonable people among you who will argue that the fight against terrorism or some other compelling problem makes the removal of a fragment of liberty the best option available to us. A little bit here, a little bit there doesn't really matter, particularly when it involves somebody else's rights. Without thinking very deeply, we say to ourselves "if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear from these new laws". Not true. There is something to fear - because someone else's liberty is also your liberty. When it's removed from them, it's taken from you even though you may not be able to conceive of the circumstances when you might need it. A system of rights must apply to bank managers, illegal immigrant cockle pickers and every type of defendant otherwise it doesn't count.
Cumulatively, these small, barely noticed reductions in our rights add up to the greatest attack on liberty in the last hundred years. No wonder the Prime Minister dismisses traditional civil liberties arguments as being made for another age. With his record he can do nothing else.
In an e-mail exchange between him and me in the spring, he suggested a kind of super Asbo for major criminals. This is what the unmediated Blair sounds like. "I would go further. I would widen the powers of police to seize cash of suspected [my italics] drug dealers, the cars they drive round in and require them to prove that they came by them lawfully. I would impose restrictions on those suspected of being involved in organised crime. In fact I would harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country."
I'm sure that echoes many people's desire just to be rid of these awful people. But think about it for a moment: Tony Blair is a lawyer, yet nowhere is there any mention of due process or the courts. Apparently it will be enough for the authorities merely to suspect someone of wrongdoing for them to act. And the police won't be troubled by the tiresome business of courts, defence lawyers or defendants' rights. I wonder what Vaclav Havel would think of such a suggestion. Certainly, he would be all too familiar with the system of arbitrary arrest and state persecution that Blair seems to be suggesting.
Blair dresses up his views in a vocabulary of modernisation and inclusivity. Yet when he talks about rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of the victim, it takes just a few moments to see that this will be achieved by doing away with the priority in our legal system of protecting the accused from miscarriages of justice. He simply wants to reduce defendants' rights in order to satisfy public demand for more prosecutions.
It is now plain that he intends nothing less than to open the ancient charters of British rights in order to tip acid into them.
The way cabinet ministers think of themselves today and what they do are at odds. They think of themselves as reasonable, tolerant, humane and liberal people, but their actions tell an altogether different story. This brings me to the Big Brother state that Tony Blair says he doesn't want to live in, but which has nevertheless rapidly come into being during his premiership.
Most people have very little understanding of what the ID card scheme will actually mean for them. They think that it just involves a little plastic identifier. But it is much more than that. Every adult will be required to provide 49 pieces of information about themselves which will include biometric measurements - probably an iris scan and fingerprinting. If you refuse to submit to what is called, without irony, enrolment, you will face repeated fines of up £2,500. The Government is deadly serious about this thing because of a simple truth. They want to know pretty much everything there is to know about you.
Personally, I find the idea of having a card repugnant and I cannot believe it will be long before policemen are stopping us on the street and asking for our papers. But this is by no means the most sinister aspect. Every time your card is swiped when you identify yourself, the National Identity Register will silently make a record of the time and date, your location and the purpose of the ID check. Gradually, a unique picture of your life will be built, to which nearly half-a-million civil servants are apparently going to have access.
But of course you will never be told who is looking at your file, or why. And nor will you be able to find out.
MPs must take responsibility for passing this invasive law but they cannot be blamed for the other half of the Big Brother society that is upon us. I refer to the total surveillance of our roads in a linked-up system of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras. These cameras cover every motorway, major dual carriageway, town and city centre and will feed information from billions of journeys into one computer, where the data will remain for two years.
The decision to put British motorists under blanket, round- the-clock surveillance was never taken by Parliament. It just happened. As the cost of processing enormous quantities of data came down, the police and Home Office just simply decided to go ahead. Traffic cameras became surveillance cameras. This, I gather, is known as function creep, and, as always, half the pressure comes from technological innovation.
We are about to become the most observed population in the world outside North Korea, and absolutely no work has been done on how this will affect each one of us and what it will do to our society and political institutions.
I worry that we are not alert to the possibilities of social control. No matter how discreet this surveillance, it increases the spectral presence of the state in the everyday consciousness of each individual. I grant that it is a slow process and that it is nothing like the leaden omnipresence of the Stasi in the GDR. But I think we're heading for a place from which we will not be able to return: the surveillance society where the state will crowd in on the individual human experience and threaten the unguarded freedoms of privacy, solitude, seclusion and anonymity. We may continue to attest to the feeling of freedom but in reality we will suffer more and more restrictions. Inexorably we are becoming subjects not citizens, units on a database that may be observed and classified by a Government which is taking control in areas where it has never dared in democratic times to trespass before.
Where this will all lead I cannot say, but I do know that it is neither good for us nor for the state. Humans work best when they have the maximum freedom, and so does government. As our Government gains more power in relation to us, confusing itself on the way with the entity and interests of the state, it will become less responsive to our needs and opinions, less transparent and less accountable.
Havel said of the Communist tyranny in that glorious but sombre new year's day speech: "None of us is just its victim. We are its co-creators." That is true of any society. And I believe we all need now to acknowledge what has happened to British rights and do something about it.
Firstly, there needs to be some kind of formal audit made of the rights which have been already compromised. An exact account. Linked to this should be a commission looking into the effects of mass surveillance. Second, we need a constitution which enshrines a bill of rights and places our rights beyond the reach of an ambitious Executive and Parliament. Third, we should be writing to our constituency MPs or clogging up their surgeries - asking what they are doing about the attack on liberty. And fourth, all schoolchildren should be taught about British rights and freedoms, what they mean and how they were won. History, as the National Trust is fond of saying, matters. Rights and liberties are as much a part of our heritage as St Paul's Cathedral and Shakespeare's plays.
This may all sound rather prescriptive but I have become certain over the last two years that we need to do something to save us from our Government and the Government from itself.
This was taken from the Summerfield Lecture given at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, on 12 October as part of the annual literary festival. Research by Emily Butselaar
On new year's day 1990, three days after becoming president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel looked his people in the eye and spoke to them as no one had done before. It is difficult to read his words without feeling the vibration of history of both the liberation and the horrors of the regime that had just expired, leaving the Czech people blinking in the cold sunlight of that extraordinary winter.
This is what he said. "The previous regime, armed with its arrogance and intolerant ideology, reduced man to a force of production. It reduced gifted and autonomous people to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, stinking machine whose real meaning was not clear to anyone. It could do no more but slowly and inexorably wear itself out, and all the nuts and bolts too."
That perfectly defines the true tyranny, where the state takes all liberty and bends each individual will to its own purpose. And here is the interesting thing that Havel put his finger on: no matter how brutal or ruthless the regime, the act of depriving people of their freedom starts the stopwatch on that regime's inevitable demise. What he was saying was that in modern times a state can only thrive in the fullest sense when individuals are accorded maximum freedom.
I agree. Individual liberty is not just the precondition for civilisation, not just morally right, not just the only way people can reach their full potential, live responsibly and have fun; it is also a necessity for the health of government. Ten years ago I would have felt silly speaking about liberty and rights in Britain with the very real concern that I have today. But I am worried. And it's not just me. Last month Le Monde asked "Is Democracy Dying in the West?". In the spring of this year Lord Steyn, the distinguished former law lord, made a speech despairing at this Government's neglect for the Rule of Law, which was followed by Baroness (Helena) Kennedy's alarm call in the James Cameron Lecture.
The inescapable fact is that we have a Prime Minister who repeatedly makes the point that civil liberties arguments are not so much wrong as made for another age [my italics]. We have a Government that has ignored the Rule of Law, reduced rights and has steadily moved to increase the centralised power of the state at the expense of the individual.
So I don't feel quite as silly or as alarmist as I might.
The relationship between the state and individual is really at the heart of any discussion about democracy and rights. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union it was the state's mission not just to prevent people from expressing themselves, from moving about freely and unobserved, from pursuing their chosen careers and acting upon their religious and political convictions, but to stop them from thinking freely. It needed to occupy people's thoughts - to take up a kind of permanent residency in the mind of the average citizen. And as the many psychological studies published in the Nineties make clear, this led to psychic disrepair on a massive scale - paranoia, clinical depression, chronic internalised anger and learned helplessness.
We fell morally ill, Havel said in that speech, because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us represented only psychological peculiarities.
Why am I harping on about communism? It died and was buried 17 years ago, at least in Europe and Russia. We're into another century. We've got Google and speed-dating and globalisation and melting ice caps and reality TV and al-Qa'ida and al-Jazeera and Al Gore. We've moved on.
As a character in Alan Bennett's The History Boys says, there is no period more remote in history than the recent past. Indeed, but we need to remember that recent past a little more than we do. For one thing, our knowledge of what existed on the other side of the Iron Curtain meant we valued and looked after our own freedoms much more than we do today.
It is perhaps the absence of an obvious confrontation between freedom and tyranny that allows Tony Blair to say that civil liberties arguments are made for another age. I profoundly disagree with this. It is dangerous arrogance to say that the past has nothing to teach us and that all the problems we face now are unique to our time.
During his speech to the Labour Party conference, Tony Blair said: "I don't want to live in a police state, or a Big Brother society or put any of our essential freedoms in jeopardy. But because our idea of liberty is not keeping pace with change in reality, those freedoms are in jeopardy."
What in heaven's name did he mean by that? Liberty is liberty. You can't update it. You can't divide it. You are either free, or you're not. A society is either just, or it isn't. People have rights or they don't. The rule of law is upheld, or it isn't.
But Blair believes there is nothing that can't be modernised, updated, pared down or streamlined to keep pace with change. And liberty is no exception to the modernising fury which serves as New Labour's only ideological foundation. What the Prime Minister is saying in this cute little Orwellian paradox is that in the particular circumstances of the war on terror and the rash of crime and anti-social behaviour, we must give up freedom to be free.
What an odd idea! Who is to decide which freedoms are essential and which can be sacrificed to make us secure? Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Lord Falconer or the former Stalinist and now Home Secretary John Reid?
"Those who would give up essential liberty," observed Benjamin Franklin, "to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither freedom or safety." That's exactly right because you can't barter one for the other even though that has been the tempting deal on offer from the British and American governments since 9/11. The truth of the matter is that relinquishing our rights in exchange for illusory security harms each one of us, and our children and grandchildren. Because once gone, these rights hardly ever return.
But let's just return to the first part of that statement by Tony Blair - the bit about him not wanting to live in a police state, or a Big Brother society. Don't get me wrong, we do not live in either a police state or a Big Brother society - yet. But there is no Englishman alive or dead who has done more to bring them about.
The trouble is that it's happening so very quietly, so very discreetly that few really see it. You have to concentrate very hard to understand what's going on and put the whole picture together because so much has been buried in obscure corners of legislation.
We used to believe in innocence until guilt was proved by a court. Not any longer. That distinction disappeared when the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act came into force and police started taking innocent people's DNA and fingerprints and treating them as a convicted criminals.
We used to believe in Habeas Corpus. Not any longer. Under terrorism laws, suspects may be held for 28 days without being charged. Now the Home Secretary wants to make that 90 days, and Gordon Brown seems to share that view.
We used to believe that there should be no punishment without a court deciding the law had been broken, and that every defendant had the right to know the evidence against him. Not any longer. Control orders effectively remove both those rights and John Reid said recently that he wanted stronger powers to detain and control, and stronger powers to deport, which would clearly require the UK to derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights.
We used to believe that an Englishman's home was his castle. Not any longer. A pincer movement by the Courts Act 2003 and the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 put paid to the 400-year-old principle that entry into your home could not be forced in civil cases.
We used to believe in the right to be tried by jury. Not any longer. The Government plans to remove trial by jury in complicated fraud cases and where there is a likelihood of jury tampering. It would like to go further.
We used to believe there was a good reason not to allow hearsay evidence in court. Not any longer. The anti-social behaviour order legislation introduced hearsay evidence. The maximum penalty for breaking an Asbo can be up to five years in jail. Hearsay can send someone to jail.
We used to believe in free speech, but not any longer. People have been detained under terrorism laws for wearing anti-Blair T-shirts. Walter Wolfgang was removed from the Labour Conference for heckling Jack Straw about the Iraq war. A woman was charged under the Harassment Act for sending two e-mails to a company politely asking them not to conduct animal experiments. Her offence was to send two e-mails, for in that lies the repeated action that is now illegal. A man named Stephen Jago was arrested for displaying a placard quoting Orwell near Downing Street. It read: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." And a mime artist named Neil Goodwin appeared in court recently charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act for what? Well, doing an impersonation of Charlie Chaplin outside Parliament. His hearing was a grim comedy. Mr Goodwin's statement to the court concluded: "In truth, one of the first things to go under a dictatorship is a good sense of humour."
We used to believe that our private communications were sacrosanct. Not any longer. The Regulatory Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and its subsequent amendments provide such wide terms for the legitimate tapping of phones, the interception of e-mails and monitoring of internet connections that they amount to general warrants, last used in the 18th century under George III.
I could go on because there is much more, but I worry about boring you and I know I am beginning to seem obsessed. There will be many reasonable people among you who will argue that the fight against terrorism or some other compelling problem makes the removal of a fragment of liberty the best option available to us. A little bit here, a little bit there doesn't really matter, particularly when it involves somebody else's rights. Without thinking very deeply, we say to ourselves "if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear from these new laws". Not true. There is something to fear - because someone else's liberty is also your liberty. When it's removed from them, it's taken from you even though you may not be able to conceive of the circumstances when you might need it. A system of rights must apply to bank managers, illegal immigrant cockle pickers and every type of defendant otherwise it doesn't count.
Cumulatively, these small, barely noticed reductions in our rights add up to the greatest attack on liberty in the last hundred years. No wonder the Prime Minister dismisses traditional civil liberties arguments as being made for another age. With his record he can do nothing else.
In an e-mail exchange between him and me in the spring, he suggested a kind of super Asbo for major criminals. This is what the unmediated Blair sounds like. "I would go further. I would widen the powers of police to seize cash of suspected [my italics] drug dealers, the cars they drive round in and require them to prove that they came by them lawfully. I would impose restrictions on those suspected of being involved in organised crime. In fact I would harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country."
I'm sure that echoes many people's desire just to be rid of these awful people. But think about it for a moment: Tony Blair is a lawyer, yet nowhere is there any mention of due process or the courts. Apparently it will be enough for the authorities merely to suspect someone of wrongdoing for them to act. And the police won't be troubled by the tiresome business of courts, defence lawyers or defendants' rights. I wonder what Vaclav Havel would think of such a suggestion. Certainly, he would be all too familiar with the system of arbitrary arrest and state persecution that Blair seems to be suggesting.
Blair dresses up his views in a vocabulary of modernisation and inclusivity. Yet when he talks about rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of the victim, it takes just a few moments to see that this will be achieved by doing away with the priority in our legal system of protecting the accused from miscarriages of justice. He simply wants to reduce defendants' rights in order to satisfy public demand for more prosecutions.
It is now plain that he intends nothing less than to open the ancient charters of British rights in order to tip acid into them.
The way cabinet ministers think of themselves today and what they do are at odds. They think of themselves as reasonable, tolerant, humane and liberal people, but their actions tell an altogether different story. This brings me to the Big Brother state that Tony Blair says he doesn't want to live in, but which has nevertheless rapidly come into being during his premiership.
Most people have very little understanding of what the ID card scheme will actually mean for them. They think that it just involves a little plastic identifier. But it is much more than that. Every adult will be required to provide 49 pieces of information about themselves which will include biometric measurements - probably an iris scan and fingerprinting. If you refuse to submit to what is called, without irony, enrolment, you will face repeated fines of up £2,500. The Government is deadly serious about this thing because of a simple truth. They want to know pretty much everything there is to know about you.
Personally, I find the idea of having a card repugnant and I cannot believe it will be long before policemen are stopping us on the street and asking for our papers. But this is by no means the most sinister aspect. Every time your card is swiped when you identify yourself, the National Identity Register will silently make a record of the time and date, your location and the purpose of the ID check. Gradually, a unique picture of your life will be built, to which nearly half-a-million civil servants are apparently going to have access.
But of course you will never be told who is looking at your file, or why. And nor will you be able to find out.
MPs must take responsibility for passing this invasive law but they cannot be blamed for the other half of the Big Brother society that is upon us. I refer to the total surveillance of our roads in a linked-up system of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras. These cameras cover every motorway, major dual carriageway, town and city centre and will feed information from billions of journeys into one computer, where the data will remain for two years.
The decision to put British motorists under blanket, round- the-clock surveillance was never taken by Parliament. It just happened. As the cost of processing enormous quantities of data came down, the police and Home Office just simply decided to go ahead. Traffic cameras became surveillance cameras. This, I gather, is known as function creep, and, as always, half the pressure comes from technological innovation.
We are about to become the most observed population in the world outside North Korea, and absolutely no work has been done on how this will affect each one of us and what it will do to our society and political institutions.
I worry that we are not alert to the possibilities of social control. No matter how discreet this surveillance, it increases the spectral presence of the state in the everyday consciousness of each individual. I grant that it is a slow process and that it is nothing like the leaden omnipresence of the Stasi in the GDR. But I think we're heading for a place from which we will not be able to return: the surveillance society where the state will crowd in on the individual human experience and threaten the unguarded freedoms of privacy, solitude, seclusion and anonymity. We may continue to attest to the feeling of freedom but in reality we will suffer more and more restrictions. Inexorably we are becoming subjects not citizens, units on a database that may be observed and classified by a Government which is taking control in areas where it has never dared in democratic times to trespass before.
Where this will all lead I cannot say, but I do know that it is neither good for us nor for the state. Humans work best when they have the maximum freedom, and so does government. As our Government gains more power in relation to us, confusing itself on the way with the entity and interests of the state, it will become less responsive to our needs and opinions, less transparent and less accountable.
Havel said of the Communist tyranny in that glorious but sombre new year's day speech: "None of us is just its victim. We are its co-creators." That is true of any society. And I believe we all need now to acknowledge what has happened to British rights and do something about it.
Firstly, there needs to be some kind of formal audit made of the rights which have been already compromised. An exact account. Linked to this should be a commission looking into the effects of mass surveillance. Second, we need a constitution which enshrines a bill of rights and places our rights beyond the reach of an ambitious Executive and Parliament. Third, we should be writing to our constituency MPs or clogging up their surgeries - asking what they are doing about the attack on liberty. And fourth, all schoolchildren should be taught about British rights and freedoms, what they mean and how they were won. History, as the National Trust is fond of saying, matters. Rights and liberties are as much a part of our heritage as St Paul's Cathedral and Shakespeare's plays.
This may all sound rather prescriptive but I have become certain over the last two years that we need to do something to save us from our Government and the Government from itself.
This was taken from the Summerfield Lecture given at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, on 12 October as part of the annual literary festival. Research by Emily Butselaar
Comment on this Editorial
Planetary Pain
Beckett to warn climate change a security threat
By Sophie Walker
LONDON (Reuters) - Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett will warn Europe on Tuesday to tackle climate change or risk terrorists seizing on famine, water shortages and failing energy infrastructures to threaten global security.
In her first major foreign policy speech, to a group of experts in Berlin, Beckett will call on the European Union to lead a global push towards new technologies and renewable energy, warning EU countries are already "dangerously behind the curve".
Beckett, according to a text of her speech obtained by Reuters, will cite reduced rainfall in the Middle East as a possible trigger for security problems.
"Look at those things that are highest on the European agenda -- strong borders, poverty reduction, the risks of conflict and international terrorism, energy security, jobs and growth," Beckett will say.
"Get our response right to climate change and our ability to deal with all of these is enhanced. Get it wrong and our efforts across the board will be undermined."
Beckett's speech follows an EU leaders' meeting in Finland last week that focussed on energy policy and urged action on climate change.
She will say climate change, with drastically diminishing resources in some of the most volatile parts of the world, has the potential to create a "potentially catastrophic dynamic" in regions already at breaking point.
Beckett, a former environment minister, will say the Middle East is a case in point as climate models suggest Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq will be among those countries to see the biggest rainfall reductions in the world.
Egypt -- a pivotal country for regional stability -- will suffer a double blow, she will say, as loss of flow from the river Nile and rising sea-levels in the north are set to destroy the country's agricultural heartland.
Beckett will urge governments to produce incentives and penalties designed to drive private capital towards a low-carbon world economy.
"The greatest security threat we face as a global community won't be met by guns and tanks," she will say.
"It will be solved by investment in the emerging techniques of soft power -- building avenues of opportunity that will lead to a low-carbon economy."
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2 Arrested at Protest at NOAA Office
AP
Two environmentalists spent about four hours Monday perched on a ledge over an entrance to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration building to protest what they said is the agency's suppression of information on global warming.
The pair, which climbed a ladder to reach the ledge, unfurled a banner that read "Bush: Let NOAA Tell the Truth," while a small group of demonstrators handed out fliers on a nearby sidewalk.
Police eventually used a cherry picker from a nearby construction site to reach the demonstrators and lower them to the ground. Both men, Ted Glick, 56, and Paul Burman, 23, were charged with disorderly conduct, reckless endangerment and trespassing.
The men had climbed to the ledge using a ladder and used suction cups to anchor themselves to a window.
NOAA, based in Silver Spring, studies climate, weather and the oceans. Its agencies include the National Weather Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service.
The demonstrators said they were part of the U.S. Climate Emergency Council and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. The groups claim NOAA denies scientific evidence that recent severe weather, such as powerful hurricanes, is caused by climate change. They also allege NOAA withholds proof of this effect.
"People are seeing that the climate is changing," said Mike Tidwell, head of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. "A grass roots movement is emerging from that."
In a statement Monday, NOAA spokesman Jordan St. John said: "We're proud of our scientists and the great work they do, and we encourage vigorous peer review and public discussion."
A report in the scientific journal Nature last month claimed NOAA administrators blocked the release of a report that linked hurricane strength and frequency to global warming. In February, a NASA climate scientist said NOAA prevents researchers working on climate change from speaking freely about their work.
NOAA denied both allegations and says its work is not politically motivated.
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Photos Capture Melting Splendor of Alaska's Glaciers
by Ed Schoenfeld
NPR
All Things Considered, October 23, 2006 - About 70 years ago, pioneer aerial photographer Bradford Washburn flew over Alaska's glaciers, documenting their splendor while looking for mountain-climbing routes.
Now, a Boston photojournalist is following in his footsteps with a very different purpose. He's reshooting Washburn's images to demonstrate global warming's impacts. Ed Schoenfeld of CoastAlaska News reports from Juneau.
David Arnold sits on a bench outside a helicopter tour office, waiting for his charter flight. He shuffles through a collection of 1930s photographs showing Alaska glaciers from the air. They were taken by Washburn, a mountain-climber, mapmaker and museum director.
"The most remarkable thing about Brad's pictures is the artistic quality of them," Arnold says. "And actually, what you see today is the loss of art. The forces, the confrontations that so enamored him are gone."
The glaciers Washburn found were massive. But many have since lost much of their mass. Arnold's goal this day is to shoot the Mendenhall Glacier, in Juneau, and learn how it has changed since Washburn flew by in 1937.
A mountain-ringed ice field almost the size of Rhode Island is the Mendenhall Glacier's birthplace. The fractured, twisting river of ice wends its way down a dozen miles of high-walled valley.
Tour buses bring more than 350,000 people a year to gawk at its face, a wall more than 100 feet high and a mile wide.
Washburn found a far calmer scene when he took his photograph of Mendenhall 70 years ago. That image shows the glacier flowing into a tree-spotted valley, largely free of human habitation.
Today, Arnold finds the area cluttered with shopping malls, suburban subdivisions and a modern airport. That makes replicating Washburn's shot difficult.
"Shooting the Mendenhall in Juneau is the first time I've looked at so much change, human change, just buildings and development," he says. "And that turned out to be, for me, very disorienting."
But Arnold is ready to try. He climbs into the helicopter, prepared to juggle his cameras while coping with wind, cold fingers and tearing eyes. But according to biographer Mike Sfraga, it's nothing compared to what Washburn had to handle.
"At 16,000 to 18,000 feet, he would hang out of the plane, and his pilot would do choreography over the mountains," Sfraga says of Washburn's daredevil techniques.
Sfraga says Washburn's passion overcame the challenges of heavy camera gear and cold temperatures.
It took two flights in the helicopter, but Arnold found Washburn's angle. "I was amazed at how much the glacier had retreated," Arnold says.
Arnold's photograph shows a smaller, thinner Mendenhall. Its crumpled, white image is much less of a presence than in Washburn's earlier image.
"I suppose if you're going to be poetic about matching up the development with the demise, or the slowly shrinking glacier, this is the shot," Arnold says.
Arnold is working for the same institution Washburn directed for 40 years, the Boston Museum of Science. Eventually, his shots will be paired with Washburn's for public display.
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Colder-than-normal Nov-Jan for U.S. Northeast: WSI
Reuters
Mon Oct 23, 2006
NEW YORK - The U.S. Northeast, the nation's top heating oil consuming region, will face colder-than-normal weather during the early winter period, private forecaster WSI Corp. predicted on Monday.
The November to January outlook, following the mildest winter on record last year, comes as U.S. energy companies built up healthy inventories of heating oil and natural gas ahead of seasonal cold weather.
"WSI expects this period (November-January) to average cooler than normal in major cities of the Northeast and parts of the southern Rockies and Southwest," WSI said in a statement.
Several government and private forecasters are now forecasting normal or colder-than-normal weather for the Northeast through January.
States in the Northeast should see warmer-than-normal temperatures in November before cooling down in December and January. The warmer November would help companies build up natural gas inventories ahead of winter, WSI said.
"Warmer weather in November may extend the injection season and put additional pressure on physical gas prices as there is little room for excess gas due to the extremely full storage, expected at 3.5 to 3.6 Tcf (trillion cubic feet) by early November," WSI said.
Other U.S. regions, including the Southeast, were expected to be warmer-than-normal from November to December, WSI forecast.
"Warmer-than-normal temperatures are expected across the rest of the northern United States and the Southeast," WSI said.
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After a Year, Hurricane Katrina Still Pummels Workers
Jane Slaughter
The first week he was in New Orleans, Juan Sifford was recruited on a street corner to tear down a chain-link fence and dig up some bamboo roots. The contractor promised him and three other workers $100 each for the job.
When the work was done and the men piled back into the contractor's truck, he drove them to what Sifford calls "a really bad neighborhood. He climbs down off the truck and he gives us $120. Not individually, collectively. Then he showed me his sidearm."
The only thing unusual about Sifford's story is that he's not a Latino immigrant. He's a Black man from North Carolina, trying his luck as a day laborer on the street corners of post-flood New Orleans.
On the corners, all the tensions that beset Black and Latino relations throughout the country are played out. Before the levees broke, Latinos made up no more than three percent of New Orleans' population. Today they're 20 percent, as immigrants seeking work in demolition and construction have arrived from other U.S. cities and from south of the border.
At the same time, displaced New Orleanians, mostly African Americans (who were two-thirds of New Orleans' pre-flood population), are struggling to return to the city and to their jobs. Often, they can't come back because schools are gone, homes are gone, and rents for the housing that's left have doubled or tripled.
WORKER JUSTICE COALITION
The New Orleans Worker Justice Coalition, made up of new and old grassroots and advocacy organizations, wants to give such workers a voice in the city's reconstruction. The odds against them are formidable, given the chaotic, anything-goes environment.
"The federal government dismantled every protection, every safety net, every mechanism for accountability," says Saket Soni, an organizer for the coalition. "It created a void in which the only law that governs reconstruction is the contractor food chain."
Contrary to the hopes of many construction workers who've flocked to the city, it's not a seller's market for labor power. In July the city's jobless rate was 7.2 percent, higher than the summer before the flood. In such an atmosphere, resentments and stereotypes flourish.
According to a new report from the Advancement Project, the National Immigration Law Center, and the Worker Justice Coalition, who interviewed more than 800 workers on street corners, on buses, and in parks, "The perception is that workers of color are competing for jobs. The reality is that private contractors are competing for the cheapest labor."
Immigrant workers tell many stories like Juan Sifford's, of unpaid wages, broken promises, and other abuses. The Advancement Project report makes plain that employer theft of wages is one of the commonplaces of day labor. Of 66 workers interviewed in City Park, 60 percent had not been paid for part or all of their work.
BRIDGING THE GULF
Even among those fighting for workers' rights, the divisions between workers of color were exemplified by two large protest marches held last spring. One, on April 1, was led by Jesse Jackson and focused on voting rights. The 4,000 marchers were mostly Black; they demanded the "right of return" and priority for Katrina survivors in jobs and training. A month later, a 5,000-person May Day march for immigrants' rights was, not surprisingly, mostly Latino.
Determined to bridge the gulf, coalition members look for ways to bring the two communities together. When the coalition helped organize the May Day march, it made sure that the slogans included respect for all workers and "multi-racial unity," as well as immigrant rights.
Organizer Colette Tippy says that Latino workers active with the coalition "are trying to tie their destiny to that of African Americans instead of to the history of white immigrants."
UNIONS REBUILD
While grassroots activists look for footing in the ravaged city, the AFL-CIO and two affiliates of the Change to Win federation are taking an indirect, and, they hope, larger-scale approach to organizing workers.
Through a Worker Resource Center founded in July, the Laborers and the Service Employees (SEIU) are offering free classes in job skills for workers ranging from certified nurse's aids to construction workers. The construction jobs available are mostly in the $12-14 range, the health care jobs $7-$8.
The AFL-CIO is coming at the jobs problem from a different angle: three investment trusts sponsored by union pension funds that will pump $700 million into construction of apartments, hotels, and hospitals, and into home mortgages.
Over seven years, the plan is to spend $250 million to build 5,000 to 10,000 housing units and to generate nearly six million hours of union construction work. The federation's Building and Construction Trades Department will offer apprenticeships.
And who will get these jobs? Although both sets of unions say they are open to all, the programs are targeted to former Gulf Coast residents. The Laborers' program, for instance, asks applicants to read at an eighth-grade level, and graduates of their first class were all African Americans.
Rosana Cruz, Gulf Coast field organizer for the National Immigration Law Center, says, "For unions to come in now and just pay attention to Latinos, after decades of ignoring Blacks in the South-'here's where we can increase our market share'-would be awful." And indeed, the unions do seem focused on the population most likely to provide a stable base for future unionization.
How will unions and grassroots coalitions deal with a situation that seems scripted to benefit employers-workers wrangling for jobs and blaming each other?
Kimberley Richards of the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond wants to do her part through education. If the Worker Justice Coalition does its job, she says, it will help both African American and Latino workers "understand how labor abuses in this region have built capital for this country.
"When you see the relationship of labor injustice to the building of wealth, you get a greater understanding that whatever tensions there are between us do not come out of our own tensions with each other."
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Strong earthquake rattles Japanese island group; no tsunami warning
The Associated Press
Published: October 23, 2006
TOKYO An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.8 rattled a group of Japanese islands in the Pacific Ocean south of Tokyo early Tuesday, Japan's weather agency said. No tsunami warning was issued.
The quake struck at about 6:18 a.m. (2318 GMT) and was centered near the Ogasawara island group, about 780 kilometers (483 miles) south of Tokyo, the Meteorological Agency said.
The quake was extremely shallow, said agency official Toshiyuki Suzuki. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage from the quake, he added.
Japan sits atop four tectonic plates and is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world.
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Is Our Pain
Afghan Drought Puts Pressure on Food Supply
Environment News Service
NEW YORK, New York, October 23, 2006 (ENS) - Worsening drought in Afghanistan means 1.9 million people will need food assistance - 200,000 more than predicted in July - according to the United Nations and Afghan government, which launched a joint appeal for a further $43.3 million in humanitarian relief today.
The plea follows an appeal for nearly $76.4 million announced in July. Just over half of that money has been received to date.
UN officials say the initial plan must be extended through the start of the next harvest in April 2007.
"While we are grateful for the generous contributions received thus far, there is an urgent and pressing need to continue assistance to drought and conflict affected communities across Afghanistan," said Secretary-General Kofi Annan's deputy special representative, Ameerah Haq.
Haq urged donor countries "to step forward with pledges that will enable us to provide vital food, and other essential living items as we approach the winter months."
The latest figures are in addition to the 6.5 million of Afghanistan's population of more than 30 million who constantly or seasonally suffer a lack of food.
food
Afghans pick up food rations supplied by the United Nations World Food Programme. (Photo by Richard Lee courtesy WFP)
Afghanistan is still recovering from a devastating drought between 1998 and 2003. Armed conflict between fighters loyal to the ousted Taliban regime and Afghan and international forces has made the effects of the current drought worse, particularly in the country's southern provinces.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, has deployed 31,000 soldiers across the country, and took over command of forces in the southern region July 31.
Today's appeal also includes assistance to an estimated 20,000 families displaced by the recent armed conflict in Uruzgan, Helmand and Kandahar provinces, said the UN, citing the Afghan government.
According to the Swiss charity ACT International, Action by Churches Together, most rain-fed crops, estimated to constitute 85 percent of the cultivated land, have failed. Some 2.5 million people are at risk mainly in the north, west and central regions of Afghanistan.
Agriculture accounts for 52 percent of the impoverished nation's gross domestic product, and wheat comprises 80 percent of cereal production.
Many water sources across Afghanistan have dried up. Due to the reduced availability of fodder, livestock mortality rates have increased and livestock prices have fallen.
Families with no reserves are migrating to other places for work. Women are suffering the most in meeting the needs of their families, and some families are so hard pressed that they see the "bride price" as a means of income and are marrying their daughters off early.
The water shortage could drive more farmers to grow opium poppies, the raw material for heroin, which requires less water than most other crops, such as wheat. The United Nations has estimated opium production will jump 60 percent this year in Afghanistan, a country that already produces more than 90 percent of the world's supplies.
Russia's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and subsequent civil wars and droughts over the past 25 years have created the world's largest refugee population with more than six million people fleeing their homes during that time, most of them to neighboring Pakistan and Iran. An estimated 2.6 million Afghans still live in Pakistan.
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Dozens flooded out of homes in Texas
AP
Mon Oct 23, 2006
VIDOR, Texas - Flooding forced dozens of people from their homes Monday, including some residents who have been living in government trailers since Hurricane Rita struck southeast Texas last year.
Heavy rains saturated the area last week and flowed downstream into the Neches River, which spilled over its banks and rose nearly 8 feet above flood stage Monday.
Although the river later dropped by about 2 inches, the water was expected to remain high through Thursday, said Jeff Kelley, emergency management coordinator for Orange County, about 100 miles northeast of Houston.
Kelley estimated about 40 homes had been destroyed as of Sunday. About 60 others were damaged, officials said.
Authorities in neighboring Hardin County estimated at least 100 homes had been damaged.
The Sabine River also was out of its banks. Officials in Newton County officials said at least three bridges have been washed out.
Officials continued assessing damage Monday. It varied from home to home because some had been built on stilts, while others sit at ground level. In some cases, water was up to the roof lines.
The area was hit hard by Rita last year, and Kelley said a number of
Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers were still in the area.
Gov. Rick Perry declared nine counties disaster areas. He also ordered state agencies to be on standby for rescue efforts if the remnants of Hurricane Paul bring more rain in the coming days. Paul was roaring toward the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula late Monday.
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Climate Change 'Will Cause Refugee Crisis'
By Michael McCarthy
21 October 2006
The Independent
Mass movements of people across the world are likely to be one of the most dramatic effects of climate change in the coming century, a study suggests.
The report, from the aid agency Tearfund, raises the spectre of hundreds of millions of environmental refugees and says the main reason will be the effects of climate - from droughts and water shortages, from flooding and storm surges and from sea-level rise.
The study, "Feeling the Heat", says there are already an estimated 25 million environmental refugees, and this figure is likely to soar as rain patterns continue to change, floods and storms become more frequent and rising tides start to inundate low-lying countries such as Bangladesh or some of the Pacific islands.
Tearfund says that without urgent action, world governments will lose the fight to tackle the world water crisis and the growing threat of climate-change refugees in catastrophic numbers.
The report calls for governments at the UN Climate Change conference, beginning in Nairobi in a fortnight, to move towards a global framework for cutting climate-changing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that goes beyond the existing climate treaty, the Kyoto protocol, and to commit billions more to help poor countries adapt to the coming changes.
"There will be millions more thirsty, hungry and ill poor people living in high-risk areas of the world by the end of the century," the report says. "It makes sense politically, economically and morally, for governments to act with urgency now."
Andy Atkins, advocacy director of Tearfund, said one of the most devastating impacts of climate change was on water supply. "In some parts of the world, floods, storms and poor rainfall are beginning to have catastrophic effects, threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions of people," he said.
This process will be steadily exacerbated, the report says, by the differing yet equally serious changes predicted to be part of a warming world. While some parts of the globe may experience much less rainfall and thus drought, others regions will have much more intense rain likely to bring about flooding. Sea-level rise , which a recent report suggested could be up to 50cm by 2050, would at that rate breach 100,000 kms (62,000 miles) of coastline around the world.
The report says: "As floods, drought and storms increase climate change will have a potentially catastrophic impact on water supply, threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Poor people - like the 80 per cent of Malawi's population who farm small plots - are reliant on rain for their harvests, and are least able to adapt to climate change. By exacerbating existing water stresses, climate change impacts many other areas of human development such as health and even industry."
It goes on: "Already, there are an estimated 25 million environmental refugees - more than half the number of political refugees. Experts such as the ecologist Norman Myers suggest this figure could soar to 200 million in less than 50 years. Unseen and uncounted, millions are already on the move in search of greater water security. In some countries, the exodus began years ago."
In the report's foreword, Sir John Houghton, former chairman of the Scientific Assessment Working Group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says politicians' strong words on climate change must now be matched by sufficient investment and strong action to cut global emissions, and help for the poorest nations adapt to climate change on their doorstep. A key to this will be helping poorer nations manage existing water supplies more efficiently.
"If your house is on fire, do you urgently try to save it, or throw your hands up in despair and walk away?" Sir John saysd. "Well, the house is on fire and it requires much more determined efforts to bring it under control and put it out. The UN climate change conference in Nairobi is an opportunity for failings to be addressed. Time is running out on us and world governments need to act much more responsibly, effectively and quickly."
The devastating impact
The report cites examples of where water problems are already causing a mass exodus or movement of people. They include:
* Poor crop yields are forcing more and more Mexicans to risk death by illegally fleeing to the US.
* One in five Brazilians born in the arid north-east of the country are moving to avoid drought.
* The spread of the Gobi desert, at a rate of 4,000 square miles a year, is forcing the populations of three provinces in China to abandon their homes.
* In Nigeria, 1,350 sq miles of land is turning to desert each year. Farmers and herdsmen are being forced to move to the cities.
* The population of Tuvalu, a group of eight Pacific islands north-east of Australia, is already being evacuated; nearly 3,000 Tuvalans have left so far.
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Global Warming and Your Health
eMaxHealth
Global warming could do more to hurt your health than simply threaten summertime heat stroke, says a public health physician. Although heat related illnesses and deaths will increase with the temperatures, climate change is expected to also attack human health with dirtier air and water, more flood-related accidents and injuries, threats to food supplies, hundreds of millions of environmental refugees, and stress on and possible collapse of many ecosystems that now purify our air and water.
"When most people think about climate change, they think of heat stress from heat waves," said Cindy Parker, M.D., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. "The heat wave in Western Europe in 2003 killed in excess of 30,000 people who wouldn't have died otherwise. With climate change, heat waves will become more severe, and last for longer periods of time."
"Scientists (in the U.S.) haven't done a good job of communicating why climate change is important to regular people," said Parker, who was invited to give a presentation on the health hazards of global warming at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Philadelphia. Parker will speak in a Pardee Keynote Symposium on Sunday, 22 October.
"The other thing that has gotten a lot of media attention is the increased risk of infectious diseases," said Parker. "This is of greater concern to other parts of the world than the United States." That's because the U.S. has good public health systems that can track down infectious diseases, such as malaria, and intervene so they don't spread, she said.
"In my professional opinion, some of the less direct impacts will be much more devastating for us," said Parker.
Hurricane Katrina was a primer on the matter. Global warming will bring bigger storms and hurricanes that will hold more water, according to climate scientists. Katrina showed how the water from a hurricane does far more damage than the high winds. All that flooding brings with it a host of direct and indirect health problems.
"As we saw from New Orleans, we're not good at evacuating people during storms." What's worse, she said, you can't evacuate critical infrastructure. "Our biggest medical centers have been built in our larger cities."
Thirteen of the 20 largest cities on earth are located at sea level on coasts, Parker points out. "As sea level rises, there go our medical institutions, water treatment plants, emergency response units such as fire departments and ambulances. The bulk of the services designed to keep us healthy are almost all located in our larger cities, which are also located frequently at sea level."
Then there is the matter of water. Clean water is one of the most basic and critical health needs. But climate change is threatening water supply quantities in many areas as well as water quality.
"Even without climate change, water is already in short supply," said Parker. "But under changed climate conditions, precipitation patterns are expected to change." That means droughts and famines could become more prominent.
Worsening water quality is expected to go hand-in-hand with the continuing deterioration of the natural ecosystems all around us.
"We rely on our ecosystems to provide very basic services to us," Parker explained. "Despite our technology, we can't live without clean water, clean air, and soil to produce food. We rely on healthy ecosystems to provide these basic and absolute necessities."
Forests, for example, absorb carbon dioxide from the environment, photosynthesize, and release oxygen as a waste product, which is essential for animal life. Similarly, with water, a healthy ecosystem such as a forest or wetland can filter a lot of toxins out of water and provide us with clean drinking water.
Water supplies and water quality are already major health problems worldwide. In most years, drought and famine cause more than half of all deaths from natural disasters. Already 1.8 million people, mostly children, die each year from diarrheal diseases caused by contaminated water. Climate change will just make this worse, Parker says.
Another absolute and basic need is, of course, food. That's also facing trouble, says Parker. Climate change will bring huge changes to how we grow food. Studies are mounting that show crops are likely to be more negatively affected by climate change than previously thought. "We need to steel ourselves from changes and, quite likely, reductions in food supplies from around the world."
All these changes, plus displacements of millions of people as was seen after Hurricane Katrina, pose health threats for everyone. But the most vulnerable members of our societies will be hardest hit, such as children, elders, city dwellers, and those who are socio-economically disadvantaged, says Parker. Planning for these threats and taking measures to minimize impacts is happening much too slowly, she said.
"These measures don't necessarily require a lot of money and we already have the new technology," she said. "I'm a preventive medicine physician, and I use that training and way of thinking with respect to climate change as well. It makes a whole lot more sense to me to prevent our climate from more instability rather than waiting and putting our research and resources into trying to fix problems after they've happened."
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Virus may affect memory decades later, study finds
Reuters
Mon Oct 23, 2006
WASHINGTON - Forget where you left your glasses? Did those keys go missing again? Now you do not have to blame your spouse -- a virus may be to blame.
A family of viruses that cause a range of ills from the common cold to polio may be able to infect the brain and cause steady damage, a team at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota reported on Monday.
"Our study suggests that virus-induced memory loss could accumulate over the lifetime of an individual and eventually lead to clinical cognitive memory deficits," said Charles Howe, who reported the findings in the journal Neurobiology of Disease.
The viruses are called picornaviruses and infect more than 1 billion people worldwide each year. They include the virus that causes polio, as well as colds and diarrhea. People contract two or three such infections a year on average.
"We think picornavirus family members cross into the brain and cause a variety of brain injuries. For example, the polio virus can cause paralysis," Howe said.
"It can injure the spinal cord and different parts of the brain responsible for motor function. In the murine (mouse) virus we studied, it did the same thing and also injured parts of the brain responsible for memory."
The Mayo Clinic infected mice with a virus called Theiler's murine encephalomyelitis virus, which is similar to human poliovirus.
Infected mice later had difficulty learning to navigate a maze. Some were barely affected, while others were completely unable to manage, and when the mice were killed and their brains examined, a correlating amount of damage was seen in the hippocampus region, related to learning and memory.
One virus particularly likely to cause brain damage is enterovirus 71, which is common in Asia, the researchers said. It can cross over into the brain and cause encephalitis, a brain inflammation that can lead to coma and death.
"Our findings suggest that picornavirus infections throughout the lifetime of an individual may chip away at the cognitive reserve, increasing the likelihood of detectable cognitive impairment as the individual ages," the researchers wrote in their report.
"We hypothesize that mild memory and cognitive impairments of unknown etiology may, in fact, be due to accumulative loss of hippocampus function caused by repeated infection with common and widespread neurovirulent picornaviruses."
Other viruses are known to kill brain cells, including the herpes virus and human immunodeficiency virus or HIV.
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Fun With Economics
Bush to Trumpet Strength of the Economy
By DEB RIECHMANN
AP
Oct 23, 2006
WASHINGTON - President Bush on Monday trumpeted the strength of the economy, an important issue in about two dozen congressional races that will determine whether Republicans retain control of the House.
Faced with difficult midterm elections and a deteriorating situation in Iraq, Bush is stressing the positive.
"The strength of this economy depends upon the strength of the small business sector," Bush said at a round-table where he talked about his administration's role in reducing taxes and limiting regulation and lawsuits that he says impede the entrepreneurial spirit in America.
"The role of the government, it seems to me, is to make sure that dreamers are rewarded for their hard work and their ingenuity and success. And the best way to do that is to reduce taxes on people," Bush said.
White House advisers, who think the president should get more credit for recent positive economic news, insist that Bush is not trying to change the subject away from the unpopular war. The president will continue to talk about Iraq and the war on terrorism as the Nov. 7 election nears, they said.
Eighty-eight percent of likely voters say the economy is an important issue - on a par with the percentage of people who view the situation in Iraq and terrorism as crucial matters, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll earlier this month. The poll found that 37 percent of likely voters say they approve of Bush's handling of Iraq overall. More voters - 42 percent - approve of his handling of the economy.
Overall, the economy grew at a 2.6 percent pace from April through June, compared with a 5.6 percent pace over the first three months of the year, which was the strongest spurt in 2 1/2 years. Still, voters remain uneasy even though gasoline prices have started dropping, the stock market is hitting record highs, and interest rates on credit cards and adjustable mortgages are leveling off.
Rising hopes for strong third-quarter earnings lifted the Dow Jones industrial average past 12,000 for the first time on Wednesday. The Conference Board's index of U.S. leading economic indicators rose last month, and the government reported last week that consumer prices fell in September by the largest amount in 10 months.
Democrats contend the middle class isn't enjoying the benefits of recent U.S. economic gains. They say sluggish median earnings show paychecks have failed to keep pace with inflation, and they note rising health care and energy costs.
White House political director Sara Taylor said that the economy is a key issue in about two dozen House races, including campaigns in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Ohio and Washington state. Democrats need a 15-seat pickup to regain the House and a gain of six seats to reclaim the Senate.
"It's going to have an important impact on certain races around the country," Taylor said. "I think it's an important issue that's not getting a ton of attention."
Bush participated in a round-table with three small- to medium-sized businesses that have taken advantage of community banking services to expand in the Washington area. The event was held at Urban Trust Bank. The bank, set up to provide mortgages, student loans and investment opportunities mainly to minorities, was founded by Robert Louis Johnson, who started BET - formerly Black Entertainment Television.
On Tuesday, the president will speak about the economy again at a campaign appearance in Sarasota, Fla., for businessman Vern Buchanan, who is in a tight House race against Democrat Christine Jennings, a former bank executive. The prospect of losing Florida's conservative 13th District to Democrats brought high-profile Republicans - Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Mel Martinez and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney - to the area last week.
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'Axis of oil' more important than health of planet
by Linda McQuaig
October 23, 2006
Exxon, the world's richest and mightiest corporation, was the leading force behind a massive 10-year campaign to block the Kyoto accord and ensure the world remains hooked on oil.
This was no easy battle, even for Exxon. Lined up against it was the scientific world - and most of the world community.
In the end, not even Exxon was able to block the signing of the historic Kyoto Protocol, as the world came together in 1997 in a far-reaching bid to shake its planet-endangering oil addiction.
But Exxon did score one huge victory when the new administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, close Exxon allies, withdrew U.S. support for Kyoto. The withdrawal of the U.S., which emits roughly one-quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, was a devastating blow. Still, the world community pressed on with Kyoto.
Into this titanic, ongoing struggle between the world community and the Bush-Cheney-Exxon axis of oil, Canada has now definitively entered on the side of the oil interests.
With the release last week of the Harper government's "clean air" bill, Ottawa has signalled its abandonment of Kyoto.
The previous Liberal government certainly shares some of the blame.
While it signed onto Kyoto and renewed that commitment last year, it failed to take meaningful steps to reach Kyoto targets, recklessly allowing Canada's greenhouse gas emissions to continue to rise.
But Harper's "green" plan is the final nail in the coffin for Canada's Kyoto commitment. The plan doesn't even mention Kyoto, instead calls for yet more consultations with industry and sets actual reduction targets an incredible 44 years into the future. By then, presumably even industry will be sick of consulting.
It won't matter much though, since the earth will almost certainly have warmed to the point where the damage will be irreversible.
Even the much more demanding deadlines set out in the Kyoto Protocol are a long shot at reversing the horrendously destructive course we're on, before it's too late. It now seems Canada will be the only nation failing to meet targets it agreed to in signing Kyoto.
This lackadaisical approach to the world's most urgent problem is utterly consistent with Harper's long-time indifference to the global warming crisis.
Like others close to the oil industry, Harper has tried to discredit the scientific conclusion that human actions are causing global warming - a conclusion which virtually every climate scientist in the world considers about as open-and-shut as the case that smoking causes cancer.
Harper knows the Canadian public, particularly in Quebec, wants action, but that means clamping down on Canada's fastest growing source of greenhouse gases: Alberta's booming oil sands. And Harper has absolutely no intention of getting tough on the oil industry.
Harper has now clearly shown which side he's on.
But he's hoping we'll be so dazzled by his talk of a "green" plan for "clean air" that we won't notice the Bush-Cheney-Exxon axis lurking in the background.
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Dow Hits New High on Earnings Optimism
By JOE BEL BRUNO
AP Business Writer
Oct 23, 2006
NEW YORK - Wall Street extended its October rally Monday as investors grew more confident about upcoming earnings reports and as a decline in oil bolstered hopes for higher consumer spending. The Dow Jones industrials crossed 12,100 for the first time and reached a new record high close.
Dow component Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which pleased investors by announcing plans to cut capital spending to improve profits, helped the blue chips to their new high. The Dow's record came just three trading days after its first move past 12,000.
Strength from International Business Machines Corp., Hasbro Inc., and Xerox Corp. also fed the advance. Just halfway through the third- quarter earnings season, companies' generally upbeat reports have given investors a renewed sense of security about the future.
"The blue chips have absolutely outperformed most markets, and this was an extension of that trend," said Steven Goldman, chief market strategist at Weeden & Co. "I don't think things are overdone. Investors are looking ahead thinking an economic slowdown is forthcoming, and its safer to get into household names and not new companies."
Blue chips resumed a three-month rally Monday after stalling Friday; the Dow had already risen 233 points in October before Monday's trading. The average also reached a new trading high Monday of 12,125.16.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 114.54, or 0.95 percent, to 12,116.91.
With investors favoring blue chips, analysts appeared satisfied that the market wasn't getting ahead of itself. The advance in the broader market was still narrow, and Goldman said he expects any future selloffs will be restrained to under a few percent.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 8.42, or 0.62 percent, to 1,377.02, and the Nasdaq composite index rose 13.26, or 0.57 percent, to 2,355.56.
Monday's gains came despite some concerns about the Federal Reserve's two-day meeting on interest rates, which starts Tuesday. Policymakers are expected to leave interest rates unchanged, though they could sound a hawkish tone in their accompanying economic assessment because of recent signs of rising inflation.
Treasury bonds fell on speculation the Fed will keep its benchmark rate at 5.25 percent, which is still at its highest level in more than five years. Bonds fell, with the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note rising to 4.83 percent form 4.79 percent on Friday.
The dollar was mixed against other major currencies, while gold prices fell.
The price of oil, which fell to lows for the year Friday from its mid- July highs, is making investors more bullish on sectors like retail, which will benefit if consumers have more spending money. Doubts that OPEC members would follow Saudi Arabia's lead to curb output pushed a barrel of light sweet crude lower by 52 cents to $58.81 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
"The picture being painted is pretty easy to suggest that the pressure on the economy from higher oil prices is easing," said Richard E. Cripps, chief market strategist at Stifel Nicolaus.
Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, said it will be more selective about where it will open stores, though it still plans 600 new locations next year. The retailer, which has been pushed by Wall Street to be more prudent in its expansion, was the Dow's biggest advancing stock.
The company said in a meeting with investors that it plans to bring costs in line with a slowdown in its sales and earnings growth. The move is expected to boost return on investment, and sent shares up $1.91, or 3.9 percent, to $51.28.
IBM was the Dow's second-biggest advancer. The technology company filed two patent infringement lawsuits against online retailer Amazon.com Inc. over technologies used to run Internet services.
Big Blue rose $1.08 to $91.56, while Amazon added 31 cents to $32.88.
AT&T Inc. rose 27 cents to $34.71 after reporting third-quarter profit rose 74 percent to exceed Wall Street projections. The telecommunications company said its quarter was boosted by strong growth at its Cingular Wireless unit.
Ford Motor Co. fell 11 cents to $7.90 after posting its largest quarterly loss in more than a decade. The troubled automaker's took a massive charge during the period to cover a restructuring plan that will shutter 16 plants and cut as many as 45,000 jobs.
Hasbro Inc. rose $2.03, or 8.7 percent, to $25.33 after the toy maker reported an 8.2 percent increase in its third-quarter profit amid strong sales of brands such as Playskool. Meanwhile, Xerox Corp. rose 47 cents, or 3 percent, to $16.47 after its third-quarter profit beat analysts' expectations.
Advancing issues outnumbered decliners by about 3 to 2 on the New York Stock Exchange, where consolidated volume came to 2.47 billion shares, compared with 2.57 billion Friday.
The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies rose 1.39, or 0.18 percent, to 763.52.
Overseas, Japan's Nikkei stock average closed up 0.82 percent. Britain's FTSE 100 closed up 0.18 percent, Germany's DAX index rose 0.65 percent, and France's CAC-40 advanced 0.68 percent.
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Enron's Skilling gets 24 years
By Bruce Nichols
Reuters
Mon Oct 23, 2006
HOUSTON - Former Enron Corp. chief executive Jeff Skilling was sentenced on Monday to more than 24 years in prison for leading a financial fraud that destroyed the company and came to symbolize a dark era for corporate America.
U.S. District Judge Sim Lake, in handing out the harshest sentence yet in the Enron saga, said Skilling's crimes "have imposed on hundreds if not thousands of people a lifetime of poverty."
He allowed Skilling, 52, to remain out of jail, but mostly confined to his home with an electronic monitor on his ankle until the U.S. Bureau of Prisons orders him to report, likely within the next 90 days.
Skilling also was ordered to pay $45 million in restitution to Enron investors, who lost billions of dollars when the company collapsed. Thousands of employees lost their jobs and retirement funds.
FBI assistant director Chip Burrus said in a statement Skilling's punishment sent a message to white collar criminals.
"Corporate crooks should beware. If you decide to use business coffers as your personal piggy bank at the expense of investors and employees, you risk loss of personal freedom," he said.
Judge Lake's sentence of 24 years and four months was the lowest it could have been within federal guidelines for the white collar crime.
Skilling, once one of corporate America's brightest and brashest stars, was subdued but stoic, telling reporters he was "disappointed" by the verdict but would appeal the 19 criminal counts against him.
"I don't blame the judge for what he did. I have a constitutional right to appeal, and I think we'll win," he said.
Skilling showed little emotion during the hearing, but occasionally looked back at wife, Rebecca, who sobbed in the gallery.
On May 25, Skilling and Enron founder Ken Lay were found guilty of defrauding investors by using off-the-books deals to hide debt and inflate profits.
Enron, once the country's seventh largest company, collapsed into bankruptcy in December 2001 when the deals were disclosed.
The resulting scandal rocked Wall Street and prompted reforms in the way companies report their finances.
Lay, 64, died of a heart attack in July while vacationing in Colorado. Following legal precedent, Judge Lake threw out the Lay convictions on October 17 because Lay died before a final judgment had been entered and before he could appeal.
In comments to the court before sentencing, Skilling said he was remorseful for what happened at Enron, but maintained he had committed no crime.
"I can't imagine more remorse. I had friends who died, good men," he said, appearing to choke up momentarily. "All of that being said, your honor, I'm innocent of these charges. I'm innocent of every one of these charges."
As he did in testimony during his trial, Skilling blamed the demise of Enron on a credit and liquidity crunch.
"The company did not have enough dry powder to deal with it. That, in sum and substance, is what happened in Enron," he said.
He and Lay testified that the crisis of confidence that engulfed Enron was caused by the actions of a few rogue employees, primarily former chief financial officer Andrew Fastow.
Fastow confessed to skimming millions of dollars from the off-the-books deals he set up at Skilling's direction. He pleaded guilty, cooperated with prosecutors and received a six-year prison sentence.
Prior to sentencing, several former Enron investors and employees made "victim impact statements" in which most of them called for Lake to impose the maximum sentence, which would have been just over 30 years.
"The worst mistake Ken Lay ever did was to hire you," former employee Ann Beliveaux told Skilling. "When things got bad, you jumped ship because you knew the sky was getting ready to fall."
"I had $1.3 million and all I have to show for it is two clocks (for service awards)," said another former employee Charles Prestwood.
"People think things like that don't happen in America, but it does. It happened to us," he said.
Skilling joins other prominent executives whose corner-office careers ended in prison cells. WorldCom founder Bernard Ebbers received a 25-year sentence, former Tyco chairman Dennis Kozlowski got 8 to 25 years, and John and Timothy Rigas of Adelphia received 15 and 20 year sentences, respectively.
Prosecutor Sean Berkowitz argued for a long sentence for Skilling, saying that Enron's demise had wide-ranging effects.
"The integrity of the marketplace as a whole was shaken by what happened at Enron," he said. "People lost their trust and their faith in the marketplace.
"Enron symbolized more than any other company the era of corporate fraud," Berkowitz said.
But Skilling's attorney Daniel Petrocelli argued for a sentence of 7 to 10 years, saying Skilling had meant no harm.
"Mr. Skilling set out to harm nobody. He didn't loot the company, he didn't engage in self-dealing ... he was not motivated by greed," he said.
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French lenders banking on British home buyers
AFP
Oct 22, 2006
PARIS - French banks are increasingly targeting investors from the United Kingdom who want to buy property in France, with a growing range of packages designed specifically for Brits seeking joie de vivre in a foreign land.
Crédit Foncier is the latest bank to move into the British property boom in France, with the opening of an office in London at the end of September to be closer to buyers.
Acquiring a property in France was once a luxury for rich Brits seeking a pied-a-terre on the Côte d'Azur on the Mediterranean, in the rural paradise of the Dordogne in the west, and to a lesser degree in Normandy across the English Channel, as well as in Paris.
But the past decade has seen thousands of ordinary British mortals take advantage of the strong pound and low cost flights to buy a piece of France, says Sébastien Duquesne, head of development at UCB International Buyers, which belongs the BNP Paribas banking group.
British people now own EUR 6.83 billion worth of property in France and have bought 51,000 houses here since 2000.
They represent 48 percent of all non-residents who have bought in France, way ahead of citizens of Benelux - Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg - at 13 percent, and Italians at 10 percent, according to a study by Crédit Foncier.
Also, the number of British people who live permanently in France has doubled in the past five years to 100,000 people, according to the last census in 2004 by the Insee statistical institute.
The 'roastbeefs', as the British are nicknamed by the French, are attracted to their nearest continental neighbour's way of life, healthcare, sunshine, and cuisine as well relatively lower property prices, said François Drouin, president of Crédit Foncier.
Aware of the new trend, BNP Paribas in 2004 bought Abbey National France, a subsidiary of the British Abbey National, specialised in housing loans for non-resident English speakers.
French banks have also started adapting to British demands for more flexible services such as variable mortgage rates or interest-only mortgages which are rarely available to French customers.
Some go even further, offering to guide potential buyers through the purchasing process from start to finish.
To this end, Barclays France last Monday launched an Internet site to advise Brits wishing to invest in France.
Crédit Foncier offers services ranging from a bilingual advisor for a day to managing an electricity subscription or taking care of an unoccupied second home.
BNP Paribas has opened five branches for foreign clients in the regions of France considered the most popular for British investors. Financial advice is available from a bilingual advisor who can reply to "legal and fiscal questions that are raised when we buy property abroad," Duquesne said.
The average price of a property in Britain is EUR 283,825, compared with EUR 176,000 in France, according to an annual study by Era Immobilier estate agents, published at the end of September.
But on average, Brits spend less money than other nationalities on their property in France - less than EUR 200,000 - because they prefer to buy houses that are run down which they can restore.
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Worldly Woes
IAEA chief: Iran is testing new enrichment device[
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-24 13:02:30
BEIJING, Oct. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- Iran has begun testing new uranium enrichment equipment, The New York Times quoted the UN atomic energy agency chief as saying Monday.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Iranian technicians had pieced together a second "cascade" of 164 centrifuges -- the devices that spin at high speed and turn ordinary uranium into a fuel usable for nuclear power plants -- "and are days away from using the cascade to enrich uranium."
ElBaradei said in a brief interview that "based on our most recent inspections, the second centrifuge cascade is in place and ready to go."
He said that no uranium had yet been entered into the new system, but could be as early as next week.
U.S. intelligence officials think that Iran is at least four to nine years away from gaining the technical capability to produce enough nuclear material for a single weapon, the paper said.
European officials suggest the latest move is political and Iranian officials are hoping to send a defiant message to the U.N. Security Council as it weighs possible sanctions, it added.
The Bush administration has dismissed Iran's energy claims and thinks it will secretly build nuclear weapons under the cover of engergy needs.
Iran has insisted that it does not intend to build a weapon, but ignored an Aug. 31 deadline, set by the Security Council, to stop enriching uranium.
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Guatemala: compromise possible over UN seat
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-24 12:17:01
MEXICO CITY, Oct. 23 (Xinhua) -- Guatemalan Foreign Minister Gert Rosenthal said Monday the country was open to a possible compromise candidate as the race with Venezuela for a UN Security Council nonpermanent seat remained deadlocked, reports reaching here said.
"The idea of a third candidate has come up in New York and we are not closed to this possibility," Rosenthal told reporters in Guatemala City.
However, the foreign minister insisted that Guatemala would consider backing down from the competition only if Caracas did the same.
"But we have no intention of stepping down unilaterally. We would only do so in agreement with Venezuela, with a clear candidate in mind."
Guatemala and Venezuela are competing for one of the 10 non-permanent seats on the Security Council. South Africa, Indonesia, Italy and Belgium have been elected to the four other rotating seats.
After three days and 35 rounds of inconclusive balloting last week, Guatemala led Venezuela by a margin of 20 to 30 votes in the 192-member General Assembly but still lacked the required two-thirds majority to win a seat on the 15-nation Council.
Uruguay, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and Panama have all been mentioned as possible alternatives, said Rosenthal. "But there is no obvious candidate. And we fear the discussion could divide the region even more," he said.
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Venezuela workers in Coke dispute
By Greg Morsbach
Caracas correspondent, BBC News
Tuesday, 24 October 2006, 02:54 GMT 03:54 UK
More than 10,000 former workers of Coca-Cola's subsidiary in Venezuela are blockading bottling plants and depots.
They say a Mexican-based subsidiary of Coke owes them a large amount of money in unpaid social benefits.
But Coca-Cola representatives in Mexico have roundly condemned the blockade as an illegal act.
The protesters are being backed by a special parliamentary commission consisting of leftist legislators loyal to President Hugo Chavez.
At one Coca-Cola plant in Caracas about 500 former workers blocked the exits and entrances, preventing the lorries which normally supply shops, kiosks and restaurants from leaving the factory.
The protestors are demanding that millions of dollars in unpaid social benefits such as pensions and severance payments be paid immediately to them by Coca-Cola Femsa, a Mexican-based subsidiary of the US soft drinks company.
Another 10,000 former contractors are camped outside 75 Coke warehouses and plants around Venezuela.
They say they are prepared to stay put until their demands are met. But Coca-Cola Femsa says this will put more than 7,000 jobs at risk in Venezuela.
State takeover
"This blockade is just the prelude to Coca-Cola being nationalised and turned over to the Venezuelan state," Nixon Lopez, a workers' leader, told the BBC.
"We're showing the world," he added, "that no multi-national company can just come here to humiliate Venezuelan employees."
The protesters are being backed by a special commission in parliament.
The committee, consisting of leftist MPs, is looking at taking control of the firm if it refuses to hand out the missing payments.
This isn't the first time lawmakers loyal to President Chavez have threatened to take over the assets of big international companies here.
President Chavez has himself spoken of seizing Venezuela's biggest phone company in a similar case to the Coca-Cola dispute.
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Hungary foes clash over protests
Tuesday, 24 October 2006, 04:29 GMT 05:29 UK
Hungary's prime minister and its main opposition party have clashed over violent protests that disrupted the anniversary of the 1956 uprising.
PM Ferenc Gyurcsany has refused calls to resign, describing anti-government protesters as an "aggressive minority".
But the leader of the main opposition Fidesz party said the whole country was against his "illegitimate government".
Some 100 people were hurt as protesters and riot police armed with tear gas and rubber bullets clashed in Budapest.
Opposition to PM Ferenc Gyurcsany turned violent last month after he admitted lying to win re-election.
Clashes continued late into the night on Monday and the mood in the capital remained tense.
By the end of the day, the number of protesters had fallen from several thousand to a few hundred, mostly concentrated on the Elizabeth Bridge over the River Danube.
Many of the protesters were from hard-right groups and some carried the red-and-white striped flag of the Hungarian government that supported the Nazis during World War II.
A group of demonstrators briefly commandeered a tank taken from an exhibition marking the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising.
'Illegitimate government'
Mr Gyurcsany said the protesters were an "aggressive minority... terrorising us".
"We have to defend the country," he said.
The Fidesz party said the police had used excessive force to break up the protests.
The party's leader, Viktor Orban, a former prime minister, told a gathering of his supporters that "an entire country has turned against this illegitimate government".
Earlier in the day, Hungarian officials and foreign dignitaries gathered at the parliament building to lay flowers.
Some veterans of the 1956 uprising refused to shake hands with Mr Gyurcsany at the commemoration and the main opposition Fidesz party said it was boycotting events where he would speak.
The Fidesz party has long refused to mark the 1956 uprising with Mr Gyurcsany's Socialists, whom it accuses of inheriting the mantle of the pro-Soviet Communists.
'Free Hungary'
Mr Gyurcsany caused political uproar recently when he admitted he had lied to the public about the economy.
But he has denied any comparison between Monday's protests and their 1956 counterparts.
"The majority of Hungarians believe that parliamentary democracy is the most suited to express people's will and to create law and give a programme to a free Hungary," he said.
The Hungarian uprising started in Budapest on 23 October 1956, with a spontaneous demonstration by a crowd of about 23,000, the reading of a pro-democracy manifesto and the singing of banned national songs.
A giant statue of Stalin was pulled down, leaving only the dictator's boots on the pedestal.
Soviet tanks were forced to withdraw, but returned with devastating force a week later.
The BBC's Allan Little says the uprising was the moment the world accepted the post-war partition of Europe and the apparent permanence of what Winston Churchill had called "the Iron Curtain".
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Moscow to negotiate new Russia-EU co-op treaty
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-24 07:57:47
MOSCOW, Oct. 23 (Xinhua) -- Russia is planning to start talks on a new cooperation treaty with the European Union (EU) before the end of this year, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday.
"We hope the first round of consultations on a new treaty will begin before the end of the year after the November Russia-EU summit in Finland," Lavrov was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying while meeting European businessmen.
The 25-member bloc, which depends on Russia for 25 percent of its gas and oil imports, was keen to formulate new principles of energy cooperation with Moscow through a new treaty.
The current treaty -- the Agreement on Partnership and Cooperation between Russia and the EU -- will expire next year.
Moscow, however, had earlier been reluctant to start talks on such a treaty, saying that the new one must focus on a long-term Russian-EU ties.
A treaty on strategic cooperation would be an ideal format for such a document, Lavrov said.
"This should be an ample juridical and political document based on the principles of equality and mutual profit," he said.
A Kremlin aide said on Friday that Moscow would not speed up work on a new agreement with the EU.
"Attempts to make the text of the future agreement excessively concentrated on energy" did not suit Russia, Kremlin aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky said.
"This must be a basic treaty, aimed at the long-term prospective of ten to 15 years, reflecting all the main spheres of cooperation, but not aimed at the settlement of current problems," he said.
The Kremlin aide said if both sides failed to finish work on the new document as scheduled, the current document could be extended. "It will not affect cooperation with the EU."
"It is always difficult to conduct negotiations with the EU," he added.
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Russia Ranked 127th, U.S. 53d in Worldwide Press Freedom Survey
Created: 24.10.2006 09:22 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 10:47 MSK
MosNews
Restrictions on civil liberties due to the "war on terrorism" have undermined media freedom in the United States and Russia over the past year, journalists' rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) quoted by Reuters said.
RSF's 2006 Worldwide Press Freedom Index released on Tuesday, a survey of censorship, intimidation and violence against journalists, found Finland, Iceland, Ireland and the Netherlands the most media-friendly. North Korea was last again.
Denmark fell from first last year to 19th after a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad sparked Muslim outrage and threats against reporters.
The United States fell nine places to 53rd in the survey of 168 countries, on a par with Botswana, Croatia and Tonga. It came 17th when the index was first compiled in 2002.
"Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of 'national security' to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his 'war on terrorism'," RSF said in a statement.
"The zeal of federal courts which ... refuse to recognize the media's right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism," RSF said.
It cited the examples of freelance journalist Josh Wolf, who was imprisoned for refusing to hand over video footage of a violent anti-capitalism protest in San Francisco, and of Sudanese Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj, who it said was being held without charge at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Russia also fell nine places, to 147th, in a year marked by the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was fiercely critical of government policy, particularly of Moscow's campaign against the insurgents in Chechnya whom she called terrorists.
"Russia, which suffers from a basic lack of democracy, continues slowly but steadily dismantling the free media, with industrial groups close to President Vladimir Putin buying up nearly all independent media outlets and with the passage of a law discouraging NGO activity," RSF said.
The law requires foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to submit a long list of paperwork, including passport numbers and home addresses of the parent group's founding members, to an agency which decides whether to approve them.
The Kremlin says the law is vital to prevent terrorists, money launderers and foreign intelligence services using NGOs as cover. Critics say it gives officials a free hand to harass charities and human rights groups it does not like.
In Japan, the firebombing of the Nihon Kenzai newspaper, rising nationalism and far-right attacks against journalists helped the country fall 14 places to 51st, RSF said.
France fell five places to 35th, partly due to an increase in searches of media offices and journalists' homes, RSF said. Police probing doping in cycling raided the offices of sports daily l'Equipe and weekly magazine Le Point.
"The steady erosion of press freedom in the United States, France and Japan is extremely alarming," RSF said.
North Korea, Turkmenistan and Eritrea remained the three most repressive countries, clocking up the highest scores. They were the only states to score more than 90 points last year but Iran, China, Burma and Cuba joined them this year.
More promisingly, Bolivia jumped to 16th from 45th, though RSF said that could change due to political tension, and the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan leapt 44 places to 98th thanks to the publication of its first privately owned newspaper.
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Cyprus talks 'may be last chance'
Monday, 23 October 2006, 19:13 GMT 20:13 UK
EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn has warned that a new bid to re-unite the divided island of Cyprus could be the last chance of progress for years.
He called on EU member states to back Finnish efforts to open a Turkish Cypriot port to trade with the EU, by putting it under UN control.
So far, Greek Cypriot politicians have blocked all such initiatives.
The EU hopes success would lead Turkey to open its ports to Cypriot vessels, removing one block to its EU entry bid.
The Finns are reported to have suggested putting both the Turkish Cypriot port of Famagusta and the nearby resort of Varosha under UN administration.
Promises
This would allow Greek Cypriots driven out of Varosha more than 30 years ago to start refurbishing their homes and hotels.
EU member states do not recognise the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and it does not qualify for preferential terms of trade, so there is almost no direct trade.
However, the European Union promised in 2004 to end the isolation of the Turkish Cypriot community, after it voted in favour of a UN plan to re-unite the island.
Soon afterwards the European Commission drafted legislation that would allow direct trade with the Turkish Cypriots, but the Cypriot government - a member of the EU since 1 May 2004 - has held it up.
For its part, Turkey promised to open its ports and airports to Cypriot traffic before it started EU membership talks last year, but has not yet done so.
Cyprus split in two in 1974, when a Greek-inspired coup prompted a Turkish invasion of the northern third of the island.
Window of opportunity
Finland has taken its initiative as the current holder of the EU presidency.
It is hoping for progress before an EU summit at the end of the year, when a decision could be taken to suspend Turkey's membership talks.
Mr Rehn, speaking in London, said the Finnish plan was currently the "only game in town".
"It really may be the last window of opportunity to make serious progress on the Cyprus issue for several years," he said.
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Royal compared to Mao for 'popular juries' idea
AFP
Oct 23, 2006
PARIS - Ségolène Royal, the Socialist frontrunner in France's presidential race, was accused of populism Monday for suggesting that members of parliament should be made to appear at regular intervals before "citizens' juries".
Speaking at a conference in Paris Sunday, Royal said she regretted "there is no on-going evaluation of the role of elected deputies."
The constitution should therefore be changed "in order to clarify the way in which deputies can be made to justify their record at regular intervals before citizens' juries drawn by lot which would evaluate the politicians," she said.
This would "put in place popular surveillance of the way in which deputies carry out their mandate."
Max Gallo, best-selling historian and former government spokesman under Socialist president François Mitterrand, said the expression "citizens' juries" reminded him of the excesses of Chinese leader Mao Zedong.
"The phrase 'citizens' juries drawn by lot' worries me deeply," Gallo told Le Figaro newspaper.
"We are getting into a kind of populist blur. If I were to be excessive, I would say that at the end-point of this - apparent - realisation of democracy you get the cultural revolution of Chairman Mao."
"He wanted professors and all representatives to be judged by the people, represented by militants who come to judge and condemn those who have been elected," he said.
According to Gallo, "We have yet to find a better way in democracies for deputies to justify their record than the principal of universal suffrage carried out at intervals set down in the law."
Comment: Royal didn't suggest that representatives of the people judge those in power; she suggested that the people themselves do it. If it was actually the people who were evaluating the policians - and not "militants" representing the people - then what's the problem?
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Norman Rockwell's America
Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America
by Mark Ehrman
Many people are thinking about it. This book shows how it's done.
Whether you find the government oppressive, the economy on a devastating course, or if you simply want adventure, you're not alone. Over 300,000 Americans emigrate each year.
Getting Out walks you through the world of the expat: the reasons, the rules, the resources, the tricks of the trade, along with compelling stories and expertise from expatriate Americans on every continent.
Getting Out shows you where you can most easily gain residence and citizenship, where can you live for a fraction of the cost of where you're living now, and what countries would be most compatible with your lifestyle, gender, age, or political beliefs.
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Radical Islam finds US to be 'sterile ground'
By Alexandra Marks
The Christian Science Monitor
Mon Oct 23, 2006
NEW YORK - The Islamist radicalism that inspired young Muslims to attack their own countries - in London, Madrid, and Bali - has not yielded similar incidents in the United States, at least so far.
"Home-grown" terror cells remain a concern of US law officers, who cite several disrupted plots since 9/11. But the suspects' unsophisticated planning and tiny numbers have led some security analysts to conclude that America, for all its imperfections, is not fertile ground for producing jihadist terrorists.
To understand why, experts point to people like Omar Jaber, an AmeriCorps volunteer; Tarek Radwan, a human rights advocate; and Hala Kotb, a consultant on Middle East affairs. They are the face of young Muslim-Americans today - educated, motivated, and integrated into society - and their voices help explain how the nation's history of inclusion has helped to defuse sparks of Islamist extremism.
"American society is more into the whole assimilation aspect of it," says New York-born Mr. Jaber. "In America, it's a lot easier to practice our religion without complications."
In a nation where mosques have sprung up alongside churches and synagogues, where Muslim women are free to wear the hijab (or not), and where education and job opportunities range from decent to good, the resentments that can breed extremism do not seem very evident in the Muslim community. Since 9/11, however, concern is rising among Muslim-Americans that they are becoming targets of bias and suspicion - by law enforcement as well as fellow citizens. It's a disquieting trend, say the young Muslims - one that might eventually help radicalism to grow.
It's impossible to pinpoint the factors that produce home-grown terrorists, analysts say. But it's also impossible to ignore the stark contrast between the lives of Muslims in European countries where bombings have occurred and those of Muslims in America.
"What we have here among Muslim-Americans is a very conservative success ethic," says John Zogby, president of Zogby International in Utica, N.Y., whose polling firm has surveyed the Muslim-American community. "People come to this country and they like it. They don't view it as the belly of the beast. With very few exceptions, you don't see the bitter enclaves that you have in Europe."
Part of what so shocked Spain about the Madrid train bombers, and then Britain after the London subway and bus bombings in July 2005, was that most of the perpetrators were native sons. In each case, the young men, allegedly inspired by Al Qaeda ideology, came from poorer neighborhoods heavy on immigrants. (By contrast, a plot foiled in August to blow up airplanes over the Atlantic involved suspects from leafy, middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods in Britain.)
America, too, has poorer neighborhoods with large Muslim concentrations, but they tend to be interspersed with other ethnic groups and better assimilated into society. Another difference, some suggest, is the general profile of Muslims who have come to the US and raised their families here.
Most Muslim immigrants came to America for educational or business opportunities and from educated, middle-class families in their home countries, according to an analysis by Peter Skerry of Boston College and the Brookings Institution. In Europe, the majority came to work in factory jobs and often from poorer areas at home.
European Muslims today live primarily in isolated, low-income enclaves where opportunities for good jobs and a good education are limited. In the US, 95 percent of Muslim-Americans are high school graduates, according to "Muslims in the Public Square," a Zogby International survey in 2004. Almost 60 percent are college graduates, and Muslims are thriving economically around the country. Sixty-nine percent of adults make more than $35,000 a year, and one-third earn more than $75,000, the survey showed.
In Britain, by contrast, two-thirds of Muslims live in low-income households, according to British census data. Three-quarters of those households are overcrowded. British Muslims' jobless rate is 15 percent - three times higher than in the general population. For young Muslims between 16 and 24, the jobless rate is higher: 17.5 percent.
"The culture is qualitatively different [in the American Muslim community] from what we've seen from public information from Europe, and that actually says very positive things about our society," says Jonathan Winer, a terrorism expert in Washington. "We don't have large populations of immigrants with a generation sitting around semi-employed and deeply frustrated. That's a gigantic difference."
Jaber, the AmeriCorps volunteer, who is studying to become a medical doctor, says he has not experienced anti-Muslim bias. In part, he says, that may be because he doesn't have an accent or look particularly Middle Eastern - his father is Palestinian and his mother Filipino. But he also credits America's melting-pot mentality, as does Ms. Kotb, the Middle East consultant.
"We weren't isolated growing up. We were part of the culture," says Kotb, who grew up outside Washington in a family that inculcated a success ethic. "Religion was important, but not so much that you'd have to cover your head or if you don't pray five times a day, that's it - nothing like that. There were a lot more progressive attitudes" within her local Muslim community.
In mosques in America, it's fairly common for imams to preach assimilation, says Mr. Zogby. That's not as true in Europe, particularly in poorer neighborhoods where sermons can be laced with extremism.
"The success of ... Saudi-inspired religious zealotry in Europe was in large part because the Saudis put up the money to build mosques and pay for imams," says Ian Cuthbertson, a counterterrorism expert at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research. "The American Muslim community was rich enough not to require Saudi money to build its mosques."
In Europe, it's estimated that millions of second- and third-generation Muslims have not been well assimilated in their adopted countries, so have little or no fealty to either the European country they live in or the one their parents were born in. "They are much more susceptible to the Internet, returning jihadist fighters, and extremist imams," says Thomas Sanderson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "There's no doubt that Europe has an incubator environment and we have a somewhat sterile environment for radicalism."
To be sure, the United States has brought charges in several terrorism-related cases involving American Muslims. Some have resulted in convictions, notably the 2002 case of six Yemeni-Americans from Lackawanna, N.Y. Other cases are pending.
Identifying and tracking home-grown terrorists is a complicated task - one that risks alienating or even infuriating the general Muslim-American citizenry if tactics are seen as unfair.
Feeling a chill
The young Muslims interviewed for this story chose their words carefully, but their inference is clear: They worry that suspicion toward Muslims has been building since 9/11, and they suggest that US intervention in Iraq and its support for Israel cause angst among many Arab-Americans.
US foreign policies "in the long term are going to hurt the US," says Mr. Radwan, the human rights activist, who works in Washington. "They, along with the crackdown on Muslim-Americans [by law enforcement], feed a feeling of resentment and the perception that the US acts on the basis of a double standard."
Indeed, America's Muslim community would wage the war on terror differently. According to the 2004 Zogby survey, three-quarters say the best way is for the US to change its foreign policy in the Middle East by recognizing a Palestinian state and being less supportive of Israel.
A newer concern for America's Muslims is their standing in post-9/11 society. Many sense that the ground under their feet is shifting - and young people like Florida-born Radwan, in particular, feel it. A 2001 graduate of Texas A&M University, Radwan wanted to become a doctor and began working as a medical researcher. One month after the 9/11 attacks, he was let go - at the end of a three-month probationary period. Afterward, he says, he couldn't get even an interview for a job that used his biochemistry degree or research skills. Eventually he abandoned his hopes of a medical career and shifted to human rights work.
That experience leads him to suggest another reason the US hasn't seen European-style homegrown terror cells: the intense scrutiny the FBI has focused on Muslim-Americans. "That is good in the short term, but bad in the long term," he says. "The Bush administration policies feed resentment that ... will stay in the Arab- American psyche for a long time."
The FBI says it doesn't target any community, neighborhood, or religion. Agents simply go where the leads take them, says John Miller, the FBI's assistant director of public affairs. But he adds: "We have put a growing effort into community outreach because we understand the discomfort the amount of pressure our attention can bring to a community."
The 'home-grown' threat: Is it overstated?
A small but growing number of analysts believe that some US officials have overstated the threat of homegrown Islamist radicalism in the United States. While Al Qaeda and foreign terrorists remain determined to attack in America, they say, the focus on potential American cells may be leading the US to misdirect its antiterror efforts.
"My theory as to why we haven't found any [homegrown Islamist terrorist cells] is because there aren't very many of them.... They aren't the diabolical, capable, and inventive people envisioned by most politicians and people in the terrorism industry," says John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University. "The danger is that we've wasted an enormous amount of money with all of the wiretaps [and] investigations, and diverted two-thirds of the FBI from criminal work to terrorism work."
The FBI calls such conclusions "uninformed," citing alleged plots by radicalized US citizens. The most notable was the case of the Lackawanna Six, so named for the six Yemeni-Americans from Lackawanna, N.Y., who went to Al Qaeda training camps in the spring of 2001.
"The people who make these claims [about threats being exaggerated] are never the ones responsible for preventing these attacks," says John Miller, the FBI's assistant director of public affairs. "The point is that if you're the dead guy, or you're a family member of one of those guys, all you know is that you wanted someone to develop the intelligence and take the actions to prevent it."
Still, a lack of public evidence pointing to extensive Islamist extremism in the US is leading a small but growing number of experts to agree with Professor Meuller's assessment. Like Meuller, though, they add a cautionary note.
"There's not zero threat in any community, but it is good news and we have to hope that reflects an underlying reality that [homegrown extremist cells] don't exist here," says Jonathan Winer, a terrorism expert in Washington. "You've always got lone nuts in every imaginable ethnic group grabbing every imaginable ideology to justify terrorism."
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Sailor Kills Marine After Lie About Rape
By SONJA BARISIC
AP
Oct 23, 2006
NORFOLK, Va. - A sailor pleaded guilty Monday to abducting and killing a Marine corporal he thought had been involved in a gang rape. The rape turned out to be a lie, but the truth surfaced too late.
Petty Officer 3rd Class Cooper Jackson, 23, pleaded guilty Monday to premeditated murder, kidnapping, impersonating a Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent and obstruction of justice in connection with the death of Cpl. Justin L. Huff, 23.
In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to spare him a possible death sentence.
Federal agents had testified at his Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury investigation, that Jackson had been fooled into falling in love with a woman who called herself Samantha and made up a story about being raped by servicemen.
"Samantha" turned out to be Ashley Elrod, a 22-year-old hotel clerk on North Carolina's Outer Banks, who testified that she lied about being raped. She said she "might have" told Jackson that one of the Marines was named Huff or Huffman, and she said Jackson called her after Huff was killed. Elrod has not been charged.
During his court-martial, Jackson told the Navy judge how he posed as an NCIS agent and took Huff to North Carolina to get information about the purported rape. He said he then slit Huff's throat and buried the body to avoid being caught.
"I'd broken several laws and I had a missing Marine with me," Jackson said at his hearing Monday. "Quite frankly, I was scared of the consequences of what would happen, of being caught, more so than I was of the consequences of taking his life."
If the judge accepts the plea, Jackson could be sentenced to life in prison with or without the possibility of parole, said his lawyer, Don Marcari. The sentencing phase was to begin Tuesday.
Huff, 23, of Indianapolis, was reported missing Jan. 2 after he didn't show up for class at the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center in Virginia Beach, where Jackson also was a student.
Agents said Jackson, of Boones Mill, confessed when they questioned him Jan. 12. The next day, he led agents to Huff's body in a wooded area in Currituck County, N.C., just south of the Virginia-North Carolina border.
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Gifted teacher caught with porn is indicted
BY JOHN GONZALES
Newsday Staff Writer
The former Huntington Station teacher accused by federal authorities of a cannibalism fetish and sexual preoccupation with children was indicted Monday on 10 counts of possessing child pornography as his attorney prepared a defense that claims the images were the result of unwanted e-mail and spam.
Michael Kelly Reiner, 46, of East Meadow, was fired from his 18-year teaching job at the Long Island School for the Gifted after he was arrested Sept. 27. Prosecutors said Monday that Reiner had 10 computer files containing about 500 sexually explicit images of children, along with 60 similar videos. Prosecutors said Reiner's home computer also held about 2,000 stories about the sexual abuse, torture and cannibalism of children, each story about two pages long.
Standing before Judge Joseph F. Bianco in orange jail scrubs, Reiner pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court in Central Islip. His lawyer, Ronald Schoenberg of Mineola, said Reiner never actively sought child pornography, but it ended up on his computer via unwanted correspondence. He said the stories were part of a fantasy that Reiner entertained, but never acted upon.
"There's children who could be character witnesses for this man," said Schoenberg, referring to Reiner's tenure as a teacher. "He has had an exemplary record his whole life. He has never had a complaint made against him by a child, ever."
"He may say it's fictitious," Assistant U.S. Attorney Allen L. Bode said, referring to Reiner's contention that the materials were part of a fantasy. "I say it's more dangerous."
According to the indictment unsealed Monday, prosecutors found files with names such as "theboyz12" and "realboylove28" in Reiner's computer. The indictment also ordered Reiner to forfeit a computer processor, four external hard drives, a desktop computer and a laptop computer.
The charge of possession of child pornography carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, authorities said. Reiner's next court appearance will be a Dec. 1 bail hearing to determine whether he is eligible for release pending a trial.
Bode said he would argue for Reiner's continued detention, and use the files to show he poses a danger to children. Schoenberg said Reiner poses no risk, but he would nevertheless ask that he be released to the custody of a brother who does not live near schools or other places that attract children.
Family members who were in court Monday to support Reiner declined to comment.
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Accident at Pa. coal mine kills 1
By MICHAEL RUBINKAM
Associated Press
Tue Oct 24, 2006
TREMONT, Pa. - An explosion in a coal mine killed a miner Monday, but five others escaped, authorities said. The blast happened 2,300 feet underground at the R&D Coal Co. anthracite mine in Schuylkill County, about 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia.
It appeared the blast occurred when miners detonated explosives, said Dirk Fillpot, spokesman for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.
The victim was Dale Reightler, 43, of Donaldson, according to his brother-in-law Charles Kimmel. Kimmel said the coal mine's owner also told the family Reightler was killed when explosives went off.
"All they know is they fired (the explosives)," Kimmel said. "They don't know if there was gas there and it went off. They won't know until they get it aired out and get up there tomorrow."
State and federal investigators were trying to determine the cause of the accident, the state Department of Environmental Protection said. Regulators ordered the mine closed until an investigation is complete.
Fillpot said the miners had checked for methane gas before the 10:30 a.m. detonation, but didn't detect any.
State officials were being cautious about calling the incident an explosion, saying it was too dangerous to go down into the mine shaft to investigate because the incident knocked out the mine's ventilation system. They hoped to have it restored Tuesday.
"Right now, it's a mining accident, a fatal mine accident, and that's what we're terming it until the investigation concludes," said Mark Carmon, a DEP spokesman.
The five miners who escaped were being interviewed, Carmon said.
The mine is in a remote, mountainous region in eastern Pennsylvania. A June inspection turned up no violations, while an August inspection found brush surrounding an exhaust fan that was cleared while the inspector was on site, according to state officials.
Four workers at the mine were injured Dec. 1, 2004, by debris from an explosion caused by a pipe with a faulty gauge, state officials said. The mine reopened after installing safety equipment, and two inspections this year turned up no significant violations, the state agency said.
The victim's neighbors were taking food to his family's home in the tightly knit mining community, neighbor Diana Carra said.
"The folks here really take care of each other," she said.
The owner of the coal company, Stu Himmelberger, was at Reightler's house Monday night to comfort the family but did not talk to a reporter. Kimmel, who also was at the home, said Reightler had worked in the mines since age 16, but dreamed of moving his wife and four children and setting up an auto repair business.
"He was going to give it up and go into auto repair full time," Kimmel said. "I guess that ain't going to happen."
The area has the nation's only deposits of anthracite, a type of hard, relatively clean-burning coal that once heated millions of homes but now represents a tiny sliver of the U.S. coal industry. The mines still operating are typically small, with only a few miners.
So far this year, there have been 41 other deaths in U.S. coal-mine accidents, none in Pennsylvania. In the deadliest accident, 12 men were killed at the Sago Mine in northern West Virginia in January.
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See a smoker in Omaha? Dial 9-1-1
WorldNetDaily.com
October 22, 2006
Omaha's tough new anti-smoking ordinance banning the practice in nearly all public places comes with an even tougher enforcement policy.
The Nebraska city's elected leaders and police department are urging residents who see violations to call the 9-1-1 emergency system for an immediate response.
Omaha banned smoking in public Oct. 2. Penalties are $100 for the first offense, $200 for the second and $500 for the third and subsequent infractions.
Teresa Negron, sergeant in charge of public information for the police, explained the department encourages observers of infractions to pick up the phone to report the infraction - just like they would for any other crime they observe being committed.
In the three weeks since the new smoking ban took effect, people have been observing the law, according to the city prosecutor.
Comment: It's Nazism reincarnated! The whole idea is to get people used to reporting on one another for something that is, essentially, a NON-offense. It is part of the "inspiring of fear" and breaking of human ties of social connectedness.
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US bans Vegemite
Kelvin Healey
Sunday Mail
THE United States has slapped a ban on Vegemite, outraging Australian expatriates there.
The bizarre crackdown was prompted because Vegemite contains folate, which in the US can be added only to breads and cereals.
Expatriates say that enforcement of the ban has been stepped up recently and is ruining lifelong traditions of having Vegemite on toast for breakfast.
Former Geelong man Daniel Fogarty, who now lives in Calgary, Canada, said he was stunned when searched while crossing the US border recently.
"The border guard asked us if we were carrying any Vegemite," Mr Fogarty said.
"I was flabbergasted." Paul Watkins, who owns a store called About Australia in San Antonio, Texas, said he had been forced to stop importing Vegemite six months ago.
"We have completely stopped bringing it in," he said.
"(US authorities) have made a stance and there is nothing that can be done about it."
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Bush Looks Like A Hack! (A Cab Driver, That Is)
wcbstv
New York Taxi Driver Bears Resemblance To President, Gets Yelled At For Bush's Policies
(CBS) NEW YORK There are thousands of faceless taxi drivers in New York City.
But when you hop into the cab of one Samuel Vazquez, well, let's just say you feel like you know him. And depending on your politics, that's not necessarily a good thing.
In fact, when it comes to New York cab drivers, some are definitely major league pros.
But Vazquez is just plain "Bush."
"I look like George Bush!" he says, referring, of course, to President George W. Bush. Unlike the commander in chief, though, Vazquez, 76, lives in the Bronx and has been a hack for 40 years.
His look-alike mug has put him in some pretty impressive political company. He has photos of himself with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and others.
But alas, Vazquez says, he and his likeness share precious little politically.
President Bush is a Republican. Vazquez is a Democrat.
President Bush supports the Iraq War. Vazquez, a Korean War veteran, isn't crazy about it.
Perhaps more striking, however, is a linguistic difference between the president and Vazquez. The president says "nuke-u-ler." Vazquez says a perfectly enunciated "nu-clee-er."
Vazquez often finds himself the subject of gawkers, people who want their pictures taken and folks who shout at him for the policies of the man he resembles.
"Are you sorting out Iraq?" one man on the street demanded to know recently.
But Vazquez says the encounters with strangers merely add richness to his colorful life. You might even say it's been quite a ride.
Vazquez, by the way, has been married to the same woman, Lucy, for 51 years. They have four children. And for the record, when it comes to his likeness, President Bush, he says he prefers to keep his opinions to himself.
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Zionist Tendencies
Israeli pleads guilty to calling in bomb threat to U.S. airport
By The Associated Press05:01 24/10/2006
An Israeli-American man pleaded guilty to calling in a bomb threat to the Long Beach Airport after he arrived too late to board his flight, authorities said.
Yechezkel Wells, 21, of Miami Beach, California, entered his plea in U.S. District Court to a felony count of conveying false information of a threat targeting an airplane. Wells, who remains free on bond, is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 29. He faces probation to five years in prison.
Wells, a college student with dual citizenship in the U.S. and Israel, was arrested Aug. 26 shortly after he made an emergency call from a pay phone and said there was a bomb on a JetBlue flight from Long Beach, California, to Fort
Lauderdale, Florida. In his plea agreement, Wells acknowledged he made the call to try to keep the plane from leaving.
Court documents said Wells did not have a bomb and was upset that an airline employee would not allow him to board because of federal rules that require airlines to close a flight 30 minutes before takeoff.
He told investigators he had hoped the threat would delay the flight and possibly allow him to board, authorities said.
Wells' lawyer, Donald Etra, said outside court that his client "apologizes to the passengers of JetBlue" who were delayed for about one hour while bomb-sniffing dogs searched the plane.
"This was a momentary gross lapse in judgment," Etra said.
Comment: Would anyone like to imagine what would have heppened if the caller had been an Arab?
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Israel founded using fake British banknotes
MURDO MACLEOD
Sun 22 Oct 2006
Scotsman
MORE than £130m worth of British banknotes forged by the Nazis was used by the Jewish underground to help establish the State of Israel.
Wads of notes, which the Germans had forged by concentration camp inmates, ended up being used after the Second World War to pay for the transport of Jews to then British-occupied Palestine, and to buy weapons for the embryonic Israeli armed forces.
The revelations are contained in a new book which has been published in the USA and Germany, written by a former Time magazine journalist, and which details how the Nazis sought to undermine the British economy and what became of the cash they produced.
The Germans produced £132m of forged Bank of England notes during the Second World War as part of an audacious plan to undermine and destroy the British economy. The sum was worth about £3bn in today's money. While the plan ultimately failed to deal the UK a fatal blow, it nevertheless frightened the Bank of England into withdrawing all notes worth more than £5 from circulation until the 1960s.
The notes were produced by a team of forgers and printing experts gathered from among Jewish concentration camp inmates. In the book, Krueger's Men, Lawrence Malkin reveals how some of the cash ended up in the hands of the Jewish underground at the end of the Second World War.
The Nazis laundered millions of pounds through a series of schemes including using business figures in occupied Europe who had concealed their Jewish origins. One of these businessman was Yaakov Levy, a successful jeweller and art expert in pre-war Germany.
In the weeks following the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, Levy got supplies to Jewish refugees in Northern Italy who were fleeing south in hope of travelling to Israel. He also handed out large wads each containing about £50,000 of fake cash to organisers looking to help Jewish Holocaust survivors get from Europe to Israel.
In his book, which draws on new information from UK, US, German and Israeli archives, Malkin wrote: "The Jewish underground wanted van Harten's [Levy's] money and did not care whether it was counterfeit or real. They passed the bogus pounds to supply Holocaust survivors and help the Brichah [Jewish escape organisation] smuggle more refugees to Palestine. On the international arms market, they used the money to buy weapons for Jews arming themselves against the British and then the Arabs."
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Top Dems Stumble Over Themselves to Prove Allegiance to Israel
JTA
Top Democrats repudiated former President Carter's new book on the Middle East.
Howard Dean, the party chairman; Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives; and a number of Democrats in Congress issued statements Monday saying that "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid" did not represent their views.
According to advance publicity, the book argues that Israel's settlement policy is principally to blame for the failure of peace initiatives in the Middle East. "While I have tremendous respect for former President Carter, I fundamentally disagree and do not support his analysis of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Dean said.
Pelosi said Carter is "wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression, and Democrats reject that allegation vigorously."
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Israelis threaten to retake Gaza-Egypt border
By Dan Williams Sun Oct 22, 6:27 PM ET
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Several Israeli cabinet ministers called on Sunday for a military operation to retake control of Gaza's southern border and prevent Palestinian militants smuggling weapons from neighboring Egypt.
"Action must be taken without hesitation. Any hesitation is dangerous and we must act immediately," Industry and Trade Minister Eli Yishai of the religious party Shas told reporters.
Israel is engaged in a massive offensive in Gaza aimed at stopping Palestinian militants from firing rockets into Israel. More than 250 Palestinians, half of them civilians, have died.
Palestinian government spokesman Ghazi Hamad denounced the proposal as a potential ruse for an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza -- something Israel has said repeatedly is not in the works.
"The call to retake the border is a serious escalation and an incitement for more Israeli aggression," Hamad said.
Israel began its assault in Gaza after Palestinian gunmen in the territory abducted a soldier in Israel in a raid in June.
Yishai's call to move back into the 12 km (7.5 mile) Gaza border zone, more than a year after Israel pulled troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip, was echoed by two other cabinet ministers and a senior military commander.
Israel estimates that since the withdrawal of tons of munitions, including advanced shoulder-fired missiles, have been spirited into Gaza from Egypt through underground tunnels.
That has rung alarm bells in an Israeli military still reeling from its difficulty in beating back well-armed Hezbollah guerillas during the recent Lebanon war, and which has been hard put to stop the rocket fire by Gazan militants.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was expected to convene top ministers on Tuesday or Wednesday to discuss the option of a major anti-smuggling operation in Gaza, political sources said.
But the sources voiced doubt that any such mission, with its attendant Palestinian casualties and strains on Israel's strategic ties with Egypt, would go ahead before a planned trip by Olmert to the United States in mid-November.
In the latest violence, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian gunman near the West Bank city of Jenin amid clashes, medics and the army said.
In mounting Palestinian violence, masked gunmen shot dead a security officer loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas's
Fatah group, locked in a power struggle with the governing Hamas movement.
Earlier, masked gunmen in Gaza killed a senior militant loyal to Fatah. Another militant who supported Fatah was killed by unknown assailants near the West Bank city of Jericho, witnesses said.
There was no claim of responsibility for any of the shootings. At least 19 Palestinians have been killed in inter-factional fighting this month.
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A call to abolish cluster bombs
By Curt Goering
Cluster munitions are not banned weapons, but their use in civilian areas violates the international ban on the use of indiscriminate weapons. According to the UN, 90 percent of the cluster bombs were dropped in the last 72 hours of the war - when all parties knew a cease-fire was imminent.
BEIRUT, LEBANON - "Watch out! Watch out!" shouted my Lebanese colleague as I approached an unexploded cluster bomb near a soccer field in the southern Lebanese village of Soultaniye. As I tried to get a close-up photograph, he warned me to proceed cautiously so my shoes wouldn't inadvertently sprinkle dirt on the bomblet or otherwise disturb it, causing it to explode.
This close call came during a recent Amnesty International mission to assess the impact on civilians of this summer's war between Hizbullah and
Israel. At the United Nation's Mine Action Coordination Center, I learned of Hussein Qaduh, a student who had been critically injured in a cluster-bomb explosion the previous evening.
One of his friends showed me where Hussein had been injured. More than a dozen unexploded bomblets still lay on the playing field and the path beside it; the adjacent wall and houses bore the signature pockmarks of exploded cluster bombs. Strewn across the spot where Hussein fell were stained pages from a notebook that villagers used to try to stem his bleeding. In the nearby village of Majdel Silim, villagers were eager, even insistent, to show me where bomblets had landed - on balconies, outside front doors, in trees and gardens, and even inside homes. A mother whose son had suffered cluster-bomb injuries pointed to the tree branches above us.
Tragically, the problem of unexploded ordnance, especially cluster bombs, has emerged as perhaps the conflict's most enduring legacy, one that will hamper southern Lebanon's recovery for years. The
United Nations has identified more than 750 sites where cluster bombs were fired, with estimates indicating that at least 1 million unexploded cluster bomblets litter the villages, fields, gardens, and orchards of southern Lebanon.
This is especially devastating because most families in southern Lebanon are heavily dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. If farmers cannot tend to their fields soon, they may miss this year's harvest, as well as the planting or cultivating cycle for next year's crops.
Cluster munitions are not banned weapons, but their use in civilian areas violates the international ban on the use of indiscriminate weapons. According to the UN, 90 percent of the cluster bombs were dropped in the last 72 hours of the war - when all parties knew a cease-fire was imminent.
Reports last week that Hizbullah fired cluster bombs at civilian areas in northern Israel suggests these weapons are spreading to nonstate armed groups, further multiplying the danger they pose.
After initially denying that it used cluster bombs, Israel later said that all weapons they use are legal. But the military purpose of their use in these circumstances is inexplicable. Although Israel has provided some maps of the affected areas, the UN says it has still not provided specific coordinates that would expedite clearing. (An Israeli official told the German newspaper Der Spiegel that granting the request could jeopardize Israeli intelligence about Hizbullah.)
The US State Department's Office of Defense Trade Controls is investigating the use of American-made cluster munitions in southern Lebanon, apparently to determine whether their use violates the terms in the (secret) agreements for their use. A congressional investigation into the munitions' use after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon pressured the Reagan administration to ban sales of cluster weapons to Israel for six years.
Last month, Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Dianne Feinstein of California submitted an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill designed to prevent cluster-bomb use in or near populated areas. It failed.
Senators Leahy and Feinstein should reintroduce their amendment next year. Ideally, this bill would include a ban on the use of all cluster bombs that have high failure rates - which leads to the danger zones of unexploded bomblets - and a ban on the stockpiling or transfer of these submunitions. It deserves the support of every senator.
As with the movement that led to the 1999 global treaty banning land mines, there is mounting international pressure to stop the use of cluster munitions altogether. Belgium has already banned them, Norway has imposed a moratorium, and other countries back a convention to prevent their use. The Review Conference examining the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons meeting next month in Geneva is a key opportunity to build momentum for the international ban.
The stakes for civilians in Lebanon are high. They will suffer the effects of these weapons for years to come. But if action is taken now, the impact could be reduced. That's why Israel must share the coordinates of the areas it cluster-bombed with the UN Mine Action Coordination Center. The center also needs greater funding to clear the land of this contamination.
The human cost of using cluster bombs in this summer's conflict should provide enough impetus to abolish these indiscriminate killers once and for all.
* Curt Goering is the senior deputy executive director for policy and programs at Amnesty International USA.
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Israel 'must open its nuke stockpile to inspectors'
10/22/2006 12:00 AM (UAE)
New York: The UAE has called on the United Nations to make Israel cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by opening up its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction for inspection.
Abdullah Hassan Obaid Al Shamsi, member of the UAE delegation to the UN, made the call in a UAE address to the UN first committee (disarmament and international security), which held a session here on Friday to discuss a number of global security issues, including the issue of having a nuclear weapon free zone in the Middle East.
He said the Middle East and the Arabian Gulf region was one of the world's most tense regions because of Israel's position and arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons, and the efforts of other states in the region to build nuclear reactors "that was a great source of danger and concern to all."
Condemned
He pointed out the UAE strongly condemned the continued unilateral policy of Israel and appealed to the international community to put pressure on the Israeli government to implement the Security Council and General Assembly resolutions which called for Israel to accede to the non-proliferation treaty as all other states in the region had done.
He also urged the UN to force Israel to cooperate with the energy agency by declaring all its nuclear facilities and accepting the principle of verification and to cease the stockpiling and production of fissile material and all nuclear testing.
He said serious efforts were needed to achieve the alleviation of tension and instability in the region, adding that it was imperative to pave the way for renewing dialogue and returning to the peaceful negotiations process, which could ultimately resolve the question of Palestine and the Middle East.
His full text concluded by saying: "Finally, we hope the working delegations in this committee will support the two draft resolutions on the establishment of a zone free from all weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East and on the risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, especially that they reflect the disturbing reality in the Middle East and are in line with the international efforts aimed at achieving comprehensive nuclear disarmament with a view to sparing our people and humanity the destructive scourge of wars."
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Sarkozy jumps into row over Muslim airport staff
AFP
Oct 21, 2006
PARIS - France's Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy jumped into a row over the suspension of access badges for mostly Muslim airport workers Saturday, saying it was unacceptable that people with "radical" ties work in sensitive jobs.
"Regarding those with access to runways, it is our duty to ensure they don't have links near or far to radical organizations," Sarkozy said, referring to the recent removal of security clearances for several dozen mostly Muslim airport workers at the Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris.
The matter has sparked outcry on the part of some airport employees, who have denounced an atmosphere of "paranoia" at the airport.
A trade union, CFDT, has filed a discrimination complaint on behalf of Muslim workers, whose badges to work in sensitive zones at the airport were suspended.
Half a dozen luggage handlers have also appealed to an administrative tribunal against the decision to suspend their work badges, which gives airport personnel access to customs zones and sensitive areas near runways.
According to the French anti-discrimination group MRAP, roughly a hundred workers have lost their badges since August.
"In the fight against terrorism, Mr. Sarkozy's cause is just, but his methods are not. One does not fight terrorism by spurning people's rights," said two lawyers, respectively representing the CFDT trade union and the baggage handlers in their complaints.
But during a public gathering in Paris Saturday, the Interior Minister said he could "not accept that people with radical practices work at the airport."
If they consider themselves victims of discrimination "they can air their rights before the courts," said Sarkozy, who is seen as the hot favourite to represent the right in next year's presidential elections.
In April, a book claiming the airport had been infiltrated by Islamic militants stirred furor. Anti-terrorist officials cast doubts on claims made in 'The Mosques of Roissy', by right-wing French politician Philippe de Villiers.
An airport union, Sud Aérien, accused Villiers - another presidential hopeful in next year's elections - of playing on public fears of radical Islam to win votes.
But four months later, Sarkozy announced that unofficial prayer sites at the airport had been closed.
"In the six years I've worked at Roissy, I've never had a problem," said one Franco-Tunisian airport worker, Mohamed Seddiki, who said he received a letter from the local police precinct claiming he posed a "significant danger to airport security."
Seddiki's badge was withdrawn in early October. "In June they closed out prayer hall, and now they tell me I'm a danger to the airport," Seddiki said. "All of this is paranoia caused by de Villiers' book."
Like Seddiki, another Muslim worker also lost his badge earlier this month, after being questioned by police.
"I was asked if I prayed and if I'd made the pilgrimage to Mecca," said the worker, who refused to disclose his name. "Yes, I went to Mecca with my wife, and so what?"
Earlier, the airport's deputy police chief said that being a practising Muslim "was absolutely not a criterion" for suspending the access badges.
Rather, he referred to conclusions drawn by France's Anti-terrorist Coordination Unit (UCLAT) as the basis for the sanctions.
Comment: Lots of Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca and pray daily. Jews and Christians also pray daily - sometimes even at work! They also visit holy sites with their spouses. That doesn't mean they're all terrorists who should be dismissed from their jobs as "security threats". Obviously, there are some candidates for the French presidency who REALLY REALLY want to turn France into a miniature version of Bush's US. And gee, now that we think about it, didn't one of them recently visit Bush again??
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Life with Zionists
Reinhart to quit her job and leave Tel Aviv in Protest
October 11, 2006 02:03 AM
Lubna Hammad
She's just fed up! She can't take it any more...
In a brave step, Tanya Reinhart declared that her government's actions in the West Bank and Lebanon are unacceptable and that she's planning to leave her job in protest. Click here for full report. One could ask what good would that bring to the Palestinians and the cause she's defending? Wouldn't it be better if she remained and influenced her students?
In addition ot the moral condemnation of her government policies, quiting her job at the Tel Aviv University sends an implicit message re the role of universities in supporting these policies and practices. It seems that Reinhart no longer believes that israeli universities could assume the roles usually played by academic institutions in the face of oppression and violations of rights. Or, it could be that Reinhart is planning to leave Tel Aviv the city and not only the university because she can't deal with the blindness and hypocracy of her society.
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Palestinian child prisoners fall victim to forced labor
Aljazeera
Hundreds of Palestinian children are arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned by the Israeli army each year, according to the Defense for Children International/Palestine Section (DCI/PS), a non-governmental organization which monitors the detention conditions of these children and represents them in Israeli military courts.
Many of those children fall victim to "forced labor in which they must work at least eight hours a day for a few shekels," stated an article on uruknet.info.
"The prison administration has forced all prisoners in the Telmond Prison to work eight hours for very low wages," said one of the Palestinian children after his release.
"The Israeli soldiers come to the chambers at seven and force us to go with our legs tied with chains," added the child, whose job was to pack plastic spoons in boxes.
Even wounded political detainees are forced to work. "I had a broken bone but the soldiers forced me out of my cell to work anyway, without any consideration for the pain," a former prisoner said.
There are more than 375 Palestinian prisoners in the Telmond Prison, most of whom are children.
The child laborers are given only two meals per day; one at 11:00 pm and another at 6:00 am.
Israeli prison officials also try to obtain information from the children about members of the Palestinian resistance, the article states.
A total of 376 Palestinian children are currently detained in Israeli prisons and detention camps. The majority of them are under 16-years-old and are being subjected to some of the worst forms of abuses, such as physical punishment, humiliation or sexual harassment, according to the Defense for Children International/Palestine Section (DCI/PS).
DCI/PS and other human rights organizations working in the occupied Palestinian territories have frequently reported widespread and systematic violations of international law designed to safeguard the rights of children deprived of their freedom.
According to DCI/PS, these violations began before the outbreak of the second infitada, or uprising, in September 2000. As early as July 1999, there was documented evidence of increased violations of children's rights to due process and to adequate standards of detention.
In recent years, the organization reported a serious increase in the number of Palestinian children arrested between the ages of 13 and 14. There is also a remarkable increase in the length of sentences received by Palestinian children.
Moreover, the detention conditions have steadily deteriorated with an increased number of attacks on child detainees by Israeli prison guards.
The children are also denied the right to education and visits from family and lawyers, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
Palestinian children who aren't in Israeli custody are also denied the right to education because of Israeli-imposed restrictions in the occupied territories, such as military curfews, closures of schools, and home confinement.
The Israeli army "resorted to excessive use of force, house demolitions, increasingly severe mobility restrictions and closure policies, negatively affecting the Palestinian economy and living conditions'', according to UNICIF.
As a result, ''a generation of Palestinian children is being denied its right to an education'' in violation of international law.
Israel is obliged to ensure that education is accessible to every Palestinian child, in accordance with the Fourth Geneva Convention governing the rules of war and the landmark UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Israel has signed both international conventions.
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Israel warplanes in Lebanon overflights in defiance of France
Mon Oct 23, 9:03 AM ET
BEIRUT (AFP) - Israeli warplanes have carried out their "most intensive overflights" of Lebanon since the end of the Jewish state's war with Hezbollah, police said, despite a French warning to halt such missions.
Two warplanes twice flew low over Beirut, police said Monday, with four planes carrying out similar mock raid over southern Lebanon, causing a sonic boom over the port city of Tyre, as Muslims celebrated the end of Ramadan.
"These are the most intensive overflights since August 14 ... and it looks like another defiance of 1701 and of French appeals," a police source said, referring to UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended the 34-day war.
The territorial violations came days after France, which currently leads the UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, said it might open fire on the intruding aircraft.
Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz vowed Sunday that the flights would continue because of alleged arms smuggling to Hezbollah since the August 14 end of the Shiite militant group's summer war with
Israel.
"Increasing intelligence indicates a growing effort to pass weapons into Lebanon," Peretz said, accusing the Lebanese government of failing to prevent arms smuggling as required by Resolution 1701.
"As long as these attempts continue, the legitimacy of our flights over Lebanon increases," Peretz said. "As long as Resolution 1701 is not carried out, we have no intention of stopping the flights over Lebanon."
The flights have been increasingly criticised by the international community, with France warning on Friday against the violations.
"These violations are extremely dangerous because they may be felt as hostile by forces of the coalition that could be brought to retaliate in case of self-defence," French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said.
Resolution 1701 calls for the disarming of all militias in Lebanon, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the south of the country, and the deployment of a beefed-up UN peacekeeping force.
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Settlements grow on Arab land, despite vow to U.S.
By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent
10:13 24/10/2006
A secret, two year investigation by the defense establishment shows that there has been rampant illegal construction in dozens of settlements and in many cases involving privately owned Palestinian properties.
The information in the study was presented to two defense ministers, Amir Peretz and his predecessor Shaul Mofaz, but was not released in public and a number of people participating in the investigations were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements.
According to security sources familiar with the study, the material is "political and diplomatic dynamite."
In conversations with Haaretz, the sources maintained that the report is not being made public in order to avoid a crisis with the U.S. government.
Brigadier General Baruch Spiegel, assistant to the Defense Minister, retired earlier this month. Spiegel was also in charge of the various issues relating to the territories, which Dov Weisglass, chief of staff in prime minister Ariel Sharon's office, promised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in writing that Israel would deal with. These commitments included illegal settlement building, improvements in the conditions of Palestinian civilians, and a closer oversight over the conduct of soldiers at IDF roadblocks.
One of Spiegel's tasks was to update the data base on settlement activities. During talks with American officials and non-government organizations such as Peace Now, it emerged that the defense establishment lacked up to date information on the settlements, which was mostly based on data provided by the Civil Administration in the territories.
The lack of updated information stemmed from the fact that the defense establishment preferred not to know what was going on, but was also linked to a number of key officials in the Civil Administration actively deleting information from the data base out of ideological allegiance with the settlers.
Spiegel and his team compared the data available from the Civil Administration to that of the Americans, and carried out dozens of overflights of the territories, using private aircraft at great expense, in order to complete the data base.
The findings of the study, security sources say, show an amazing discrepancy between the Civil Administration's data and the reality on the ground. The data in Spiegel's investigation served as the basis for the report on the illegal outposts prepared by attorney Talya Sasson and made public in March 2005.
"Everyone is talking about the 107 outposts," said a source familiar with the data, "but that is small change. The really big picture is the older settlements, the 'legal' ones. The construction there has been ongoing for years, in blatant violation of the law and the regulations of proper governance."
Three years ago, in talks with the Americans, Israel promised that all new construction in the older settlements would take place near existing neighborhoods. The idea was that construction would be limited to meeting the needs of the settlements' natural growth, and bringing to an end the out-of-control expansion over territory.
In practice, the data shows that Israel failed to meet its commitments: many new neighborhoods were systematically built on the edge of areas of the settlement's jurisdiction, which is a much larger territory than the actual planning charts account for.
The data also shows that in many cases the construction was carried out on private Palestinian land. In the masterplans, more often than not, Palestinian properties were included in the construction planned for the future. These included Palestinian properties to which the state had promised access.
However, exploiting the intifada and arguing that the settlers should not be exposed to security risks, Palestinian farmers were prevented access to their properties that were annexed by Israeli settlements.
In many settlements, including Ofra and Mevo Horon, homes have been constructed on private Palestinian land.
"The media is busy with the outposts, but how many of these are really large settlements like Migron? In most cases, it's a matter of a few mobile homes. Spiegel's study shows the real situation in the settlements themselves - and it is a lot more serious than what we knew to date," one of the sources said.
A senior security official expressed concern that with Spiegel's retirement, the data base will not be updated and the data will be lost.
"The [defense] establishment does not necessarily have an interest in preserving this information. It may cause diplomatic embarrassment vis-a-vis the Americans and cause a political scandal. It is not unlikely that there will be those who will seek to destroy the data," the senior officer says.
Other relevant sources said it is necessary for an objective, external source, like the State Comptroller's office, to intervene in this matter.
A statement issued by the Defense Minister's office in response said that "the matter is being examined internally and staff work will be completed soon, and the parts of the report that can be published will be made available. The Defense Minister will discuss the matter with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert."
Meanwhile, construction in the new outposts has intensified. Sources in the Yesha Council say that since the Lebanon War, "Junior officers on the ground are in our favor and in many instances turn a blind eye regarding mobile homes in place."
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Spanish journalist seized in Gaza
Tuesday, 24 October 2006, 08:26 GMT 09:26 UK
A Spanish photographer working for the Associated Press news agency has been kidnapped by gunmen in the Gaza Strip.
It is not clear who is holding him or what their motive might be, and a Hamas spokesman has condemned the kidnap.
Emilio Morenatti, 37, was apparently leaving a flat in the centre of Gaza City on his way to an early-morning assignment when he was seized.
He was reportedly approached by gunmen who emerged from a white Volkswagen car and took him away.
Over the last two years or so, there have been about 24 cases of foreigners being kidnapped in the Gaza Strip.
Their captors have normally been disaffected militant groups who use hostages as bargaining chips in disputes with the local authorities, BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston says.
The foreigners were usually released quickly and unharmed.
But the last kidnapping involving two journalists from the US Fox news organisation was a much more prolonged affair.
The pair were held by a militant Islamist Jihadi-style group that at times threatened to kill them.
The captives were forced to convert to Islam and denounce the West in a video before eventually being freed.
Ghazi Hamad, spokesman for the Hamas-led Palestinian government, condemned the kidnapping, saying it "damages the reputation of the Palestinian people".
"The government will take all steps to ensure his release," he said.
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Winning the Hearts and Minds of Iraqis
US seeks to steady nerves on Iraq
Tuesday, 24 October 2006, 06:55 GMT 07:55 UK
The US military commander in Iraq is to hold a rare joint news conference with the US ambassador in Baghdad, amid speculation over Washington's strategy.
Gen George Casey said recently that Iraqi security forces would be able to take over responsibility for the whole of Iraq in 12 to 18 months.
On Monday the US increased pressure to get the Iraqi authorities to do more to tackle the growing violence.
Washington said it would monitor Baghdad's efforts.
Senior White House aide Dan Bartlett said "benchmarks and milestones" would be used to track Iraq's progress, but these were not linked to deadlines or threats to withdraw troops.
The remarks follow growing calls from senior officials and politicians for US and British troops to be withdrawn.
At least 87 US troops have died this month - the highest monthly toll since November 2004.
On the offensive
Gen Casey and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad are expected to speak to journalists at 1400 local time (1100 GMT).
The BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says the White House will be hoping Gen Casey can make a convincing case that the 12-18-month timetable is feasible.
The Bush administration intends to spend the day on the offensive over Iraq, exactly two weeks before key mid-term congressional elections.
An opinion poll conducted during the last few days for CNN suggests that only 20% of Americans think the war is being won. The figure was 40% a year ago.
To help shore up support, a group of conservative talk radio hosts will broadcast the administration's message to their audiences live from a tent on the lawn of the White House.
Pressure for change
Our correspondent says the problem the White House faces is that politicians across both major parties have lost patience with the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.
Wayne White, a former deputy director of Iraq intelligence in the US State Department, told the BBC on Monday that pressure was mounting for a major change in approach - "either withdrawal or a major shift in strategy".
Meanwhile in London, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, Barham Salih, said his government would "assume more and more responsibility in the security area".
But he said the US and UK could not "cut and run" leaving Iraq to face the difficult challenges on its own.
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said Britain intended "to hold its nerve" in Iraq, and his office denied he had pressed Mr Salih for assurances that Iraqi forces could take over policing southern Iraq within a year.
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Despair of Baghdad turns into a life of shame in Damascus
Hugh Macleod in Damascus
Tuesday October 24, 2006
The Guardian
Young women fleeing war and poverty fall prey to sex traffickers
Um Ahmad, as she was known to the girls, had it all planned out. From Baghdad to the border and on to Damascus and a new life, Mona and her three Iraqi friends didn't need to worry about a thing.
The job in the textiles factory outside the Syrian capital would pay $300 (£160) a month, travel for the long journey was already arranged, a place for the girls to stay was ready and waiting and - best of all - Um Ahmad would pay Mona's father one month's salary in advance.
For the 26-year-old eldest daughter of eight children whose parents faced a daily despair of car bombs and poverty in their Baghdad slum, the offer sounded too good to be true.
It was.
Within a week of arriving in Damascus, Mona - whose name has been changed to protect her identity - had been plied with alcohol by Um Ahmad, required to dance for "friends of the factory owner" and had lost her virginity.
Unable to return to her family due to the perceived shame she had brought upon them, Mona began her new life in Syria as a prostitute working for Um Ahmad, dancing in bars outside Damascus and having sex with clients.
As pressure mounts on President George Bush to announce a significant change of direction to the disastrous military occupation of Iraq, the stories of Mona and others like her are a sobering reminder of the consequences of the other Iraq that war has created: a place away from bombs and beheadings, but where the daily struggle for existence is still desperate, and where young lives continue to be torn apart.
Mona had become another victim of the growing sex trade among an Iraqi refugee community in Syria that local NGOs now estimate at 800,000 people, and to whose plight aid agencies say the international community continues to turn a blind eye.
Laurens Jolles, acting representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Damascus, told the Guardian that international donor funds for the agency's Iraq programme have been drastically reduced for 2007, roughly halving an office budget he said was already "totally insufficient to provide tangible results".
UNHCR Damascus had requested an overall 2006 budget of $1.3m but got only $700,000, said Mr Jolles - amounting to less than $1 per Iraqi refugee per year, not including the agency's operating costs and its expenditure on non-Iraqi refugees.
"When Iraqis first came here they brought resources and many were not in need of assistance. Two years on, that situation has changed and many refugees are no longer able to look after themselves," said Mr Jolles.
"The situation in Iraq is getting worse and there is no prospect of return. Without providing sufficient resources to help host governments contain the refugee population there will be a secondary displacement of refugees to Europe. The time to do something is now."
A report published recently by the UNHCR and Unicef, the UN children's fund, concluded that an estimated 450,000 Iraqis in Syria "are facing aggravated difficulties" related to their "ambiguous legal status and unsustainable income".
Privately, officials acknowledge the real number is far higher. The majority of Iraqis live in the suburbs of Damascus in deteriorating conditions without work permits, suffering unemployment.
Before April 2003 the number of Iraqis in Syria was estimated at 100,000. Last week UNHCR chief spokesman Ron Redmond said that each month some 40,000 Iraqis are now arriving in Syria, a country of only 19 million people.
The UNHCR report found that prostitution among young Iraqi women in Syria, some just 12 years old, "may become a more widespread problem since the economic situation of Iraqi families is increasingly deteriorating".
"Organised networks dealing with the sex trade were reported," it said, finding evidence that "girls and women were trafficked by organised networks or family members".
Overall, the UNHCR estimates more than 1.5 million Iraqis are internally displaced in Iraq, including some 800,000 who fled their homes prior to 2003, as well as 754,000 who have fled since. A further 1.6 million Iraqis are refugees residing in neighbouring countries, with the majority in Syria and Jordan.
Despite ever increasing numbers of Iraqis fleeing the deadly violence in their homeland, donations to the UNHCR Iraq programme from the US, EU nations, Japan and Australia have been in freefall since the start of the US-led war.
From a high of $150m in 2003, the UNHCR budget for its Iraq programme fell to $29m for 2006, with just a quarter of that budget allocated to neighbouring countries.
Andrew Harper, coordinator for the Iraq unit at UNHCR in Geneva, said the drastic shortfalls have led to the suspension of priority projects such as work to identify and aid the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees, including single mothers, the sick and the elderly.
"Iraq has seen the largest and most recent displacement of any UNHCR project in the world, yet even as more Iraqis are displaced and as their needs increase the funds to help them are decreasing," said Mr Harper. "This growing humanitarian crisis has simply gone under the radar screen of most donors."
The UNHCR is now calling on donor countries to extend their funding of the Iraq programme to a budget of $25m for 2007. Even if that figure is achieved it will be too little too late to help rebuild the lives of many Iraqis living in Syria.
Mona's life took an unexpected turn when Syrian police broke up Um Ahmad's prostitution racket. Free to work for herself, she found a job in a clothes shop, married her Syrian boyfriend and is now a proud mother. Back in Baghdad her family still have no idea where the money she sent them came from.
But for another 17-year-old from the Shia holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq, an evening's work in an adult bar outside Damascus still brings her shame. But it is the only income her family has.
"No one in my family can shout at me, even though they know what I do, because I am the only one working," said the girl, who has changed her name to Ayman since arriving in Syria in June 2003 and who earns $60 a night dancing and sleeping with wealthy Syrians and Arabs from the Gulf.
"I drink a lot of wine before I have sex with the men. Sometimes I hate myself for doing this job, especially when men ask me to do unusual things to make them happy," said Ayman. "I want to be married to a good husband and to have a family of my own, but the war forced me to come to Syria. I keep thinking I should just run away to start a new life in Europe, or maybe even America."
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Iraq Can Break Up if No Measures Taken - Top Russian Official
Created: 24.10.2006 12:38 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 12:38 MSK
MosNews
Iraq could break up if measures are not undertaken urgently to underpin national unity, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday.
"If there is no sudden change and if there is no start to efforts towards unity, this situation could become reality," Russian news agencies quoted Lavrov as telling journalists in St. Petersburg, Russia's second city.
Russia opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has called for efforts to contain violence there, Reuters reports.
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Political Maneuvering
Maryland Suffers E-Voting Security Breach
Jay Wrolstad
newsfactor.com
Mon Oct 23, 2006
Proponents of electronic voting have found themselves again on the defensive following the unauthorized release of software for voting machines used by the State of Maryland and manufactured by Diebold Election Systems.
The apparent security breach comes just two weeks before nationwide elections that will include an array of new voting technologies.
According to news reports, three disks containing software code were sent to a former Maryland lawmaker. Maryland and Diebold officials told the Associated Press that the software in question is outdated and will not be used in the upcoming election in that state, although it might be used in other states.
Voters in Maryland use a touch-screen voting system by Diebold that lets them make and review selections before casting a ballot. For absentee voting and provisional voting, voters use a paper-based system.
The state contends that the transition to electronic voting from paper-based systems has improved the accuracy of the vote count and reduced the number of voter errors.
E-Voting Pros and Cons
But the challenges and benefits of e-voting have come under scrutiny almost since its inception. The arguments and counterarguments mostly center on security: Can the machines be hacked and do they accurately record the voter's intent?
Opponents point to the glitches in other forms of self-service technologies as worrisome indicators that electronic voting will cause similar problems on election day. Proponents argue that such technology works just fine, and that mistakes happen because of the people and processes surrounding its use.
Regardless of the relative seriousness of this release of voting-machine software, the incident has an adverse effect on the perception among public officials, voters, and voting-equipment manufacturers, said Paul Stamp, a security analyst at Forrester Research.
"Electronic voting is the wave of the future, but there remains the question of people putting their trust in unfamiliar equipment," he said. "Without a paper ballot process you are at the mercy of machines that will hopefully work properly."
Stamp noted that, while the merits of e-voting have been fiercely debated, traditional methods of casting ballots are far from perfect. He cited the "hanging chad" problems of 2000 as but one example. "But at least with paper ballots, there is a physical record to consult," he said.
Perception Is Key
Following the 2000 election, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit privacy-advocacy group, pointed to glitches that made it difficult to change votes if people made mistakes. Some electronic machines were not calibrated properly, the EFF said, which made it easy to vote for the wrong person.
And there were indications that the electronic voting process takes longer than officials expected, which could result in long lines on election day.
Unauthorized distribution of software underscores the potential for security problems associated with the use of electronic voting systems, said Stamp.
"Perception among voters is key, because we know the lengths to which people might go to rig an election, for example, with a fully-automated process," he noted.
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Chicago Voter Database Hacked
By JAKE TAPPER and REBECCA ABRAHAMS
ABC News
Oct. 23, 2006
As if there weren't enough concerns about the integrity of the vote, a non-partisan civic organization today claimed it had hacked into the voter database for the 1.35 million voters in the city of Chicago.
Bob Wilson, an official with the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project - which bills itself as a not-for-profit civic organization dedicated to the correction of election system deficiencies - tells ABC News that last week his organization hacked the database, which contains detailed information about hundreds of thousands of Chicago voters, including their Social Security numbers, and dates of birth.
"It was a serious identity theft problem, but also a problem that could potentially create problems with the election," Wilson said.
A nefarious hacker could have changed every voter's status from active to inactive, which would have prevented them from voting, he said.
"Or we could've changed the information on what precinct you were in or what polling place you were supposed to go to," he said. "So there were ways that we could potentially change the entire online data base and disenfranchise voters throughout the entire city of Chicago."
"If we'd wanted to, we could've wiped the entire database out," Wilson claimed.
Tom Leach, a spokesman for the Chicago Election Board, tells ABC News that the problem seems to have arisen because the city's database allowing voters to locate their voting precinct once asked voters for detailed information such as Social Security numbers.
Approximately six years ago, Leach said, when the website was updated - requiring only name and address - city computer experts "never cut the links to the Social Security numbers and the dates of birth."
Leach said he doubted the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project could have disenfranchised voters or wiped out the database, but he and the Election Board were very concerned and had taken steps to remedy whatever problems exist, including bringing in an outside computer forensic expert to verify that the database is secure and to ensure no one had already hacked the database.
"We're also making arrangements to remove the Social Security numbers," he added, and the Election Board was also alerting law enforcement to the problem as pointed out to them.
"Even though they could hack into the Web site, they couldn't hack into the voter file," Leach said. "The Web site feeds into a copy file, not the actual original file."
Leach said the issue had absolutely nothing to do with the city's electronic voting machines, which are manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems.
But Wilson counters that this is just one hole in a system that may be full of them.
"This is a part of the entire electronic voting program that we're depending on - computerized voter databases and electronic voting machines," Wilson said. "Any computer is subject to failure and security flaws and we have seen in electronic voting hundreds of news reports about dozens and dozens of jurisdictions where there are problems."
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Lieberman blasted on all sides at debate
By ANDREW MIGA
Associated Press
October 24, 2006
HARTFORD, Conn. - Sen. Joe Lieberman sat between his Democratic and Republican rivals in Monday's final Connecticut Senate debate - and got it from both sides as well as from hecklers.
The three-term senator, who has a 17-point lead in the latest statewide poll, struck back at Democratic challenger Ned Lamont, who has assailed him as a career politician desperate to hang onto his seat and one beholden to powerful Washington special interests.
"You constantly distort and, frankly, just tell lies," Lieberman, who ran as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Lamont, said at the Garde Arts Center New London. "No matter how many millions of his own family's money Ned Lamont spends, the polls show the people of Connecticut are not buying it. They can't be bought."
Lamont, a wealthy cable TV executive who has poured $12.7 million of his own fortune into his campaign, bristled.
"Senator Lieberman just called me a liar and he made a lot of outrageous accusations," Lamont replied. "Senator, everything we're talking about is your record, and you can't run from your record."
Hecklers interrupted the debate at times, and some chanted "Lieberman Protects Cheney." They were escorted from the theater.
An exasperated Lieberman, a particular target for outbursts from the audience, scolded the hecklers. "C'mon," he said, "let's let the candidates talk."
Lieberman's support for the war in Iraq drew criticism from Lamont and Republican candidate Alan Schlesinger.
"Joe Lieberman and George Bush's stay-the-course strategy, that's the recipe for failure," Lamont said.
Lieberman warned that Lamont's support for a deadline for U.S. troop withdrawals would be disastrous.
"Your answer is to give up on Iraq," Lieberman said. "Your plan is a recipe for retreat and disaster."
Lamont's primary upset of Lieberman last August was fueled primarily by his strong anti-war views. Lieberman reiterated Monday night that if re-elected he would still caucus with the Democrats.
"Not only am I a man of my word, it's what I want to do," Lieberman said.
Schlesinger has tried to use the debates to climb out of the single digits in the polls. Lieberman and Schlesinger are vying for Republican support, so any Schlesinger gains could come at Lieberman's expense.
Schlesinger accused Lieberman of trying to mask his liberal record to win GOP votes.
"In the spirit of Halloween, we have a U.S. senator here who's masquerading as a Republican," said Schlesinger, the former mayor of Derby.
Schlesinger also chided Lieberman on health care, accusing him of avoiding the truth about how the massive generation of baby boomers needing health care in coming years will overwhelm the nation's medical system.
"For 18 years, our senator has not been straight with you," Schlesinger said.
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