- Signs of the Times for Thu, 09 Nov 2006 -

• Signs Editorials
• No Change In US Politics
• International Zionism
• Fleecing Iraq, Slaughtering Its People
• French Foibles, Exorcizing and Tacos
• Southern 'Sedition'
• In-debt-ed To Our 'Leaders'

In her arms, hospital staff laid the bodies of her relatives: two sisters, Maysa, one, and Maram, three. Their mother Manal was also killed in yesterday's attack, but lay in a morgue at another hospital awaiting burial.

In all, 18 members of the extended Athamna family died when Israeli artillery struck their houses on Hamad Street. At least 14 of the dead were women and children. It was the biggest single Israeli strike in the Palestinian territories for four years and came only a day after the military had ended a six-day incursion in Beit Hanoun, a heavy battle which claimed more than 50 lives.

The first shell struck the side of the Athamna family house, a poor, four-storey, breeze-block structure divided into apartments shared between the grandparents and their several children. Sanaa's brother, Ayman, was one of the first to arrive. At least one of his neighbours was already dead. He tried calling the ambulance services on his mobile phone but the line was already engaged. "The house was full of smoke. Everyone was coming outside," he said.

The family, most of whom had been asleep, poured out of their apartments in their nightclothes bringing the dead and injured down into the broad alley at the side of the house. They started to tend to the wounded. "My mother came out and I told her to go back and to take care of the children," said Ayman. He stayed in the alley, trying to calm the injured. "Then they shouted that another shell was coming and I ran for shelter." A wave of six or seven shells followed in quick succession striking the alley and houses on either side of the street.

By the time the shelling had stopped his mother, Nama, his sister Sanaa, and his brother's wife, Nihad, were lying dead. Broad pools of blood and torn pieces of clothing lined the alley. Gaping holes in nearby houses and walls showed where the shells had struck.

Feriyal Hamadeen heard the first shell strike and ran from her house down the street towards the Athamna home. The first person she found was her cousin Manal, who was carrying her daughters Maysa and Maram in her arms. "I was going to take her back to my house, then the second shell came," she said. "We fell and I landed on top of her. I said to her: 'Get up, get up' but she didn't answer. She was lying face down, so I turned her over. There was blood on her face and down her side. Her daughters weren't moving."

She turned to look around her and saw her husband Saqqaa lying in the street. She called to him and he was still alive at that point but barely able to speak. She ran to ask her son Mohammad for help but he had a shrapnel wound in his back. "Then we heard the sound of another shell coming. My son pushed me: 'Take cover' he said and then the shell landed near the street," she said.

Her husband Saqqaa, her cousin Manal and Manal's two young daughters were dead. Feriyal and her son Mohammad, 21, suffered shrapnel injuries and were taken to the Kamal Adwan hospital.

As Feriyal spoke, a young boy aged eight, Abdullah Athamna, lay on the hospital bed next to her screaming from his wounds as doctors cut the clothes off his body. He had suffered a serious shrapnel injury to his side and to his right foot. His mother died in the strike and his father was badly injured and was being operated on in another hospital. "Call my father to come," the boy shouted at the three nurses who were standing over him. "Call my father."

Only a few days earlier, in the middle of the Israeli operation in Beit Hanoun, soldiers had come to the Athamna house, as they had many others. They searched the apartments, questioned the men in the family and eventually moved on. "They were speaking Arabic saying they were our friends, they wanted peace and that they only wanted to stop the rockets being fired into Israel," said Hanine Athamna, 20, who lay injured by shrapnel in the al-Ouda hospital. She lost her uncle, her sister-in-law and her brother-in-law in yesterday's attack. "They want to stop the rockets, but how can we stop them when they are shelling and destroying our houses?" she said. "I cannot see a day when we will live in peace with them."

Yesterday the Israeli military halted all artillery shelling into Gaza while it investigated the incident. It said the army had fired "preventative artillery at launch sites" from which militants had fired rockets the day before towards the Israeli town of Ashkelon. "Initial information shows the artillery fire was directed at a location distant from the one reportedly hit," it said in a statement.

[Ed: It should be noted that the Israeli military and government has a long track record of lying about such murderous attacks. There is no reason whatsoever to believe one word that ever comes out of the mouth of an Israeli politician. Indeed, the truth generally lies about 180 degrees from the claims of any Zionist leader.]
Comment on this Editorial

The move also came two days after an editorial ran in the Army-, Navy-, Airforce- and Marine Corps-Times newspapers calling for the Secretary's head. "When the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary," the unusually blunt editorial argued, "then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads."

The administration hopes that the move will deflect criticism from its policies in Iraq, move the national discussion away from the Democrats' blow-out in the midterms, blunt any investigative zeal that Democrats might feel in their new majority position and, possibly, lay a trap for Democrats going into the next election cycle.

It's unlikely to work. Without a fundamental change in policy, the departure of "Rummy" is a piece of political theater, a transparently meaningless gesture made in an attempt to mollify a restless public.

It's meaningless because while the administration may have abandoned the phrase "stay the course" during the lead-up to the midterms -- it polled badly -- Bush has made it clear that he will continue the bloody occupation of Iraq and leave the mess for the next president to try to clean up (what's less clear is whether either the Iraqis or his own party will allow him to do so).

The Wall Street Journal's John Harwood said yesterday that Rumsfeld's departure won't be enough to change Americans' increasingly negative view of Bush's Iraq policy. "We have asked this question several times in our Journal/ NBC poll," he said on MSNBC, "and found it would be a symbolic gesture. Really, American people want to see results. They want to see casualties down..."

According to former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, co-author of the soon to be published book, The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens, Rumsfeld was jettisoned primarily in an attempt to defuse increasing calls for investigation into the administration's conduct of the Iraq war and occupation. "The president thinks that Rumsfeld is the bad public face of the Iraq war," she told me by phone on Wednesday. "In the wake of elections that were a huge repudiation of the administration's policies, I think it's clear that Americans are angry with the corruption, with the direction the administration has taken, with the arrogance, and they threw Rumsfeld to the wolves."

Holtzman cited a recent Newsweek Poll that found a majority of Americans want investigations into Iraq contracting and the way the country was led into the war to be a "top priority" of the new Congress, and that a majority now favor calls for impeachment. She added: "I can't say for sure what the president was thinking, but it's possible that impeachment was explicitly on his mind."

It's also possible that the administration cut Rumsfeld loose in favor of former CIA Director Robert Gates, Bush's nominee to replace him, with the specific intention of provoking a bruising confirmation hearing. That would allow the Republicans to reinforce two of their favorite narratives about Democrats: that they're insufficiently belligerent to govern -- "soft on defense" -- and that Senate Democrats are "obstructionists," a key charge in the defeat of former Majority Leader Tom Daschle in 2004.

Because while it's possible that Bush thought the nomination of Bob Gates -- a long-time government official who's been through the confirmation process before -- would get a smooth sail through the Senate, the truth is that Gates will have a very hard time being confirmed, and he should. The reason is simple, and important to understand: Robert Gates is Donald Rumsfeld -- or at least a body double in experience, ideology and temperament.

Rumsfeld is a hawkish ideologue whose long career in government has been broken by dips into the private sector. He's known for his secrecy, his loyalty, his ability to win internal political fights and his eagerness to manipulate intelligence to support a desired policy objective. He has shown that he is not above breaking -- or at least stretching -- the law when he feels it's necessary to do so.

Gates has a remarkably similar profile. Like Rumsfeld, Gates served stints in the Nixon and Ford administrations -- he also advised Carter's hawkish National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski and served on Bush 41's National Security Council. After his nomination by Ronald Reagan to head the CIA was blocked by the Senate in 1987, Gates eventually got the job in 1991 under the first Bush. According to Thomas Powers, writing in 1996 in the New York Review of Books, Gates is an "unusual figure" -- the first Director "to come out of the analytical side of the organization, which had been dominated for its first thirty years by the ethos of the covert operators of World War II."

Gates, like Rumsfeld, was a dedicated Cold Warrior. Powers recalls that during his 1987 confirmation hearing, Gates was accused by former CIA colleague Mel Goodman (who Gates called "one of my oldest friends in the Agency") and Harold Ford ("another old friend and colleague") of pressuring "CIA analysts to exaggerate Soviet involvement in the plot to kill Pope John Paul II and in international terrorism and ...suppress[ing] and ignor[ing] 'signs of the Soviet strategic retreat, including the collapse of the Soviet empire.'"

And like Rumsfeld -- whose picture warmly greeting Saddam Hussein in 1983 has become legendary -- Gates, who served on the Iraq Study Group headed by former Secretary of State James Baker, has a sordid past with Iraq and the deposed strongman.

In announcing his decision to vote against Gates' confirmation in 1991, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MASS) said that "the record also shows" Gates "was integrally involved with the secret sharing of intelligence to Iraq and our sharp tilt toward Iraq in its war with Iran. But Mr. Gates hid that action from Congress... It is important to keep in mind that this shift toward Iraq in its war with Iran began our ill-fated cozy relationship with Saddam Hussein."

But it was Gates' propensity to manipulate intelligence that really bothered the Massachusetts' Senator:

[Gates] quashed dissenting views and helped craft an inaccurate 1985 intelligence estimate that Soviet influence in Iran could soon grow... He personally insisted that State Department officials drop footnotes from the report which did not support his viewpoint. These actions had consequences far beyond mere intellectual debates. In recommending that United States allies be permitted to sell arms to Iran, the report helped lay the foundation for the ill-fated arms for hostages deal in Iran.

Iran-Contra, which followed the arms for hostages deal with Iran, is the source of Gates' worst baggage. In the 1980s, as the illegal arrangement was being put together, Gates was then-CIA Director William Casey's Chief of Staff. The Independent Counsel investigation of Iran-Contra found insufficient evidence to charge him with a crime, but that was in large part due to the refusal by Clair George, the CIA's former deputy director for operations, to cooperate with the investigation (George was indicted for his role in 1991).

Gates has denied knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair. But as Thomas Powers noted, "The problem, of course, is that Gates, working for Casey, North's enthusiastic backer, was in a very good position to know about [Iran-Contra] and a great deal else besides."

Gates' former colleague at the CIA, Tom Polgar, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1991. Powers recalls that "Polgar's testimony... [was] a careful detailing of Gates's passage through many meetings and encounters when even the furniture, Polgar argues, must have grasped what was going on."

And Gates is an ideologue. According to Ted Kennedy, "His public speeches actively promoted the Reagan doctrine and exaggerated Soviet advances." He added, in a comment that would describe Rummy and his Office of Special Plans to a tee: "Rather than an objective professional dedicated to ensuring that the President receives the best intelligence possible," Gates "became an enthusiastic promoter of President Reagan's policies."

As the CIA's Tom Polgar testified in 1991:

His proposed appointment as Director also raises moral issues. What kind of signal does his renomination send to the troops? Live long enough, your sins will be forgotten? Serve faithfully the boss of the moment, never mind integrity? Feel free to mislead the Senate-Senators forget easily? Keep your mouth shut-if the Special Counsel does not get you, promotion will come your way?'

Those questions are as appropriate today as they were 15 years ago.

And while the administration will portray the replacement of Rumsfeld with Bob Gates as a sign that it's responsive to criticism coming from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle -- as evidence of Bush's new-found desire to work with Congress as a partner -- it's hard to see the nomination of someone with such a checkered history as anything but a challenge to Congressional authority and a preemptive strike against the body's expected oversight of the Bush White House.



Comment on this Article

Philip Merrill was the 71 year old president and CEO of Capital-Gazette Communications, Inc., which publishes Washingtonian magazine, the Annapolis Capital, and five other Maryland newspapers.

On June 10th, Mr Merrill's wife reported him missing when he failed to return from a days sailing in his boat, 'the Merrilly', on Chesapeake bay. The following day, the Merrilly was found floating 25 miles off the coast with its engine running. The first man on the scene reported that the boat was empty and that there was evidence of blood on the deck. Mr Merrill's body was subsequently found floating in Chesapeake bay on June 19th. Police said that he had apparently died of a shotgun blast to the head, and deemed his death a suicide even before an autopsy has returned its findings and despite the fact that Mr Merrill's body was found with an anchor tied to his feet.

While it might seem surprising that the mainstream media would completely ignore the fact that it is highly unlikely that someone would, or could, commit suicide by shooting themselves in the head with a shotgun and tieing an anchor to their feet, we need only remember the long list of politicians, journalists and scientists who 'officially' departed this life in equally impossible ways and whose suspicious deaths were met by the mainstream media with the same lack of journalistic integrity.

I am, however, open to having it explained to me how Mr Merrill could have shot himself in the head while on the boat, as the blood seems to suggest he did, and then flung himself over the side with an anchor attached to his feet. Perhaps he shot himself in the head and then attached the anchor to his feet? Or perhaps he attached the anchor to his feet, jumped into the water and then shot himself in the head? Of course, it is always possible that this was a case of 'assisted suicide', where a dear friend accompanied him on his last voyage and did the dirty work for him and then took off in another boat or swam the 25 miles to shore. Hey, anything is possible if you work for the great American mainstream media - it is, after all, "where wings take dream".

As to the 'official' motive: we are told that Mr Merrill's bypass operation last year is the likely cause of his assumed depression and 'suicide'. Mainstream media reports inform us that "experts" have tied depression to such illnesses and operations, but they are careful to add that "the link is complex". (which might be read as 'unlikely'). Family members, while stating that "it is impossible for them to imagine" that Philip Merrill would have committed suicide, appear to have publicly accepted the official verdict. Pictures on the Washingtonian website of a smiling Mr. Merrill holding his newborn grand-daughter on June 8th, just two days before his 'suicide', certainly do not belie a man in the depths of depression.

As is usually the case with such suspicious 'suicides' in the US, many of those who knew the victim express their shock, and in the case of Mr Merrill, many of his friends and colleagues found it difficult to reconcile his premature death with a man they knew to possess an "irrepressible spirit", a man who was brash and loud, a larger than life figure with impressive enthusiam and energy for life. Indeed, Mr Merrill, with a long career that took him to elevated positions within national and international politics, was no ordinary Maryland newspaper publisher.

Born Philip Merrill Levine on April 28, 1934 in Baltimore he grew up in New York City and Norwalk, Conn. His father, who worked in public relations, later encouraged his son to drop "Levine," saying a Jewish surname could limit his career prospects. Having graduated from Cornell University and Harvard Business School, he served as counselor to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 1981 to 1983; as a member of the Defense Policy Board from 1983 to 1990; and as assistant Secretary General of NATO in Brussels from 1990 to 1992 under President George H. W. Bush. In 1988, Merrill received the Medal for Distinguished Service from the Secretary of Defense and was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Merrill was a rich man, but it seems he gave his money away as easily as he made it, albeit that it was his two apparent passions, journalism and politics, that were the main benefactors. In 2001, he donated $10 million to the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park, which now bears his name. He also donated $4 million in 2003 to create the Center for Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, aka a high-profile Neocon "thinktank", headed by arch Neocon Eliot Cohen. Cohen remembers Merrill as "a guy you could argue with" and a man with "a voracious intellect ... tremendous curiosity, a penetrating voice, a wonderful laugh. [He was] someone you would go to for advice - a font of hardheaded wisdom." Which makes us wonder how many arguments Merrill night have had with Neocons like Cohen ... and about what. Indeed, it seems that while he mixed with the political elite, Mr Merrill had no love for the predations of modern day Capitalist America. In remembering their ostentatious boss, staff writers at his own newspaper 'The Capital' recently wrote:

"He made a lot of people mad - his ear-splitting battles with politicians, businesspeople and even his own editors were legendary. He used the opinion pages of The Capital to take stands against slot machines and what he saw as pension giveaways and other government waste."

and:

"Right up to the end, Mr. Merrill remained engaged, still pecking out occasional editorials on the manual Royal typewriter in his office at the newspaper or the Washingtonian. In one in April on the BGE rate hikes, he blasted the governor's vetoes and fondly remembered Republicans who stood up for "Main St." and small business, not "Wall St. manipulators."

Vice President Dick Cheney's wife Lynne worked at Merrill's Washingtonian magazine for several years and it was the Vice President, who Merrill counted among his personal friends, who swore him in as chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States in 2002. A post that he held until 2005.

As you might have guessed, this is where it gets interesting.

Officially, the Export-Import Bank is a U.S. institution that has been providing 'insurance' to the tune of (at least initially) $500 million to U.S. companies that are 'investing' in Iraq.

But that's just officially.

Over the period of the first two months of the Iraq invasion in 2003, then Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) administrator Paul Bremner, on behalf of the Bush administration and with the blessing of the UN, established a 'Development Fund for Iraq' that was to be held by the Central Bank of Iraq. The fund was to comprise the proceeds from the sale of 95% of "all export sales of petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas from Iraq and the money used "in a transparent manner to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people, for the economic reconstruction and repair of Iraq's infrastructure, for the continued disarmament of Iraq, and for the costs of Iraqi civilian administration", although the funds were actually held in a new account in the Federal Reserve bank in New york. To start the fund off, there was $6bn in Iraqi money left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and at least $10bn from Iraqi oil exports that had already resumed. At the same time, the U.S. Congress voted to spend $18.4bn of U.S. taxpayers' money on the redevelopment of Iraq.

During the summer of 2003, Bremner, taking his orders from members of the Bush administration, came up with plan of how best to spend Iraq's billions:

To start, he signed various orders that established the CPA as exercising sole power over how to spend Iraq's oil money, and indemnified its American corporate cronies from liability in their theft of that oil. In essence, they took complete control of the Development Fund for Iraq and how it would be spent. Added to this were orders that allowed U.S. corporations to own 100% of any Iraqi land and resources and the mass privatisation, into the hands of these same corporations, of state enterprises previously owned by the Iraqi government.

Vast sums were awarded in no-bid contracts to companies like Haliburton and vast sums of money simply went missing. In essence, it was the complete and utter U.S. corporate pillaging of ALL of Iraq's wealth. To add insult to injury, the war that is being waged against the Iraqi resistance and the Iraqi people that they represent, including the US-trained death squads working out of the Iraqi interior ministry which is swarming with CIA personnel, is being financed from the same stolen Iraqi oil and resource money. Basically, the U.S. government put its hand into the pocket of the ordinary Iraqi citizen, used the money to buy a gun, and then shot him in the head with it.

Z Magazine of Jan 2004 continues:

"On June 8th 2003, Bremer issued CPA Order 12 , which lifts "All tariffs, custom duties, import taxes, licensing fees and similar surcharges for goods entering or leaving Iraq. The order unleashed a flood of imported goods that left Iraq's worn-out manufacturers unable to compete, pushing them to the brink of insolvency.

On June 19 2003 the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) of the United States announced it is "prepared to immediately start processing applications for exports to Iraq," including "subcontractors providing goods and services to Iraq under USAID contracts." The Ex-Im Bank (as it's called) went on to explain "support may be available for transactions where...the primary source of repayment is the Development Fund for Iraq, or another entity established under the auspices of the Coalition Provisional Authority."

The sole purpose of the Ex-Im Bank is to help "finance the sales of U.S. exports, primarily to developing markets, by providing guarantees, export credit insurance, and loans." Thus, in the case of Iraq, the Bank will provide credit for purchases for goods and services authorized by Bremer-including all of Bechtel and Halliburton's contracts.

This is amplified by CPA Order 20 from July 17 2003 establishing the Trade Bank of Iraq. Its purpose is to provide "financial and related services to facilitate the importation and exportation of goods and services to and from Iraq."

Take note of the entity called the "Trade Bank of Iraq".

While the facilitating of "importation and exportation of goods and services to and from Iraq" might sound reasonable, in reality, the "goods and services" being 'imported' to Iraq consist of:

the American military and its hardware

the infamous 'security contractors' like Blackwater

hardware to equip US-run death squads in the Iraqi interior ministry

the 'services' of US corporations like Haliburton etc.

The "goods and services" that are being 'exported' back to the U.S. (to U.S. companies) are, for the most part, Iraq's wealth in the form of massively overpriced no-bid contracts to U.S. corporations and payments to death squads and security contractors to kill civilians.

The official government website for the Ex-Im Bank of America informs us that "the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), the Iraqi Ministry of Finance, and the Trade Bank of Iraq have signed a framework agreement that enables Ex-Im Bank to continue to support U.S. exports for Iraqi reconstruction."

The Trade Bank of Iraq was established in July 2003 and is led by a consortium of about a dozen private [mainly America] banks led by J.P. Morgan. Initially, this consortium was awarded a contract to provide letters of credit to companies looking to do business in Iraq via the newly formed Trade Bank of Iraq, but it seems that the Trade Bank of Iraq and the consortium of private banks are in fact one and the same.

Remember that the development Fund for Iraq was started with at least $16 billion of Iraqi money and that congress pledged $18 billion of U.S. taxpayers money? And remember that the CPA was tasked with spending that money "in a transparent manner to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people, for the economic reconstruction and repair of Iraq's infrastructure"?

When, in late 2003, an International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB) was established to provide independent, international financial oversight of CPA spending ( the board included representatives from the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development), it found "incomplete accounting", "lack of documented justification for limited competition for contracts at the Iraqi ministries", "possible misappropriation of oil revenues", "significant difficulties in ensuring completeness and accuracy of Iraqi budgets and controls over expenditures" and "non-deposit of proceeds of export sales of petroleum products into the appropriate accounts in contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 1483".

Bascially, if found fraud on a massive scale.

By the end of Paul Bremner's tenure in July 2004, his CPA had spent up to $20bn of Iraqi money, compared with $300m of U.S. funds, and $21 billion of Iraqi money was simply "missing".

Given its official remit to oversee the import and export of "goods and services" between Iraq and the U.S., and provide "finance" and "insurance" for American corporations and "security contractors" to "invest" in Iraq, it seems that, between them, the Trade Bank of Iraq (controlled by a consortium of private U.S. banks) and the Ex-Im Bank of America are two ends of a massive international theft operation run by the American government in cahoots with its corporate cronies, and where the Trade Bank of Iraq processes the stolen billions as they leave Iraq and head westwards, while the Ex-Im Bank of America receives these funds and funnels them to American corporations and god knows who else.

Philip Merrill presided over all of this as President of the Ex-Im Bank of America from 2003-2005, and while a political 'high-flyer', he still held to a quaint notion that journalists should have integrity - a dangerous mix if there ever was one. How much he knew of what was, and is, happening to Iraq's wealth and its people is hard to know. What we do know is that, now that he is dead, he can't write one of his "fiery editorials" about U.S. government and Wall Street "manipulations". But all of this is irrelevant, and we shouldn't waste time on "crazy conspiracy theories" about his death - the mainstream media has spoken: he shot himself in the head with a shotgun and then tied an anchor to his feet and jumped off his yacht into the cold Chesapeake bay.

There's nothing to see here.

With the Bank of England expected to increase interest rates today, consumer groups gave warning that overstretched borrowers could lose their homes if they failed to keep up repayments.

Among the one third of lenders prepared to sell mortgages lasting for 40 years or more, the supermarket chain Tesco allows some customers 52 years to pay off one of its home loans.

According to MoneyExpert.com, a financial website that collated the research, first-time buyers are one of the groups most likely to be targeted by lenders seeking to extend mortgage terms.

Keith Tondeur, of Credit Action, a debt advice group, said: "Lenders are coming up with more ingenious ways to sustain a house price boom that is not sustainable. The only way to afford property now is to be saddled with debt for life. But if something goes wrong, such as a rise in interest rates or a fall in house prices, then these moves could prove catastrophic."

Longer repayment terms offer fresh evidence that mortgage lenders are bending the traditional rules of lending as house prices rise ever higher. Figures released yesterday by the Land Registry showed that house prices rose by 9 per cent in the past year.

Abbey, the second biggest mortgage lender, has increased the amount that it is willing to lend couples to five times joint income, up from 3.5 times. Advantage, the mortgage lending arm of Morgan Stanley, will lend up to seven times the borrowers' income.

Citizens Advice this week reported a rapid increase in inquiries from homeowners struggling with mortgage debt. David Harker, its chief executive, said: "We are particularly concerned by the sharp rise in inquiries from people getting behind with mortgage payments at a time when court action that can lead to repossession is on the increase."

Homeowners are tempted by longer mortgage terms because monthly repayments are lower. However, they have to pay tens of thousands of pounds in extra interest.

Sean Gardner, the chief executive of MoneyExpert.com, said: "The old model of three times salary and a mortgage lasting twenty-five years maximum is on the way out, but nobody should have a mortgage to pay when they are no longer working and do not have the income to meet repayments."

First Direct, part of HSBC, Britain's biggest bank, offers mortgages which last for 47 years. HSBC and Alliance & Leicester offer 40-year loans.

Nick Gardner, of Chase De Vere mortgage management, said: "Longer terms are a false economy. The monthly savings are relatively small but result in vast sums of extra interest. The message to borrowers is, 'Don't do it'."

Most lenders usually require borrowers to pay off their mortgage before they are between 65 and 75. But age limits are also creeping up. Yesterday, Advantage removed the maximum age limit from mortgages aimed at borrowers with poor credit histories to allow those over 65 to take out loans.

Tesco has yet to offer anyone the 52-year mortgage.