- Signs of the Times for Fri, 08 Dec 2006 -


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Editorial: Pearl Harbor - A Lesson Lost On The People Of The World

Signs of the Times
08/12/2006

Yesterday was the 65th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the day when President Roosevelt gave the American people and the world conclusive proof that, as a general rule, war doesn't just happen but is deliberately created by politicians.

From Douglas Reed's Controversy of Zion:

In the First [World] War President Wilson, re-elected on the promise to keep his country out of war, immediately after his re-inauguration declared that "a state of war exists". In the Second War President Roosevelt was re-elected in 1940 on the repeated promise that "your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars". His electoral programme, however, included a five-word proviso: "We will not send our armies, navies or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside the Americas except in case of attack". These five words were added (says one of Mr. Bernard Baruch's approved biographers, Mr. Rosenbloom) "by Senator James F. Byrnes, who was so close to Baruch that it was sometimes impossible to tell which of the two originated the view that both expressed".

The importance of the proviso was shown on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. Twelve days earlier Mr. Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary for War, after a cabinet meeting on November 25, 1941, had noted in his diary: "The question was how we should manoeuvre them" (the Japanese) "into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves; it was a difficult proposition".

The pre-history of this notation, again, is that on January 27, 1941 the United States Ambassador in Tokyo had advised his government that "in the event of trouble breaking out between the United States and Japan, the Japanese intended to make a surprise attack against Pearl Harbour"; that the Soviet spy in Tokyo, Dr. Richard Sorge, informed the Soviet Government in October 1941 that "the Japs intended to attack Pearl Harbour within sixty days" and was advised by the Soviet Government that his information had been transmitted to President Roosevelt (according to Sorge's confession, New York Daily News, May 17, 1951); that the Roosevelt government delivered a virtual ultimatum to Japan on November 26, 1941; that secret Japanese messages, from September 1941 up to the very moment of the attack, which were intercepted and decoded by United States intelligence units, gave unmistakable evidence of a coming attack on Pearl Harbour but were not transmitted to the American commanders there; that on December 1 the Head of Naval Intelligence, Far Eastern Section, drafted a dispatch to the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet saying "war between Japan and the United States is imminent", which was cancelled by superior authority; that on December 5 Colonel Sadtler of the U.S. Signal Corps, on information received, drafted a dispatch to commanders, "War with Japan imminent; eliminate all possibility of another Port Arthur" (an allusion to the similar "surprise attack" that began the Russo-Japanese war), which was similarly suppressed; that a Japanese reply, obviously tantamount to a declaration of war, to the Roosevelt ultimatum was received in Washington on December 6, 1941 but no word was sent to the Pearl Harbour defenders. A message stating that "the Japanese are presenting at one p.m., eastern time today what amounts to an ultimatum. . . be on the alert" was at last dispatched about noon on December 7, 1941, and reached the commanders at Pearl Harbour between six and eight hours after the Japanese attack.

The record now available suggests that the Americans on Hawaii alone were left without knowledge of the imminent onslaught which cost two battleships and two destroyers (apart from many vessels put out of action), 177 aircraft and 4575 dead, wounded or missing. A direct and immediate consequence was also the disaster suffered by the British navy off Malaya, when the battleships Prince of Wales and Renown were sunk with great loss of life.

Political leaders who are ready to obtain their country's entry into war by facilitating an enemy attack on it cannot be depended on to wage it in the national interest. The American people as a whole still is unaware of the truth of Pearl Harbour, an ominous beginning which led in unbroken line to the ominous end.

Eight investigations were held, seven naval or military ones during wartime and one Congressional one at the war's end. Thus wartime secrecy enshrouded them all and none of them was truly public or exhaustive; moreover, all were conducted under the aegis of the political party whose man was president at the time of Pearl Harbour. The vital facts (that the president knew at the latest eight weeks earlier, from an intercepted Japanese dispatch, that "a surprise attack was being planned and that these intercepted messages were withheld from the Pearl Harbour commanders over a long period) were burked throughout. The Secretary of War's diary (with the significant entry above quoted) was not admitted in evidence and Mr. Stimson himself was not called, being in ill health. Control of the press enabled the long proceedings (six months) to be presented to the public in bewildering and confusing form.

However, the three naval commanders chiefly concerned have published their accounts. Rear Admiral Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet at the time, says of another admiral's belief that "President Roosevelt's plans required that no word be sent to alert the fleet in Hawaii", that "the individuals in high position in Washington who willfully refrained from alerting our forces at Pearl Harbour should never be excused. The Commanders at Pearl Harbour Were never informed of. . . the American note delivered to the Japanese Ambassadors on November 26, 1941, which effectually ended the possibility of further negotiations and thus made the Pacific war inevitable . . . No hint of vital intercepts received, decoded and delivered to responsible officials in Washington on December 6 and 7, 1941, was sent to the Navy and Army Commanders in the Hawaiian area".

Fleet Admiral Halsey, who at that time was one of Admiral Kimmel's three senior commanders, says, "All our intelligence pointed to an attack by Japan against the Philippines or the southern areas in Malaya or the Dutch East Indies. While Pearl Harbour was considered and not ruled out, the mass of the evidence made available to us pointed in another direction. Had we known of Japan's minute and continued interest in the exact location and movement of our ships in Pearl Harbour" (indicated by the withheld message) "it is only logical that we would have concentrated our thought on meeting the practical certainty of an attack on Pearl Harbour".

Rear Admiral Theobald, commanding destroyers of the Battle Force at Pearl Harbour, writing in 1954 says, "Dictates of patriotism requiring secrecy regarding a line of national conduct in order to preserve it for possible future repetition do not apply in this case because, in this atomic age, facilitating an enemy's surprise attack, as a method of initiating a war, is unthinkable".

(The admiral presumably means that he hopes a repetition is "unthinkable"). He adds. "The recurrent fact of the true Pearl Harbour story has been the repeated withholding of information from Admiral Kimmel and General Short" (the naval and military commanders at Pearl Harbour, who were made scapegoats) ". . . never before in recorded history had a field commander been denied information that his country would be at war in a matter of hours, and that everything pointed to a surprise attack upon his forces shortly after sunrise".

Admiral Theobald quotes the later statement of Admiral Stark (who in December 1941 was Chief of Naval Operations in Washington and who refused to inform Admiral Kimmel of the Japanese declaration of war message) that all he did was done on the order of higher authority, "which can only mean President Roosevelt.


The more things change, the more they stay the same. If it works, why change tactics? It should be obvious to anyone that is prepared to think logically rather than emotionally or "patriotically" that involving a country in a war that the population doesn't want is easy. In 1941 it happened by way of Pearl Harbor, Vietnam was helped along by the fake Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the current invasion of Iraq absolutely required the events of September 11, 2001.
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Editorial: Letter from James Abourezk, former US Senator from South Dakota to Jeff Blankfort on the Israel Lobby

Jeff Blankfort
08/12/2006

The following letter was sent to me today by James Abourezk, former US Senator from South Dakota, and he readily complied when I asked that I be allowed to forward it to my list because what he had to say is of the utmost importance, given last month's election and all the new faces in Congress, and the immediate previous posting to you and James Petras's article earlier in the day.

Dear Jeff:

I just finished reading your critique of Noam Chomsky's positions in an e mail sent to me by Tony Saidy.

I had never paid much attention to Chomsky's writings, as I had all along assumed that he was correct and proper in his position on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But now, upon learning that his first assumption is that Israel is simply doing what the imperial leaders in the U.S. wants them to do, I concur with you that this assumption is completely wrong.

I can tell you from personal experience that, at least in the Congress, the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear--fear of defeat by anyone who does not do what Israel wants done. I can also tell you that very few members of Congress--at least when I served there--have any affection for Israel or for its Lobby. What they have is contempt, but it is silenced by fear of being found out exactly how they feel. I've heard too many cloakroom conversations in which members of the Senate will voice their bitter feelings about how they're pushed around by the Lobby to think otherwise. In private one hears the dislike of Israel and the tactics of the Lobby, but not one of them is willing to risk the Lobby's animosity by making their feelings public.

Thus, I see no desire on the part of Members of Congress to further any U.S. imperial dreams by using Israel as their pit bull. The only exceptions to that rule are the feelings of Jewish members, whom, I believe, are sincere in their efforts to keep U.S. money flowing to Israel. But that minority does not a U.S. imperial policy make.

Secondly, the Lobby is quite clear in its efforts to suppress any congressional dissent from the policy of complete support for Israel which might hurt annual appropriations. Even one voice is attacked, as I was, on grounds that if Congress is completely silent on the issue, the press will have no one to quote, which effectively silences the press as well. Any journalists or editors who step out of line are quickly brought under control by well organized economic pressure against the newspaper caught sinning.

I once made a trip through the Middle East, taking with me a reporter friend who wrote for Knight-Ridder newspapers. He was writing honestly about what he saw with respect to the Palestinians and other countries bordering on Israel. The St. Paul Pioneer press executives received threats from several of their large advertisers that their advertising would be terminated if they continued publishing the journalist's articles. It's a lesson quickly learned by those who controlled the paper.

With respect to the positions of several administrations on the question of Israel, there are two things that bring them into line: One is pressure from members of Congress who bring that pressure resulting in the demands of AIPAC, and the other is the desire on the part of the President and his advisers to keep their respective political parties from crumbling under that pressure. I do not recall a single instance where any administration saw the need for Israel's military power to advance U.S. Imperial interests. In fact, as we saw in the Gulf War, Israel's involvement was detrimental to what Bush, Sr. wanted to accomplish in that war. They had, as you might remember, to suppress any Israeli assistance so that the coalition would not be destroyed by their involvement.

So far as the argument that we need to use Israel as a base for U.S. operations, I'm not aware of any U.S. bases there of any kind. The U.S. has enough military bases, and fleets, in the area to be able to handle any kind of military needs without using Israel. In fact I can't think of an instance where the U.S. would want to involve Israel militarily for fear of upsetting the current allies the U.S. has, i.e., Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The public in those countries would not allow the monarchies to continue their alliance with the U.S. should Israel become involved.

I suppose one could argue that Bush's encouragement of Israel in the Lebanon war this summer was the result of some imperial urge, but it was merely an extension of the U.S. policy of helping Israel because of the Lobby's continual pressure. In fact, I heard not one voice of opposition to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon this summer (except Chuck Hagel). Lebanon always has been a "throw away" country so far as the congress is concerned, that is, what happens there has no effect on U.S. interests. There is no Lebanon Lobby. The same was true in 1982, when the Congress fell completely silent over the invasion that year.

I think in the heart of hearts of both members of congress and of the administrations they would prefer not to have Israel fouling things up for U.S. foreign policy, which is to keep oil flowing to the Western world to prevent an economic depression. But what our policy makers do is to juggle the Lobby's pressure on them to support Israel with keeping the oil countries from cutting off oil to the western nations. So far they've been able to do that. With the exception of King Feisal and his oil embargo, there hasn't been a Saudi leader able to stand up to U.S. policy.

So I believe that divestment, and especially cutting off U.S. aid to Israel would immediately result in Israel's giving up the West Bank and leaving the Gaza to the Palestinians. Such pressure would work, I think, because the Israeli public would be able to determine what is causing their misery and would demand that an immediate peace agreement be made with the Palestinians. It would work because of the democracy there, unlike sanctions against a dictatorship where the public could do little about changing their leaders' minds. One need only look at the objectives of the Israeli Lobby to determine how to best change their minds. The Lobby's principal objectives are to keep money flowing from the U.S. treasury to Israel, requiring a docile congress and a compliant administration. As Willie Sutton once said, "That's where the money is."
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Editorial: US and Israel targeting DNA in Gaza? Part 3 of 3: The DIME bomb, yet another genotoxic weapon

James Brooks
Online Journal
Dec 7, 2006

The human genome: target or innocent bystander?

Since early July, Israeli forces have been using a new weapon in the Gaza Strip that inflicts strange and deadly wounds. Doctors and medics say the unidentified device has significantly increased fatalities from Israel's attacks. [1] [2]

In the first two parts of this article, we reviewed evidence that Israel's new weapon may be Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME), a "low collateral damage" weapon developed by the US Air Force. The DIME bomb's "micro-shrapnel" is reportedly made of HMTA, a tungsten alloy that disrupts body biochemistry, damages the immune system, rapidly causes cancer, and attacks DNA (genotoxic). [3-9]

The road to DIME

DIME weapons are "spin-offs" from the military's "bunker buster" research. Initially, "bunker busters" were made with depleted uranium (DU), which had already been used in armor-piercing bombs, bullets, and artillery shells. [10]

The former director of the US Army's Depleted Uranium project, Dr. Douglas Rokke, warns us that DU is an "illegal . . . radioactive toxic material," the use of which "is absolutely unacceptable, and a crime against humanity." [11]

During Gulf War I, US forces deployed more than 300 tons of DU in Iraq. A few years later, more was dropped during Operation Desert Fox. Iraqi doctors reported alarming rises in the incidence of cancer, leukemia, and birth defects, in clusters closely correlated with US bombsites. Scientists found strong links between DU and Gulf War Syndrome, which is slowly killing thousands of veterans. [12-14]

Despite the science, the vets, and the tragedies in Iraq, the US has stubbornly refused to end its use of DU. US-UK forces may have expended more than 2,000 additional tons of DU in Iraq since March 2003. Nowadays, however, commanders are supposed to warn GIs to avoid contact with the results of their work. [15]

After the 2001-2002 bombing of Afghanistan, the Uranium Medical Research Centre (UMRC) found that the urine of Afghanis living near US bombing sites contained four to 20 times the normal level of non-depleted uranium (NDU). These unexpected results could not "be explained by . . . any known geological or other features in the area."

UMRC researchers were "shocked" that, "without exception, at every bombsite investigated, people are ill . . . [with] symptoms consistent with internal contamination by uranium." [13]

Their field results indicated that our weapons scientists had "progressed" beyond DU to NDU, a processed form of pure uranium that is even more toxic than the depleted form. The "slightly enriched" uranium reported from recent Israeli bombsites in Lebanon may possibly be NDU from modified GBU 28 'bunker busters' supplied by the United States. [16] [17]

Dual-purpose munitions

Considering the scope of their destructive power, DU and NDU may be said to function as Dual-Purpose Munitions, like cluster bomblets that kill both tanks and people. As their exotic metallurgy "burns" through concrete and steel, DU and NDU bombs are converted to micron-sized particles that sicken and kill and murder the next generation in the womb. [18] [19]

Agent Orange, an herbicide heavily used during the war on Vietnam, also performed two functions. It obliterated the 'jungle cover hiding the Viet Cong' while it 'weakened the enemy' with burns, illness, and death, and corrupted the DNA of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. The third generation of its disfigured and suffering victims is now being born. [20] [21]

This madness seems to have begun during World War II, within the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb. In a 1943 memo to Brigadier General L. R. Groves, three researchers proposed steps to develop "a gas warfare instrument" [of radioactive material, such as uranium] "ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke. . . . in this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small. It has been estimated that one millionth of a gram accumulating in a person's body would be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty." [22]

The good doctors were concerned the Germans might be preparing such a weapon. They urged the Army to be ready to respond, or act, in kind. General Groves promptly followed their recommendations.

The toxic HMTA "micro-shrapnel" spewed by DIME weapons appears to be the latest development in a long string of carcinogenic and genotoxic weapons developed and deployed by the US military.

Return to Gaza: The mythology of murder

Israel has denied using DIME weapons. Nonetheless, Israel's military has used the occupied Palestinian territories as a weapons development zone for decades, testing bright ideas like depleted uranium and poison gases. It would not surprise us to find that it is now testing a weapon for the US Air Force on Palestinians in Gaza. [23]

Unfortunately, the DIME hypothesis is the most plausible explanation for the grotesque effects of Israel's new weapon. We can only pray that we have not witnessed the first experiment in the effects of embedded HMTA in human subjects.

Still, DIME may not explain all of the evidence. For example, one of the metals found in victims' wounds was copper. DIME bombs are not known to contain significant copper, but another US marvel, the Sensor Fuzed Weapon (SFW), sprays slugs of molten copper at its targets. Is Israel also testing the SFW? [24] [25]

If DIME weapons are designed to reduce civilian casualties, why has Israel's 'mystery weapon' increased the civilian death toll? Perhaps this question should be addressed to the advocates of Focused Lethality Munitions, and to the remote-control operators of Israel's drone aircraft and their commanders and politicians.

Although much remains unclear about Israel's new weapon, a few devastating facts are indisputable:

The weapon causes enormous and indiscriminate pain and suffering.

It operates as both a chemical weapon and an anti-personnel explosive. At the very least, it is likely to induce heavy metal poisoning in its surviving victims.

The weapon has significantly increased civilian mortality rates, in part because it inflicts virtually untreatable wounds.

Despite this public parade of horrors, Israeli forces have continued to use this weapon against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for nearly five months.

"Whenever and wherever necessary"

If the DIME hypothesis is confirmed, authorities will probably explain that it is a new class of weapon not regulated by international law. The truth is that existing conventions and treaties have already prohibited some of the most egregious effects of the new weapon.

To cite one example, the bomb may be in direct violation of Protocol I of the 'Geneva Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons,' which "prohibits the use of any weapon the primary effect of which is to injure by fragments which in the human body escape detection by X-rays." [26]

We will likely be told that DIME weapons provide a more "humane" way to fight "terrorism" by "reducing collateral damage" and "helping US troops win hearts and minds." At the same time, we'll be assured that the new weapon "packs quite a punch" and will "give our troops more options" to "take the battle to the enemy," even if he is "hiding among civilians."

Whether Israel's new weapon is the Air Force's DIME bomb or another similarly dreadful invention, the horrors unfolding in Gaza make it clear that "Focused Lethality" is a blood-drenched lie. It promises only a deadlier form of indiscriminate warfare.

US plans to explode payloads of cancer-causing genotoxic heavy metal powder "wherever and whenever necessary" may portend an escalation of a campaign currently limited to the vicinity of "hard targets" we attack with DU and NDU. Whatever we make of the intent behind these weapons, the result is chemical-genetic warfare. It cannot be allowed to continue.

References

1) Gaza doctors say patients suffering mystery injuries after Israeli attacks, Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, 10/18/2006

2) Israel used chemical weapons in Lebanon and Gaza, Jean Shaoul, Centre for Research on Globalization/wsws.org, 10/24/2006

3) Abstract: Potential late health effects of depleted uranium and tungsten used in armor-piercing munitions: comparison of neoplastic transformation and genotoxicity with the known carcinogen nickel, Miller, AC, et al, PubMed, 11/26/2006

4) Neoplastic transformation of human osteoblast cells to the tumorigenic phenotype by heavy metal-tungsten alloy particles: induction of genotoxic effects, Miller, AC et al Carcinogenesis, Vol. 22, No. 1, 115-125, January 2001, Oxford University Press

5) Abstract: Carcinogenic Potential of Depleted Uranium and Tungsten Alloys, Alexandra C Miller, Ph. D., Department Of Defense, Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI)

6) Depleted uranium-catalyzed oxidative DNA damage: absence of significant alpha particle decay, Miller, AC et al, Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, Issue 91, 2002 pp. 246- 252

7) Embedded Weapons-Grade Tungsten Alloy Shrapnel Rapidly Induces Metastatic High-Grade Rhabdomyosarcomas in F344 Rats, Kalinich et al, Environmental Health Perspectives Volume 113, Number 6, June 2005

8) Abstract: Effect of the militarily-relevant heavy metals, depleted uranium and heavy metal tungsten-alloy on gene expression in human liver carcinoma cells (HepG2), Miller, AC et al, SpringerLink/Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, 1/1/2004

9) Preconceptional paternal exposure to radiation or heavy metals like cadmium can induce cancer in unexposed offspring, Alexandra C. Miller, Rafael Rivas, Robert J. Merlot and Paul, Carcinogenesis 5: Environmental and Endogenous Carcinogens/Proc Amer Assoc Cancer Res, Volume 47, 2006

10) Cancer Worries for New U.S. Bombs, DefenseTech.org, 5/20/2006

11) Depleted Uranium and US-Israeli Bombs, Dr. Doug Rokke, PhD, Media Lens, 7/24/2006

12) Dirty Weapons - Casualties From Iraq War Will Mount, Chalmers Johnson, Pacific News Service, 5/3/2003

13) Uranium Radiation Levels in Afghanistan Not Attributable to Depleted Uranium, Centre for Research on Globalization - Middle East, 6/5/2003

14) Depleted Uranium Radioactive Contamination In Iraq: An Overview, Prof Souad N. Al-Azzawi, Centre for Research on Globalization - Middle East, 8/31/2006

15) Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons Lingers as Health Concern, Larry Johnson, Common Dreams, 8/4/2003

16) Further Evidence Of Enriched Uranium In The Air In Lebanon Following The Recent Conflict, Stop Uranium Wars/Pandora DU research Project, 11/22/2006

17) Mystery of Israel's secret uranium bomb, Robert Fisk, The Independent, 10/28/2006

18) The Real Dirty Bombs: Depleted Uranium, Christopher Bollyn, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, 8/6/2004

19) Depleted Uranium, Australian Peace Committee, 12/2/2006

20) Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign

21) Agent Orange DNA injury confirmed in Vietnam veterans, Patrick Gower, New Zealand Herald, 7/29/2006

22) Memorandum to: Brigadier General L. R. Groves From: Drs. Conant, Compton, and Urey, Midfully.org/War Department, United States Engineer Office, Manhattan District, Oak Ridge Tennessee, 10/30/1943

23) The Israeli Poison Gas Attacks, James Brooks, Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel

24) CBU-97, Wikipedia

25) Textron Systems' Sensor Fuzed Weapon Production to Include Maritime Capability, Textron Systems Corporation, 8/10/2006

26) Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons . . . , United Nations: International Law, 10/10/1980

Part 1, Part 2

Original
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Editorial: Double Standards

Bulov
28 Nov 06

1) What do you call someone who explodes a bomb and kills innocent people?

- A terrorist.

What do you call someone who drops a bomb from a plane and kills innocent people?

- A brave American pilot.

What do you call it when a Palestinian uses violence against the Jews who have illegally occupied his land?

- A terrorist attack.

What do you call it when an Israeli helicopter fires rockets at Palestinian youths armed with stones?

- Self-defence.

What do you call it when someone gives money to a government official in return for favors?

- Bribery.

What do you call it when a large corporation gives money to a government official in return for favors?

- A campaign contribution.

What do you call the form of government where a small elite exploits and intimidates the citizens?

- A dictatorship.

What do you call the form of government where a small elite exploits and intimidates the citizens, and the citizens can choose every few years which part of the elite should occupy the government buildings?

- A democracy.

What do you call it when someone carrying a gun enters your house and steals your valuable possessions?

- An armed robbery.

What do you call it when a multinational corporation supported by armed forces enters your country and steals your valuable possessions?

- Free trade.

What do you call it when a group of people take the law into their own hands and kill people without a fair trial?

- A lynching.

What do you call it when the US takes the law into its own hands and kills people without a fair trial?

- Operation Enduring Freedom. (The invasion of Afghanistan)

What do you call someone who steals from the rich and gives to the poor?

- Robin Hood.

What do you call someone who steals from the poor and gives to the rich?

- The US government.

What do you call a weapon that can kill thousands of people?

- A weapon of mass destruction.

What do you call a weapon that killed 1.5 million Iraqis, including more than 500,000 children?

- Sanctions.

What do you call an army that will fight for whoever pays the most money?

- Mercenaries.

What do you call an army in Afghanistan that will fight for whoever pays the most money?

- The Northern Alliance (or United Front).

What do you call an attack on the Pentagon, a military command and control center in the US?

- A cowardly attack on American freedom and democracy.

What do you call the destruction of an Afghan village by US bombs?

- An attack on a Taliban military command and control center.

What do you call it when just over 3 thousand people were killed in the September 11 attack on the US?

- An atrocity.

What do you call it when nearly 5 million people were killed in the Vietnam war?

- A mistake.

What do you call it when very rich people exploit poor people?

- Greed and selfishness.

What do you call it when very rich countries exploit poor countries?

- Globalization.

What do you call a foreign oppressor in the last century that controlled the economic and social life of a country?

- A colonialist power.

What do you call a foreign oppressor in this century that controls the economic and social life of a country?

- The International Monetary Fund.

What do you call it when people are slaughtered?

- A massacre.

What do you call it when 100,000 to 200,000 Iraqis are slaughtered by the US at a loss to American forces of 148 (46 of which were killed by friendly fire)?

- Gulf War I.

What do you call members of the Ku Klux Klan, a white racist organization?

- American patriots.

What do you call members of the Black Panther party, a black racist organization?

- Prisoners on death row.

What do you call the extermination of a people?

- Genocide.

What do you call the extermination of native Americans in the US?

- A glorious episode in American history.

What do you call someone who stands up in front of a crowd and tells stories?

- An entertainer.

What do you call someone who stands up in front of a crowd at the Pentagon and tells stories?

- Donald Rumsfeld.

What do you call a television station that broadcasts only the government's views?

- A propaganda station.

What do you call the BBC when the World News consists solely of half an hour of a Pentagon briefing?

- Fair and impartial.

What do you call the 2002 presidential election in Zimbabwe where there were serious irregularities?

- A flawed election.

What do you call the 2000 presidential election in the US where there were serious irregularities?

- A victory for democracy.

What do you call it when American Whites advocate an exclusively White state and the expulsion of all non-Whites?

- Racism.

What do you call it when Israeli Jews advocate an exclusively Jewish state and the expulsion of all non-Jews?

- Zionism.

What is the name of the leader wrongly accused of trying to create an ethnically pure Greater Serbia?

- Slobodan Milosevic, on trial as a war criminal until his death.

What is the name of the leader trying to create an ethnically pure Greater Israel?

- Ariel Sharon, a "man of peace".

What do you call a leader who sells out his country to a foreign power?

- A traitor, or Quisling.

What do you call a British leader who sells out his country to a foreign power?

- Tony Blair.

Which Middle East country (whose name begins with I) does not possess nuclear weapons, agreed to allow access to UN weapons inspectors, and has been occupied by the US?

- Iraq.

Which Middle East country (whose name begins with I) possesses nuclear weapons, refuses to allow access to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and receives around $5 billion p.a. in aid from the US?

- Israel.

What do you call it when innocent people are killed by those resisting a brutal occupation?

- Terrorism.

What do you call it when innocent people are killed by an occupying army?

- Collateral damage, self-defense, or caught in the crossfire.

What do you call it when Saddam Hussein kills his own people with chemical weapons?

- A crime against humanity.

What do you call it when the FBI uses chemical weapons to murder 96 US citizens (including women and children) in Waco, Texas?

- Law and order.

What do you call a serial killer who claims that God told him to do it?

- A psychopath.

What do you call a serial killer who claims that God told him to invade Iraq?

- George W. Bush.
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Editorial: The Spirit of Democracy in Venezuela

by Stephen Lendman
8 December 2006

"Today we gave another lesson in dignity to the imperialists, it is another defeat for the empire of Mr. Danger....another defeat for the devil. We will never be a colony of the US again....Long live the socialist revolution....Destiny has been written....Socialism is human. Socialism is love." This is how Hugo Chavez Frias characterized his smashing electoral victory on December 3 when he appeared on the balcony of the Palacio de Miraflores (the official presidential palace residence) and addressed a huge gathering of his followers below that evening telling them of his victory for the people and that he now has an even stronger mandate to pursue his Bolivarian Project to do more for them ahead than he's already accomplished so far which is considerable.

He told his loyal, cheering supporters his impressive landslide electoral victory is one more blow to George Bush, and it follows on the others won by populist candidates in the region in the past six weeks by Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil on October 29, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua on November 7, and Rafael Correa in Equador on November 26. Chavez will serve for another six year term that will run until December, 2012.

Earlier in the day, Hugo Chavez showed he's indeed a man of the people by casting his own vote the same way ordinary people do. Unlike George Bush who goes everywhere in an entourage of limousine, helicopter, or Air Force One luxury accompanied by a phalanx of security needed to protect him from the people he was elected to serve, Chavez drove himself in his aging red-colored Volkswagon to his assigned polling station accompanied by his young grandson in the back seat, voted, and then left the same unaccompanied way he came. That's how a man of the people does it - no bells, whistles or extravagant trappings of power that's a hallmark of how things are done to excess in the US calling itself a model democracy but one only for the few with wealth and power and that behaves like a rogue state that's only a model for despots and tyrants.

In Venezuela under Hugo Chavez there's real participatory democracy for all the people. After it played out in a fair and open electoral process, Chavez greeted his supporters in an atmosphere of jubilant celebration once National Electoral Council (CNE) president Lucena Tibisay announced at 10:30 PM election night that with about 78% of the vote tallied, Chavez received 61.4% (5,936,000 votes) to right wing opposition candidate Manuel Rosales 38% (3,715,000 votes).

The early figures were then updated showing Chavez increased his advantage to 62.89% (7,161,637 votes), handily defeating Rosales by about 26 points (at 36.85%) - an impressive nearly two to one thrashing. It was also announced that voter turnout was about 75% or the highest percentage in Venezuela's history making this election an historic event and a clear mandate for Hugo Chavez.

Once the first results were announced on election night, it was clear to Mr. Rosales he'd lost and he was forced to concede defeat. He added, however, he would continue opposing the policies of the Chavez government "struggling for the people of Venezuela (and announcing) we are beginning the struggle for the construction of a new time for Venezuela....and I won't stop there, from today on I will be in the streets (staying) in the struggle, in the fight." He didn't say what he has in mind is returning the country to its ugly past serving the interests of wealth and power and ignoring the needs of ordinary people, all his pious rhetoric aside. He's sure to get lots of encouragement and help from Washington as its unbending agenda going forward is to do precisely that. Short of an armed invasion, however, it may be harder than ever to do that as Hugo Chavez came out ahead in all 23 of Venezuela's states including in Rosales' home state of Zulia that went for Chavez with a 50.57% majority, an embarrassment he also neglected to mention in his concession statement cum bravado. A dozen other candidates participated in the election as well, but had nothing to brag about, getting in total less than half of one percent of the vote total.

From the US capitol, State Department spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus added her government's response without a touch of irony from an administration that's already tried and failed three times to oust Hugo Chavez: The US government recognizes the right of the Venezuelan people "to elect the government of their choice and the path they want for their country." US Undersecretary of State for Latin America Thomas Shannon added: "We do not want a relationship of confrontation (with Venezuela). We've always looked for ways to deepen the dialogue with....President Chavez (and we hope) he will show a greater interest."


Neither US official tried explaining that their post-election good faith rhetoric is belied by their government's actions since the Bush administration came to power in 2001 trying every underhanded trick it could cook up to undermine and oust Hugo Chavez and is still engaging in subversion. It would be quite a change in the Bush White House if it ever practiced what it always disingenuously preaches fooling no one, especially Hugo Chavez and his government.

The same kind of post-election forked tongue comments came from US Ambassador William Brownfield who congratulated Venezuelans on a smooth and peaceful election and indicated Washington's willingness to have a less confrontational relationship with Chavez saying: "We recognize that and we're ready, willing and eager to explore and see if we can make progress on bilateral issues." Hugo Chavez understands full well the kind of relationship the ambassador means and responded to the overture: "They want dialogue but on the condition that you accept their positions. If the government of the United States wants dialogue, Venezuela will always have its door open. But I doubt the US government is sincere....we are a free country. We were once a North American colony, and we will not be one ever again."

Chavez was being polite but firm as he knows the US is never sincere in its dealings with other countries and is determined to remove him from office. Also, its relations with all Global South countries are uncompromisingly ones on an "our way or the highway" basis. For Hugo Chavez, that's no way, and it's hard to imagine relations between the two countries will change going forward, at least under a Bush administration. Chavez explained further saying: "How are we going to have good relations with a government that has financed conspiratorial activities here?"

It's also a government establishing closer ties with the military in Latin American countries (circumventing ruling governments if necessary) to counter the influence and spread of populist leftist governments like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Former US Southern Command General Bantz Craddock explained the real sentiment of the Bush administration toward the region when he said: "The challenges facing Latin America and the Caribbean today are significant to our national security. We ignore them at our peril." He wasn't referring to the need to be more conciliatory to populist leftist leaders like those in Venezuela, Bolivia or Ecuador (in January) or Fidel Castro in Cuba (the US has tried and failed many dozens or even hundreds of times to kill) who have notions of governance much different than those in Washington.

For the moment at least, the cheering crowd outside the Miraflores on election night had other thoughts on their mind, but like their president demand nothing less than a relationship based on equality and respect with their dominant northern neighbor. They gathered in the late evening pouring rain dressed in their signature red T-shirts and caps, waving Venezuela flags and shouting "Uh, ah, Chavez no se va" - "Uh, ah, Chavez will not go." It continued all night in the celebratory streets of Caracas echoing Chavez's words repeating "Libertad (liberty) and telling the crowd this was a victory for them, for socialism and for the Bolivarian Revolution he now wants to advance to the next stage.

Venezuela Under Chavez - How Real Democratic Elections Are Run

The polls opened at 7AM on Sunday, December 3, but hours earlier people were already queueing up in their eagerness to participate in Venezuela's democratic electoral process. Most of them, as we know, were there to support Hugo Chavez Frias as their president and won't allow anyone else to have the job as long as he wants it. The lines were long at many of the stations, but observers noted voting across the country ran smoothly with only minor problems that were no obstacle to the electoral process. About 1400 observers were on hand to witness the day's events including 10 representatives from the Carter Center in the US, 130 from the European Union (EU), 60 from the Organization of American States (OAS) and 10 from the Mercosur Common Market of the South countries.

At day's end, OAS team leader Juan Enrique Fisher congratulated Venezuelan officials for a "transparent and well-run election....We congratulate the Venezuelan people for their spirit of citizenship, President Chavez for his popular mandate and candidate Rosales for his civic spirit and for fortifying democracy." He described the voting as "massive and peaceful" and added scattered reports of voting equipment malfunctions were minor and more attributable to voter unfamiliarity with the machines than to irregularities. Spanish parliamentarian Willy Meyer, one of seven members from the European Parliament, noted the process was smooth-running and turnout was "massive, well-arranged and happy..." European Union leader Antonio Garcia Velasquez said Venezuelan electoral officials gave them "complete liberty and with all requirements so that the job (of observing) can be fulfilled in conformity with our stipulations." The NGO Electoral Eye noted in an afternoon statement that 99% of the voting centers were operating "completely normally."

Voting took place using 33,000 ballot tables at 11,118 polling stations throughout the country, and each candidate in the election was allowed to have observers present at all of them if they wished. All registered Venezuelans, of course, could vote including the 57,667 eligible ones located in other countries. Voting took place on Sunday to make it as easy as possible for people to participate, and while polling stations were scheduled to close at 4PM Caracas time, most stayed open as long as there were people in line who hadn't yet voted.

Venezuela's Electoral Process Prior to the Election of Hugo Chavez

Before Hugo Chavez was first elected the country's president in December, 1998, less than half of all eligible Venezuelans were registered to vote and thus were unable to participate in choosing their elected officials who might help them raise their standard of living including the great majority of impoverished people in the country most in need of positive change. For decades previously, two parties in the country, Democratic Action (AD) and Social Christian Party (COPEI), dominated the political process through a power-sharing arrangement that served the interests of Venezuela's wealthy elite and its "sifrino" middle class ignoring the needs and rights of the great majority of poor and effectively disenfranchised. It finally boiled over in the streets in the late 1980s and 1990s that led to the governing coalition bringing Hugo Chavez to power in 1998 that changed everything - just the way Chavez promised he's do it if elected.

Along with his political and social revolution, Chavez promised to address the problem of electoral fraud and exclusion that had to be overcome for any true democracy to exist. At the outset of his first term in office, the National Assembly strengthened earlier reforms and initiated new ones focusing on voter access and rights, security and eliminating the kinds of fraudulent practices that characterized Venezuelan elections in the past.

A major and successful initiative was later established in 2003 known as Mision Itentidad (Mission Identity) that aimed to implement Article 56 of the Bolivarian Constitution stating: "All persons have the right to be registered free of charge with the Civil Registry Office after birth, and to obtain public documents constituting evidence of the biological identity, in accordance with law." The Mission constituted a combined mass citizenship and voter registration drive that's given millions of ordinary Venezuelans national ID cards granting them the full rights of citizenship they never before had. It also resulted in over five million Venezuelans being able to register and vote in elections for the first time ever up to the middle of 2006 - including qualified immigrants and indigenous people who never before had any rights. In 2000, before this initiative was begun, 11 million Venezuelans were registered to vote. By September, 2006, the number had grown to over 16 million in a country of 27 million people.

How the Electoral Process Is Administered

The electoral process is administered by the National Electoral Council (CNE). It's an independent body, separate from the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government or any private corporate interests. It's comprised of 11 members of the National Assembly and 10 representatives of civil society, none of whom are appointed by the President.

Elections are now conducted in Venezuela using Smartmatic touchscreen electronic voting machines with verifiable paper ballot receipts that voters can check to assure they confirm the vote they cast and then are saved by the CNE to have as a permanent record of vote totals that can be used in case a recount is needed. They also require voters to leave an electronic thumbprint to assure no one votes more than once.

The machines work as intended leading the Carter Center to comment, based on their observations of their use: "The automated machines worked well and the voting results do reflect the will of the people." Further independent studies verified the same thing including ones carried out by vote-process experts at the University of California Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and elsewhere. Great care was taken in their design to eliminate any possibility of tampering. It involves using a special technology splitting the security codes into four parts that has been endorsed in numerous voting security reports because it makes the machines used in Venezuela the most advanced system in the world according to the European Union Election Observation Mission in the country.

How Elections Are Now Run in the US

Contrast this exercise of real participatory democracy with the way things are done in the US, especially since the fraud-laden election bringing the Bush administration to power. A growing number of investigations have since revealed how corrupted the electoral process has become, especially in national elections, where a systematic effort has been made to disenfranchise portions of those segments of eligible voters likely to oppose Republican candidates or selected Democrats representing elitist interests. Many techniques are used to do it starting with the privatization of the electoral process that gives large electronic voting machine companies total unregulated control over it.

In the 2004 national election, more than 80% of the US vote was cast and counted on these machines owned, programmed and operated by three large corporations, most of which have no verifiable paper ballot receipts making it impossible to have a recount as any done, if needed, will only verify the first result being challenged. The process now is secretive and unreliable run by private corporate interests with everything to gain if candidates they support win, and based on what's now known, that's exactly what's happened. As long as this system prevails, the US electoral process is fraudulent on its face making a sham of the notion of the kind of free, fair and open elections that are a hallmark of the way things are run under Hugo Chavez.

It's what one observer, commenting on US elections, calls the "ultimate crime" as the very bedrock of democracy depends on the right of the electorate to exercise its will at the polls without it being subverted by private or other interests. Its importance is what Tom Paine said about it at the nation's founding: "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right (as has happened in the US) is to reduce a man to slavery."

Subversion with electronic voting machine manipulation is only part of the problem as investigations have also uncovered much more revealing a systematic perversion of the democratic process. In the 2000 and 2004 national elections in the US, millions of votes cast were never counted that included "spoiled ballots," rejected absentee ballots and others lost or deliberately ignored in the count. In addition, there's been massive voter roll purging, for a variety of reasons, that added up to one common denominator - eligible voters disenfranchised were likely to vote for the "wrong" candidates so they were denied the right to vote at all. In Venezuela under Hugo Chavez today, every eligible voter can register and is encouraged to vote without fear their vote cast will disappear, go to another candidate or they will be purged from the voter roles. That's how a true democracy is supposed to work, and in Venezuela today it does. In the US it doesn't, and it shows in the results. It also shows in that half or more of eligible voters here never bother showing up on election day believing, with justification, their votes don't count.

Another major difference between the two countries is in Venezuela the people are informed well enough to understand what the candidates stand for, how their government serves them, and they're willing to actively engage to keep their hard-won democratic rights and social benefits they won't give up without a fight. In contrast, in the US, the public is lulled into believing in an illusion of democracy and the rights of the people guaranteed under one that don't exist anymore, if they ever did. Because of their apathy, they're not in the streets like the people of Venezuela, their comrades in Mexico, who aren't as fortunate, or the anti-Bush/Olmert masses comprising up to half the population of Lebanon in the streets of Beirut demanding real democracy, justice and an end to Western domination. Instead, they're home or out shopping because they fail to understand unless they go there in large enough numbers for the rights they don't, in fact, have, they'll never get them.

Chavez's Goal to Build A Socialist Society in the 21st Century

Chavez first announced to the world his hope to build a socialist society in the 21st century in Venezuela at the January 30, 2005 Fifth World Social Forum. He wants a humanistic one based on solidarity, not the bureaucratic kind that doomed the Soviet Union and Eastern European states where governments were top - down with no participation of the people who ended up ill-served. Later on, Chavez elaborated saying "We have assumed the commitment to direct the Bolivarian Revolution towards socialism....a new socialism....a socialism of the 21st century....based in solidarity, fraternity, love, justice, liberty and equality" beyond the free-market model based on exploitation of working people for the interests of capital.

The Chavez government has pursued these goals incrementally since it came to power in February, 1999 following Hugo Chavez's election in December, 1998. He promised Venezuelans his vision of a Bolivarian Revolution to free them from what 19th century liberator Simon Bolivar called the imperial curse that always "plague(d) Latin America with misery in the name of liberty." His Movement for the Fifth Republic Party (MVR) got a peoples' mandate for change at its outset to draft a new constitution that transformed Venezuela from an oligarchy serving wealth and power alone to a model humanist democratic state serving everyone based on solidarity and the principles of political, economic and social justice.

He delivered in ways unimaginable in the US where essential government-delivered services for the people are denounced as radical and denied in a nation now dominated by a reactionary ideology and the notion that only neoliberal market-based solutions are acceptable - even though it's proved they don't work. Under this flawed model, government only works for the privileged few that benefit under its law-of-the-jungle rules that come at the expense of the great majority losing out the way it always happens in a top-down society run by and for them. This is the state of things today in the US, a nation where its founding principles have been turned upside down and is now run by and for plutocrats with values corrupted by false notions of fairness, equity and justice.

That was how Venezuela was governed before the age of Hugo Chavez. In the 28 years before he was first elected, the people suffered from deprivation, neglect and indifference. Venezuelan inflation-adjusted per capita income fell 35% in those years, the worst decline in the region and one of the worst in the world. Chavez halted the decline and turned it around as high oil prices and a favorable economic climate lifted the nation's growth to the highest level in the region following the crippling 2002-03 oil strike and destabilizing effects of the short-lived coup deposing Hugo Chavez for two days in April, 2002. Since that time, unemployment declined and the crushing poverty level in the country fell from a high of around 62% in 2003 to a level near 40% today and falling.

Chavez, however, went much further by enshrining the principles of a participatory democracy and its social revolution in the new 1999 Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. It mandates revolutionary structural changes for political, economic and social justice that include quality health care for all as a "fundamental social right and....responsibility....of the state." It bans discrimination, guarantees free expression Chavez's fiercest critics enjoy and use to the fullest against him without recrimination, provides for housing assistance, an improved social security pension system for seniors, assures support for the rights of indigenous people, and requires quality education be made available for all to the highest level that virtually eliminated illiteracy - compared to the stated 20% level here in the US according to the Department of Education figures but which, in fact, is much higher and increasing based on the best evidence of functional illiteracy among the secondary student populations of the nation's inner cities.

That would now be unacceptable in Venezuela where Chavez post-election wants to take his Revolution to the next level doing more than ever for his people. Along with all of the above, the government additionally already provides subsidized food for those in need, land reform, job training and micro-credit. It's a country in which most of the productive capacity is state or privately owned, but a great emphasis has been made to be innovative and go in new directions, experimenting with the idea of co-management with state-owned enterprises allowed to be jointly managed by the workers in them. A major effort has also been made to expand the number of cooperatives outside of state or private control, and since Chavez was first elected the total number of them has grown from 800 to 100,000 employing 1.5 million people or 10% of the adult population and rising.

Another of Chavez's top priorities since first taking office in 1999 has been land reform. The country has long been run by rich oligarchs including large land-owning ones that allowed 5% of the largest landowners to control 75% of the land and 75% of the smallest ones to have only 6% of it. Chavez is trying to implement land reform legislation allowing underused land owned by the latifundistas (the large rich landowners) to be redistributed to landless campesinos who'll put it to productive use and improve their lives in the process.

Chavez also wants to continue enhancing all the above-listed programs that have improved the lives of his people including the many innovative social Missions using the country's oil wealth to do it. His impressive electoral victory gives him a greater mandate than ever to advance his Bolivarian Project to the next level and his vision of socialism or social democracy in the 21st century. It won't be a simple task as the power of the oligarchs supported by the Bush administration, and what may succeed it, are powerful obstacles in the way of social advance. So far he's achieved wonders for the past eight years in the face of great odds, but much more needs to be done. With the power of the Venezuelan people standing with him, not willing to give up the great gains already gotten, Chavez is now looking ahead to advance the country's social democracy well into the new century.

Hugo Chavez is now an empowered symbol and leader of a growing social revolutionary populist movement slowly spreading in the region that needs to be turned into an unstoppable juggernaut. It represents a hopeful and promising alternative to generations of entrenched elitism backed by military power along with oppressive US dominance and the poisonous effects of the neoliberal Washington Consensus model savagely exploiting the Global South for the interests of capital in the North. It's a way to be free from the US-controlled IMF and World Bank debt-bondage demanding in return punishing fiscal austerity, state-owned industry privatizations, social neglect, the loss of organized labor rights in a system of market deregulation benefitting the privileged alone at the expense of staggering levels of poverty, deprivation and inequality for the majority. It's a way to build a free society of, for and by the people unbeholden to wealth and power. It's a way to reduce poverty and inequality and improve the lives of ordinary people in ways never thought possible in the developing world until Hugo Chavez had a vision and was able to implement it and begin its spread.

Chavez now has allies in Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Nicaragua, Uruguay and even Chile that still exists under the shadow of Augusto Pinochet and his 17 year dictatorship that crushed the strongest democracy in the region and from whose rule the country has yet to fully recover, but hopefully has a chance under its new more enlightened leader. They represent what author Tariq Ali refers to in the region as an "Axis of Hope," and Chavez has now earned enough political capital to bring it closer to fruition.

The momentum in Latin America is with Hugo Chavez and his allies if they can seize it and take it to the next level. The chance for success has never been better with the US more vulnerable than ever and staggering from its loss of dominance in the Middle East and the forces arrayed against it there showing they can stand up to the most powerful nation on earth and prevail. It's a sign America is not all-powerful, is in decline politically and economically and choosing an independent course is an alternative that can work if enough nations unite and do it together.

The region's most dominant nations have already shown they can oppose Washington and prevail. Following Argentina's IMF-imposed structurally adjusted economic meltdown at the end of the 1990s, President Nestor Kirchner got the financial markets in 2005 to accept his take-it-or-leave-it offer of 30 cents on the dollar payment on the country's unrepayable sovereign debt of around $130 billion and have to accept it in the form of long-term, low-interest bonds.

Then, events at the November, 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar del Playa, Argentina sounded the death knell for the US-proposed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) expansion of the disastrous NAFTA model because the dominant Southern Common Market Mercosur countries in the region of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Venezuela want no part of it signaling for scholar Immanuel Wallerstein that "The Monroe Doctrine is dead. And there are few mourners."

And yet another blow to US-promoted globalization came with the collapse of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha (so-called "Development") Round talks in July, 2006 because more developing countries now realize the US/Western-one-way trade deals have been disastrous despite disingenuous rosy promises of economic growth and prosperity that only delivered increased poverty, deprivation and environmental destruction instead.

Before these agreements from hell were ever agreed to, average per capital income growth in Latin America was 82% from 1960 to 1980 (4% per person, per year). Once the notion of globalization took hold after 1980 based on the Washington Consensus neoliberal model, the rate of income growth in the region through 2000 fell to 9% (less than half of 1% per person, per year), and since 2000 it dropped to 5% - a stunning indictment of how so-called "free-trade" US-style (that isn't "fair trade") is a formula for economic ruin for those countries adopting it, and significant ones like Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and others in Latin America want no more of it.

It remains to be seen going forward if this kind of momentum can continue, gain strength with new allies working together for the common self-interest of all to break free from the dominant US chokehold by asserting their independence as Venezuela under Hugo Chavez has shown can be done and be able to get away with it and benefit as a result.

Further success in Venezuela and elsewhere depends on breaking free from what South African born and now activist and distinguished Bolivarian Venezuelan Professor of philosophy and political science Franz Lee says must be accomplished ahead: "(Getting) rid of all the five tentacles of capitalist imperialism: exploitation, domination, discrimination, militarization and alienation....in a class struggle against global fascism." In Venezuela, the process has only just begun. Hugo Chavez has taken up the challenge to move it ahead, but he'll need the support of other enlightened leaders to boldly go with him where he's already gone and then take it a lot further to achieve a peoples' victory over the forces that have long held them down and denied them the equity and justice they deserve.

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


Bipartisan panel urges agencies to order civilians to Iraq

GovExec.com
06/12/2006

With the situation in Iraq "grave and deteriorating," the United States must begin the process of shifting troops out of the country, members of a bipartisan panel said Wednesday. But at the same time, the group recommended, the Bush administration must make sure that it has sufficient civilian personnel in Iraq -- if necessary, by ordering some employees to serve there.
"The nature of the mission in Iraq is unfamiliar and dangerous, and the United States has had great difficulty filling civilian assignments in Iraq with sufficient numbers of properly trained personnel at the appropriate rank," wrote members of the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former Secretary of State James A. Baker II and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., in their report. For example, panel members said, the United States still has "far too few Arab language-proficient" officials in the country.

To address the problem, the group recommended that the secretaries of State and Defense and the Director of National Intelligence put the "highest possible priority" on language and cultural training for military personnel and civilian employees about to be assigned to Iraq. And, the report said, if not enough of the latter group volunteer to go to the country, "civilian agencies must fill those positions with directed assignments."

If agencies do so, the panel recommended, the federal government should take steps to address employees' financial hardships resulting from service in Iraq, such as providing the same tax breaks military personnel stationed in the country receive.

The Iraq Study Group, launched earlier this year under the auspices of the United States Institute of Peace, also recommended that the Defense, Justice, State and Treasury departments, along with the U.S. Agency for International Development, begin to conduct cross-agency training efforts to prepare for complex operations such as those in Iraq. Those efforts, the group said, should be modeled on the joint training exercises conducted by the military services since the passage of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act.

In a separate recommendation, the panel said the State Department should create a Foreign Service Reserve Corps with personnel who could provide "surge capacity" to deal with future stability operations. Other departments, such as Agriculture, Justice and Treasury, should develop similar capacities, panel members said



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We Must Prevent Permanent Bases in Iraq

By David Swanson
davidswanson.org
December 8, 2006

Congress passed a law banning permanent bases in Iraq and the Baker-Hamilton Report suggests that Bush state we don't have long-term plans - meanwhile, construction continues.
Did you notice something about the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report? It recommends all sorts of changes, all of them far short of actually ending the war, but it recommends them all to the same person responsible for the disastrous situation we're in now. It doesn't suggest what Congress should do to rein in an out-of-control president. Rather, it recommends that the President do dozens of things. Here's one of them:

Recommendation 22: The President should state that the United States does not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. If the Iraqi government were to request a temporary base or bases, then the U.S. government could consider that request as it would in the case of any other government.


Bush came close to stating this on April 13, 2004, when he said "As a proud and independent people, Iraqis do not support an indefinite occupation and neither does America." But the Iraq Study Group does, and so -- judging by other remarks and actions, does Bush. When you refuse to set a definite time for getting out, you are supporting an indefinite occupation. Robert Gates, the new Rumsfeld, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that he thought the "war on terror," which he dishonestly connected to the War on Iraq, would last "a generation." That's pretty indefinite.

But what if Bush were to state that the United States does not seek permanent bases? How would that differ from Bush stating that he had no warning of Katrina, or that he knew Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or that the United States does not torture, or that he planned to keep Rumsfeld on another two years?

Speaking of Rumsfeld, on February 17, 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, testifying before the same Senate Armed Services Committee, said: ''We have no intention, at the present time, of putting permanent bases in Iraq.'' Now, in Rumsfeldspeak this probably meant that he would build temporary bases and then decide later to make them permanent, or that they would just be "enduring," which would mean permanent but not, you know, permanent -- in the same way that an "enemy combatant" is a prisoner of war without the rights of, you know, a prisoner of war. In any case, what is gained by having Bush or Rumsfeld say the words? Wouldn't it make more sense to recommend to Congress that it do something that used to be the role of Congress: namely, pass a law?

But there's the catch. Congress already has. Since the moment we entered Fiscal Year 2007 in October, every dime spent on permanent military bases in Iraq has been illegal. But no one even knows how to find out how many dimes that is. And that illustrates a broader problem. Bush not only began this war in secret with money that Congress had approved for something else, but he also immediately turned it into a permanent occupation and began constructing permanent bases. It took Congress three years to get around to cutting off the funding for more such construction, but Congress had never approved the whole idea. Neither, of course, had the Iraqis.

This past weekend there was a huge protest in Italy where a permanent U.S. military base plans to expand with the construction of a new base nearby. In South Korea it's a similar story, with the added kicker that our military is evicting townspeople, eliminating their village, and building a new base with a golf course attached. There's a global meeting planned in March in Ecuador on eliminating foreign military bases. It was U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia that enraged Osama Bin Laden. Americans pay a fortune to maintain bases all over the world, and the primary product of them is anger.

Last March, when Congress passed the "emergency" supplemental funding for the war for 2006, both houses of Congress included language banning the use of funds to build permanent bases. A Republican-run conference committee "reconciled" this agreement by deleting it.

But leaders on this issue like Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) didn't give up. Similar language was included in the "Defense" Appropriations bill for 2007. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) introduced an amendment on the floor of the House to again delete the language on no-permanent-bases. But most of the Republicans and almost all of the Democrats went against him. Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) urged King to withdraw his amendment: "If we strike this prohibition from this bill that was well thought out, what we are saying to the Iraqi people and what I am satisfied the propaganda machine of al Qaeda in Iraq are going to do is use this and say: see there, we told you so. The Americans plan to occupy us for the rest of our lives." The House voted 376-50 for no-permanent-bases. It's been the law since October. The 2007 "Defense" Authorization bill passed including the same language.

Why did King want to allow the construction of permanent bases? He argued on the floor: "I believe that we should not foreclose our options in Iraq ... Historically, basing rights agreements have been a necessary part of diplomatic relations with foreign governments." Well, yes, but that's exactly what the Iraq Study Group recommends: working the basing arrangements out with the puppet government. Indications are that the Iraqis are not fooled.

When a number of us wrote to Congressional leaders to thank them for cutting off funds for permanent bases, we noted that: "This important step comes as evidence increasingly points to its need. A University of Maryland poll recently showed that 77 percent of Iraqis believe that the United States intends to maintain permanent bases in that country, while a State Department study found that a majority of Iraqis are calling for U.S-led military forces to withdraw immediately. The recently issued National Intelligence Estimate confirmed what many of us had feared for so long: the U.S. presence in Iraq is increasing terrorist threats and not making America's homeland more secure."

So, over three-quarters of Iraqis are hip to what we're doing. Americans don't lag so far behind. In a new study released by the same university this week, we learn that 66 percent of Americans (including a near majority of Republicans) believe that a majority of Iraqis oppose the establishment of permanent U.S. bases in their country, and 68 percent of Americans (including a majority of Republicans) believe that, in any case, we should not have such bases. Tom Engelhardt points out that: "This is an especially remarkable set of figures, given that the permanent bases have received next to no attention in the American mainstream media."

Enough has been reported, however, for us to know that we are spending billions of dollars to construct bases in Iraq for the U.S. military. The new Democratic majority in Congress knows this, knows the damage these bases are doing, and knows the good that could be done by making better use of all that money, not to mention the lives lost in the process. If we speak up, perhaps the new majority will also know how quickly it can become a minority again if it does not seize this issue, expose it, and set it right. As Congressman Dennis Kucinich said on the floor of the House on Wednesday: "The American public did not vote for the Iraq Study Group. They voted for a new congress and a new direction in Iraq -- out."



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Iraq Doesn't Need Any More Heavy Weapons

By Stephen Pizzo
News for Real
December 8, 2006

The Baker-Hamilton report proposes to "beef up Iraqi military" with billions in new hardware -- the absolute last thing the war-torn country needs.

I know everyone is abuzz today about how the Baker/Hamilton commission's bleak report on Iraq represents the beginning of the end for Bush's disastrous blunder. True, there is now light at the end of that bloody gauntlet. But more US kids will have to die before it's over, not for strategic, but for entirely face-saving reasons.

And, if you listened carefully to statements from both administration and Iraqi officials over the the last couple of weeks, you heard the lid on the KY jelly jar being loosened for one last reaming - of you, your kids and your grandkids.
It's a "new plan," a plan to "beef up Iraqi military" so it can take over from US forces. You heard Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki last week claim that the only reason his forces have not stood up to the insurgents so far is because they don't have any "heavy weapons." He wants heavy weapons -- tanks, Humvees, artillery, that kind of stuff.

Maliki's request fell on eager -- no, desperate -- ears. George W. Bush, now painted into a corner by his own incompetence, is now looking for any way to hold off Iraq's inevitably collapse until after he leaves office. And Maliki's request for more military gear was just the ticket, especially now that the Baker/Hamilton has sanctified the notion of encouraging and enabling the Iraqis to fight for themselves.

Of course, Iraq can't even pay it's own utility bills, so guess who's going to have to borrow a few billion dollars more to pay for those heavy weapons Maliki wants?

Bush's new strategy, which has already begun to emerge, will be a two-pronged ruse: 1) Increase training of Iraqi troops, and 2) Provide them "the means" to function after US forces leave. ("Means" = heavy weapons.)

Bear with me here as I free associate on this "new course forward:"

Let's see -- first let's talk about "heavy weapons."

Over the past three years the harsh Iraq environment has worn down our own military's stock of heavy weapons to the breaking point. Nearly $8 billion in US heavy weapons, tanks, trucks, Humvees and trucks, are now up on blocks awaiting repairs at US headquarter and supply depots around the world. Our soldiers in Iraq are now so short heavy equipment that the Pentagon has been looting National Guard and Reserve units to make up the shortfall. Gutted reserve units now need their own $7 billion infusion of heavy weapons to replace theirs which are now being degraded in Iraq.

So, just what can we give Mr. Maliki? The heavy weapons and gear now on the ground in Iraq, of course. We could just leave it behind when our own troops split. Forget for moment that we will have to then replace it all for our own armed forces. Let's instead consider what the Iraqis will do with those heavy weapons.

Well let's see. Maliki is a Shiite. So is that little two-legged tumor, al-Sadar. Shiites are to Iraq what racist segregationists were to the US south a century ago -- only meaner. Sunnis are Iraq's minority. What does common sense suggest the Shiite-government of Iraq has in mind for those heavy weapons. (You only get one guess.)

Which is precisely why, at such as critical tipping-point moment, al-Maliki is not begging for more US troops. And he's not begging US troops to stay in Iraq either. All Maliki is asking for now are "heavy weapons" for his 350,000 US-trained and supplied Iraqi soldiers.

On top of that al-Sadar has his own 60,000-man Shia militia. These are the folks who have been kidnapping Sunnis off the street. Most are later found shot in the head, but only after militia soldiers amused themselves by making holes in them with electric drills. (Imagine the creative uses those dudes will come up with once they have heavy weapons!)

Meanwhile up north the Kurds, who have been stabbed in the back by the US more than once, will go berserk at the very notion that the US is providing the Shiites the heavy military gear. That's all the Shiites need to reclaim the Kurd's newly acquired oil fields -- which of course is another reason al-Maliki wants heavy equipment.

I guess my point here is Bush is about to make things worse in Iraq -- again. We should not give Maliki "heavy" anything. We've already armed and trained his new army with the kinds of weapons necessary to bring law and order to Iraq. I suggest he be told to get on with that task because that's all he's getting from Uncle Sap. (Thank goodness it takes too long to train helicopter pilots or we'd be giving them choppers too.)

New York Times -- and one-time supporter of the war -- Tom Friedman, said today that the trouble real problem we face in Iraq is that Iraqis living together as a unified nation is our first choice. But for Iraqis that is their second choice. Most Iraqis first choice is that their particular tribe, Sunni, Shia or Kurd, get everything they want. (Which for Sunnis and Shiites is, pretty much, everything.) The Shiites want full control of Iraq. The Sunnis want to return to the good old days when they ran roughshod over Iraq. The Kurds want nothing to do with either of them, just their own country and every drop of oil under it.

"We lost," Friedman, said today. "It's over. We should no longer sacrifice our first-choice soldiers to further the second choices of the Iraqis."

Amen. Get out. Sooner rather than later. And take our heavy weapons with us.

A couple of other free-associative observations on all this:

* We all know now that the Bush administration lied to us about WMD in Iraq. Now, thanks to the Baker/Hamilton report we learn they've been lying to us about the true level of violence in Iraq. They looked at one particularly violent day in Iraq during which the administration reported 93 violent incidents. The real number was over 1100 violent attacks. (Not exactly a rounding error.)

* Ever wonder why, from the very start of this mess, the Bush administration made one breathtaking mistake after another? There was a clue in the Baker/Hamilton report. We have 1000 Americans working at the US embassy in Iraq out of which only six of them speak Arabic. There's 4 million Arab-Americans, but the Bush administration could only round up 6 (s-i-x) to work at our embassy in Baghdad.

* On 9/11 3030 Americans were killed, resulting in the Bush administration's "war on terror." The same year the leading causes of death for Americans was tobacco -- the source of 435,000 deaths, or 18.1% of total US deaths that year. Rather than declare war on tobacco Bush administration lawyers argued the court should reduce the $135 billion fine against Big Tobacco to $10 billion.

* The same year as terrorist killed 3030 Americans, 17,000 Americans -- more than 5 times as died on 9/11 -- died from illicit drug use. Yet just this week I read this dispatch from our war front in Afghanistan:

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon, engaged in a difficult fight to defeat a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, has resisted entreaties from U.S. anti-narcotics officials to play an aggressive role in the faltering campaign to curb the country's opium trade...Military units in Afghanistan largely overlook drug bazaars, rebuff some requests to take U.S. drug agents on raids and do little to counter the organized crime syndicates shipping the drug to Europe, Asia and, increasingly, the United States, according to officials and documents. (Afghanistan now provides upwards of 90% of the heroin coming into the US, and this years crop has been a record. )


So, let me get this straight. We will go to war against anyone that kills 3030 Americans in one year by flying planes into office buildings, but have no interest in going to war against those that kill 17,000 Americans every year by providing them deadly drugs.

Meanwhile, now self-financed by this booming drug trade, the Taliban is making a strong comeback in Afghanistan.

Maybe it's time for the Baker/Hamilton commission to get to work on an Afghanistan report.

Yes Virginia, George W. Bush is a moron. No need for special commission to verify that. The evidence -- and bodies -- mount by the hour.



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Widows Become The Silent Tragedy

By Dahr Jamail & Ali Al-Fadhily
08 December, 2006
Inter Press Service

BAGHDAD, Dec. 7 (IPS) - Hundreds of thousands of widows are becoming the silent tragedy of a country sliding deeper into chaos by the day.

Widows are the flip side of violence that has meant more than a million men dead, detained or disabled, Iraqi NGOs estimate. These men's wives or mothers now carry the burden of running the families.
"The total figure of men who have been killed, disabled or detained for long periods of time adds up to more than one and a half million," Khalid Hameed, chief of the Iraqi al-Raya human rights organisation told IPS. "The average number of Iraqi family members is seven, so about ten million Iraqis are facing the worst living circumstances."

In these circumstances, he said, women have had to "search for ways to survive and support their families at a time when not much help comes from the international community."

Most international NGOs left the country by last year apparently on the advice of governments of their countries pointing to growing violence and dangers to NGO members.

"International NGOs were conducting support projects for Iraqi women before they suddenly quit and left the country in a rush in October 2005," Faris Daghistani, who was project manager at the Baghdad mission for the Italian humanitarian aid organisation in Iraq INTERSOS told IPS.

"There was a wide focus on working women and how to support them by training and providing them with necessary tools to raise income on their own," he said. "It is a pity that most of our productive projects have stopped, and we had to leave women to face their fate on their own."

The violence since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is not the first to have taken its toll. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed, taken prisoner or disabled during the 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq.

"We have never lived our lives as human beings should live," 42-year-old Dr Shatha Ahmed told IPS at her home in Baghdad. "The Iraq-Iran war took our fathers, and now the Bush war is taking our husbands and sons."

Women now face a long struggle surviving and bringing up families on their own, she said. "We could not even dream of developing our own skills."

Dr. Shatha's husband, also a doctor, was killed by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army in September this year when he was leaving the Ministry of Health offices in Baghdad. She now has to support her family, and her husband's parents as well.

Some help is on offer to widows through groups such as the Iraqi Red Crescent, the Islamic Party, the Muslim Scholars Association and non-governmental organisations. But this support is not well organised, and is insufficient to help the growing number of widows.

The Social Affairs Office of the government has started paying the equivalent of about 100 dollars monthly to widows. But this payment cannot support whole families, given particularly the shooting inflation.

And the payment is not easy to get. "I had to pay a lot of money as bribes to government officials in order to get the monthly support payment, and that is not enough to support my big family," 47-year-old widow Haja Saadiya Hussein from Baghdad told IPS.

"Americans killed my husband last year near a checkpoint, and now I have to work as a servant in government officials' houses to earn a living for my six children. I have stopped them going to school, to cut my expenses."

Some widows have attempted to remarry in order to find support. Some second husbands, who are usually older, offer to take care of their new sons for religious reasons.

"There can be no compensation for losing a husband," a spokesperson from the Iraqi Red Crescent's social support department told IPS. "The world is responsible for these women who lost their spouses in the name of the international community."



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U.S., Iraqis dispute raid, at least 17 killed

By Ghazwan al-Jibouri
Reuters
8 Dec 06

ISHAQI, Iraq - Iraqi and U.S. officials gave sharply differing accounts of an overnight raid and air strike on Friday in which up to 20 people were killed, with a town mayor accusing American troops of killing five children.

The U.S. military issued a statement saying ground forces with air support killed 18 men and two women in the Thar Thar area of Salahaddin province, north of Baghdad. It suspected all of being al Qaeda militants and said it found weapons including rocket-propelled grenades and explosive suicide vests.
In the village of Jalameda, near Ishaqi, 90 km (50 miles) north of the capital, police said they found the bodies of 17 dead civilians in the rubble of the family homes of brothers Mohammed Hussein Jalmoud and Mahmoud Hussein Jalmoud.

Captain Nasser Abdul Majeed told Reuters that the 17 included six women and five children. They had been sent to the regional capital Tikrit to determine the cause of death.

The houses, surrounded by open fields, were flattened in the raid, leaving little but rubble and twisted steel rods.

Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver said the statement on al Qaeda referred to the Ishaqi incident.

It is an area where the Sunni insurgency is active. Earlier, Ishaqi police and the mayor put the death toll as high as 32.

"The Americans have done this before but they always deny it," Ishaqi Mayor Amer Alwan told Reuters by telephone.

"I want the world to know what's happening here."

In March, Ishaqi police and officials accused U.S. troops of tying up and shooting dead six adults and five children and then calling in an air strike to destroy the house. An investigation by the U.S. unit involved concluded there was no wrongdoing.

It did, however, also find that there were up to nine "collateral deaths" of civilians, as opposed to the three which the military originally reported.

COMPLAINTS

That incident was one of a handful involving civilian deaths that came to light in the past year which have been investigated by the U.S. military, including the deaths of two dozen civilians in the town of Haditha in November 2005.

At least five marines are expected to be charged soon with offences, possibly including murder, U.S. officials have said.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said shortly after taking office in April that he was losing patience with reports of U.S. troops killing civilians. Many Iraqis believe unjustified killings by U.S. troops are common, but few have been confirmed by official investigations.

Such sentiments are among reasons cited by many Iraqis for wanting an end to the U.S. military presence, although many also share the concerns of some U.S. officials that a hasty withdrawal could precipitate greater sectarian violence.

In its statement on Friday's strike, the U.S. military said: "Coalition Forces targeted the location based on intelligence reports that indicated associates with links to multiple al Qaeda in
Iraq networks were operating in the area."

Ground forces were searching buildings when they came under heavy machinegun fire from one of the buildings. The ground forces returned fire, killing two militants, it said. The troops then called in an air strike that killed 18 more militants.



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The Empire Is Falling

By Robert Fisk
08 December 2006
The Independent

The Roman Empire is falling. That, in a phrase, is what the Baker report says. The legions cannot impose their rule on Mesopotamia.

Just as Crassus lost his legions' banners in the deserts of Syria-Iraq, so has George W Bush. There is no Mark Antony to retrieve the honour of the empire. The policy "is not working". "Collapse" and "catastrophe" - words heard in the Roman senate many a time - were embedded in the text of the Baker report. Et tu, James?
This is also the language of the Arab world, always waiting for the collapse of empire, for the destruction of the safe Western world which has provided it with money, weapons, political support. First, the Arabs trusted the British Empire and Winston Churchill, and then they trusted the American Empire and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and all the other men who would give guns to the Israelis and billions to the Arabs - Nixon, Carter, Clinton, Bush...

And now they are told that the Americans are not winning the war; that they are losing. If you were an Arab, what would you do?

Be sure, they are not asking this question in Washington. The Middle East - so all-important (supposedly) in the "war on terror" - in itself, a myth - doesn't really matter in the White House. It is a district, a map, a region, every bit as amorphous as the crescent of "crisis" which the Clinton administration invented when it wanted to land its troops in Somalia. How to get out, how to save face, that's the question. To hell with the people who live there: the Arabs, the Iraqis, the men, women and children whom we kill - and whom the Iraqis kill - every day.

Note how our "spokesmen" in Afghanistan now acknowledge the dead woman and children of Nato airstrikes as if it is quite in order to slaughter these innocents because we are at war with the horrid Taliban.

Some of the same mindset has arrived in Baghdad, where "coalition" spokesmen also - from time to time - jump in front of the video-tape evidence by accepting that they, too, kill women and children in their war against "terror". But it is the sentences of impotence that doom empires. "The ability of the United States to influence events within Iraq is diminishing." There is a risk of a "slide towards chaos [sic] [that] could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian catastrophe."

But hasn't that already happened? "Collapse" and "catastrophe" are daily present in Iraq. America's ability "to influence events" has been absent for years. And let's just re-read the following sentence: "Violence is increasing in scope and lethality. It is fed by a Sunni Arab insurgency. Shiite [Shia] militias, death squads, al-Qa'ida and widespread criminality. Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability."

Come again? Where was this "widespread criminality," this "sectarian conflict" when Saddam, our favourite war criminal, was in power? What do the Iraqis think about this? And how typical that the American media went at once to hear Bush's view of the Baker report - rather than the reaction of the Iraqis, those who are on the receiving end of our self-induced tragedy in Mesopotamia.

They will enjoy the idea that American troops should be "embedded" with Iraqi forces - not so long ago, it was the press that had to be "embedded" with the Americans! - as if the Romans were ready to put their legions amid the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths to ensure their loyalty.

What the Romans did do, of course - and what the Americans would never do - is offer their subjects Roman citizenship. Every tribe - in Gaul or Bythinia or Mesopotamia - who fell under Roman rule became a citizen of Rome. What could Washington have done with Iraq if it had offered American citizenship to every Iraqi? There would have been no insurrection, no violence, no collapse or catastrophe, no Baker report. But no. We wanted to give these people the fruits of our civilisation - not the civilisation itself. From this, they were banned.

And the result? The nations we supposedly hated - Iran and Syria - are now expected to save us from ourselves. "Given the ability [sic] of Iran and Syria to influence events and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage [sic] them constructively."

I love those words. Especially "engage". Yes, the "influence of America" is diminishing. The influence of Syria and Iran is growing. That just about sums up the "war on terror". Any word yet, I wonder, from Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara?

The strategies

The Baker panel considered four options, all of which it rejected:

Cut And Run

Baker believes it would cause a humanitarian disaster, while al-Qa'ida would expand further.

Stay The Course

Baker accepts that current US policy is not working. Nearly 100 Americans are dying every month. The US is spending $2bn (Ł1bn) a week and has lost public support.

Send In More Troops

Increases in US troop levels would not solve the cause of violence in Iraq. Violence would simply rekindle as soon as US forces moved.

Regional Devolution

If the country broke up into its Shia, Sunni and Kurd regions, it would lead to ethnic cleansing and mass population moves.

Baker outlines a fifth option - 'responsible transition' - in which the number of US forces could be increased to shore up the Iraqi army while it takes over primary responsibility for combat operations. US troops would then decrease slowly.



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Bush cool on key Iraq report recommendations

AFP
8 Dec 06

US President George W. Bush has rebuffed some key policy recommendations by the Iraq Study Group, but announced a new push for talks with Israel and the Palestinians after a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The group's report, which warns that the situation in Iraq is "grave and deteriorating," called for most US combat troops to be withdrawn by early 2008, for talks with Iran and Syria, and for a new Middle East peace effort.
Bush lavished praise on the Iraq Study Group, calling its Wednesday report as "worthy of serious study."

"The American people expect us to come up with a new strategy," he said at a joint press conference with Blair. "We need a new approach," he said.

Bush also described the situation in Iraq as "bad."

Initially he described the violence in Iraq, which the report warned could spiral into a regional war, as "unsettling."

Later, when asked how he could convince the public that he is not in denial and was sincere about a policy overhaul, Bush responded: "It's bad in Iraq. That help?

"You want frankness? I thought we would succeed quicker than we did. And I am disappointed by the pace of success," he said.

Blair said his trip to the Middle East would show that Britain and the United States could be trusted as honest brokers in the region, despite their Iraq entanglement.

"I believe that by moving this forward, we send a very strong signal -- not just to the region but to the whole of the world -- that we are even-handed and just in the application of our values," Blair said.

Blair said his main goals would be to seek the release of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit, whose kidnap in Gaza in June sparked fierce Israeli-Palestinian clashes, and to seek ways to speed formation of a Palestinian national unity government acceptable as a negotiating partner to Israel.

"We need to get the door unlocked, because it's kind of barred at the moment, and it needs to be opened," Blair said.

The prime minister's visit was to set the stage for a Middle East visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in early 2007, her eighth trip in two years to Israel and the Palestinian territories, her spokesman said.

Bush cautioned that the review, led by former secretary of state James Baker and former representative Lee Hamilton, was one of many, citing pending reviews by the Pentagon, US State Department, and national security council.

Bush was cool on two key commission proposals -- talks with Iran and Syria, and withdrawing most US combat troops by early 2008.

"I've always said we'd like our troops out as fast as possible," he said, while insisting on the need to be "flexible and realistic" and tying any change in troop level to advice from US military commanders, as he has in the past.

Bush said he would make a speech outlining his strategy "after I get the reports," a move the White House says will come in weeks.

Bush said Damascus and Tehran might be welcome for talks if they renounced support for extremists and pledged support for Baghdad's fledgling government, otherwise "they shouldn't bother to show up."

Bush also reiterated his longstanding condition that Iran freeze sensitive nuclear work before any direct talks.

"Should they agree to verifiably suspend their (uranium) enrichment, the United States will be at the table with our partners," he said, telling Tehran: "There's no need to continue this obstinance."

The Bush-Blair meeting followed November 7 US legislative elections, in which Bush's Republican Party lost the control of Congress to the opposition Democrats.

It also came one week after a dispute inside the State Department, triggered by a senior analyst saying he was "ashamed" of the way Bush treated Blair and that US-British relations were "totally one-sided" in Washington's favor.



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Paris praises 'lucid' Baker-Hamilton Iraq report

PARIS, Dec 7, 2006 (AFP)

France on Thursday praised as "lucid" the Iraq Study Group report on the US presence in Iraq, in particular its call for Washington to step up efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"The report made by the Baker-Hamilton committee is lucid. From our point of view, it reflects the actual situation in Iraq," Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said in a statement.

"As France has always said, there can be no military solution to the deep crisis that Iraq is going through. The report does not fix a precise timetable for withdrawal, but it does set a horizon. That is also what we are saying," he said.

"To ensure that the withdrawal does not lead to chaos, it is vitally important to have a political process which can bring Iraqis together and isolate the extremists and terrorists," he said.

Douste-Blazy also said that he "agreed with the appeal which is made to the US to involve itself totally in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which would open up room for manoeuvre to solve other crises in the region."



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Gore to Bush on Iraq: It's Not About You

ABC
6 Dec 06

ABC News' Teddy Davis Reports: Calling the Iraq war "the worst strategic mistake in the entire history of the United States" and "worse than a civil war," former Vice President Gore urged President Bush to find a way to get U.S. troops out of Iraq "as quickly as possible without making the situation worse" while appearing this morning on NBC's "Today."

"I would urge the President to try to separate out the personal issues of being blamed in history for his mistake and instead recognizing that it is not about him. It's about our country," Gore said in an interview with NBC's Matt Lauer.
When asked if he would pull U.S. troops out of Iraq even it was seen as a defeat for the U.S., Gore dodged the question, saying if he were president, he would have "the full flow of information" and he would be able to test these ideas.

On the question of whether he would run for president in 2008, Gore once again said he is involved in a different kind of campaign - to educate people about climate change - and that he isn't planning to do so but he hasn't completely ruled it out.

When asked if Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is the man to beat on the Democratic side in 2008, Gore said once again, "I think it's too early to evaluate the candidates who look like they are planning to run." Gore gave a similar answer about Obama when he was interviewed last month by ABC Radio's David Blaustein.



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Catastrophe Still Awaits

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Counterpunch

"The real difficulty in changing any enterprise lies not in developing new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones."

John Maynard Keynes


A ray of realism appeared in the confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense nominee Robert Gates before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Gates himself said that the US was not winning in Iraq, a statement with which everyone agreed except the White House.

The US, however, is not out of the woods. The question remains: what will be the US government's response to the lost war and the terrible calamity that Bush has created in Iraq?
Many Americans are still fighting the Vietnam war. They see Iraq through the lens of the futile Vietnam misadventure and express their dismay that America will lose another war because "the Democrats will cut and run like they did in Vietnam." These Americans have forgotten that it was a Republican administration that got the US out of Vietnam and that it was the Democrats who committed the US to that conflict. Moreover, Democrats are not showing a cut and run propensity.

For example, Silvestre Reyes, the incoming Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says the US cannot withdraw from Iraq until it has dismantled the militias. Reyes wants to put 30,000 more US troops into Iraq to dismantle the militias. Reyes has forgotten that sending more troops was the Democrats' policy in Vietnam, a policy whose only result was that more Americans lost sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers.

Obviously, sending more US troops will not succeed in dismantling the Iraqi sectarian militias. However, a US attempt to dismantle the militias will result in the militias joining the insurgency and turning on the US troops. The situation would deteriorate, not improve. It is frightening that the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee does not understand this.

The appearance of a ray of realism about Iraq in the Senate Arms Services Committee does not mean that the US will escape catastrophe. At the Armed Services Committee hearing (Dec. 5), some senators said that US troops must not be used in a civil war between Iraqis, but that the troops have to stay until stability is created. Senators have the idea that US troops can be shorn of their combat role, but remain to train the Iraqi army so the Iraqi government can put down insurgency and civil war.

However, in civil war each side has a government and an army. Which side will the US support? If the US sides with the Sunnis against the majority Shiites, it will be throwing in its lot with the insurgency that has been killing its troops and find itself arrayed against the more numerous Shiites backed by Iran. If the US favors the Shiite majority, the US will anger its Sunni allies in the Middle East.

Indeed, civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, with or without US involvement, could easily spread throughout the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was not the only country where Sunnis hold political sway over Shiites. By invading Iraq, stirring up extremism, and setting in motion sectarian violence, the Bush regime may have opened Pandora's Box of civil war throughout the Middle East.

The neoconservative Bush regime lacked the brains to understand that defeating Saddam Hussein's army would not give the US control over Iraq. Whatever minimum control the US might once have had is gone.

The US army in Iraq has so little control that it cannot even provide sufficient security for President Bush to meet in Iraq with Prime Minister Maliki.

Since the US army has no control, provides no security, and does not know who it is fighting, US troops simply provide targets for insurgents. They are accomplishing nothing positive and should be withdrawn. US troops in Iraq serve one purpose: They are a provocation that foments Islamic extremism and creates dangerous instability throughout the Middle East.

The senators and Robert Gates haven't got this far in their comprehension. The question is whether they will see the light before US troops are forced to pay a higher price for their government's stupidity.

A minority of Americans still believe the US can defeat the Iraqi insurgency if only the US would use enough force. Americans hear this from neoconservatives and from the right-wing crazies of talk radio. These are the same Americans who believe the US could have won the Vietnam war by invading or nuking North Vietnam.

The US probably could have defeated North Vietnam on a one-on-one basis. However, just as General MacArthur's invasion of North Korea brought in the Chinese, a US invasion of North Vietnam would have been an extreme provocation for the Soviet Union and China and could have ended in nuclear war.

Many Americans have the absurd notion that the only limit to US power is the will to use it. This absurd idea provides the Israeli lobby with a vocal American minority that is easy to exploit in behalf of "standing tough" in the Middle East. The main reason that neither Republicans nor Democrats can come to their senses about Iraq and America's disastrous Middle East policy is that the Israeli Lobby will not let them.

Right-wing Israeli governments suffer the same delusion as neoconservatives about limitless US power. They believe that the power of their lobby can ensure that American power will be used to destroy all of Israel's enemies.

The US is likely to remain mired in Iraq until Israelis cast out this delusion. No amount of US power can make it possible for Israel to both steal Palestine from Palestinians and have peace. No number of US invasions of Islamic countries can win "the war on terror." As long as right-wing extremism prevails in Israel and as long as the US interferes in the internal affairs of Muslin countries, the formula for calamity remains in place.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com



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Afghanistan's opium crop at an all-time high

Online Journal
Dec 7, 2006

The question is why. Under Taliban rule, which began in the late 1990s, Afghanistan just about kicked the growing habit by 2001. After five years the Taliban is slipping back
in, but poppy production has grown by leaps and bounds.

According to the Washington Post, "Opium production in Afghanistan, which provides more than 90 percent of the world's heroin, broke all records in 2006, reaching a historic high despite ongoing U.S.-sponsored eradication efforts, the Bush administration reported yesterday.


"In addition to a 26 percent production increase over the past year -- for a total of 5,644 metric tons -- the amount of land under cultivation in opium poppies grew by 61 percent. Cultivation in the two main production provinces, Helmand in the southwest and Oruzgan in central Afghanistan, was up by 132 percent."

With a flair for understatement, White House drug policy chief John Walters called the news "disappointing." I'd say it was shocking. But curiously, the "resurgent Taliban forces" were cited "as the main impediment to stabilization and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and the U.S. military investment has far exceeded anti-narcotic and development programs."

But Walters went so far as to say "the drug trade as a problem . . . rivals and in some ways exceeds the Taliban, threatening to derail other aspects of U.S. policy." But I thought when those bearded brigands, the Taliban, were there, poppy production was near nil, 94% gone.

Somehow this brings to mind a Michael Ruppert article, "The Bush-Cheney Drug Empire," published in Nexus Magazine. He wrote, "The Bush family's involvement in drug-running is an open secret, but Dick Cheney's direct link to a global drug pipeline through a US construction company is less well known." Sparing no toes, Mike takes the next step . . .

From Medellin To Moscow With Brown & Root

"Halliburton Corporation's Brown & Root is one of the major components of the Bush-Cheney Drug Empire. The success of Bush Vice-Presidential running mate Richard Cheney at leading Halliburton, Inc. to a five-year, US $3.8 billion 'pig-out' on federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans is only a partial indicator of what may happen, now that the Bush ticket has won the US presidential election."

But is Cheney's former company's subsidiary, Brown and Root, involved in Afghanistan as well? Well, The Center for Public Integrity reports, "KBR was awarded a $100 million contract in 2002 to build a new U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, from the State Department." Ah, so. And . . .

"KBR has also been awarded 15 LOGCAP [Logistics Civil Augmentation Program] task orders worth more than $216 million for work under 'Operation Enduring Freedom,' the military name for operations in Afghanistan. These include establishing base camps at Kandahar and Bagram Air Force Base and training foreign troops from the Republic of Georgia."

But hasn't the CIA traditionally had a hand in Afghanistan's drug business, going back to the 80s, and also with the Iran-Contra scam, providing a continuous drug-revenue stream to what has been called "our shadow government," sponsor of worldwide dark ops? Again, according to Ruppert, the Afghanistan opium growing began with the CIA around that time.

CIA planted the opium currently growing

Ruppert says, "Before 1980, Afghanistan produced 0% of the world's opium. But then the CIA moved in, and by 1986 they were producing 40% of the world's heroin supply. By 1999, they were churning out 3,200 TONS of heroin a year ­ nearly 80% of the total market supply. But then something unexpected happened. The Taliban rose to power, and by 2000 they had destroyed nearly all of the opium fields. Production dropped from 3,000+ tons to only 185 tons, a 94% reduction! This enormous drop in revenue subsequently hurt not only the CIA's Black Budget projects, but also the free-flow of laundered money in and out of the Controller's banks"

University of Wisconsin History Professor Alfred McCoy, writing for The World Traveler, mostly corroborates Ruppert's views . . ."Within a few years, the currents of global geopolitics then shifted in ways that pushed the CIA into new alliances with drug traffickers. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Sandinista revolution seized Nicaragua, prompting two CIA covert operations with some revealing similarities.

"During the 1980s, while the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, the CIA, working through Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence, spent some $2 billion to support the Afghan resistance. When the operation started in 1979, this region grew opium only for regional markets and produced no heroin.

"Within two years, however, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979 to 5,000 in 1981 and to 1.2 million by 1985-a much steeper rise than in any other nation.

"CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujaheddin guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests.

"In May 1990, as the CIA operation was winding down, The Washington Post published a front-page expose charging that Gulbudin Hekmatar, the ClA's favored Afghan leader, was a major heroin manufacturer. The Post argued, in a manner similar to the San Jose Mercury News's later report about the contras, that U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies 'because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.'"

Bottom line

So, I guess we "inspired" the Afghans to grow heroin, we exported it to finance dark ops, including a full-scale war. Therefore the miracle of the poppies popping back this year must be what, an accident, an ill wind that blows no good, the testy Taliban or those warlock warlords who fought with us once, or conceivably the favorite U.S. contractor, Brown and Root, in the middle of some larger CIA effort?

Returning for an answer to the Washington Post article, its author Karen DeYoung reported that "Gen. James L. Jones, supreme allied NATO commander said in a recent speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Afghanistan is NATO's biggest operation with more than 30,000 troops. Drug cartels with their own armies engage in regular combat with NATO forces deployed in Afghanistan. He said, 'It would be wrong to say that it is just the Taliban. I think I need to set that record straight.'" Well all right. We like straight talk.

DeYoung also reports, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden told Congress last month, "It's almost the devil's own problem . . . Right now the issue is stability. . . . Going in there in itself and attacking the drug trade actually feeds the instability that you want to overcome." You'll excuse me while I go and think about that one, "the devil's own problem." And who would that devil be?

Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, agrees. He said, "Attacking the problem directly in terms of the drug trade . . . would undermine the attempt to gain popular support in the region. There's a real conflict I think." I think so, too. The conflict seems to be between the people who seeded and grew the opium business and who are now faced with losing their profits from it completely.

We also have Afghan President Hamid Karzai noting that, "once we thought terrorism was Afghanistan's biggest enemy . . ." I believe that was a Bush-Cheney proposition, not "we" as in all of America's citizens. Part of that supposition was that we needed to attack the country because it was "harboring" bin Laden and his baddies. To date, bin Laden eludes his pursuers. The president claims he is no longer important. And to finish President Karzai's quote, now he says "poppy, its cultivation and drugs are Afghanistan's major enemy." Aha.

So let's go get the purveyors. But DeYoung tells us, "Eradication and alternative development programs have made little discernible headway. Cultivation -- measured annually with high-resolution satellite imagery that is then parsed by analysts using specialized computer software -- is nearly double its highest pre-Karzai level."

So what does that expensively mined data really tell us? Perhaps, aside from friends at his former employer, Unocal, the pipeline folks, President Karzai may have more friends at the seemingly befuddled CIA, not to mention Halliburton subsidiary Brown and Root, the ineffable Mr. Cheney's former firm.

Perhaps that was stated more delicately by Karen DeYoung: "After the overthrow of the Taliban government by U.S. forces in the fall of that year [2001], the Bush administration said that keeping a lid on production among its highest priorities. But corruption and alliances formed by Washington and the Afghan government with anti-Taliban tribal chieftains, some of whom are believed to be deeply involved in the trade, undercut the effort." The italics are mine. The sin is theirs.



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Israel And America - Manufacturing War


Pentagon Fomenting the "Civil War" in Iraq

December 7, 2006
La Voz del Aztlan


The Pentagon's "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)" is behind many of the terrorist attacks in Iraq. The car bombings, assassinations, sabotage, kidnappings and attacks on mosques are designed to cause violence and discord between Sunnis and Shiites. P2OG in collusion with Israeli IDF and MOSSAD operatives are responsible for a series of secret covert operations whose purpose is to create an all out civil war in Iraq. The ultimate purpose is to dismember the country, achieve complete control and make it easier for the USA and Zionist Israel to profit from Iraq's vast oil resources.

As part of the Pentagon's well funded programme, the CIA and Israeli MOSSAD have been training and arming the Kurds for terror raids inside Iraq. The Israeli operatives are also helping train US special forces in aggressive counter-insurgency operations, including the use of assassination squads against guerrilla leaders, prominent Iraqi academics, scientists, politicians and religious leaders.

Their first major operation was the bombing on February 22, 2006 of the Shiite Askariya shrine in Samarra, also known as the Golden Mosque. The mosque was a very well thought out target that holds the tombs of two revered 9th-century imams of the Shiite branch of Islam. The attack on the Golden Mosque began at 7 a.m., when a dozen men dressed in paramilitary uniforms entered the shrine and handcuffed four guards who were sleeping in a back room. The attackers then placed a bomb in the dome and detonated it, collapsing most of the dome and heavily damaging an adjoining wall.

The covert operation against the Golden Mosque was designed to provoke Shiite groups into committing violent acts and retaliations against the Sunnis. Sunni political leaders said retaliatory attacks hit more than 20 Sunni mosques across Iraq with bombs, gunfire or arson. Authorities reported at least 18 people killed in the aftermath, including two Sunni clerics. In one incident, in Basra in southern Iraq, police said gunmen in police uniforms broke into a jail, seized 12 Sunni men and later killed them. These attacks against the Sunnis were also carried out by operatives under the Pentagon's "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group".

The Pentagon blamed the bombing of the Golden Mosque on al-Qaeda but cleric Abdul Zara Saidy had another explanation. He said the mosque attack was the work of "occupiers," or Americans, "and Zionists".



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Iraq's Death Squads: An Instrument Of The Occupation

by Ghali Hassan
Global Research
December 7, 2006

On November 14, 2006 militias and death squads dressed as police commandos kidnapped up to 150 staff and visitors in broad daylight raid - one of daily raids throughout Iraq - on the Higher Education Ministry annexe in central Baghdad. Although some hostages have been released, the fate of others is unknown. It is alleged that large number of the hostages have been tortured and others were murdered. The totality of the raids, kidnapping, torture, ongoing civilian massacres and murder were part of the illegal and racist war of aggression perpetrated by the U.S. and Britain against a defenceless nation in disregard of International Law and contempt for International institutions.
Let me stating the obvious. The U.S. did not invade Iraq to establish "democracy" and "free Iraqis". The U.S. invaded and destroyed Iraq in order to humiliate and divide Muslims - Arabs in particular -, protect Israel's Zionist expansion and control Iraq's natural wealth. So, the U.S.-imposed democracy by force is fraud. 'Democracy is like a plant; it grows from bottom up, not from top down'. The U.S. sabotage of democracy in Palestine and U.S. support for Israel's criminal destruction of Lebanon are just two current examples of U.S. love for democracy. Also the idea that the U.S. and its allies are in Iraq to stabilise the situation is a falsehood. Destabilisation was one of the aims of U.S. foreign policy. The unprovoked war of aggression and the continuing U.S. presence in Iraq, including the illegal building of U.S. military bases and the largest C.I.A. station in the world on Iraqi soil, are major destabilising factors. The U.S. objectives have always been to weaken Iraq, divide the people and control Iraq behind a façade of corrupt stooges, with poorly trained and poorly armed army and police.

Long before the invasion, the U.S. and its allies were involved in the training and arming of tens of thousands of militias and anti-Iraq collaborators....

In Let a Thousand Militias Bloom , Arun Gupta writes that 'the U.S. government is not only aware of these illegal militias but is arming, training and funding them for use in their counter-insurgency operations'. According to Greg Jaffe of the Wall Street Journal, the "special police commandos" - is being used throughout Iraq and has been conducting criminal assassinations known as the "Salvador option" with the full knowledge of U.S. forces. "Pound for pound, though, they are the toughest force we've got", Col. Dean Franklin, a senior officer in Gen. David Petraeus's command told Greg Jaffe (WSJ, February 16, 2005). The occupying forces have also succeeded in turning one militia group against the other using the civilian population as a fodder. "And it's all happening under the eyes of US commanders, who seem unwilling or unable to intervene", revealed Deborah Davies in a special Channel 4 investigation, 'Iraq's Death Squads'.

To destroy Iraq as an independent nation, the U.S. initiated the criminal campaign of "De-Ba'athification", which implied the liquidation of anyone associated with the Ba'ath Party as well as anyone with anti-Occupation nationalist views. "De-Ba'athification" is simply a murderous campaign for inciting violence and destroying the Iraqi society. Together with the Israeli Mossad, U.S. Special Forces, the pro-Occupation militias and death squads have embarked on deliberate campaign of assassinations and ethnic cleansing. Thousands of scientists, including more than 350 scientists specialized in nuclear science have been assassinated. Thousands of professors, prominent politicians, and medical doctors have been murdered in cold blood. The Ministry of Higher Education reported that at least 210 teachers have been murdered and some 3,700 have fled Iraq to neighbouring countries. According to the UN more than 3,000 Iraqis flee to Syria and Jordan every day to avoid being killed. More than 1.7 million Iraqis have fled the country.

The aim is to create a climate of terror and incite civil war among Iraqis in order to justify the ongoing Occupation of Iraq and the fraudulent "war on terror". The growing number of daily civilian massacres, rapes and torture of Iraqis by U.S. forces and their collaborators are deliberately ignored by the media, making Iraq the biggest hidden U.S. atrocity in the U.S. history of violence against defenceless people. It is also possible that the violence is created to provide a "safety net" for foreign troops' withdrawal and discredit the heroic struggle and Resistance against the Occupation and deny Iraqis victory against the most violent and powerful war machine in history....

The U.S. policy of "let them kill each other" is an integral part of U.S. foreign policy carefully executed to serve U.S. imperialist interests. Hence, the comment of Senator Carl Levin, "We cannot save the Iraqis from themselves", designed to deflect any U.S. responsibility away from war crimes and misleadingly presenting the Occupation as the saviour of Iraqis. We know that the vast majority of Iraqis disagree and want the immediate end of the Occupation. More than 61 per cent of Iraqis approve of the Resistance attacks against the occupying forces. The U.S. and its allies bear full responsibility for the destruction of Iraq and for the death of more than 700,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.

Iraqis have gone many generations without fighting each other. Iraqi (males and females) worked studies and conducted their business in a safe environment. Regardless of their religious affiliations and ethnic backgrounds, the Iraqi people were living in peaceful environment despite the horror of the West-imposed genocidal sanctions. Why have they suddenly started fighting? Why all these crimes and bloodshed did not take place under the government of Saddam Hussein, even when his government was scrutinised by Western NGOs and human rights organisations? Today, these NGOs and human rights organisations have remained silent, preferring to use the fraudulent and farcical trial of Saddam to claim credibility of "defending" human rights. In less than four years, the U.S. and U.S.-trained and armed death squads and militias have destroyed Iraq beyond comprehension.

The immediate arrest of senior police commandos after the raid on the Higher Education Ministry annexes and the immediate release of some hostages shed light on the extent of U.S. complicity in the ongoing crimes against the Iraqi people. Therefore, the longer the U.S. forces stayed in Iraq, the more violence they generate. Only full and immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces and mercenaries will contribute to the end of violence and ongoing suffering of the Iraqi people.



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The Surreal Politics of Premeditated War

By RICHARD W. BEHAN
6 Dec 06

George W. Bush, who proudly claimed the mantle of "war president, "was keenly rebuked in the recent mid-term election. The event was notable, but it merely continued the surreal politics of premeditated war" a politics that has dominated the last six bizarre, hideous years of our nation's history.

Two elements of the repudiation seem unreal, indeed. Not the fact of it, but the amazing length of its gestation period--those six years--and how tepid it was. Given the documented record of the Bush Administration"lying us into war, torturing prisoners, rewarding cronies with no-bid contracts, spying secretly on the nation's citizens, selling public policy to Jack Abramoff's clients, stating even their intent to ignore laws with dozens of "signing statements"--one would expect the political about-face to have occurred far sooner, and the protest to have been a firestorm. Bush loyalists in Congress (and George Bush) should have been turned out angrily and en masse two years ago.
The victorious Democrats' response was even more surprising, and also unreal. "Impeachment is off the table" quickly became the mantra: let us instead proceed with raising the minimum wage. Apparently the Bush Administration's record is flawless, showing nothing remotely approaching a high crime or a misdemeanor. Impeachment would be a "waste of time."

There is a good reason for these strange results: we practice a politics of surrealism, and have done so since George Bush was first put in office.

Ron Suskind of the New York Times learned how the Bush Administration works, from a "senior advisor to Bush" (Karl Rove is a suspect): "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." They have done that, incessantly, and it is the source of the surrealism. Spins, evasions, omissions, jingoisms, distortions, "perception management" (i.e., propaganda), and deliberate lying all contribute to a political discourse adrift from what is honest, true, and reliable.

The Clear Skies Act allowed more pollution, the Healthy Forests Act caused more trees to be cut down, the Patriot Act scarred the Bill of Rights, No Child Left Behind was a step toward privatizing public education, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act was a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry and began the process of dismantling Medicare, the Military Commissions Act fostered torture and suspended habeas corpus.

But no such manufactured reality is more misleading, fraudulent, and damaging than the "global war on terror."

It took six years for a tardy and mild electoral protest of the Iraq war to surface, because the trusting American people believed the "war on terror" was the just and moral response of an innocent nation to a brutal terrorist attack. They handily reelected the President who was prosecuting it, proudly supported the troops, and accepted as necessary evils the Bush Administration excesses. But gradually that acceptance weakened, and on November 7, 2006 it was withdrawn.

The recent electoral turnaround was generated largely by the horrific conditions in Iraq today, the savage bloodletting of insurgency and civil war suffered by Americans and Iraqis alike. These conditions finally exceeded public tolerance. But the rationale for the war, its purpose, went unquestioned, because the Bush Administration obscurantism has been so successful.

We need to strip away the created reality of the "war on terror" to see the true nature of it instead, or our weird, unreal politics will continue.

The wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq were not simply justified and honorable retaliations to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They couldn't possibly have been that, because both of them were premeditated"conceived, planned, and prepared long before September 11, 2001.

(Yes, there have been premeditated military incursions in the past"Panama, Grenada, and Kosovo come to mind"but none was of the magnitude and duration of the Afghan and Iraqi wars. Never before have we unleashed full scale combat, unprovoked, on sovereign foreign nations and then installed permanent military bases to occupy them.)

Though it has not been addressed in the mass media, the factual story of the President's premeditated wars is clearly visible, and when the story is read at one sitting, the dreamlike quality of our politics is apparent.

The story to follow will not be a great revelation to anyone who has read, perhaps a bit more than casually, about our recent political, military, and diplomatic past, and has spent some time searching the Internet for corroboration and details. On the other hand, it is far from common knowledge, because in the manufactured reality crafted by the Bush Administration, it does not exist.

Two strands of history converged in the Bush years. One led to the invasion of Afghanistan, the other to the invasion of Iraq, and the strands came together on September 11, 2001.

The opening chapter of the story reveals a photograph dating to the Reagan years of Donald Rumsfeld cordially shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. We supported Saddam in his war with Iran. But history convulses: on January 26, 1998, Mr. Rumsfeld and 17 others, members of the Project for a New American Century, wrote a letter to President Clinton, urging the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. If we fail to do so, they were candid in asserting, "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will be put at hazard."

This could be considered the fountainhead of our surreal politics. The PNAC proposed premeditated war explicitly, in a bizarre retrogression to the centuries of unapologetic European imperialism. Since World War II and the birth of the United Nations, however, the world has been seeking to surpass imperialism, struggling to settle international difficulties peaceably"and here was an open, sad, and radical rebuff.

(In addition to Mr. Rumsfeld, 10 others of the signatories would serve in the Bush Administration: Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, William Schneider, Jr., Robert Zoellick, and Paul Wolfowitz.)

When George W. Bush took office, a concern for the "significant portion of the world's oil supply" was never far from view, because the Administration's personal linkages to the oil industry were intimate, historic, and numerous. The president and vice president were just the first examples: eight cabinet secretaries and the national security advisor were recruited directly from the oil industry, and so were 32 others in the secretariats of Defense, State, Energy, Agriculture, Interior, and the Office of Management and Budget.

The Bush Administration came to power anxious, we know from published sources, to fulfill the PNAC's vision of regime change in Iraq.

In his second week in office, President Bush appointed Vice President Cheney to chair a National Energy Policy Development Group. The supersecret "Energy Task Force," as it came to known, was composed of officials from the relevant federal agencies and beyond question heavily attended by energy industry executives and lobbyists. (The full membership has yet to be revealed, but Enron's Kenneth Lay was conspicuously present.)

One brute fact had to be apparent to the Task Force: in the Caspian Basin, and beneath the Iraqi deserts there are 125 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, and the potential for 433 billion barrels more. Anyone controlling that much oil could break OPEC's stranglehold overnight.

By early March, 2001, the Task Force was poring over maps of the Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, tanker terminals, and oil exploration blocks. It studied an inventory of "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts""dozens of oil companies from 30 different countries, in various stages of exploring and developing Iraqi crude. (These documents were forced into view several years later by a citizen group, Judicial Watch, with a Freedom of Information Act proceeding. It wasn't easy--the Bush Administration appealed the lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court--but the maps and documents can now be seen and downloaded.)

Not a single U.S. oil company, however, was among the "suitors," and that was intolerable. Mr. Cheney's task force concluded, "By any estimation, Middle East oil producers will remain central to world security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy."

Condoleezza Rice's National Security Council, meanwhile, was directed by a top secret memo to "cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered melding two seemingly unrelated areas of policy." The NSC was ordered to support "the review of operational policies towards rogue states such as Iraq and actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

The Bush Administration seemed clearly to be drawing a bead on Iraqi oil"long before the "global war on terror" was envisioned and marketed. But how could the "capture of new and existing oil fields" be made to seem less aggressive, less baldly in violation of international law?

At the State Department, a policy-development initiative called "The Future of Iraq" was undertaken which would accomplish this. The date was April, 2002, almost a full year before the invasion. The "Oil and Energy Working Group" provided the cover. Iraq, it said in its final report:, "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the warthe country should establish a conducive business environment to attract investment in oil and gas resources."

"Capture" would take the form of "investment," and the vehicle for doing so would be the "production sharing agreement." In exchange for investing in development costs, oil companies would "share" in the subsequent production. What would happen, though, if the companies' investments were only minimal, but their shares of the production were disproportionately, obscenely large?

That's the way it will work out. Production sharing agreements (PSA's) are in place covering 75% of the undeveloped Iraqi fields, and the oil companies, soon to sign the contracts, will earn as much 162% on their "investments." The "foreign suitors" are not quite so foreign now: the players on the inside tracks are Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell.

The use of PSA's, instead of alternative methods of financing infrastructure, however, will cost the Iraqi people hundreds of billions of dollars in just the first few years of the "investment" program.

PSA's are favored by the oil companies because the term "production sharing agreement" is a euphemism for legalized theft. PSA's were not adopted voluntarily by the Iraqis, however: their use was specified by the U.S. State Department and institutionalized by Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority.

So a line of dots begins to point at Iraq, though nothing illegal or unconstitutional has yet taken place. We are still in the policy-formulation stage, but two "seemingly unrelated areas of policy""national security policy and international energy policy"have become indistinguishable.

Another line of dots begins with the Carter Administration encouraging and arming the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, in Afghanistan, to fend off the Russian invasion there.

And so the next chapter in the story of George Bush's wars is underway.

The strategic location of Afghanistan can scarcely be overstated. The Caspian Basin contains some $16 trillion worth of oil and gas resources, and the most direct pipeline route to the richest markets is through Afghanistan.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the first western oil company to express interest and take action in the Basin was the Bridas Corporation of Argentina. It acquired production leases and exploration contracts in the region, and by November of 1997 had signed an agreement with General Dostum of the Northern Alliance and with the Taliban to build a pipeline across Afghanistan.

Not to be outdone, the American company Unocal fought Bridas at every turn, even spurning an invitation from Bridas to join an international consortium in the Basin. Unocal wanted exclusive control of the trans-Afghan pipeline, and hired a number of consultants in its conflict with Bridas: Henry Kissinger, Richard Armitage (now Deputy Secretary of State in the Bush Administration), Zalmay Khalilzad (a signer of the PNAC letter to President Clinton) and Hamid Karzai. (Eventually Bridas sued Unocal in the U.S. courts, and won.)

Unocal stayed on the attack until 1999, frequently wooing Taliban leaders at its headquarters in Texas, and hosting them in meetings with federal officials in Washington, D.C.

Unocal and the Clinton Administration hoped to have the Taliban cancel the Bridas contract, but were getting nowhere. Mr. John J. Maresca, a Unocal Vice President, testified to a House Committee of International Relations on February 12, 1998, asking politely to have the Taliban removed and a stable government inserted. His discomfort was well placed.

Six months later terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and two weeks after that President Clinton launched a cruise missile attack into Afghanistan. Clinton issued an executive order on July 4, 1999, freezing the US held assets and prohibiting further trade transactions with the Taliban.

Mr. Maresca could count that as progress. More would follow.

Immediately on taking office, the new Bush Administration actively took up negotiating with the Taliban once more, seeking still to have the Bridas contract vacated in favor of Unocal. The parties met three times, in Washington, Berlin, and Islamablad, but the Taliban wouldn't budge.

Behind the negotiations, however, planning was underway to take military action against the Taliban. The State Department sought and gained concurrence from both India and Pakistan to do so, and in July of 2001 three American officials met with Pakistani and Russian intelligence people to inform them of planned military strikes against Afghanistan the following October.

State Department official Christina Rocca told the Taliban, at their last pipeline negotiation in August of 2001, just five weeks before 9/11, "Accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs."

Common to both the Afghan and Iraqi lines of dots are energy resources, both oil and gas. It is true our country depends on oil and gas, but it is not the American people who need to corner Mid East oil and gas by force. Dozens of oil companies around the world"the "foreign suitors," for example"can supply us with Iraqi oil or Caspian Basin gas, and would be pleased to do so. There is no reason not to rely on them: we are buying more and more Toyotas and Volvos, and fewer Chevrolets and Fords, with no apparent damage to our national security. Why not do the same with gasoline, diesel, and LNG, and avoid armed conflict?

Why not? Because the bottom lines of Exxon-Mobil, Unocal and other domestic oil companies, in the eyes of the Bush Administration, are sacrosanct. It is not the American consumers, then, but only the American oil companies who benefit from George Bush's premeditated wars.

Also common to both lines of dots, and integral to the overall story, is the historic, intimate, and profitable relationship across several generations between the Bush family and the royal family of Saudi Arabia. It can be seen today in the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based investment company focused primarily in the arms, security, and energy industries. Both George H.W. and George W. Bush have been deeply involved in Carlyle, and so have a number of the Saudi royalty. (And so, incidentally, has the family of Osama Bin Laden.)

Carlyle has profited immensely from the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars. Its legal matters are handled by Baker, Botts"James Baker's law firm in Texas. Mr. Baker also has a personal interest in Carlyle, amounting to some $180 million. (Baker, Botts defended Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia, who was sued by the families of Trade Tower victims for alleged complicity in the attacks.) Another client of Baker, Botts is Exxon-Mobil.

In September of 2000, with the Presidential election approaching, the Project for a New American Century published a report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses." The PNAC once more advocated pre-emptive war, i.e., premeditated war, something unprecedented in the U.S. history, but it realized what a radical departure that would represent. Moving to such a mindset would be long and difficult, in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."

When President Bush assumed office three other members of the Project for a New American Century joined his administration: Richard Cheney, Douglas Feith, and Lewis Libby. Pre-emptive, premeditated war was formally adopted when the President signed the National Security Strategy early in his tenure.

So the twists and turns, convulsions, and complexity of people and ideas continued, and so did the jockeying for the world's oil wealth, but still nothing illegal or unconstitutional had been done.

The rationale, the urge, and the planning, however, for attacking both Afghanistan and Iraq were in place. But to attack a sovereign nation unprovoked would enrage the American people"and much of the world, as well. The Bush Administration bided its time.

The preparations had all been done secretly, wholly within the executive branch. The Congress was not informed until the endgame of the premeditation, when President Bush, making his dishonest case for the "war on terror" asked for and was granted the discretion to use military force. The American people were equally denied information of critical public importance. Probably never before in our history was such a drastic and momentous action undertaken with so little knowledge or oversight: the dispatch of America's armed forces into five years of violence.

The story of George Bush's premeditated wars now enters its final chapter.

The catastrophic event takes place. A hijacked airliner probably en route to the White House crashes in Pennsylvania, the Pentagon is afire, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center are rubble.

In the first hours of frenetic response, fully aware of al Qaeda's culpability, both President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld seek frantically to link Saddam Hussein to the attacks, we know from on site-witnesses. They are anxious to proceed with their planned invasion. And less than a week later, at a meeting of the National Security Council, President Bush ordered the Defense Department to be ready to handle Iraq, "possibly occupying Iraqi oil fields."

The controversies rage on yet today about the events of September 11, 2001. No steel building has ever collapsed from fire alone. Buildings falling precisely into their footprints are the marks of deliberate (and expert) demolition. The faulty construction/foreshortened lifespan/insurance angle. The collapse of a third building that was not hit at all. The short-selling of airline stock in previous days. The Pentagon hit by a missile, not a civilian airliner. Michael Rupert's book "Crossing the Rubicon" lays the blame for 9/11 directly at Dick Cheney's feet. Senator Robert Dole's former chief of staff, Mr. Stanley Hilton, claims he can prove George Bush signed an order authorizing the attacks. Half the people polled in New York city believed the Bush Administration had prior knowledge of the attack, and "consciously failed" to act. Et cetera.

(Conspiracy is forever easier to see than to find, but that does not obviate the need to seek thoroughly the whole truth about 9/11, and that has yet to be done.)

Involving the Bush Administration in the execution of 9/11, or even accommodating their informed inaction, is almost too appalling to contemplate. But if they needed a reason to proceed with their planned invasions, they could not have been handed a more fortuitous and spectacular excuse.

9/11 was a criminal act of terrorism, not a violation of our entire nation's security. Comparing it, as the Bush Administration immediately did, to Pearl Harbor was ludicrous: the hijacked airliners were not the vanguard of a formidable naval armada, an air force, and a standing army ready to engage in all out war, as the Japanese were prepared to do and did in 1941. 9/11 was a shocking event of unprecedented scale, but to characterize it as an invasion of national security was criminal. It was creating reality. It was also, and in the extreme, surreal, because the Bush Administration chose consciously to frighten the American people beyond any conceivable necessity. It adopted fear mongering as a mode of governance.

As not a few disinterested observers noted at the time, international criminal terrorism is best countered by international police action, which Israel and other nations have proven many times over to be effective.

Then why was a "war" declared on "terrorists and states that harbor terrorists?"

The pre-planned attack on Afghanistan, as we have seen, was meant to nullify the contract between the Taliban and the Bridas Corporation, to assure access to the Caspian Basin riches for American oil companies. It was a pure play of international energy policy. It had nothing to do, as designed, with apprehending Osama bin Laden"a pure play of security policy.

But the two "seemingly unrelated areas of policy" had been "melded," so here was an epic opportunity to bait-and-switch--and the opportunity was not missed for a moment. Conjoining the terrorist and the state that harbored him made a "war" plausible: it would be necessary to overthrow the Taliban as well as to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. (As it turned out, of course, the Taliban was overthrown instead of bringing Osama bin Laden to justice, but the energy policy goal was achieved, at least. And years later President Bush was astonishing in his candor, when he admitted "Osama bin Laden isn't important.")

The first monstrous and intentional deception"the declaration of a "war on terror""took place. There was no talk of contracts, pipelines, or Argentinian oil companies. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban were cleverly, ingeniously conflated, and there was only talk of war.

On October 7, 2001 the carpet of bombs is unleashed over Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai, the former Unocal consultant, is installed as head of an interim government. Subsequently he is elected President of Afghanistan, and welcomes the first U.S. envoy"Mr. John J. Maresca, Vice President for International Relations of the Unocal Corporation, who had implored Congress three years previously to have the Taliban overthrown. Mr. Maresca was succeeded by Mr. Zalmay Khalilzad"also a former Unocal consultant. (Mr. Khalilzad has since become Ambassador to Iraq.)

With the Taliban banished and the Bridas contract moot, Presidents Karzai of Afghanistan and Musharraf of Pakistan meet on February 8, 2002, sign an agreement for a new pipeline, and the way forward is open for Unocal once more.

The Bridas contract was breached by US military force, but behind the combat was Unocal. Bridas sued Unocal in the US courts for contract interference, and in 2004 it won, overcoming Richard Ben Veniste's law firm. That firm had multibillion dollar interests in the Caspian Basin, and shared an office in Uzbekistan with the Enron Corporation. In 2004, Mr. Ben Veniste was serving as a 9/11 Commissioner.

About a year after the Karzai/Musharraf agreement was signed, an article appeared in "Alexander's Gas and Oil Connections," an obscure trade publication. It described the readiness of three US federal agencies to finance the prospective pipeline, and how "the United States was willing to police the pipeline infrastructure through permanent stationing of it troops in the region." The article appeared on February 23, 2003.

The objective of the first premeditated war was now achieved. The Bush Administration stood ready with financing to build the pipeline across Afghanistan, and with a permanent military presence to protect it.

Within two months President Bush sent the military might of America sweeping into Iraq.

The second round of deliberate deception was more egregious by far.

Alleging a relationship between bin Laden's al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan had at least some basis in fact. Alleging a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein simply did not. And the weapons-of-mass-destruction argument was equally fraudulent, we know now. But the bait-and-switch "war on terrorism" would continue. "Cakewalk." The staging of the Jessica Lynch rescue. The toppling of the statue in Baghdad. Mission accomplished. The orchestrated capture of Saddam Hussein. And the barrage of managed perception continues to this day.

The smokescreen includes the coverup of the 9/11 attacks on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon. Initially and fiercely resisting any inquiry at all, President Bush finally appoints a 10-person "9/11 Commission." Its report places the blame on "faulty intelligence." President Bush and Vice President Cheney are accorded breathtaking courtesies in the inquiry: they are not required to testify under oath, and they need not even testify separately. At the insistence of the White House, they are "interviewed" together in the Oval Office, with no transcription permitted.

The apparent manipulation of pre-war intelligence is not addressed by the 9/11 Commission, the veracity President Bush's many statements is assumed without question, and the troubling incongruities of 9/11 are ignored.

Many of the 10 commissioners, however, were burdened with stunning conflicts of interest--Mr. Ben Veniste, for example--mostly by their connections to the oil and defense industries, both of which were benefited beyond measure (and doubt) by the Mid East conflicts.

Then the Abu Ghraib horrors came to the surface. Then the spectacular cronyism of the no-bid contracts, with Mr. Cheney and his former company, Halliburton, becoming the icons of corruption. Then the domestic spying issue. Torrents of exposés were published, while Iraq descended into the hellish quagmire of insurgency and civil war"with Afghanistan belatedly following suit.

On November 7, 2006 the American people said, "Enough!" By any measure--by public acclaim--the last six years have been a national tragedy and a national disgrace.

In spite of the Democrats' united message rejecting it, many citizens are calling actively for the impeachment of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and perhaps others. (Secretary Rumsfeld has left the Administration, but faces prosecution under German law.)

The story told here has to be considered "circumstantial." None of it results from testimony under oath, none of it has been admitted as legal evidence in a jurisprudential undertaking, and the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven remains axiomatic. And we might well reiterate the humane and civil plea, heard frequently after 9/11: what we need is justice, not vengeance.

We should not proceed directly to impeachment. At the very least, however, the story of George Bush's premeditated wars raises questions of presidential dereliction as grave as any in our history.

We need to know the truth and all the truth. The time has come, as well as the opportunity, for formal, Congressional investigations, based on subpoenas, sworn testimony, and direct evidence about 9/11 and about the created reality of the "war on terror."

The new Congress has no greater Constitutional duty than to find this truth and display it, if our nightmarish politics is to end. If such inquiries clearly exonerate the Bush Administration, the nation can breathe deeply and go on. If they do not, then but only then should impeachment be undertaken.

To fail in this responsibility is to condone the surreal political discourse the Bush Administration has imposed. That could render it the permanent condition of American governance.

Richard W. Behan's last book was Plundered Promise: Capitalism, Politics, and the Fate of the Federal Lands (Island Press, 2001). Behan is currently working on a more broadly rendered critique, 'To Provide Against Invasions: Corporate Dominion and America's Derelict Democracy.' He can be reached by email at rwbehan@rockisland.com.



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No clash of civilizations, says UN report - A UN-sponsored group says the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the main cause of global tensions.

By Dan Murphy
The Christian Science Monitor
14 Nov 06

CAIRO - A UN-sponsored group called the Alliance of Civilizations, created last year to find ways to bridge the growing divide between Muslim and Western societies, released a first report Monday that says the conflict over Israel and the Palestinian territories is the central driver in global tensions.

"Our emphasis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not meant to imply that it is the overt cause of all tensions between Muslim and Western societies," write the report's authors, a group of academics and present and former government officials from 19 different countries. "Nevertheless, it is our view that the Israeli-Palestinian issue has taken on a symbolic value that colors cross cultural and political relations ... well beyond its limited geographic scope."
But while the authors hope their report will invigorate and create cross-cultural dialogue, its tone implies that it is unlikely to be well received by the United States and Israel, focusing as it does on allegations of double standards by those two nations while giving less time to the faults of the Palestinians or specific Muslim governments.

Criticism of US policies, though at times oblique, is a major feature of the document and hits on themes that have angered representatives of the Bush administration in the past. For instance, in a discussion of Al Qaeda's attack on the US on Sept. 11, the report states: "Later, these attacks were presented as one of the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, whose link with them has never been demonstrated, feeding a perception among Muslim societies of unjust aggression stemming from the West."

While that is indeed a common view in Muslim countries, it is unlikely to gain the favor of the current US administration, whose representative to the United Nations, John Bolton, is an ardent supporter of the invasion of Iraq and a frequent critic of the world body. Earlier this year, Mr. Bolton characterized the UN Human Rights Commission as packed with officials from "some of the world's most notorious human rights abusers."

The report is the result of a UN-sanctioned "High Level Group" meeting of some twenty "eminent personalities" that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed last year. The group, which was cosponsored by the Prime Ministers of Turkey and Spain and included among its authors Nobel Peace Prize-winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami, issued the final report on Nov. 13 at its final meeting in Istanbul.

To be sure, the report is also framed as a direct challenge to the notion that a "Clash of Civilizations" is imminent - a concept first popularized by Samuel Huntington's 1996 book of the same name.

In a statement, Mr. Kofi Annan said it was clear that religion is not at the root of current tensions.

"The problem is not the Koran or the Torah or the Bible,'' Mr. Annan said. "The problem is never the faith, it is the faithful and how they behave towards each other."

That sentiment was echoed in an editorial published in the Houston Chronicle on Sunday by three of the report's authors, who also said that political repression in the Muslim world contributes to extremism.

"Denying peaceful opposition movements the freedom to express their views and jailing their supporters generate anger and resentment, encouraging some to join violent groups,'' wrote Mr. Tutu, former Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas, and Andri Azoulay, an advisor to Morocco's King Muhammed VI.

"When Western governments lend their support - tacitly or overtly - to authoritarian regimes, they become part of the problem," the authors wrote.

The overall objective of the paper is to set out problems between the Muslim and the West as a matter of politics, and not of culture, and tends to see anger and misunderstanding as largely a problem of inadequate education.

For instance, the authors point to a recent Gallup poll that found 57 percent of Americans either responded "nothing" or "I don't know" when asked what they most admired about Muslim societies, as evidence for a need for education systems in both the West and Muslim countries to provide a "basic understanding of religious traditions other than their own."

The authors also point to another recent survey that found 30 percent of US government money for cultural exchanges go to programs with Europe - the societies with which the US has the most in common - while just 6 percent go to programs with the Middle East, arguably the place where such efforts could do the most good.
How to build an alliance of civilizations

The UN's High Level Group report includes a set of concrete recommendations for the international community. Among the recommendations:

- The international community should draft a white paper to analyze the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

- An international conference should be convened to reinvigorate the Middle East peace process.

- Ruling parties in the Muslim world should provide space for the participation of peaceful political groups.

- Leaders and shapers of public opinion should behave responsibly and work to promote understanding among cultures.

- The UN should appoint a high representative to assist in defusing cross-cultural tensions.

- The UN should establish a forum for the alliance of civilizations under its auspices.

- Journalists should receive improved training in intercultural understanding.

- Media content should aim to promote intercultural dialogue.

- Educational materials and media literacy programs in schools should face a critical review.

- Governments should increase the number of international youth exchanges and youth-oriented websites.

- The international community should create media campaigns to combat discrimination.

Source: United Nations Fourth High Level Group, www.unaoc.org



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Propaganda Alert: Religious split could set region on fire

Times Online
08/12/2006

The language was stark. Iraq's slide towards chaos could spark "a broader regional war", according to the blue-chip panel reporting to President Bush this week. There was a risk of "regional conflagration", said Robert Gates, the incoming Pentagon chief, the day before.

Yet even as these dire warnings were being delivered in measured tones by Washington's wise men, there are disturbing signs that Sunni-Shia violence is already bleeding across Iraq's borders.
If the sectarian strife spreads, the Iraq Study Group cautioned on Wednesday, neighbouring countries face instability as the two Muslim sects vie to protect their spheres of influence. "Ambassadors from neighbouring countries told us that they fear the distinct possibility of Sunni-Shia clashes across the Islamic world," the Iraq Study Group, led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, wrote.

Their alert may have been buried deep within the 100-page report. But it is page one, paragraph one of neighbouring regimes' concerns, as the report recognised: "Such a broader sectarian conflict could open a Pandora's box of problems - including the radicalisation of problems, mass movements of populations and regime changes - that could take decades to play out."

For Ahmad Mahmoud, it did not take decades. The 20-year-old's face now stares impassively from mourning posters plastered on his two-storey home in Beirut. A Shia, he lived in the mainly Sunni neighbourhood of Tarek Jdeide. Mahmoud was shot dead on Sunday during street clashes between Sunnis and Shias.

It was the first fatality of Lebanon's worsening political crisis, which has soured the already tense relations between the two communities. His death sparked further clashes in Beirut, where for the first time the Sunni-Shia split was overshadowing the more traditional divide between Christians and Muslims.

The sectarian tensions behind Mahmoud's death are being played out across the Middle East, where broader suspicions and hostilities have led to a riot in Damascus suburbs, a knife fight between pupils and cruel barbs in Amman schools. In Syria and Jordan - both Sunni countries - there is rising domestic anger at the daily slaughter of their brethren in Iraq, which is beamed into their homes by satellite television. Many blame Shia Iran for stoking the conflict there.

Many regimes also fear that al-Qaeda's brand of Sunni militancy will spread after thousands of young Arabs who fought with the insurgents in Iraq return home, emboldened to take on their leaders. King Abdullah II of Jordan has talked, separately, of a "Shia Crescent" from Iran to Lebanon, and last week cautioned that the region could end up with three civil wars: in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories.

"Iran is now connected to all the ongoing conflicts in the region in Iraq, in Lebanon, and in Palestine, and is now the main address you have to go through for solving all these conflicts," a senior Jordanian official said.

"[Iran] is operating through its local allies, in Iraq, and through Hezbollah and Hamas. It is engaging with the marginalised Shia communities in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and in Kuwait to turn them into arrows that can challenge their Government's legitimacy and authority."

The growing regional influence of Iran was certainly a dark undercurrent beneath last week's Amman mini-summit between Mr Bush and Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister. There are fears among Sunni regimes that Tehran is distracting US efforts to curb its nuclear ambitions by using its oil wealth and regional proxies to foster trouble across the region.

Another potential cause for instability is the more than one million Iraqis who have fled into Syria and Jordan. In June, a fatal quarrel between a Syrian and an Iraqi refugee triggered rioting in Geramana, an Iraqi-majority suburb south of Damascus. Witnesses said that scores of Syrians took to the streets, burning Iraqi cars and shops and three Iraqi-run real estate offices before they were dispersed by police.

Since the Iraqi exodus began, Geramana's population has nearly doubled, driving up rents, prices and hostility. Maher Mohammad, 42, a Geramana resident, said: "The Syrian citizen is bearing the burden. I like the Iraqi people and I know they are suffering a lot from the war and terrorist attacks, but these are not the Syrian citizens' problems."

Iranian influence is increasingly being felt across Syria. Its first car-making plant is Iranian; a new fleet of buses for Damascus is coming from Iran and Syria's first private-sector power plant is being built by Iran.

There is also growing tension in Jordan, where Mustafa Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi asylum-seeker, was attacked with a knife in Amman in October. "I was going to school when ten boys came up to me and said 'Come here Iraqi Shia, you helped the Americans capture Saddam Hussein'," he told The Times. "The largest boy held me down and they slashed my face. I'm sure things are going to get worse."

Since the US-led invasion of Iraq, his parents don't go to the mosque because their distinctive Shia rituals set them apart.

A few streets away, their friend Umm Mohammed's two sons - the only Shias in their class - came home from school last week in tears. "Our religion teacher came the classroom and said 'You are Shia, and it is halal (religiously permitted) to kill Shia in Islam. You are not good Muslims like us'," Haidar, 14, told The Times. "My classmates said nothing. They used to be my friends, but now nobody talks to me."

Nasser Joudeh, a Jordanian government spokesman, insisted that Jordan did not exclude Iraqis except on security grounds, saying: "We don't have a Sunni-Shia problem."

Yet the Middle East's so-called "miderate" states such as Jordan are alarmed by the rising prominence of the anti-Western alliance that has emerged in recent months, grouping Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and various other players. Some fear that it is a bid by a resurgent Shia community inspired by Iran to alter the sectarian balance of power at the expense of Sunnis. They are irritated at apparent overturnes by the US toward Damascus and Tehran, fearing that it will be at the expense of Washington's traditional regional allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

But on the ground, there are bonds of nationality that cross the Sunni-Shia divide. At a near-deserted Jordanian taxi rank late one night this week, The Times watched as a misguided Iraqi Shia tried to persuade a cab to take him back to Iraq.

He was desperate to see his family. But the drivers, all Sunni Iraqis, spurned a lucrative fare by convincing him not to run the gauntlet of Sunni insurgents along the 400-mile route. His suicidal would-be fare was sent back to Amman. One driver said that he did not want to see a fellow Iraqi die: "He is a Shia. I am a Sunni, but we know they will kill him on that road. They will drag him from our car and kill him and we won't be able to do anything."

Comment: It's called "social engineering" with a twist. The goal is to "inflame the Middle East", and it is being attempted by way of deliberate mass murder of one religious group by those that CLAIM to represent another. It is about establishing "facts on the ground". Kill hundreds of thousands of Sunni and Shia in Iraq, hey presto there is a "civil war". Murder a few Sunnis in Lebanon and blame it on the Shi; hey presto! the "sectarian conflict" is spreading beyond Iraq's borders". Bring the Christians and Druze in Lebanon into the conflict and you have the 15 years of "civil war" in Beirut all over again, but this time Israel will get involved personally and directly rather than through its Christian falange proxy. To what end? Why, the destruction of large parts of the Middle East no less!

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Rumsfeld's War and War Crimes

Dr. Habib Siddiqui
19 Nov 06

Always defensive and combative, Rumsfeld was tunnel-visioned in his approach to the neocon-orchestrated war against the Muslim world (which he liked to package as Islamofascism); behaving more like an old dog that did not like to learn new tricks. In spite of mounting pressure from the Congress to sack him, Bush had kept him in his job, hoping for miracles in Iraq and thus, the 2006 election. But with the humiliating defeats in both the houses, the honeymoon was over. So, the man who was the architect of the first war of the 21st century became its first big casualty.
The 2006 election was a referendum on America's war in Iraq. The results displayed widespread mistrust of the Bush administration. Some of the most pro-war Republican hawks in the Senate and the Congress have been replaced by Democratic candidates that appeared to be anti-war or less pro-war. As a face saving measure, President Bush had to find the fall-guy, and so his 'trusted' Defense Secretary, the 74-year old neocon idealist, Donald Rumsfeld, had to be replaced with a realist - Robert Gates, former CIA Director.

The decision to ask Rumsfeld to resign was easy for the White House. After all, Rumsfeld's resignation had been sought, since America's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, by many groups, including military officers within his own Pentagon, for not developing a 'winning' strategy. His policies have been dubbed variedly as being authoritarian, failed, insane, unrealistic, stupid, criminal, businesslike, quagmire and fiasco.

Always defensive and combative, Rumsfeld was tunnel-visioned in his approach to the neocon-orchestrated war against the Muslim world (which he liked to package as Islamofascism); behaving more like an old dog that did not like to learn new tricks. In spite of mounting pressure from the Congress to sack him, Bush had kept him in his job, hoping for miracles in Iraq and thus, the 2006 election. But with the humiliating defeats in both the houses, the honeymoon was over. So, the man who was the architect of the first war of the 21st century became its first big casualty.

As one of the primary architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rumsfeld will always be remembered alongside Bush and Cheney for the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo that epitomized inhumanity, savagery, bigotry, perversion and sadism. He authorized the use of torture and brutal, evil and shameful treatment that violated the Geneva Conventions, and thus constitute war crimes. He refused to treat his Muslim prisoners as POWs. He put them in cage and moved them around naked. He approved interrogation techniques that included the use of dogs, removal of clothing, hooding, stress positions, isolation for up to 30 days, 20-hour per day interrogations, forcing to wear women's underwear on head, denying bathroom access and deprivation of food, sleep and rest. He approved the use of physical coercion and sexual humiliation to extract information from prisoners. He also authorized water-boarding (which constitutes torture), where the interrogator induces the sensation of imminent death by drowning.

In the Muslim world, Rumsfeld (alongside Bush & Cheney) will long be remembered as another Hulagu Khan that killed, plundered and looted Baghdad, destroying the very city that was once the citadel of Muslim learning.

Like Robert McNamara of the Vietnam era, Rumsfeld is equally remorseless for the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis. He describes the Iraq war as a "little-understood, unfamiliar war".

As has been pointed out lately by Marjorie Cohn of Thomas Jefferson School of Law, President of National Lawyers Guild, prosecuting a war of aggression isn't Rumsfeld's only crime. He also participated in the highest levels of decision-making that allowed the extrajudicial execution of several people. [Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh] Willful killing is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, which constitutes a war crime. To elaborate further, Marjorie Cohn writes, "Even though Rumsfeld didn't personally carry out the torture and mistreatment of prisoners, he authorized it. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, a commander can be liable for war crimes committed by his inferiors if he knew or should have known they would be committed and did nothing to stop of prevent them. The U.S. War Crimes Act provides for prosecution of a person who commits war crimes and prescribes life imprisonment, or even the death penalty if the victim dies." [Jurist - Forum: Donald Rumsfeld: The War Crimes Case, Nov. '06]

War crime is a serious matter. Many legal experts and human rights activists are of the opinion that the warlords of our world need to be tried for their crimes against humanity. A few years ago, therefore, there were cases filed in the European courts against some war criminals, including Ariel Sharon of Israel for the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in Lebanon, and Jenine in the Occupied Palestine. Fearing their imminent arrest if they had stepped onto European soil, some of the Israeli generals did not disembark from their planes and returned to Israel.

Last Tuesday (11/14/06), emboldened by Rumsfeld's resignation last week, German and American lawyers asked a German prosecutor to investigate Rumsfeld on allegations of war crimes, stemming from the treatment of prisoners held in military jails in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The 220-page lawsuit, filed with the German federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe, names 11 other current and former American officials, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whom it claims either ordered the torture of prisoners or drafted laws that legitimated its use. The suit, filed by civil-rights legal groups on behalf of 12 detainees - 11 Iraqis and a Saudi - asserts that they were subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation, withholding of food, and sexual humiliation. [See: War Crimes Suit Prepared against Rumsfeld, and HERE for details.]

These legal experts who filed the case believe that there is a fair chance of succeeding in bringing Rumsfeld and other Pentagon brasses to justice. The problem, however, is even if Rumsfeld and Co. are to be found guilty and condemned, the USA may not allow their extradition for hearing and subsequent imprisonment. Among western countries, interestingly, the USA is the only country that has not accepted the full jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague to try its own war criminals, although, rather hypocritically, she had no problem having other monsters like the late Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia or Hutu leaders of Rwanda tried under the auspices of the ICJ.

With U.S. laws protecting its government officials that are at variance with international laws, Rumsfeld's war crimes case may eventually go to the UNSC. But there, the USA will veto such resolutions further isolating herself from the rest of the civilized world. Nonetheless, for billions of conscientious people in our planet, the suit is a much welcome event. It should be a matter of warning and deterrence for war criminals of today and tomorrow. "Even if we never put Rumsfeld on trial in a German court, he will be harassed and publicly stamped as a torturer," said Wolfgang Kaleck, a Berlin attorney who filed the complaint against Rumsfeld, together with the Center for Constitutional Rights, an American group, and other legal organizations.

During the resignation event in the White House, President Bush said in tribute: "Donald Rumsfeld has been a superb leader during a time of change. Yet he also appreciates the value of bringing in a fresh perspective during a critical period in this war." In his farewell speech, Rumsfeld was equally gracious to his boss. Addressing the president, he said: "It is not well-known, it was not well understood, it is complex for people to comprehend and I know with certainty that over time the contributions you've made will be recorded by history." Only time will tell whether his euphoria is rightly placed!



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Incoming Secretary of Defense: Israel has nuclear weapons

AP
07/12/2006

Incoming U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told a Senate committee on Thursday that Israel has nuclear weapons, and that this partially explains Iran's motiviation to acquire nuclear weapons.

"They are surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons - Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west and us in the Persian Gulf," he told the Senate committee during his confirmation hearing.
Though Israel is widely assumed to have a nuclear weapons arsenal, it has stuck to its policy of ambiguity on the subject, insisting against all the evidence that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. A retired Israeli general said Thursday Israel is no longer trying to convince anyone that it has no nuclear arsenal.

Israeli officials traditionally do not respond to statements like the one Gates made, and true to form, government spokeswoman Miri Eisin told The Associated Press, "there is no direct Israeli comment."

Experts played down the importance of Gates' "outing" of the Israeli nuclear weapons program. Defense analyst Shlomo Brom, a retired Israel Defense Forces general who was once in charge of strategic planning for the military, said similar statements came out of Washington during the first Gulf War in 1991 and did not lead to a change in Israeli policy. "This is nothing really new," he said. "It doesn't change anything."

What has changed over the years is the perception of Israel's nuclear capabilities. In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Israel's main nuclear reactor, gave pictures and documents to the London Sunday Times that led experts to conclude that Israel has a sizable nuclear weapons arsenal, ranking it sixth in the world. Vanunu served an 18-year prison term for his disclosures.

The pictures and other evidence put Israel's official policy in a new light. "The fact is that for a long time, Israel's policy of ambiguity has been not a matter of people thinking we don't have any [nuclear weapons], just that Israel doesn't admit it," Brom said.

Even so, Israel has consistently maintained its policy of ambiguity. Analyst Yossi Alpher said it allows Israel's neighbors "to assume that even if Israel had nuclear weapons, this was not a threat to them," and therefore it should not be changed. However, Alpher added, "it's very possible that if and when Iran goes nuclear in the military sense, Israel will have to consider ending its policy of ambiguity. Then it won't be the first."

At a news conference in Tel Aviv on Thursday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert responded to Gates' explanation of Iranian motives for acquiring nuclear weapons.

"I don't think anyone in the U.S. thinks there is justification for Iran's achieving nuclear [weapons] capability," he said, without referring to Gates' reference to Israel's nuclear potential.

Olmert added, "We are not indifferent, cannot be indifferent, and won't be indifferent to efforts that appear serious to us, to develop capabilities that could be used as a springboard to build a [nuclear] bomb."

Gates told the Senate committee that the U.S. could not guarantee that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, it would not attack Israel with it. "I don't think that anybody can provide that assurance," he said.

Comment: So let's deal with Israel's WMDs, because clearly the Zionists are extremist nutjobs who are threatening the stability of the entire world.

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AIPAC Funds All-Expense Paid Trips to Israel for Newly Elected Congress People

By Alana Y. Price and Lindsay Blakely
Times Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON | New office on Capitol Hill? Check. Orientation to congressional protocols? Check. All-expense paid trip to Israel? Add that to the freshman lawmaker's calendar.

Next year first-term members of Congress could be initiated into an unofficial Washington tradition -- flying to Israel, one of the top foreign destinations for privately sponsored congressional travel. Every two years -- the years between elections -- the American Israel Education Foundation invites House and Senate members to gain firsthand knowledge about a region they will influence through legislation.
The education foundation is a nonprofit arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee -- AIPAC, one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. A 2005 National Journal survey of congressional insiders ranked AIPAC second most influential lobbying group among Democratic lawmakers and fourth among Republicans.

The pro-Israel organization made headlines in August when two of its former lobbyists were charged with conspiring to pass on national defense information to the Israeli government.

AIPAC's education foundation is the third largest private sponsor of congressional travel, having spent more than $1.5 million sending lawmakers and their staffers on trips since Jan. 1, 2000, according to a Medill News Service analysis of travel disclosure forms from 2000 through mid-August 2006. Most of the trips -- worth nearly $1.4 million -- were to Israel.

"Being on the ground in Israel, seeing the terrain, being there in person provides the perspective that one can't get from being in classrooms and reading media coverage," AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said.

Block declined to provide a full itinerary for any trip, saying AIPAC does not customarily release such agendas to the public. But he said a typical trip would include meetings with Israeli and Palestinian elected officials, academicians and journalists.

A trip three years ago included an afternoon at a Holocaust Memorial and visits with then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, then-Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, according to Block.

Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., who went on the trip, said that new members of Congress who accompanied him were shocked by Israel's small size.

"Many realized for the first time that their districts were bigger" than Israel, he said. "Why would Israel [ever] want to give up land? They could never see that unless they went."

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee urges lawmakers to go see what life is like for Palestinians, but generally can't afford to pay for the congressional trips, said spokesman Tony Kutayli.



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Blair reaffirms linkage of Mideast conflict, Iraq war

Haaretez
08/12/2006

Responding to a direct question on whether the two issues are linked, Blair said both the U.S. and U.K. governments agree that the successful stabilization of Iraq depends on addressing the broader regional issues.


Comment: So why don't Blair and Bush and others DO SOMETHING about the broader issues i.e. prevent that "shitty little country" Israel from committing unprovoked genocide against a defenseless civilian population in Palestine!!

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America The Farcical


Double Standards

Bulov
28 Nov 06

1) What do you call someone who explodes a bomb and kills innocent people?

- A terrorist.

What do you call someone who drops a bomb from a plane and kills innocent people?

- A brave American pilot.

What do you call it when a Palestinian uses violence against the Jews who have illegally occupied his land?

- A terrorist attack.

What do you call it when an Israeli helicopter fires rockets at Palestinian youths armed with stones?

- Self-defence.

More...
What do you call it when someone gives money to a government official in return for favors?

- Bribery.

What do you call it when a large corporation gives money to a government official in return for favors?

- A campaign contribution.

What do you call the form of government where a small elite exploits and intimidates the citizens?

- A dictatorship.

What do you call the form of government where a small elite exploits and intimidates the citizens, and the citizens can choose every few years which part of the elite should occupy the government buildings?

- A democracy.

What do you call it when someone carrying a gun enters your house and steals your valuable possessions?

- An armed robbery.

What do you call it when a multinational corporation supported by armed forces enters your country and steals your valuable possessions?

- Free trade.

What do you call it when a group of people take the law into their own hands and kill people without a fair trial?

- A lynching.

What do you call it when the US takes the law into its own hands and kills people without a fair trial?

- Operation Enduring Freedom. (The invasion of Afghanistan)

What do you call someone who steals from the rich and gives to the poor?

- Robin Hood.

What do you call someone who steals from the poor and gives to the rich?

- The US government.

What do you call a weapon that can kill thousands of people?

- A weapon of mass destruction.

What do you call a weapon that killed 1.5 million Iraqis, including more than 500,000 children?

- Sanctions.

What do you call an army that will fight for whoever pays the most money?

- Mercenaries.

What do you call an army in Afghanistan that will fight for whoever pays the most money?

- The Northern Alliance (or United Front).

What do you call an attack on the Pentagon, a military command and control center in the US?

- A cowardly attack on American freedom and democracy.

What do you call the destruction of an Afghan village by US bombs?

- An attack on a Taliban military command and control center.

What do you call it when just over 3 thousand people were killed in the September 11 attack on the US?

- An atrocity.

What do you call it when nearly 5 million people were killed in the Vietnam war?

- A mistake.

What do you call it when very rich people exploit poor people?

- Greed and selfishness.

What do you call it when very rich countries exploit poor countries?

- Globalization.

What do you call a foreign oppressor in the last century that controlled the economic and social life of a country?

- A colonialist power.

What do you call a foreign oppressor in this century that controls the economic and social life of a country?

- The International Monetary Fund.

What do you call it when people are slaughtered?

- A massacre.

What do you call it when 100,000 to 200,000 Iraqis are slaughtered by the US at a loss to American forces of 148 (46 of which were killed by friendly fire)?

- Gulf War I.

What do you call members of the Ku Klux Klan, a white racist organization?

- American patriots.

What do you call members of the Black Panther party, a black racist organization?

- Prisoners on death row.

What do you call the extermination of a people?

- Genocide.

What do you call the extermination of native Americans in the US?

- A glorious episode in American history.

What do you call someone who stands up in front of a crowd and tells stories?

- An entertainer.

What do you call someone who stands up in front of a crowd at the Pentagon and tells stories?

- Donald Rumsfeld.

What do you call a television station that broadcasts only the government's views?

- A propaganda station.

What do you call the BBC when the World News consists solely of half an hour of a Pentagon briefing?

- Fair and impartial.

What do you call the 2002 presidential election in Zimbabwe where there were serious irregularities?

- A flawed election.

What do you call the 2000 presidential election in the US where there were serious irregularities?

- A victory for democracy.

What do you call it when American Whites advocate an exclusively White state and the expulsion of all non-Whites?

- Racism.

What do you call it when Israeli Jews advocate an exclusively Jewish state and the expulsion of all non-Jews?

- Zionism.

What is the name of the leader wrongly accused of trying to create an ethnically pure Greater Serbia?

- Slobodan Milosevic, on trial as a war criminal until his death.

What is the name of the leader trying to create an ethnically pure Greater Israel?

- Ariel Sharon, a "man of peace".

What do you call a leader who sells out his country to a foreign power?

- A traitor, or Quisling.

What do you call a British leader who sells out his country to a foreign power?

- Tony Blair.

Which Middle East country (whose name begins with I) does not possess nuclear weapons, agreed to allow access to UN weapons inspectors, and has been occupied by the US?

- Iraq.

Which Middle East country (whose name begins with I) possesses nuclear weapons, refuses to allow access to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and receives around $5 billion p.a. in aid from the US?

- Israel.

What do you call it when innocent people are killed by those resisting a brutal occupation?

- Terrorism.

What do you call it when innocent people are killed by an occupying army?

- Collateral damage, self-defense, or caught in the crossfire.

What do you call it when Saddam Hussein kills his own people with chemical weapons?

- A crime against humanity.

What do you call it when the FBI uses chemical weapons to murder 96 US citizens (including women and children) in Waco, Texas?

- Law and order.

What do you call a serial killer who claims that God told him to do it?

- A psychopath.

What do you call a serial killer who claims that God told him to invade Iraq?

- George W. Bush.



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May I Quote You, Mr. President?

Rodrigue Tremblay
20 Nov 06

Here is a selection of 50 quotes from President George W. Bush, for entertainment or for meditation:
-A man lost in his geography:

1-"We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe." George W. Bush

2-"It's time for the human race to enter the solar system."
George W. Bush

3-"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country."
George W. Bush

-A man lost in his logic:

4-" It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it."
George W. Bush

5-"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." George W. Bush

6-"These people are trying to shake the will of the Iraqi citizens, and they want us to leave...I think the world would be better off if we did leave..." George W. Bush

7-"I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family." George W. Bush

8-"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."
George W. Bush

9-"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." George W. Bush

10-Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness. George W. Bush

-A man lost in space:

11-"For NASA, space is still a high priority."
George W. Bush

-a man with heaven on his side:

12-"I believe God wants me to be president."
George W. Bush

13- [I was] "chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment." George W. Bush

14-"God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East." George W. Bush

15-"I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job." George W. Bush

-a man lost in his vocabulary:

16-" Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children." George W. Bush

17-"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepreneur'." George W. Bush



18-"One word sums up probably the responsibility of any Governor, and that one word is, 'to be prepared'."
George W. Bush

19-'There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again.' George W. Bush

- thoughts coming straight from George Orwell's '1984':

20-"Iraq and Afghanistan ...are now democracies and they are allies in the cause of freedom and peace." George W. Bush

21-"Ariel Sharon ... is a man of courage and a man of peace." George W. Bush

22-"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." George W. Bush

-a deceiving pacifist:

23-"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace." George W. Bush

24-"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table." George W. Bush

25-"Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction."
George W. Bush

26- "Governments accountable to the voters focus on building roads and schools - not weapons of mass destruction." (N.B.: The U.S. has 10,000 nuclear weapons) George W. Bush

-the theologian:

27-"Islam, as practiced by the vast majority of people, is a peaceful religion." George W. Bush

28-"The Islam that we know is a faith devoted to the worship of one God, as revealed through The Holy Qur'an. It teaches the value and the importance of charity, mercy, and peace."
George W. Bush

-the flip-flopper:

29-"I favor leaving up to a woman and her doctor the abortion question." George W. Bush

30-"I am pro-life." George W. Bush

31- "The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him." George W. Bush

32- "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." George W. Bush

33-"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories...for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them." George W. Bush

-The forecaster of things to come:

34-"Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties [in Iraq]." George W. Bush

35-"We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur." George W. Bush

36-"I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future." George W. Bush

37-"Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them: If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you." George W. Bush, (speech of March 17, 2003)

38-"To the C students, I say you too can be president of the United States." George W. Bush

The astute observer:

39-"A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls." George W. Bush

40-"Brownie (Michael Brown of FEMA), you're doing a heck of a job." George W. Bush

-A man and his environment:

41-"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."
George W. Bush

-The double-talker:

42-"There's a lot of suffering in the Palestinian territory, because militant Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy."(N.B.: The Hamas government was democratically elected) George W. Bush

43-"We look forward to analyzing and working with legislation that will make - it would hope - put a free press's mind at ease that you're not being denied information you shouldn't see." George W. Bush

-The would-be dictator:

44-"In a time of war, the president must have the power he needs to make the tough decisions, including, if need be, the decision to grant himself even more power." George W. Bush

45-"I'm also not very analytical. You know I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things."
George W. Bush

46-"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." George W. Bush

47-"I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president." George W. Bush

48- "I will not withdraw [from Iraq], even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me." George W. Bush

49- "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best." George W. Bush

-And, last but not least, CONSIDERING THE MESS IN IRAQ:

50-"I don't have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy." George W. Bush



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Houston suburb opposes plans for mosque; neighbour threatens to hold pig races

Published: Thursday, December 7, 2006 | 2:42 PM ET
Canadian Press: RASHA MADKOUR

KATY, Texas (AP) - A plan to build a mosque in this Houston suburb has triggered a neighbourhood dispute, with community members warning the place will become a terrorist hotbed and one man threatening to hold pig races on Fridays just to offend the Muslims.

Many neighbourhood residents claim they have nothing against Muslims and are more concerned about property values, drainage and traffic.
But one resident has set up an anti-Islamic website with an odometer-like counter that keeps track of terrorist attacks since Sept. 11. A committee has formed to buy another property and offer to trade it for the Muslims' land. And next-door neighbour Craig Baker has threatened to race pigs on the edge of the property on the Muslim holy day. Muslims consider pigs unclean and do not eat pork.

"The neighbours have created havoc for us and we didn't expect that," said engineer Kamel Fotouh, president of the 500-member Katy Islamic Association.

Fotouh vowed to press ahead with plans for a mosque on the four-hectare site, as well as a community centre that would offer after-school activities, housing for senior citizens, a fitness centre and an Islamic school.

"We just bought it," Fotouh said. "And we are going to use it. We have the right like any one of them."

Katy, population 13,000, is a mix of middle-class bedroom-community neighbourhoods and small farms on Houston's western edge and boasts of being the hometown of Oscar-winning actress Renee Zellweger. It is 70 per cent white and 24 per cent Hispanic.

The Houston metropolitan area has about 170,000 Muslims, according to the Islamic Society of Greater Houston, and among their many mosques is one built in Houston by former NBA star Hakeem Olajuwon.

The Islamic association bought the land in Katy in September for US$1.1 million. It said the overall cost of the project has not been determined.

The dispute began when the group asked Baker to remove his cattle from their newly bought land. Baker agreed but mistakenly thought the Muslims also wanted him off the land his family has lived on for more than 100 years. The rumour spread.

Baker, who makes marble and granite fixtures for kitchens and bathrooms and also owns livestock, said he got so mad he put up a sign announcing the pig races.

(Baker's attempt to offend missed its mark, according to Fotouh. Muslims do not hate pigs, he said; they just don't eat them.)

As for the website, the address is virtually identical to that of the Katy Islamic Association. The site claims the neighbours will have to hear the Muslim call to prayer from the mosque's minaret five times a day, the Islamic group denies that, and offers an audio sample.

Besides keeping track of the running total of post-Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the website provides home addresses of some association members and advises people who see anything suspicious to contact the FBI. Many people have sent anti-Islamic e-mails to the site.

A few complaints about the mosque project have also trickled in to Harris County offices: The "Coming Soon" sign was on government property; the parking lot gravel was piled up without a permit; the project would increase traffic in the quiet neighbourhood.

County Commissioner Steve Radack said traffic concerns can be addressed as they are elsewhere, with off-duty police officers. He also noted the group has said it would comply with rules on drainage and flood control.

Cynthia Blackman wrote Radack that the centre was a security risk: "Would you and your family safely and comfortably live next to this 11-acre Muslim mosque and facilities?"

The reaction has not been all negative. Fotouh said one man came to the mosque on a Friday afternoon and apologized for his neighbours. "He moved me, really," Fotouh said. "The sense of fairness, the sense of standing by the underdog."

Though he now concedes the Muslims are probably not after his land, Baker said he is obligated to go through with the pig races, probably within the next few weeks, because "I would be like a total idiot if I didn't. I'd be the laughingstock now because I've gone too far."



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Chicken meat salmonella illness rising in U.S.

www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-08 15:43:12

BEIJING, Dec. 8 (Xinhuanet) -- United States Agriculture Department tests show a type of salmonella found in eggs is turning up more often in chicken meat. From 2000 through 2005, there was a fourfold increase in positive test results for salmonella enteritidis on chicken carcasses.
"It still continues to rise, even though the overall incidence of salmonella in general has fallen," said Richard Raymond, the Agriculture Department undersecretary for food safety. "It's one that we still don't have all the scientific evidence we need to know how best to attack it.

"Even though that particular bug is going up, the overall incidence of food-borne illness from salmonella is declining, and the amount of salmonella positives has shown a dramatic drop."

Salmonella sickens at least 40,000 people and kills about 600 every year in the United States.

Many different salmonella bacteria make people sick, but salmonella enteritidis is one of the most common. It causes fever, stomach cramps and diarrhea. In vulnerable people, infection become deadly by spreading beyond the intestine to the bloodstream.

At one time, eggs became contaminated with salmonella on the outside from contact with fecal bacteria. But in recent years, the salmonella enteritidis strain has been found inside intact, disinfected, grade A eggs.

This type of germ contaminates eggs inside a hen's ovaries, before shells are even formed.

Now the germ is turning up in broiler chickens, the kind used for meat, according to research by the Agriculture Department published in the December issue of the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Cooking poultry to 165 degrees will kill the salmonella germ. The government also strongly recommends that people use food thermometers and follow basic rules for kitchen safety: wash hands often, keep raw poultry and meat separate from cooked food, and refrigerate or freeze food right away.

However, a recent CDC study on food poisoning from salmonella noted that the risk of illness from salmonella enteritidis increased the less people ate at home.

"This measure may, in fact, be considered to be a proxy for eating a larger number of commercially prepared meals," the CDC found.

That study said that while overall infections from salmonella were lower than in the mid-1990s, infections from salmonella enteritidis were 25 percent higher.

While salmonella is commonly found in poultry, it is found in many other products, from pork and beef to raw fruits and vegetables and dairy products.



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Space Shuttle Discovery launch scrubbed

AFP
8 Dec 06

Thick low clouds over the launch site forced NASA late Thursday to scrub a night launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery just minutes before the planned blastoff.

The seven astronauts -- two women and five men, including Sweden's first astronaut -- were strapped into their seats ready for liftoff, but low-lying clouds forced a last-minute postponement of the 9:35 pm (0235 GMT Friday) blastoff.
"We gave it our best shot and didn't get clear and convincing evidence that the cloud ceiling had cleared for us," launch director Mike Leinbach told the crew. "We have to declare a scrub at this time."

The shuttle commander, Mark Polansky, responded. "Thanks to the team for all the hard work, try not to be too disappointed and we will be ready to support for the next time we get a chance," he said.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials said it would make a new attempt to launch the shuttle on its mission to the International Space Station (ISS) at 8:47 pm Saturday (0147 GMT Sunday).

The shuttle's external fuel tank was filled with two million liters (500,000 gallons) of liquid hydrogen and oxygen when the launch was scuttled, after a tense half-hour of on-again-off-again weather conditions.

"We had to scrub the launch tonight because the cloud ceiling exceeded our requirements," said NASA spokesman Bruce Buckingham.

NASA has described the shuttle mission as the most complex to date, with three space walks scheduled to rewire the ISS and install a new 11-million-dollar truss segment.

The Discovery mission was to be the first night shuttle launch since the Endeavour flight in November 2002.

The three shuttle launches following the February 2003 Columbia tragedy -- in August 2005, and in July and September 2006 -- were scheduled during daylight so that ground and shuttle cameras could closely photograph the spacecraft's exterior tank in case pieces of thermal insulation or ice broke off during liftoff.

A piece of insulating foam damaged Columbia's heat-shield shortly after launch which led to the shuttle disintegrating upon re-entry to Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts aboard and grounding the shuttle program for more than two years.

Discovery's mission will be the third and final shuttle launch of the year, and the fourth since the Columbia disaster.

NASA has planned 14 shuttle missions -- including this one -- through 2010 to finish building the International Space Station.

The weather forecast for a Saturday launch, however, was discouraging, with only a 30 percent chance of favorable conditions.

The space agency has set a window for rescheduling the liftoff that lasts until December 26, but after December 17 it would have to reprogram the shuttle's computer to adjust to the date change at the end of the year.

After December 26, the Discovery mission would have to wait until mid-January for another chance at liftoff.

One of the astronauts aboard Discovery, American Sunita Williams, will be staying at the ISS. She will repace German Thomas Reiter of the European Space Agency, who arrived at the Space Station in July and will be returning to earth at the end of Discovery's mission.



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Goodbye and Good Riddance! Frist bids farewell to Senate

By Thomas Ferraro
Reuters
8 Dec 06

Frist had been criticized for his work as majority leader, some saying he seemed more concerned about advancing Bush's interests than those of the Senate.
WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who fanned partisanship during much of his reign, preached the need for the two parties to work together as he bid farewell to the U.S. Congress on Thursday.

"Beyond Democrat or Republican, we are Americans," the retiring Tennessee Republican told colleagues. "It's our responsibility to uphold the dream."

As majority leader the past four years, Frist, 54, stirred some big partisan battles, particularly when he broke tradition in 2004 and campaigned against Democratic Leader Tom Daschle in his home state of South Dakota. Daschle lost a re-election bid.

In sharp contrast to the way Republicans treated Daschle afterward, Frist's delivered his farewell address in a packed Senate chamber.

Only a few Republicans bothered to show up for Daschle's good-bye to the Senate two years ago. Frist walked in near the end.

As Democrats victorious in last month's elections prepared to take control when the new Congress convenes next month, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid urged members of his party to attend Frist's farewell.

"We don't want to be seen as petty," a Democratic aide said. "We don't want to be seen as trying to get even. We want to show some respect."

Frist, a heart-transplant surgeon, was first elected to the Senate in 1994 with a promise not to stay more than two six-year terms. In keeping that vow, he said: "It's time for fresh faces and fresh resolve."

Frist became Senate Republican leader in January 2003, after he helped his party win control of the legislative body as head of the Senate Republican campaign committee.

In last month's elections, Republicans lost the Senate and House to Democrats, largely because of the Iraq war and discontent with what was denounced as a "do-nothing Congress."

Frist had been criticized for his work as majority leader, some saying he seemed more concerned about advancing Bush's interests than those of the Senate.

Yet Frist had some major accomplishments, such as cranking up the global war against AIDS and helping increase security of the United States after the September 11 attacks.

Frist had been considered a potential 2008 White House contender. But last month he announced he had decided instead to resume his career in medicine.



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Nearly 100 ill after manure found in Taco Bell onions

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
08 December 2006

The Mexican fast-food chain Taco Bell is at the centre of America's latest food scare, after nearly 100 people were reported to have fallen sick with an acute bacterial infection after eating contaminated green onions at Taco Bell restaurants.

The chain immediately dropped the onions at all 5,800 of its North American outlets, and closed dozens of branches along the eastern seaboard. Government investigators working on similar cases are trying to find out how vegetables apparently infected by animal faeces entered the food chain.
Another outbreak involves the E.coli O157:H7 bacteria, a singularly nasty E.coli strain that originates in the stomachs of grain- and corn-fed cattle. In September, three people died and 200 others fell ill after eating bagged spinach from a Californian grower. There have been problems, too, with salmonella, including one outbreak in tomatoes which affected dozens of people across 21 states.

Michael Pollan, a journalism professor who has written extensively about food safety, said all the recent problems stemmed from the intensive, industrial-style agriculture increasingly practised in the United States.

The 0157:H7 strain of E.coli was unknown until cattle were taken from their traditional grazing grounds, pushed into industrial feedlots and fed grain and corn instead.

Faeces from those animals, in turn, can sometimes enter the water supply on big farms and find its way into irrigation canals in vegetable fields.

Professor Pollan recently likened many US farms to giant "petri dishes" in which all sorts of bacterial cultures could grow and thrive. Fast-food chains have taken steps to safeguard their ground beef - which can easily get mixed with faeces - but vegetables represent a new front in the fight for public health.

Federal investigators responding to the Taco Bell outbreak also checked the safety of other ingredients. Now the lawsuits are flying. On Long Island, outside New York, the family of an 11-year-old boy who fell ill filed a negligence suit against the chain. The boy ate three tacos last month and had to be treated in hospital. He recovered.



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Much Ado About Nothing - Iraq Study Group

by Mary Pitt
mumzeeskitchen.blogspot.com
8 Dec 06

The elephant called the Iraq Sudy Group has labored long and hard and, after keeping their secret until "after the election", has brought forth a gnat. They have utterly failed to discover a method for extracting W's grubby little fist from the cookie jar this time. Instead they have delivered another missive of pomposity which has nothing new to offer and can only prove one thing. We are in another quagmire and there is no way we can get out of it without being covered with mud. One does not walk out of a door with honor after walking in without any. This committee recemmendation deserves only one title: "Too Little, Too Late".
This is typical Bush politics. When in trouble, appoint a prestigious investigative committee, make a lot of smoke, and then continue with the same foolhardy practices that started the problem. After 9/!!, a similar committee was nanmed and they "investigated", failing to come to any realistic conclusion without having deposed any of the major figures in the administration, particularly not Bush and Cheney, and issuing a large tome of recommendations to prevent its happening again, none of which were instituted by the administration or the Congress. In this instance, they have re-written the Bible, solving all the international conflicts of history, but only if we accept the whole thing rather than "picking and choosing as if it were a fruit salad". So much for that, since Bush has already announced his intention to "cherry pick".

Those of us who were aware of the events of the world for the past couple of decades warned against attacking the Middle Eastern countries, both Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly the latter. In their history, these nations have been "conquered" and occupied time after time and have worn out their enemy by the simple method of out-lasting them. They merely go on with their lives as if nothing had happened, living by their own rules and methods, informally enforcing their traditional roles and dealing with those who break their rules in their own manner, summary execution. Personally, I recall stating in a forum of mixed political persuasion that invading either of these countries would be tantamount to entering the lion's den and would end in the greatest defeat ever experienced by the American war machine and I suffered being berated as a "fraidy-cat peacenik" and "un-patriotic". It is small consolation to be able to say, "I told you so."

But, what should we expect? We went into Iraq with just a quarter of the forces that were used in the Gulf War, with no mechanism having been prepared for "re-construction" because, if you recall, Mr. Bush had said that he was "not into nation building". Once Saddam fell, those charged with control of that poor nation were concerned merely with stealing the taxpayers' money and enjoying the privilege of instituting any brain storm that occured to them, because there was no constructive leadership at the top. There was no preparation for the invasion with insufficient military personnel, requiring the activation of the National Guard, many units equipped with old, unreliable vehicles which were anything but battle-ready, in order to have the minimal force which was used. The word "draft" became a dirty word, since the administration was well aware of the kickback that would have caused as wealthy people would realize that their own sons and daughters would be put at risk. It was more important to keep the consumer goods flowing so that the profits would continue to pour into the pockets of the multi-national corporations and, thus, the campaign funds into the coffers of the political parties.

The first proposal of the ISG to hit the dirt was, of course, the proposal to end the conflicts between Israel and its neighbors. This, the most important of the entire publication, is a hot potato which neither the administration nor the Congress dares to touch. The political hold of Israel on our government, through their lobbies and their campaign funding, is so strong that it cannot even be discussed without accusations of "anti-semitism". While Iran is threatened with annihilation for their attempt at developing nuclear technology, it is a well-known fact that Israel also possesses nuclear power, though discussion of that is also forbidden. Would it not express our good will if those nations were to be brought together in Jimmy Carter fashion and pushed to come to an agreement in eliminating this threat to Middle East peace?

President Bush is right about one thing. This war will go on and on and on! Not until after he leaves office and not before current members of Congess either see the light or are dis-elected, will any leader be found with the ability and determination to restore peace to the Middle East. We can only pray that the United States is still standing when it is over, despite the loss of the lives of our young people, the overwhelming indebtedness of our treasury, and the destruction of our own democracy. Never mind the idiotic plans to "re-deploy outside the country" or to "set a timetable". The only way our troops will ever leave Iraq will be to deploy to the border, cover their arses, and get the hell out.........fast!

The author is a very "with-it" old lady who aspires to bring a bit of truth, justice, and commom sense to a nation that has lost touch with its humanity in the search for societal "perfection".



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The Perfect Crime

by Michael Richardson

In Florida, 18,000 missing votes likely changed the outcome of a Congressional election. A naďve public tries to make excuses for the "undervotes" speculating that maybe the voters decided to boycott the race or were confused by the electronic ballot design on the screen of the electronic voting machines. Some even suggested that innocent "glitches" might be at fault. But a hacker, using self-deleting malicious code to erase votes without detection, gets the satisfaction of altering an election without getting caught or even leaving proof a crime was committed.
Sherlock Holmes used to solve them, con artists the world over have been trying to commit them, and books have been written about them--perfect crimes.

A perfect crime has several elements, the most important of which is to not get caught. The ideal perfect crime also has a big payoff to the criminal and attracts public attention, further rewarding the unknown perpetrator with ego gratification.

Perfect crimes like big art heists, large cash thefts from secure facilities, and political assassinations generate publicity, speculation, and sometimes even end up in the folklore. Many perfect crimes fall into the fraud category with various schemes and swindles that enrich the criminal and some even end up memorialized in movies.

Advances in computer technology have given criminals a whole new world to exploit for those technically proficient enough to keep up with the programmers. It is now possible, thanks to electronic voting machines, to steal an election without being caught. Moreso, it is now possible to steal an election without even leaving evidence a crime was committed-the ultimate perfect crime.

In Florida, 18,000 missing votes likely changed the outcome of a Congressional election. A naďve public tries to make excuses for the "undervotes" speculating that maybe the voters decided to boycott the race or were confused by the electronic ballot design on the screen of the electronic voting machines. Some even suggested that innocent "glitches" might be at fault. But a hacker, using self-deleting malicious code to erase votes without detection, gets the satisfaction of altering an election without getting caught or even leaving proof a crime was committed.

Sound farfetched? Not so to the National Institute of Standards and Technology which warns in a just released report, "Potentially, a single programmer could "rig" a major election." Further, the National Institute "does not know how to write testable requirements" to make the paperless voting machines secure.

The alarming report warns of, "the inability, in a practical sense, to test complex systems for errors and intentionally produced fraud." To make it more explicit, the National Institute states, "In principle, a single clever, dishonest programmer in a voting machine company could rig an entire statewide election if the state uses mainly one kind of system."

Never before in the history of crime has such an enormous potential for mischief been present. Think of it. The ability to steal an election, without getting caught or even leaving behind a trace that a crime was committed.

The missing votes in Florida will be blamed on the voters or at most on "glitches" in the voting machines. A forensic analysis will not be able to uncover malicious software code that has already self-deleted. We will never know if the Florida votes were stolen.

Hand counting paper ballots seems like a lot of work and trouble but that is the only way to prevent the Perfect Crime.

[Permission granted to reprint]



Michael Richardson is a freelance writer based in Boston.



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Changes Are Expected in Voting by 2008 Election

By IAN URBINA and CHRISTOPHER DREW
NY Times
December 8, 2006

By the 2008 presidential election, voters around the country are likely to see sweeping changes in how they cast their ballots and how those ballots are counted, including an end to the use of most electronic voting machines without a paper trail, federal voting officials and legislators say.
New federal guidelines, along with legislation given a strong chance to pass in Congress next year, will probably combine to make the paperless voting machines obsolete, the officials say. States and counties that bought the machines will have to modify them to hook up printers, at federal expense, while others are planning to scrap the machines and buy new ones.

Motivated in part by voting problems during the midterm elections last month, the changes are a result of a growing skepticism among local and state election officials, federal legislators and the scientific community about the reliability and security of the paperless touch-screen machines used by about 30 percent of American voters.

The changes also mean that the various forms of vote-counting software used around the country - most of which are protected by their manufacturers for reasons of trade secrecy - will for the first time be inspected by federal authorities, and the code could be made public. There will also be greater federal oversight on how new machines are tested before they arrive at polling stations.

"In the next two years I think we'll see the kinds of sweeping changes that people expected to see right after the 2000 election," said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a nonpartisan election group. "The difference now is that we have moved from politics down to policies."

Many of the paperless machines were bought in a rush to overhaul the voting system after the disputed presidential election in 2000, which was marred by hanging chads. But concerns have been growing that in a close election those machines give election workers no legitimate way to conduct a recount or to check for malfunctions or fraud.

Several counties around the country are already considering scrapping their voting systems after problems this year, and last week federal technology experts concluded for the first time that paperless touch-screen machines could not be secured from tampering.

Having stalled for over two years, federal legislation requiring a shift to paper trails and other safeguards, proposed by Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, has a better chance of passing next session, several members of Congress and election officials say.

They say that fixing the voting system is viewed as a core issue by the new Democratic leaders, and the bill already has the bipartisan support of more than a majority of the current House. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who will be the new chairwoman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, said she planned to introduce a similar bill in January.

But it is also clear that the changes will not come without a struggle. State and local election officials are still reeling from the last major overhaul of the country's voting system, initiated by the Help America Vote Act in 2002, and some say that the $150 million in federal aid proposed by Mr. Holt would not be enough to pay for the changes.

Advocates for the disabled say they will resist his bill, because the touch-screen machines are the easiest for blind people to use. And the voting machine companies say they will argue against making the software code completely public, partly out of concern about making the system more vulnerable to hackers.

Paul S. DeGregorio, the chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission, which was created by Congress in 2002 to set voting standards, also cautioned against rushing to make changes, especially since some counties also ran into problems with printers in this year's elections. "All of the implications have to be looked at carefully," Mr. DeGregorio said in an interview.

Still, the changes are rapidly gaining momentum, partly because the Help America Vote Act did not go far enough in establishing clear guidelines for the type of machines that should be used, many critics have said. It took so long for the federal guidelines to be established that many local voting officials bought new equipment without the full benefit of federal research and standards.

"Everyone was getting intense pressure to comply by January 2006, and so they went ahead and bought," said Alysoun McLaughlin, who was a lobbyist for the National Association of Counties at the time.

Now some local and state officials are paying the price as they shelve machines that have problems or that could soon be out of compliance.

In Maryland, legislators say they plan to replace the more than $70 million worth of touch-screen machines the state began buying in 2002 with paper optical scanners, which officials estimate could cost $20 million.

Voters in Sarasota, Fla., where the results of a Congressional race recorded on touch-screen machines are being contested in court, passed a ballot initiative last month to make the same change, at an estimated cost of $3 million. Last year, New Mexico spent $14 million to replace its touch screens. Other states are spending millions more to retrofit the machines to add paper trails.

New York has been slow to replace its old lever voting machines, and the state has required counties to buy screens with printers or optical scanners. New Jersey has passed a law requiring its counties to switch to machines with paper trails by 2008, and Connecticut is buying machines that can scan paper ballots.

This week, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, a federal panel of technical experts that helps set voting standards, adopted a resolution that recommends requiring any new electronic voting systems to have an independent means of verification, a move that could eventually prevent paperless touch-screen machines from being federally certified.

Touch-screen machines with paper trails give voters a chance to check their choices on a small piece of paper before casting their ballots, while large rolls of paper keep a running tally and can be used to check the vote count made by the machine's software. Localities can also use optical-scan systems, in which paper ballots marked by voters are counted by scanning machines and remain available for recounts.

Over the last two years, 27 states have passed laws requiring a shift to machines with paper trails, and 8 others do not have such laws but use the machines statewide. Some counties have attached rolls of paper to touch-screen machines, at a cost of $1,000 to $2,000 for each device, while others have bought optical-scanning devices.

Five states - Maryland, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Delaware - still use only the paperless machines, and 10 states have counties that use them and have not made plans to change.

State and local election officials say they have been overwhelmed by the changes since 2002, and they are worried about how much they may have to pay to meet new requirements. Many have already spent millions in state and local money to buy and operate new machines, and Mr. Holt's changes would require retraining poll workers as well as add the recurring costs of buying paper ballots and conducting election audits.

Because some printers malfunctioned last month, election commissioners in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which includes Cleveland, said last week that they were considering scrapping their new $17 million system of touch-screen machines and starting over with optical scanning devices.

In Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, electronic machines can print a paper tally, but do not give voters a paper record, meaning they would not comply with Mr. Holt's bill. Beverly Kaufman, the county clerk, said she and other election officials elsewhere disliked the paper requirement.

"Every time you introduce something perishable like paper, you inject some uncertainty into the system," Ms. Kaufman said. She said she was skeptical that Congress would come up with enough money for replacements by 2008. "You show me where you can pry the cold, bony fingers off the money in Washington, D.C., that fast," she said.

Another significant change that will affect how votes are counted involves the recording and tallying software embedded in each electronic machine. Under changes approved by the Election Assistance Commission yesterday, voting machine manufacturers would have to make their crucial software code available to federal inspectors. The code is now checked mainly by private testing laboratories paid by the manufacturers. Mr. Holt would go even further, requiring the commission to make the code publicly available.

Computer experts and voting rights groups have long advocated such openness, arguing that the code is too important to be kept secret and would allow programmers to check for bugs and the potential for hacking. But manufacturers are resistant. Michelle Shafer, a vice president at Sequoia Voting Systems, said that while the industry was willing to give the source code to state and federal officials, "we feel that just putting it out there would give it to people with an intent to do something malicious or harmful."

Because election technology is changing so quickly, it is not clear that the new requirements, particularly the demand for a paper trail, will stand the test of time, and advocates for change are already worried about a jury-rigged solution for 2008.

"We're confident that the accuracy and integrity of voting is going to take some big steps forward with the legislation in Congress right now," said Warren Stewart, policy director of VoteTrustUSA, an advocacy group that prefers optical scanners to touch screens. "But our big concern is to avoid replacing old problems with new ones."



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I Spy Zionist Skullduggery


Prior knowledge of 9/11 attacks overheard in Hebrew

December 1, 2006
Muckraker Report

In October 2000, approximately 11 months prior to September 11, 2001, a former Israeli Defense Force member and veteran of the Yom Kippur War (1973) was collecting English Ivy cuttings at the Gomel Chesed Cemetery located at McCellen and 245 Mount Olive Ave. in Newark, NJ. The Gomel Chesed Cemetery is a 'Jewish' cemetery.

While he was scouting the cemetery for ivy cuttings, he overheard what he believed to be a conversation spoken in Hebrew, which drew his attention. Curious, he walked toward the voices until he was close enough to accurately hear the conversation and confirm that it was indeed being spoken in Hebrew. He found himself along a heavily vegetated fence line that sat on top of an eight-foot high retaining wall, which concealed his presence from the men engaged in the conversation. The two men he saw and overheard were casually leaning against the retaining wall beneath him.
As he watched and listened, a third man arrived to the meeting in a Lincoln Town Car. He emerged from the rear seat of the car while the driver and another passenger remained in the car. The two men leaning against the wall, upon seeing the arrival of the third man, changed their relaxed posture into that of attentiveness, signifying respect and the importance or ranking of the person that had just arrived. It was clear that the two men were waiting and expecting the arrival of the third, indicating that the meeting was pre-arranged.

What the observer of these happenings heard beneath him after the normal niceties were exchanged between the three men alarmed him. The man who arrived in the Town Car said, "The Americans will learn what it is to live with terrorists after the planes hit the twins in September." One of the men that had been leaning against the retaining wall expressed concerns regarding whether the upcoming presidential election (November 2000) between Bush / Cheney and Gore / Lieberman could impact the plans. The man that arrived in the Town Car pacified the doubts by saying, "Don't worry, we have people in high places and no matter who gets elected, they will take care of everything."

Is this Muckraker Report source that has requested that I not use his name in this article, credible? Initially, I had my doubts. However, after listening to his account of what he attempted to do with the information he had obtained in the Gomel Chesed Cemetery, coupled with the plethora of independent media accounts of a vivid Israeli connection to 9/11, I decided that I should avoid contempt prior to investigation, and check out this story.

The source informed me that he wrestled with what to do with the information he stumbled upon while searching for English Ivy. Truthfully, he fears for his life. Having served in the IDF and possessing a firm understanding of how the Israeli government and the Mossad really operates, his fears are justifiable and prudent rather than the result of skittish paranoia.

According to his account, on February 9, 2001, approximately 8 months prior to the airplanes being flown into the twins, he sent an e-mail to then Attorney General Ashcroft informing the Attorney General that he had important terrorism-related information. The U.S. Department of Justice did not directly respond to the source. It forwarded the e-mail to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Shortly thereafter, on March 28, 2001, the source received a letter from Arthur Radford Baker (FBI) informing him that if he had information to share, he should contact the FBI Newark Division. The source contacted the FBI Newark Division and was told that two agents would be in contact with him, but no FBI agents came at that time.

The source continued to call the FBI Newark Division in attempt to pass his information onto the agency. He wanted to do this in person to ensure that it wasn't carelessly discarded or dismissed. He also sought a guarantee of protection by the FBI. As September 2001 drew closer, he grew more impatient. He began to act with a sense of urgency because in his words, "Time was running out!"

As he was getting nowhere with the FBI Newark Division, the source decided to write a letter to Arthur Radford Baker on May 21, 2001, the person that sent the letter advising him that he should contact the FBI Newark Division. In this letter, the source reiterated that he had important information to share with the government, but would need a guarantee of protection by the FBI before he could disclose all that he knew.

On the day that the source received a response letter from Arthur Radford Baker, June 26, 2001, now less than 3 months prior to the 9/11 attacks, two FBI agents finally paid a visit. They were Agent Robin Gritz and Agent Andrew Stengel. The agents were shown the second letter received that day from Arthur Radford Baker by the source. The letter informed the source that the FBI would not be able to do anything on his behalf.

Without the guarantee of protection, the source was unwilling to disclose the complete details of what he heard at the Gomel Chesed Cemetery in October 2000. However the two agents, Gritz and Stengel, spent 2-3 hours attempting to draw the information out of the source. What he did tell Gritz and Stengel is that there would be an attack in New York City and airplanes would be used. He emphasized once again that he could not provide greater detail without a guarantee of protection.

The source has spoken favorably to the Muckraker Report regarding Agent Gritz and Agent Stengel. They must have been in a difficult situation. It is assumed that they wanted the information the source had, yet were confronted by a letter from the upper echelon of the FBI command structure that indicated that the FBI was not willing to provide protection for the source, regardless of the information he provided. All they could offer was to "see what they could do". However, given the seriousness and scope of the intelligence the source maintained, he could not risk revealing the information on the flimsy non-committal being offered to him by two FBI special agents, particularly in light of the fact that he had just received a letter from FBI Headquarters telling him that the FBI was unwilling to do anything on his behalf. Even though Gritz and Stengel told the source that they would see what they could do for him, the source has never heard from either of them again.

I contacted the FBI Newark Division on Wednesday, November 22, 2006 to confirm whether Agent Gritz and Agent Stengel met with the source on or about June 26, 2001. I was directed to the FBI Newark Division Legal Unit where I spoke with a woman who identified herself as Amy. She suggested that I put my request in writing and fax it to her, which I did that same day.

On Friday, November 24, 2006 I received a phone call from Amy confirming receipt of my written request. She informed me that she would be out of the office the following week, and that somebody else from the Newark Division Legal Unit would handle my request.

On Tuesday, November 28, 2006 I received a phone call from Kathy at the FBI National Press Office. She informed me that the Legal Unit decided that I needed to file a Freedom of Information Act request.

On Wednesday, November 29, 2006 I contacted Agent Robin (Gritz) Laird. Since her meeting with the source on June 26, 2001, Agent Gritz has been promoted to a supervisor position within a counter terrorism unit at FBI headquarters. Once I had Agent Gritz on the phone, I introduced myself and immediately explained that I was attempting to confirm a meeting that herself and Agent Stengel allegedly had with the source on June 26, 2001. Agent Gritz was already aware of my inquiries. She indicated that she understood that the Press Office was handling my request. I told her that I decided to call her directly and emphasized that I only wish to confirm the meeting. Gritz said, "I'm not allowed to discuss this with you. I would get in trouble."

The Muckraker Report has received copies of the contact cards that Agent Gritz and Stengel left with the source on June 26, 2001. Both cards have old phone numbers crossed out and new phone numbers handwritten on them. Clearly, the handwriting would be that of the agents.

I also have copies of the letters received by the source from Arthur Radford Baker.

The copies of the letters, the business cards, the way my initial request quickly reached FBI Headquarters, and the fact that Agent Gritz was obviously informed of my inquires and told that she was not to discuss anything with me, is sufficient evidence that there is yet another effort to cover up any information that strays from the "official" 9/11 story, especially any information that further exposes an Israeli connection to September 11th.

In addition to overhearing in Hebrew, the statements, "The Americans will learn what it is to live with terrorists after the planes hit the twins in September", and "Don't worry, we have people in high places and no matter who gets elected, they will take care of everything", the source also reports that he overheard one of the three men in the Gomel Chesed Cemetery say, "The Arabs are so stupid. They don't even imagine that we are using them." This comment should not be overlooked.

For the reader that is unfamiliar with the under reported stories of an Israeli connection to September 11, 2001, it is important to do your own research. There is plenty to read and learn. However, as with any other news story that has been purposely censored, you will have to collect the pieces of the puzzle in individual news reports and piece them together to finally see the big picture. Be forewarned, the picture is not pretty. [...]

Of all the stories about an Israeli connection to 9/11, the Muckraker Report believes that the story of the Urban Moving Systems and the five Israelis detained on 9/11 is related to what was overheard at the Gomel Chesed Cemetery in October 2000.

As reported by Scott Da Vault for What Really Happened, 'an employee of Urban Moving Systems, who would not give his name, said the majority of his co-workers were Israelis and were joking on the day of the attacks. (September 11, 2001) The employee said, 'I was in tears, and these guys (Israelis) were joking, and that bothered me.' These guys (Israelis) were like, "Now America knows what we go through."

In October 2000, at the Gomel Chesed Cemetery, a former IDF member and veteran of the Yom Kippur War overheard, in Hebrew:

"The Americans will learn what it is to live with terrorists after the planes hit the twins in September."

In closing, here are some additional quotes to consider carefully.

I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing - although that was part of it - by a sovereign government...It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now."

--Senator Graham (FL) as quoted in Senator: At Least One Foreign Country Assisted the 9/11 Terrorists

"While I agree with you, if I say anything about US geopolitical interests with Israel, I might as well clean off my desk."

-- Unnamed reporter as quoted in American Media Censorship and Israel

"Investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying ... is considered career suicide."

-- Carl Cameron, as quoted in The Spies Who Came In From The Art Sale

"Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information."

-- US official quoted in Carl Cameron's Fox News report on the Israeli spy ring and its connections to 9-11.



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Israel frets over Iraq report, dispatches FM to Washington

AFP
8 Dec 06

Israel's foreign minister has arrived in the United States amid worries that the Jewish state's main ally could shift course after a report urged Washington to redouble Mideast peacemeaking efforts.

Tzipi Livni will meet with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other officials during her visit, which will focus on the repercussions of a report released Wednesday by the Iraq Study Group, her office said.
"This trip will be an occasion to review with her counterparts the report and to discuss its meaning," a foreign ministry spokesman said.

That report said progress towards Arab-Israeli peace was key to saving Iraq.

It also called for direct US talks with two of Israel's most fearsome foes, Syria and Iran, the latter of which is believed to be steaming ahead in its bid for nuclear weapons.

A day after receiving the top-level commission's report, the United States and Britain signalled the start of a renewed diplomatic push in the region.

President George W. Bush promised "concerted efforts to advance the cause of peace" and said British Prime Minister Tony Blair would soon travel to the region for talks with Israel and the Palestinians.

The prime minister's visit was to set the stage for Rice, in early 2007, to make her eighth trip in two years to Israel and the Palestinian territories, Rice's spokesman said.

The renewed focus on Mideast peacemaking and growing domestic pressure on US leaders to end the imbroglio in Iraq has Israelis worrying about a possible policy shift by Bush, who for six years has largely ignored the intricacies of Mideast peacemaking.

"The fact that he has decided to support Blair's visit to the region and to present this trip as a joint mission of Britain and the United States shows that Bush intends to at least try to change his policy," Israel's Yediot Aharonot daily wrote Friday.

The newspaper went on to slam the Iraq report, accusing its chief authors James Baker and Lee Hamilton of ignoring Israel while preparing the report.

"If the truth be told, they barely paid any attention to us," the newspaper lamented. "For 14 years, Israel enjoyed warm and pampering attention, under Clinton and Bush. Now, in light of the catastrophe in Iraq, Baker and Hamilton wish to restore us to our proper proportions."

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has also expressed disatisfaction with the report's recommendations. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, he said US problems in Iraq "are entirely independent of the controversy between us and the Palestinians."

He also said that restarting peace talks with Syria, as recommended by the report, was unlikely in the near future.

In statements sure to allay Israeli concerns, Bush has rebuffed some of the report's recommendations and maintained his insistence that Damascus and Tehran renounce support for extremists and pledge support for Baghdad's fledgling government and that Iran freeze sensitive nuclear work before any direct talks.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa, meanwhile, have both welcomed the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that Bush revitalise Arab-Israeli peacemaking efforts.

On the ground, a Palestinian rocket struck southern Israel on Friday, causing neither injuries nor damage. It is the 18th rocket to hit the Jewish state since a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip took effect 13 days ago.

That truce agreement had rekindled international optimism about restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, dormant since the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, in September 2000.



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Hamas: we will never recognise Israel

Staff and agencies
Friday December 8, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

The Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, today said his Hamas-led government will never recognise Israel and will continue to fight for the liberation of Jerusalem.

"We will never recognise the usurper Zionist government and will continue our jihad-like movement until the liberation of Jerusalem," Mr Haniyeh told thousands of Friday prayer worshippers at Tehran University in Iran.
The comments underline the difficulty of the task confronting Tony Blair, who confirmed yesterday at a joint press conference in Washington with George Bush that he is to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories in a last push for peace before he leaves office next year. Mr Haniyeh, who is on his first foreign visit since his Hamas-led government took office in March after a surprise election victory, called Iran, a long-time ally of Hamas, the Palestinians' "strategic depth".

"They (Israelis) assume the Palestinian nation is alone. This is an illusion ... We have a strategic depth in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This country (Iran) is our powerful, dynamic and stable depth," he said.

Mr Haniyeh is in Iran for talks with Iranian leaders, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map".

Iran has provided the Palestinian government with $120m (Ł61.2m) in aid following an international economic boycott that has plunged the occupied territories into economic crisis.

The international community, under the quartet of the US, the UN, the EU and Russia, halted direct funding to the Palestinian government following the Hamas victory, saying it must recognise Israel, halt violence and accept past peace agreements.

UN aid agencies yesterday launched their biggest appeal for funding to tackle the humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territories, asking for $453m for next year and warning of a weakening in the Palestinians' ability to govern.

The election of Hamas has led to political turmoil in the occupied territories, including armed clashes between Hamas supporters and those of the more moderate Fatah movement led by President Mahmoud Abbas.

Mr Abbas is seeking an end to the Palestinians' economic isolation by trying to form a coalition government of Fatah and Hamas. But unity talks broke down last week. Hamas appears increasingly confident that its government can stay afloat without western aid, mainly with help from the Arab world and countries such as Iran.

Comment: One has to wonder about the leader of Hamas. While we understand that he feels compelled to keep his comments in line with the views of the Palestinian people, one would think that a better course of action for the Palestinian people themselves would be for their leaders to call Israe'ls bluff and make a statement asserting Israel's "right to exist". If this were done, then the ball would, to some extent, be in Israel's court. Statement's that serve to portray the Palestinian leadership and people as "extremists" and the problem in the Middle East crisis merely provide Israel with the "political capital" to claim that they have no "partner for peace" and justify its continued murder of Palestinian people. So. Is it possible that Palestinian PM Haniyeh is in fact working for Israel?? Much stranger things have happened and the placing of an agent within the leadership of the oppostion, including the top spot itself, is far from being without precedent.

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Russia opens criminal probe into Litvinenko's death

www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-08 10:07:44

MOSCOW, Dec. 7 (Xinhua) -- Russian prosecutors have formally opened a criminal investigation into the poisoning death of former spy Alexander Litvinenko, and a related murder attempt on a Russian businessman, the Prosecutor General's office said on Thursday in a statement.
The statement said that the criminal investigation had been launched as a result of inspections, which revealed that Litvinenko died after being poisoned with a radioactive nuclide.

"The examination revealed that Litvinenko died after being poisoned with a radioactive nuclide, and (Dmitry) Kovtun, who met with Litvinenko in London in October 2006, was diagnosed with a disease also connected with a radioactive nuclide," the statement said.

Kovtun is the business partner of Andrei Lugovoi, whom Britain views as a key suspect in Litvinenko's death probe.

Traces of radiation have been detected in the hotel rooms in London where Lugovoi stayed in October and November, and on the airliners in which he flew to Britain, Russian daily Kommersant said on Wednesday.

The Russian chief prosecutor said on Tuesday that Russia would not extradite to Britain possible suspects in the poisoning death of Litvinenko but would help British police investigate the case.

British detectives went to Moscow this week as the investigation widened.

The Russian Prosecutor General's Office said that a team of its investigators may fly to London for investigations.

"We do not exclude that in case there is a need for a more detailed investigation of the circumstances of the case, a team from the Prosecutor General's Office may fly to Britain to work locally," Marina Gridneva, a Prosecutor General's Office official, was quoted by the Interfax news agency.

Litvinenko died of radioactive poisoning in London on Nov. 23. Experts investigating his death have found radiation traces at a dozen locations and on two British Airways planes that flew the Moscow-London route.



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Litvinenko 'was poisoned in hotel'

Times Online
08/12/2006

Investigators believe the poison cocktail was likely to have been manufactured in a guest room at the hotel, a short walk away from the US Embassy. Significant traces of polonium-210 were found in a fourth-floor room, which was occupied by a visiting Russian.Police believe that the killer may have stalked Litvinenko in London that day and had first tried to poison the ex-KGB colonel in a sushi bar. That failed but the poisoner left ample traces of the deadly radioactive isotope in the Piccadilly restaurant. Traces were also found on an Italian academic, Mario Scaramella, who was in the Itsu sushi bar. Toxicologists found polonium-210 in every place that Litvinenko visited after his drink at the hotel. It was not until he arrived home two hours later that he was violently ill.
# Bar staff positive in radiation test
# Contact 'in coma' claims are denied

As Alexander Litvinenko was buried yesterday investigators revealed that they now suspect that the former Kremlin spy was poisoned in the bar of a luxury London hotel when he met two Russian businessmen.

All seven bar staff working at the Pine Bar in the Millennium Hotel that night have tested positive for polonium-210, the radioactive isotope that killed Litvinenko. Health authorities are trying urgently to contact the 250 customers using the busy bar on November 1.

The Pine Bar is a popular haunt for businessmen and foreign guests at the five-star hotel in Grosvenor Square. Many of those overseas travellers have returned home after being told they were at no risk.

Health experts said they were surprised to find that the levels of radiation found in the seven bar staff approached that found in Litvinenko's wife, Marina. Professor Pat Troop, of the Health Protection Agency, said there was no short-term danger to the bar staff but conceded that there was a "very small" long-term risk of cancer.

Michael Clark, of the agency's radiation protection division, said last night that it was possible that Litvinenko was poisoned by a contaminated cigarette or drink.

A minute quantity of polonium-210 placed in Litvinenko's glass would explain how he ingested the radioactive poison that led to his agonising death three weeks later.

The vapour that evaporated from the drink would have been inhaled by anyone in the area, with a greater concentration for his Russian companions and staff, who would have been in the bar much longer.

Investigators believe the poison cocktail was likely to have been manufactured in a guest room at the hotel, a short walk away from the US Embassy. Significant traces of polonium-210 were found in a fourth-floor room, which was occupied by a visiting Russian.Police believe that the killer may have stalked Litvinenko in London that day and had first tried to poison the ex-KGB colonel in a sushi bar. That failed but the poisoner left ample traces of the deadly radioactive isotope in the Piccadilly restaurant. Traces were also found on an Italian academic, Mario Scaramella, who was in the Itsu sushi bar. Toxicologists found polonium-210 in every place that Litvinenko visited after his drink at the hotel. It was not until he arrived home two hours later that he was violently ill.

Litvinenko told police he felt no ill-effects as he went on to the hotel to discuss a business deal with Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB colonel, and his partner, Dmitry Kovtun.

Reports last night that Mr Kovtun had suddenly collapsed in a coma in Moscow with radiation poisoning were denied by his lawyer, hours after the Interfax news agency claimed that Mr Kovtun was in critical condition in a clinic. Mr Kovtun had spent the past two days at the clinic talking to Russian prosecutors and British detectives.

He joked that on the night "the only poison we [he and his business partner Mr Lugovoy] gave Litvinenko was alcohol".

British police were again told yesterday that they will have to wait to see Mr Lugovoy. He met Litvinenko four times in the fortnight before he was poisoned. He has denied having any part in his death.

The Russian authorities announced last night that they were opening their own investigation, claiming that the Russian businessmen were also targets of the killer. The move is likely to hijack the inquiry from the Scotland Yard team in Moscow. Marina Gridneva, a spokeswoman, for the Prosecutor-General said that Moscow could decide to send a team of prosecutors to Britain. She said that the investigation was intended to "deepen co-operation" with Scotland Yard.

# Traces of polonium-210 has been found at Parkes Hotel, Mayfair, it was confirmed last night. It means that radiation has been found at all three hotels where Mr Lugovoy had stayed since flying to London on October 16. The Parkes was the first he stayed at.

The radioactive isotope has also been found at Risc Management, a security firm in Cavendish Place, visited by Litvinenko with Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun on October 17.



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New poisoning case found in Litvinenko's death probe

www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-07 22:58:06

MOSCOW, Dec. 7 (Xinhua) -- The Russian Prosecutor General's office investigating the poisoning death of former spy Alexander Litvinenko said on Thursday in a statement that a Russian businessman was also found to have developed an illness connected with a radioactive nuclide.

"The examinations revealed that Litvinenko died as a result of poisoning by a radioactive nuclide, and (Dmitry) Kovtun, who met with Litvinenko in London in October 2006, was diagnosed with a disease also connected with a radioactive nuclide," the statement said.
Kovtun is the business partner of Andrei Lugovoi, who is also undergoing medical tests at a hospital in Moscow.

Russian prosecutors on Thursday formally opened a criminal investigation into Litvinenko's death. The former spy died in London on Nov. 23.

Kovtun and Lugovoi and another Russian businessman said they had met Litvinenko briefly at a hotel bar before attending a soccer match in a stadium in London.

Traces of polonium-210, the isotope that killed Litvinenko, had been found at two spots in the stadium, the British health authority said.



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Litvinenko poisoning suspect not in a coma: lawyer

Last Updated: Thursday, December 7, 2006 | 10:47 AM ET
CBC News

A lawyer for the suspect who was being questioned for the murder of an ex-Russian spy said that reports his client fell into a coma from the effects of radiation poisoning were false.

The Russian news agency Interfax earlier reported that Dmitry Kovtun, one of the men who made contact with the ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko before he died from radiation poisoning, was himself in critical condition with radiation poisoning.
But lawyer Andrei Romashov said the reports were wrong and that Kovtun's health was satisfactory. "I just 15 minutes ago spoke to his [Kovtun's] representative, who had spoken directly to him, and he denied that information," he told Reuters.

"His health right at this minute is no different from the state of his health when he was questioned by Russian and British investigators [on Thursday]," Romashov said.

The Prosecutor General's Office says Russian police are investigating the attempted murder by "radioactive nuclide" of Kovtun, who lives in Moscow.

The Russian businessman met with Litvinenko, 43, in London's Millennium Hotel on Nov. 1, just hours before Litvinenko became ill.

The disputed reports about Kovtun's declining health came just hours after Britain's Health Protection Agency confirmed that trace amounts of polonium-210 were found in seven bar staff at the London hotel where Litvinenko drank and dined moments before falling ill.

"Preliminary results received from seven members of staff working in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel on Nov. 1 show that they appear to have been exposed to low levels of polonium-210," the health agency said in a statement Thursday.

"There is no health risk in the short term and in the long term the risk is judged to be very small on the basis of initial tests," it said.

Russia has opened its own criminal investigation into the Litvinenko affair - a move that would allow suspects to be tried in Russia.

Detectives from Scotland Yard have been questioning suspects in Moscow under the supervision of Russian authorities, but officials have made it clear that no one will be extradited to Britain to stand trial.

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The Prosecutor General's Office in Moscow said Thursday the Russian murder investigation would allow anyone accused in what is now being considered a murder to be prosecuted in Russia.

A private funeral in London on Thursday was attended by about 30 of Litvinenko's family and friends. His remains were sealed in an airtight coffin to protect against radiation leaks.

Kovtun and Lugovoi suspected a frame-up

Another former KGB agent, Andrei Lugovoi, told the Russian media he and Kovtun met Litvinenko in London to discuss a business opportunity. They later attended a soccer game between CSKA Moscow and Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium in north London.

Traces of polonium-210 have been detected at the stadium, though experts say radiation levels were too low to pose a risk to the public. Lugovoi is currently in hospital being monitored for radiation contamination.

Kovtun and Lugovoi have told Russian reporters they suspect someone is trying to frame them for Litvinenko's death.

A close friend of Litvinenko's, Alex Goldfarb, said last week that the former spy voiced suspicions about Lugovoi from his deathbed.

Goldfarb said he told British police Litvinenko did not want to publicize details of his encounters with Lugovoi because he hoped he would be able to recover and lure his alleged assailant back to London.

Litvinenko had been fiercely critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin's government and had been investigating the murder of an outspoken anti-Kremlin reporter when he was poisoned. He accused Putin of orchestrating his murder.



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Neo-Con Salafis (Saudi-Salafis)

Yamin Zakaria
London UK
1 Dec 06

In the 13th century, Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, led the brutal Mongol invasion of Baghdad, turning the river Euphrates and Tigris red with blood of men, women and children. To instil fear and humiliation, the invaders made pyramids with the human skulls of the victims. For the same reasons, the neo-Mongols of today made similar pyramids with the bodies of naked Iraqis. Clearly technological advancements does not always equate to advancement of civilisation; at least Hulagu Khan was honest, and did not pretend to wear the mask of civilisation while his men carried out atrocities!

The advancing Mongols were halted after their defeat by Sultan Baybars in the battle of Ein Jalut in 1260. Subsequently, the Mongol invaders were absorbed by the Muslims. This is a distinct episode of human history, where the invading conquerors assimilated into the culture and religion of the conquered nations. Yet, the medieval propaganda that Islam was spread by the sword continues to be propagated, by the 'enlightened' and scientifically advanced minds of today.
Prior to Sultan Baybars, Salahuddin Al-Ayubi came to the defence of Muslims and non-Muslims of Palestine, and liberated it from the clutches of the barbaric crusaders. After Sultan Baybars, came the rule of the Othmania Caliphate (Ottomans). It produced the likes of Sultan Muhammad Al-Fatih, who liberated Istanbul (Constantinople) at the age of 21, partly fulfilling the prophecy of Prophet Muhammad (SAW). The Islamic State reached its apex under the rule of Suleiman Al-Qanuni (Suleiman the Magnificent), who was on the verge of opening up Venice to Islamic rule.

After his demise, the Islamic State kept declining, with its inherent problems of economic and cultural stagnation. The gap between the Islamic State and secular Europe increased significantly after the Industrial Revolution, because now the European powers could produce much larger quantities of military hardware over a shorter period of time. This led to loss of territory in a series of disastrous wars and increasingly the Ottoman State fell under the financial control of the European powers, who labelled it as "the sick man of Europe'. Furthermore, fuelled by nationalism and inspired by outside forces, internal rebellions from the various ethnic groups increased, after living together in harmony for centuries under the Islamic State.

The last independent Ottoman Sultan was Abdul Hamid, who was renowned for refusing to sell Palestine to the Zionists, despite being tempted by huge amounts of money and at the time the state was in huge debt. He also tried to eradicate the notorious network of freemasonry which was prevalent within the Islamic State. During the Ottoman rule, there were Sultans in other parts of the Islamic world that also defended the Muslim community, for example, Ahmad Shah Durrani (Ahmad Shah Abdali) of Afghanistan, Imam Shamil of the Caucasus, and Sheikh Uthman Dan Fodio who established the Sokoto Caliphate over Nigeria, Cameroon and other parts of West Africa.

Eventually, the Ottoman Islamic State was symbolically demolished in 1924. This was achieved by the collective effort of the colonial powers (Britain and France), the Turkish nationalist movement (Young Turks), and the treacherous Arab regimes that were aided by the Wahhabi (Salafi) movement. The Wahhabi movement 'legitimised' the revolt against the Islamic State, as they considered everyone as an apostate unless they followed the Wahhabi school of thought. Whilst the British schemed to create the Arab revolt, the French worked to create the revolt of the Young Turks, both groups worked for the destruction of the Caliphate.

As a just 'reward' for their treachery, the colonial nations handed Palestine to the Zionists. People forget that these Arabs aided by the Salafi movement, were complicit with the Zionists in creating the Israeli cancer. Also, the colonial powers betrayed the Arabs by carving up the rest of the region, according to the secret treaty of Sykes-Picot. They created petty kingdoms ruled over by puppet dictators to serve their policy of divide and conquer. Some of the countries are so small and artificial that it can be classified as an oil field with a flag. The colonial powers even manufactured royal dynasties out of wild Bedouins who were operating as bandits.

In the absence of the Caliphate who will come to the defence of the Muslims now? With the demise of the Caliphate, the incursions into the Islamic lands have increased, as has the killing of Muslims and the exploitation of their resources. Most of the puppet regimes in the Muslim world continue to function like the coolies of the British Raj, always ready to serve and take orders in order to preserve their self-interests. They would sell anything to maintain their oil fields, empty palaces, shopping complexes and Filipino 'maids'. After the Iraqi invasion, one of the members of the Kuwaiti royal family stated on TV that he would embrace the devil to regain his oil-field (Kuwait) in the south of Iraq. There was no Fatwa (Islamic edict) to pronounce him as an apostate from the land that produces endless fatwas against anyone, except those who show support for the pro-US puppet regimes!

When Iraq was attacked by the US-led coalition in 1991, these Gollum (Smeagol) like Salafi 'scholars' nearly choked trying to utter the word Jihad. Instead they gurgled and legitimised fighting the Muslims of Iraq under the American flag; some even saw 'Jihad' behind American troops in 1991! If fighting behind the Americans is Jihad, surely the likes of Bush and Sharon (a close ally of the US) are the Ameers (leaders) of Jihad! In reality this is Jihad in reverse gear, as the Muslims are the intended victims.

It was those same American troops that continued to commit the atrocities in Iraq, through enforcing the self-styled no-fly zone, and the cruel economic sanctions with direct cooperation from the Salafi orientated regimes. Then came the second invasion in 2003, the US troops committed atrocities in places like Abu-Ghraib, Baghdad, Fallujah, and Ramadi. To humiliate the Arab/Islamic world, they deliberately taped and aired the sadistic torture of Iraqis. In Haditha they gang raped a young girl and killed her along with her family, one of many such brutal crimes.

These Salafi orientated regimes managed to spin idiotic arguments for the naďve and their brain-dead followers. One of these claims is that the presence of US troops was good for Islam, as allegedly so many of them embraced Islam. According to these idiots, the blood of the Iraqi Muslims for some mysterious number of US soldiers allegedly converting to Islam was a good exchange! I suppose the first instruction given to those 'converts' by the Gollum like Salafi 'scholars' was to bomb the Muslims in Iraq! Was it their words of encouragement that led to the US forces, perhaps including the so-called 'converts', to massacre the retreating Iraqis on the road to Basra, and bury the defenceless Iraqi soldiers under the sand?

These Salafis describe the resistance in Palestine and Iraq as terrorists and extremists. Concurrently, they will not issue any criticism of the Pro-US regimes who are actively aiding the slaughter in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, because allegedly they have found a 'Hadith' which permits this treacherous stance. Even common sense tells us that this is a perverted interpretation of Islam, as they justify remaining silent and inactive when violence is inflicted upon the Muslims but become overtly critical against Muslims for retaliating against injustices. This stance contradicts human nature as well as Islamic evidences.

What then is the difference between the Salafi position and the neo-con ilk, who are leading the war on terror (Islam)? Only the shameless and treacherous ones would adopt the same position as those who have raped and tortured their children, mothers and sisters in a manner that is not even found amongst animals. Yet, these charlatans have the audacity to call themselves followers of the real pious predecessors (Salafis) that came after the demise of Prophet Muhammad (SAW). Therefore, the label 'neo-con salafis' or Saudi-Salafis is most appropriate for them. This also distinguishes them from the Jihadi-Salafis, who are far more consistent.

According to the neo-con Salafi obsession of purifying the creed (Aqeeda), liberation (purification) of Palestine should be a top priority. This is because Palestine includes Masjid Al-Aqsa (Jerusalem, Al-Quds), which is explicitly mentioned in the Quran and in the Hadiths, as a purified sacred place for the Muslims. Of course that is difficult as the Salafi orientated Saudi regime is closely aligned with the US and by implication allied with Israel. No one can dispute that the US provides the lifeline for Israel. So how will these neo-con Salafis liberate Palestine when they are aligned with the US and the Israelis? Thus, to date, not a single item of literature has been produced by these neo-con Salafis, as to how they visualise liberating Palestine.

When the Muslims in Bosnia were being massacred and raped by the Christian-terrorists of Europe, the Saudi-Salafis blamed the victims (Bosnians) for their fate, because they were bad Muslims. Surely, such arguments are also applicable to the Palestinians and the Iraqis who are also suffering. If we recall, Prophet Muhammad (SAW) sent an army seeking retribution for the dishonoring of one woman, and there was no discussion if she was a good Muslim or a bad Muslim. What the Saudi-Salafis really meant was: the Bosnians were apostates, so they have no obligation to help them, and they have the same opinion of the others, but the existing public opinion makes it difficult to express their real views. Isn't it convenient for those who blame the victim, because they can simple turn their backs on them! Some would call it treachery and cowardice. This is why those planes should have been rammed against the palaces of these oppressors, instead of the WTC. Remove the snake inside your house, before you attempt to fight the bigger beast outside.

The paradox is: the neo-con Salafis (Saudi-Salafis) incessantly attack the mainstream Muslims by calling them deviants, as their Aqeeda is not pure enough, yet they have no problem in aligning with belligerent non-Muslims with a false Aqeeda and not just a deviant one. Note, the US bases in Saudi Arabia, and the other smaller Gulf States are used to launch murderous campaigns against the Muslims in Iraq, Palestine and else where, this has hardly bothered the conscience of the neo-con Salafis. Did the Prophet (SAW) not cleanse this land (Saudi Arabia, Hijaz, Najd) and say this is exclusively for the people of Tawhid (monotheism)? How can we explain this paradox, when these neo-con Salafis scream Shirk (Polytheism), Bidda (Innovation) and Kufr (Disbelief) but they are most comfortable with the presence of those hostile foreign forces that displays Shirk, Bidda and Kufr and even go beyond it?

This paradoxical behaviour of the neo-con Salafi can be explained if we dig deeper. Although they classify the rest of the Muslims (non Salafis) as deviants, but in reality they are viewed as apostates. Because, the neo-con Salafis follow the Khawarij doctrine of elevating minor issues of sin to major issues of disbelief (Kufr), hence like the Khawarij they pronounce Takfir (declare someone as an apostate) frequently. However, to avoid being isolated they say a particular notion makes one deviant instead of an apostate, but this is simply clever language on their part.

Therefore, the neo-con Salafis are also the Khawarij (neo-Khawarij) of today. Accordingly they see no real problems with the killings of the Palestinians or the Iraqis or the Bosnians, as they are unbelievers being killed for their sins by another group of unbelievers (the Israelis, Americans, and Serbs). Consequentially, Salafi orientated regimes like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf States find it easy to abuse the poor Muslim workers who have come from places like Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Egypt, Sudan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Yemen. These poor workers are often paid very low salaries, and some occasions paid a lower than what was agreed and there are many cases of withholding payments for long periods. This is disgusting behavior and naked oppression by any standards.

When such criticisms have been raised they become Salafi-Capitalist, arguing that the labor force should move elsewhere for greater salary. So, the Islamic brotherhood vanishes, the purity of the Aqeeda is put aside, and exploiting the poverty faced by the poor Muslims is deemed acceptable and even 'Islamic'. They are depicting the Sunnah of the pre-Islamic pagan Arabs. Is there a chance of issuing a 'fatwa' on this type of issue? Then the neo-Con Salafis have the audacity to lecture these poor Muslim workers facing exploitation about how deviant they are in their Aqeeda. In contrast, the white Europeans and Americans are paid promptly and paid a far greater salary for doing the same work. This is the consequence of having deep inferiority complex and racist views. There is no chance of squeezing a 'fatwa' out of them on this issue either.

True to their rebellious Khawarij nature, they aided the destruction of the Caliphate, replaced it with oppressive monarchies. Surely this is one of the greatest form of innovation (Bidda)? Old habits die hard, so they remain active in opposing those who are trying to re-establish the Caliphate, using various pretexts. For example, they say they do not oppose the notion of the Caliphate (Islamic State) but the creed of those who are trying to re-establish it, and at times they have had the chutzpah to question their sincerity. Obviously this is an excuse, otherwise by now we would have seen plenty of literatures and books on the notion of the Caliphate from these neo-Khawarij. In any case, did the Prophet (SAW) test the creed of all the companions before the establishment of the first Islamic State of Medina?

Perhaps these neo-Khawarij are shy to proclaim that they consider the current rulers as legitimate. They were dancing and celebrating with the American forces after the killing of Muslims (or non-Muslims?) in Iraq! Never mind the dead Iraqis, but I would have thought a fatwa on the issue on dancing and celebrating with the American unbelievers would have been pronounced by now, from the land of 'fatwas'.

For these neo-Khawarij, the Shi'ites are worse than the American soldiers massacring the Iraqis and presumably worse than the Zionist that are murdering Palestinians and Lebanese everyday! Accordingly they criticised the Shi'ites in Lebanon for fighting the Israelis, a close friend of their American masters, and simultaneously remained silent towards the Shi'ites in Iraq who collaborated with the Americans. These neo-Khawarij have been living with the Shi'ites for centuries and they only became a problem after Khomeini came to power in 1979, challenging the legitimacy of the Saudi regime. It was at this juncture we witnessed the circulation of anti-Shi'ite literatures from that part of the world.

To divert attention away from the occupation and slaughter facing the Muslims, the neo-con Salafis insist that everyone should accept their interpretation of certain metaphysical issues that has no real consequences for our life on earth. Nothing else can be discussed until this is resolved. So shedding of the blood of the Muslims, addressing famine, and other forms of tragedy does not rank very high on their list of priorities, assuming it is on their list in the first place! Perhaps helping Muslims in need is considered a minor Prophetic tradition (Sunnah)! But then again, there are no Muslims unless one is a neo-Khawarij (Saudi-Salafi or neo-Con Salafi)!

These neo-Khawarij are well-known for attacking the mainstream Muslims for following the established Madhabs (the traditional Schools of thought). They say you should not follow the Scholars but only the Quran and Sunnah (Hadiths) of the Prophet (SAW). Which tacitly implies the previous Scholars did not do that. In any case this is a redundant argument as following the opinion of a scholar is a must, unless one is a scholar who is capable of deducing the rules from the Islamic texts. The vast majority of the Muslims are not scholars. Therefore, the neo-Khawarij claim of following the Quran and Sunnah in reality means: do not follow the established Madhabs but follow our interpretation of the Quran and Sunnah, i.e. our Madhab. So instead of referring to the books of the traditional scholars like the Hanafi, Shafee, Maliki, Hanbali, Ghazali, and others, you should pickup 'only' the books of Al-Albani or Bin-Baaz.

According to these neo-Khawarij, the solution to our problems means going back to the 14th century and continuing the philosophical/theological debate that was initiated as a result of encountering Greek Philosophy. In essence, when everyone becomes a neo-Khawarij, our problem will be magically solved! The US soldiers will then suddenly run in fear seeing the prevailing of the Khawarij (Salafi) compliant doctrines, Israel will cease to exist, and our lands from Morocco to Indonesia will be free and unified under a single Caliphate, finally the oil will be ours, and it will be sold at genuine market prices, the revenue will be used for the welfare of the entire Muslim Ummah (community)!

The neo-Khawarij hide behind their superficial piety which they like to display and brag about, and then confuse the unwary Muslim by citing books, scholars and technical terms. It is easy to promote the above mentioned arguments, as the vast majority of the Saudi-Salafi followers are brain-dead, incapable of thinking independently and rationally about their situation. This is why they fear the wooden cross or the tombstones over the graves, more than the American firepower.

Moreover, they have been programmed to attack the mainstream Muslims and to raise irrelevant minor issues, so that focus is kept away from their paymasters and from vital issues like the mass killings of the Muslims. The Saudi-Salafis talk, you must listen. You challenge them by the constructing your own thoughts then automatically you are reduced to a deviant innovator lacking in scholarly knowledge. There is no doubt the neo-Khawarij are the fifth columnist, they will be at the forefront of fighting the Caliphate when it returns. If we are to learn from history this time we should be prepared to shed their blood and make them extinct, if it is necessary!



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Zionists Continue The Slaughter


UN plea for millions in Palestinian aid amid fears of economic collapse

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
Friday December 8, 2006
The Guardian

- Half of population going short of food, agencies say
- Senior officials warn of breakdown of government

UN aid agencies launched their biggest appeal for funding to tackle the humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territories yesterday, asking for $453m (Ł231m) for next year and warning of a weakening in the Palestinians' ability to govern.

Senior UN aid officials in Jerusalem said there were clear signs of a worsening economic crisis. Around two thirds of the 4 million Palestinian population were living below the poverty line and half the population were "food-insecure", meaning they could not afford the basic foods to meet dietary needs. Unemployment was running as high as 40% in the Gaza strip and at around 25% in the West Bank.
Most of the money will be spent on emergency food aid and economic recovery, including job programmes. Kevin Kennedy, the UN humanitarian coordinator, said the crisis was not only an economic collapse but was also tied to an increase in closures and access restrictions imposed on the occupied territories by the Israeli government and to continued conflict, internal political fighting and a breakdown of law and order.

The UN has warned there has been a gradual weakening of the Palestinian Authority. The crisis results from an international boycott imposed in March after the Hamas militant movement won elections and formed a government. Israel has since withheld $60m a month of tax revenues that should go to the Palestinians.

Although some of that money has been spent paying the Palestinian bills of Israeli electricity and water companies, the Israelis have now withheld nearly $600m.

The international community, under the Quartet of the US, the UN, the EU and Russia, has also halted direct funding to the Palestinian government, saying it must recognise Israel, halt violence and accept past peace agreements. The freeze means salaries for 160,000 government workers have largely gone unpaid.

Mr Kennedy said the UN programme was not trying to replace the Palestinian Authority, but he added: "Obviously the longer the current situation continues, with further deterioration, a lack of salaries, people on strike, continued military conflict on both sides, [the] further [the] weakening of the Palestinian Authority and its institutions."

The Quartet has proposed that Israel begin passing on the tax revenues it owes via a system called the temporary international mechanism, which channels money to the office of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, a leader of the more moderate Fatah party, and not directly to the rival Hamas government. But so far Israel is withholding the revenues.

In the past year the UN said there had been a 40% increase in the number of barriers and checkpoints across the West Bank. In addition, there have been continued closures of the crossing points for people and goods out of Gaza. Under an agreement negotiated last November, Israel was to open up the main crossing points to relieve the economic crisis. But the crossings have in effect been closed, with Israel citing security concerns.

On top of the economic crisis and the restrictions on movement, in recent weeks talks between Mr Abbas and Hamas to form a coalition government appear to have entirely broken down.

Comment: Historically, when attempts to subdue and enslave a native population by way of force and intimidation did not work, it was a very popular tactic among politicians of colonising nations to resort to starvation.

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4 Palestinians killed, 13 injured and 117 taken prisoner in last 7 days

IMEMC
08 December 2006

The Palestinian center For Human Rights, in Gaza, published its weekly report on the Israeli violations and illegal activities in the occupied territories in the period between 30 Nov - Sep 6. The center reported that four Palestinians, including two children, were killed, and thirteen, including 7 children, were injured.

Also the center added than one Palestinian child died of earlier wounds sustained in an Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip.

The center also reported that soldiers carried 37 military invasion in several Palestinian areas in the occupied West Bank. During these military offensives, Israeli soldiers took prisoner 117 Palestinians including five children and one woman.

Eight Palestinian civilians were taken prisoner at Israeli checkpoints installed in several areas in the occupied West Bank.

Also, four Palestinian houses and four civilian establishments were demolished in Qalqilia and Bethlehem.

All border crossings in the Gaza Strip remained closed, but were partially opened it certain cases to allow the entry of food, medical supplies and other medications. The movement of the residents remained restricted.

Israeli continued the construction of the illegal Annexation Wall in the West Bank, demolished a house and informed five Palestinian families that their house would be demolished.

Settlers in the occupied West Bank continued their attacks against the Palestinian residents and their property especially in Hebron and Qalqilia.

A Palestinian house in a village, south of Hebron, was fired at by setters driving on bypass road Nr. 60, and one resident was injured by a round of live ammunition in his shoulder. One Palestinian child was also seriously injured in Hebron.




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Israeli Army attacks two local radio stations in Hebron, abducts one journalist

IMEMC
08 December 2006

The Israeli army invaded two radio stations in Hebron and took one of their staff prisoner in the West Bank city of Hebron on Thursday night, Palestinian sources reproted.

At lest 10 army vehicles surrounded the building where the two stations offices are then stormed the offices, soldiers forced the employees of the two stations in one room, then searched and ransacked the studios.

Eyewitness reports say that troops invaded Siraj and Radio Al Huriya local radio stations and abducted Siraj station director Abd Al Jabar Abu Sneinah.
Sa'ed Al Shyukhi, a journalist at Radio Al Huria (Freedom Radio) told IMEMC that soldiers forcefully strip-searched all the employees, then locked them up them in one small room.

He added that all 15 journalists were forced to crouch for 2 hours, " The treated us as like animals" Al Shyukhi said.

Soldiers also confiscated the transmitter of Siraj radio claming it intrrupts Israeli army gunships flying over Hebron area. They also took some other equipments of the station.

According to Shyukhi, troops took Abu Sneinah to unknown location saying that they will release him soon, however, so far, he has not been released.

Israeli army often assult journalist in an attempt to force to leave the area in order not to document the Israeli violations of Human Rights in Palesine, which will make them look bad, Al-Shyukhi added.



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One day after opening it, Israel closes the Rafah Border Crossing

IMEMC & Agencies
07 December 2006

Wa'el Abu Al Thahab, media spokesperson of the border crossing and the presidential guards, reported on Thursday, that Israel closed the Rafah Border Crossing, linking between Egypt and Gaza Strip. The Crossing was opened on Wednesday morning.

The Israeli closure of the crossing forced hundreds of residents back home especially after several hundreds headed to the crossing after Israel opened on Wednesday. Only several hundreds managed to cross on Wednesday.

A Palestinian security source said that the crossing was opened for the Palestinian residents stranded on the Egyptian side to enable them come back to Gaza, and for humanitarian and urgent cases.

Israel closed the Rafah Border Crossing since it initiated the Summer Rains offensive six months ago, Since then, the crossing was opened for limited hours on a number of days over the past six months.
The Rafah Border Crossing was closed ton June 25, and was only opened for several short periods enabling some residents to cross back into the Gaza Strip.

At least eight residents died at the Rafah Border Crossing since August after they were stranded there for several weeks due to the Israeli closure and siege imposed on the Gaza Strip after Palestinian fighters captured an Israeli soldier in a raid that targeted a military post near the Gaza borders.

Comment: This is the gateway through which Palestinians receive food and essential supplies. The Israel government is clearly engaging in a policy of slow starvation of the Palestinian people, and no one cares, because no one hears about it, because the mainstream media, upon which Western populations have come to depend for their daily dose of "reality", will not report it.

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Baker panel's mention of Palestinian "right of return" raises eyebrows

AFP
6 Dec 06

A reference to Palestinians' "right of return" in the report issued by the high-level Iraq Study Group broke a diplomatic taboo which sparked immediate concern in Israel and surprise among Middle East policy experts.

The reference was buried deep inside a 160-page report that urged US President George W. Bush to renew efforts to revive Israel-Palestinian peace talks as part of a region-wide bid to end the chaos in Iraq.
"This report is worrisome for Israel particularly because, for the first time, it mentions the question of the 'right of return' for the Palestinian refugees of 1948," said a senior Israeli official, who was reacting to the US policy report on condition he not be identified.

A Middle East analyst who was involved in the Iraq Study Group discussions but did not participate in drafting the report expressed surprise when the reference was pointed out to him by a reporter.

"It's hard to know whether that language got in there because of carelessness -- I know there were many revisions up to the very last minute -- or whether it was a deliberate attempt to fuse something to the Bush rhetoric which wasn't there before," the analyst said.

The 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians calls for a resolution of the issue of Israeli and Palestinian "refugees" as part of a final status agreement that would include the creation of a Palestinian state.

But they do not use the term "right of return", which is a long-standing Palestinian demand -- rejected by Israel -- that Palestinians who fled or were driven out of what was to become the Jewish state in 1948, as well as their descendants, be allowed to return home.

Bush, in a 2002 speech in the White House Rose Garden, became the first US president to formally back the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, but he also did not mention a right of Palestinian 'return'.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group's co-chairman is former secretary of state James Baker, who as the top diplomat for Bush's father in the early 1990s clashed with Israel over its handling of the Palestinian issue.

Among his group's 79 recommendations for a policy shift on Iraq, number 17 concerned five points it said should be included in a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

The final point in the list was: "Sustainable negotiations leading to a final peace settlement along the lines of President Bush's two-state solution, which would address the key final status issues of borders, settlements, Jerusalem, the right of return and the end of conflict."

"'Right of return' is not in Oslo I or Oslo II, it's not in the Bush Rose Garden speech, it's not even in UN 181, the original partition resolution -- it's part of the Palestinian discourse," said the US analyst.



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Get Out Now


Top Level Insiders Selling Their Stock

December 7, 2006
NY Post

America's corporate chiefs are unloading their own stocks at one of the boldest paces in 20 years.

In cases of the very rich, such as Microsoft's Bill Gates and Google's top brass, the executives are selling a whopping $63 for each $1 of stock they bought, says a report by Bloomberg.

In November alone, leaders of public companies dumped $8.4 billion worth of stock they owned as insiders, most of it awarded as compensation, bonuses or other management incentives.

But the vast majority of the executives put their windfall cash to work elsewhere, with just $133 million being plowed back into purchases of more company stock.

Analysts say a take-the-money-and-run flight from their own companies signals a growing lack of confidence in the economy's future course, as well as fears of a possible global meltdown if the Iraq crisis escalates across borders.
It's also a good time to take profits, with the Dow Jones industrial average up nearly 15 percent this year, the S&P 500 ahead 13 percent, and the Nasdaq 11 percent higher.

Wall Street investors are displaying fresh worries that the Federal Reserve might pull the trigger too quickly on hiking rates again, possibly plunging the U.S. into a recession as the Fed did in 2000.

Just before the worst of the 2000 recession, insider sales were also at a near record.

Leading the latest wave of insider selling is Microsoft, with $594.2 million of stock sold by insiders during November, with Gates unloading $581.1 million.

Gates has been selling shares regularly - including $2.1 billion last year - as he whittles down his once mammoth stake, putting a big chunk of his wealth to work in a not-for-profit foundation that invests in a wide range of securities and other deals.

Billionaire Paul Allen also sold off 28 percent of his stake last month in DreamWorks Animation SKG for $224.2 million, keeping about 21 million shares.

Insiders at Seagate sold $311.8 million in November, while Google insiders unloaded $182.1 million in the four weeks.

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt and its co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have usually led the insider-selling parade with sales of hundreds of millions as the stock rose steadily to break the $500 mark.

Comment: Eh...do ya think we should take this as a subtle hint? Naaah! Our government and business leaders would warn us, the little people, if we were in danger of losing everything...wouldn't they?...

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An 80-hour week for 5p an hour: the real price of high-street fashion

Randeep Ramesh in Dhaka
Friday December 8, 2006
The Guardian

Factories in Bangladesh are breaking pledges to workers made by big UK retailers [Ed: they would not be doing so without the consent of the big UK retailers]

Bangladeshi factory workers

Bangladeshi factory workers take part in a protest to demand better pay. Photograph: Pavel Rahman/AP



Some of Britain's best-known high street brands are selling "cheap chic" clothes at the expense of workers in Bangladesh who are paid 5p an hour despite pledges to protect basic labour rights, an investigation by War on Want will reveal today.

Employees in Bangladesh are forced to work excessive hours, refused access to trade unions and face abuse and sacking if they protest, says the report, Fashion Victims, based on interviews with 60 garment workers from six factories.


War on Want says that although Primark, Asda and Tesco have stated publicly they will limit the working week and pay a "living wage" overseas, these commitments are flouted in their suppliers' factories. The Guardian, which interviewed workers in Dhaka, confirmed the allegations of excessive hours and poor working conditions in the report. Employees making clothes for the three retailers said they had no choice but to work longer than the agreed 60 hours a week.

Nazmul, 24, whose job is to stick pins into shirts, said he regularly worked more than 80 hours a week, with only one day off a fortnight. With overtime he makes 2,400 taka (Ł17) a month. "If a big order comes in we have to work. [In Britain] you get three-for-two offers. It is we people who have to make the third shirt for you. There's no choice. We just get shouted at. There are others who will take my place if I do not work."

Women, who make up two-thirds of the workforce, are particularly vulnerable. Another worker, Veena, 23, said she was accused of stealing a piece of cloth and sacked after complaining of sexual harassment. "I did not steal but I refused to do what the manager asked me [to do]. There is no union. Who can I complain to? Who will get my job back?"

War on Want says bargains in Britain, such as jeans for Ł3 and cocktail dresses for Ł6, are possible only because retailers wrench lower prices from suppliers in Bangladesh who get clothes stitched at the lowest possible cost.

The country has the cheapest garment workers in the world, with wages halving in real terms in the past 10 years. Experts say a living wage in Bangladesh would be 3,000 taka, well above shopfloor salaries in an industry of 2 million employees, despite massive street protests in September. Factories disgorge thousands of workers into huge slums constructed of bamboo, tin and concrete above fetid inky-black lakes.

Salma, 21, lives with two other girls in a tiny room in Begun Bari slum. Her basic wage is 1,150 taka a month for 48 hours a week as a shopfloor assistant making Primark clothes. By working to 3am she can double that. A factory job is one of the few socially acceptable ways for a woman to earn a living in a conservative Muslim country. "It is a hard life. I am shouted at. I prefer this to the village where [women] are not allowed to work."

There are dangers, however. After garment factory collapses and fires in Bangladesh left nearly 100 workers dead this year, safety has become an issue. War on Want claims emergency exits are often locked. Louise Richards, the charity's chief executive, said UK prices were at "rock bottom" only because of exploitation. "The companies are not even living up to their own commitments."

Factory owners said the $8bn a year clothing export industry was under intense scrutiny by foreign buyers but there was no extra cash for "social improvements".

Mohammed Lutfor Rahman, vice president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers & Exporters Association, said western companies had imposed codes of conduct and sent inspectors to enforce the rules, counting fire exits and auditing overtime records. "I am asked about how many light bulbs we use in the factory and where is our toilet? But who pays for these things? The buyers' profits are going up. But if we ask for more money for improvements they say China is very cheap. It is a threat to move the work somewhere else."

Mr Rahman, whose factory sells mostly to German companies, took the Guardian on a tour of one of his units. On the third floor, rows of women stitched jackets under fans. "It is too cramped now. We are moving outside Dhaka."

Companies mentioned in the report said they had not seen it but took the issue seriously. Chris McCann, Asda's ethical standards manager, said he hoped the charity would share the findings so "we can do something about it". He said if he could identify the factories, there would be an audit of labour practices. "We have a clear policy and commitments. If these are violated we will investigate and expect the issues will be resolved. If people are being abused then frankly it is unacceptable."

A Tesco spokesperson said: "Tesco offers affordable clothing to UK customers - including many low-income families - but this is not achieved through poor working conditions in our suppliers' factories. All suppliers to Tesco must demonstrate that they meet our ethical standards on worker welfare, which are closely monitored. Our suppliers comply with local labour laws, and workers at all Bangladeshi suppliers to Tesco are paid above the national minimum wage."

Geoff Lancaster, head of public relations at Primark, said the company had been involved in trying to raise standards in Bangladesh and would investigate. It denied it was cutting costs so British shoppers benefited from cheap prices. "We use huge volumes, deal directly with suppliers cutting out the middlemen and do not advertise. That's how we get best value."

Names of workers have been changed.





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U.S. says trade friction with China could escalate

Reuters
8 Dec 06

HONG KONG - The United States sees potentially escalating trade friction with China next year as Beijing is stepping up restrictions on foreign investment and recent U.S. Congressional elections create uncertainty, a U.S. trade official said on Friday.

"There's potential next year for greater friction in the trade relationship," Franklin Lavin, U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, told a business lunch during a visit to Hong Kong.

Lavin said the United States' record trade deficit with China was not in itself a problem but barriers to market access for U.S. companies in China were.
"From the Department of Commerce's point of view a pure bilateral trade deficit is not intrinsically a sign of a problem," he said. "We look at market access: can U.S. businesses fairly compete?"

It was uncertain how U.S.-Sino relations would be affected by Congressional elections in the United States last month, which gave the Democrats control of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, he said.

China in the past two years had become much more ambivalent about the role of foreign direct investment in its economy and was becoming more selective and not always willing to let market forces work, Lavin said.

Meanwhile piracy remained widespread in China and a number of items were still subject to high tariffs.

Lavin hoped the two sides could resolve these issues without the U.S. having to resort to formal trade action but said China needed to show flexibility.

Meetings in Beijing next week between Chinese officials and a top-level U.S. delegation led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and including U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, would help, he said.

"The most effective way to resolve trade issues is through talking," he said. "The least effective way is formal trade action."

Massive increases in steel production capacity in China would lead to global oversupply in a few years if it continues at the current pace, resulting in dumping or subsidized trade, Lavin said.

However, he gave China generally high marks for completing its obligations in the first five years of its admission to the
World Trade Organization.

He also said there was a window of opportunity in the next few months for the WTO to salvage the Doha Round of trade talks.

"The U.S. needs to move," he said. "We are prepared to move but we're not going it alone."

Washington was looking primarily at Brussels to make a move as well.

"We know, as does Brussels, that we've got distortions in our markets, principally agriculture," he said.



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Thieves steal wallet from man dying in street

Times Online
08/12/2006

Thieves stole a man's wallet and keys as he lay dying in the street, Scotland Yard said today.

George Boyle, 58, had collapsed close to his home in Galvestone House, Harford Street, suffering from severe chest pains on November 22, when it is thought three suspects struck.

A neighbour eventually raised the alarm, and Mr Boyle was taken to the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, east London where he later died. The theft was discovered by medical staff at the hospital and alerted police.

Two women, aged 29 and 31, and a 36-year-old man were arrested in connection with the theft and have been bailed to return to an east London police station next month.



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Target Iran


Iran's Holocaust Conference Plan Prompts Anger

Deutsche Welle
6 Dec 06

A proposed conference that stirred ire in Germany earlier this year is now slated to take place next week. Iran is behind the meeting, which is expected to be a platform for Holocaust deniers.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has dismissed the Holocaust as a myth.

And last January, the Iranian government announced it would hold a conference on the Holocaust. It said it intended to invite academics such as German neo-Nazi Horst Mahler and the Israeli journalist and Christian convert Israel Shamir, both of whom are Holocaust deniers.

Back in January, Western politicians, especially in Germany, were up in arms at the plan -- although it was debated at the time whether the conference would actually take place, and what it was intended to provoke. Now, however, it seems clear that it will take place after all.

Questioning the gas chambers

Iran's foreign ministry has invited scholars from 30 countries to discuss questions such as the scale of the Holocaust, and whether or not the Nazis really used gas chambers to kill Jews.

Deputy Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mohammadi said 67 researchers from countries including Britain, Germany and France would take part in the two-day meeting starting on Monday, according to Wednesday's Jomhuri-ye Eslami newspaper.

Not in attendance will be British historian David Irving. He was on the original invitation list, but is currently serving a three-year jail term in Austria for Holocaust denial.

Ahmadinejad: Holocaust open to question

Ahmadinejad caused international outrage last year when he said the Holocaust -- in which six million Jews were killed by the Nazis -- was a myth. He has not repeated that remark but has said the Holocaust is open to question.

Foreign Minister Mohammadi said the aim of the conference, dubbed "Holocaust, World Prospect," was to give scholars a chance to discuss the issue freely.

Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany and Austria

When the conference plans were firsted announced in January, German Green party chief Reinhard Bütikofer called it further evidence that Ahmadinejad was pursuing an "unrestrained policy of anti-Semitic indoctrination" in Iran.

Bütikofer said Ahmadinejad had used public statements questioning the legitimacy of the Holocaust to mobilize Iranian fundamentalists. This will lead, he said, to "the international isolation of the Iranian regime."

Legal consequences?

But speaking in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel earlier this year, Gert Weisskirchen, the foreign affairs spokesman for the Social Democratic Party, warned western leaders not to be sucked into a further row with Iran as the so-called "Holocaust experts" could not be taken seriously.

As well as condemning the conference, German politicians were quick to point out that any Germans who spoke at the conference would have to accept the legal consequences. Holocaust denial is a criminal offence in Germany.

But according to Gerry Gable, the former editor of anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, "Iran obviously has no law against Holocaust denial and therefore if (anyone) speaks there they will not be punished."



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Diplomatic efforts on Iran's nuclear issue run into deadlock

www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-08 10:50:16
by Xu Yanyan

TEHRAN, Dec. 7 (Xinhua) -- The controversial and highly sensitive Iranian nuclear issue, coming in the spotlight for more than three years, was stuck at a standstill by the end of 2006 due to the hardline stance pursued by both Tehran and the Western countries.
TEHRAN, Dec. 7 (Xinhua) -- The controversial and highly sensitive Iranian nuclear issue, coming in the spotlight for more than three years, was stuck at a standstill by the end of 2006 due to the hardline stance pursued by both Tehran and the Western countries.

The sticking point between the two sides was uranium enrichment activities, which Iran claimed for generating electricity while the West feared might be used to make nuclear weapons. Despite great efforts that the international community had paid to defusethe crisis, the whole situation was still inevitably fell into a deadlock.

IRAN'S URANIUM ENRICHMENT AND ITS NUCLEAR STANCE

Shortly after Tehran decided to resume uranium enrichment work, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on April 11 that the country had successfully produced 3.5 percent enriched uranium with its first group of 164 centrifuges.

Western countries, especially the U.S. feared that Iran's nuclear program was aimed at making nuclear weapons, but according to many experts, including the International Atomic Energy Agency(IAEA), uranium with 3.5 percent purity was at a pretty low level and was actually not enough to make a bomb.

However, Iran's top officials have made a lot of flinty comments on Western demand to freeze uranium enrichment, saying Iran was already a nuclear country and it was deserved to be respected as a powerful country by the international community.

Accompanying these remarks, an Iranian heavy water plant dived into circulation on Aug. 26, which was used to feed a neighboring nuclear research reactor under construction. The research reactoris going to be completed in 2009 despite IAEA's opposing attitude,and could produce plutonium for what Iran said of medical use at the appointed time.

What is more, Tehran confirmed the country's experts had installed the second group of another 164 centrifuges on Oct. 25 and said Iran had gained the product (uranium) several days later.

More over, President Ahmadinejad also disclosed Iran would install 3,000 centrifuges by the end of this year, and would finally have 60,000 for the whole program.

INTERNATIONAL EFFORTS, PRESSURE TO DEFUSE CRISIS AND IRAN'S RESISTANCE

In the face of Iran's uncompromising position, the international community outspread both persuasion and squeeze play, beginning a persistent effort to seek diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue.

Due to Iran's insistence to enrichment activities, the IAEA board of governors on Feb. 4 adopted a resolution at an emergency meeting to report Iran's nuclear issue to the UN Security Council.Iran immediately slashed at that decision and vowed it would not bend to such a "pressure".

In order to ease the tension between Iran and the international community, chief of UN nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei paid avisit to Tehran in April, he urged on Iran to abide by UN requestand to suspend its nuclear activities for a specific period of time, but Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani told him the UN Security Council statement on March 29 demanding Iran to freeze the enrichment-related activities was "not so important".

In June, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council(Britain, China, France, Russia, and the U.S.) plus Germany agreed a new package over Iran's disputed nuclear issues. The proposal included both incentives aimed at persuading Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and possible sanctions if Iran chooses not to comply.

Later, European Union (EU) foreign policy chief Javier Solana visited Tehran to present Iran the new six-nation proposal, and Iranian President Ahmadinejad promised to give a formal response on Aug. 22.

However, the international community seemed to have no patience to wait for Iran's answer for two months. The UN Security Councilon July 31 adopted a resolution by a vote of 14 to 1, urging Tehran to "suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development" by Aug. 31 or face the prospect of sanctions.

As a response, Iran's top leaders, especially Ahmadinejad have repeatedly said the country would not accept it and "the Iranian people do not give in to language of force".

On Aug. 22, in its formal response to the package, Iran didn't mention anything about "suspension", a huge slash to the world powers' effort. Soon, the UN deadline of Aug. 31 also passed, the UN Security Council received nothing from the Iranian government but Ahmadinejad's pledge "not to back down an inch from its legal rights in the face of intimidation".

In order to prevent the situation at that time from moving into further crisis, EU's Solana met with Larijani several times in September to discuss Iran's possibility to halt enrichment.

But after the month-long contact, the EU was disappointed with Tehran's uncompromising stance. On Oct. 17, the EU foreign ministers issued a statement which virtually admitted the failure of negotiations, saying that if Iran does not comply with UN Security Council's requirements, the EU would "work for the adoption of measures under Article 41 of the UN Charter," which stipulates economic and diplomatic sanctions.

Iran's top officials subsequently criticized EU's statement,saying it would destroy the opportunity to resolve Iran's nuclear issue peacefully and worsen the crisis in Mideast.



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US tells banks to shut down Iran operations

By Andrew Murray-Watson
03 December 2006

Several of the UK's largest banks fear they could face the full legislative wrath of the US government unless they bow to Washington's pressure to shut their operations in Iran.

It is believed that officials in President George Bush's administration have also put pressure on banks with operations in the US, including RBS, HSBC and Barclays, to stop acting on behalf of UK business customers in Iran. Barclays, it is thought, has already told its corporate clients that it will not accept deposits from transactions originating in Iran.




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France preps to back Lebanon peacekeepers

PARIS, Dec 7, 2006 (AFP)

France is ready to send drones flying over southern Lebanon to back the UN-mandated peacekeeping force there, a defence ministry spokesman said Thursday.

"It's an issue on which we are available to act, but we'll need a decision from the UN department for peacekeeping operations," spokesman Jean-François Bureau said.
"These means will allow us to extend the observation capabilities of UNIFIL (the UN Interim Force in Lebanon) in the area," he said.

France currently leads the UNIFIL deployment, to which it has contributed 1,650 soldiers and 13 modern Leclerc tanks. Other European countries, notably Italy, are also participating.

The beefed-up force was sent to southern Lebanon following the July-August war between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah militia to keep the two sides apart and prevent further hostilities.

Israel has been sending warplanes over Lebanon, ostensibly to monitor arms-smuggling routes along the Syrian border, but both Paris and Beirut have vehemently argued that the flights violate the UN resolution mandating the ceasefire and UNIFIL's deployment.

The French foreign ministry said Thursday that the UN had been informed of ""movements of arms" on the Syria-Lebanon border, though it added those have not been verified.

The French daily Le Monde quoted a "senior UN figure" saying there was "a constant and massive rearmament of Hezbollah."



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'There will be sanctions' on Iran, says French FM

PARIS, Dec 6, 2006 (AFP)

The powers making up the UN Security Council are agreed that "there will be sanctions" against Iran, though their extent is yet to be decided, France said Wednesday, after a Paris meeting on Tehran's nuclear programme.
"There is a question as to the extent of the sanctions, but there will be sanctions," Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told RTL radio.

He said the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany "agree on one thing: that there will be a United Nations Security Council resolution backed by all, including China and Russia.

Political directors from Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States met in the French capital late Wednesday to talk about what action to take against Iran, which defied a UN deadline of August 31 to cease enriching uranium.

Several of the countries, especially the United States, fear that despite Iran's insistence that it is pursuing civilian nuclear energy ambitions, the programme is in fact designed to build a nuclear arsenal.

Diplomats said the Paris meeting failed to reach agreement among the six countries on what sanctions should be applied.

Russia and China -- which have strong economic interests in Iran -- have tried to water down a draft UN Security Council resolution drawn up by France, Britain and Germany, while the United States has sought to harden it.

The European draft would bar trade with Iran in goods related to its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and impose financial and travel restrictions on persons and agencies involved.

According to diplomats in Paris, Russia -- though willing to back the trade ban -- is still opposed to sanctions being applied to individuals, though it will accept a ban on shipments of sensitive goods.

Tehran has warned it would regard any attempt to thwart its nuclear programme as an "act of hostility".

Douste-Blazy, at a joint media conference with his Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni, said France was "in a hurry" to see sanctions imposed.

"I think this is about the credibility of the United Nations Security Council," he said.

"To my mind, we are going to find a joint solution to be united behind a resolution," he said, adding that he would soon be speaking by telephone with the foreign ministers of the five other countries involved.

Livni, whose country is especially alarmed over Iran's nuclear ambitions and its expressed wish to see Israel one day wiped off the map, said decisions had to be made quickly, "because the Iranians are trying to stall" to win time to master the nuclear processes underway.

President Jacques Chirac, who also received Livni, reinforced Douste-Blazy's message by insisting on the "importance of solidarity in the international community on this issue concerning Iran," his spokesman said.

Comment: So when are we going to see sanctions on Israel for their nuclear programme, which is allowed to continue and develop without any threat of sanctions.

Come to think of it, when are we going to see any international condemnation of Israeli war crimes, for the apartheid wall, for the slaughter of the Palestinians?

Uh, sorry. We must have been dreaming for a moment.

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Cracks appear between Bush and Blair over need for talks with Iran and Syria

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
08 December 2006

Differences have emerged between Tony Blair and George Bush on strategy in the Middle East, even as the two leaders agreed that a major change of course was necessary in Iraq in the wake of the devastating critique delivered this week by a high-level bipartisan panel in Washington.

In a first sign of the intensified regional diplomatic drive urged by the Iraq Study Group (ISG), the Prime Minister will visit Israel and the Palestinian Territories - probably within the next 10 days or so - to try to break the logjam over the failure of the Palestinians to come up with a unity government to embark on new negotiations. The mission had the full support of the US, Mr Bush declared.

But at a joint press conference after a White House meeting yesterday, the President ruled out early talks with Iran and Syria, as the ISG strongly recommended and on which Britain seems much keener.
Though he held the door open to their inclusion in a regional support group to tackle the Iraq crisis, this could only happen if the two neighbours "faced their responsibilities" and ceased funding terrorists and threw their weight behind Iraq's fragile democracy.

But the direct talks with Tehran seen by some experts as an essential part of a new US strategy remain out of the question, Mr Bush stressed, until the regime verifiably suspended uranium enrichment. British officials later refused to make such a connection, pointing to the full diplomatic relations that exist between London and Tehran.

In the case of Syria - recently visited by Mr Blair's top foreign policy adviser - Mr Bush was equally uncompromising. Any serious discussions between Washington and Damascus depended on Syria not fomenting terrorism against Iraq and ceasing its meddling in Lebanon, he said.

In general Mr Blair sounded distinctly more enthusiastic about the report, welcoming the "strong way forward" it set out. But the President stressed repeatedly that while it was "important," the ISG document was just one among several studies being prepared here, by the State Department, the Pentagon and the National Security Council. "I don't think Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton [the two co-chairmen of the ISG] expect us to accept every recommendation," he said. Mr Baker has admitted as much. But in testimony on Capitol Hill yesterday, the former secretary of state under the first President Bush insisted that "this is probably the only bipartisan report he's going to get." It was vital, he said, "not to treat it like a fruit salad," taking a bit here and a bit there.

Only when he has received and digested their recommendations will Mr Bush announce his new strategy in a major speech, within the next few weeks. But it appeared unlikely yesterday that he would meet the ISG's request for the launch of a new regional diplomatic initiative before the new year.

Yesterday's meeting was a sombre occasion, the first at which the two architects of the war had to confront, head on and in public together, the recent slide towards anarchy in Iraq. A tired-looking Mr Bush acknowledged that the situation was "bad" and "very tough," and that the task ahead was "daunting." But, he warned, the stakes could not be higher. A terrorist-dominated Middle East, he said, represented "an unprecedented threat to civilisation". As unwilling as ever to admit error, he described America's involvement in Iraq as "a noble mission". Unlike the Prime Minister, he spoke explicitly of "victory," insisting that it was "important for the entire world" that the US and Britain prevailed.

The two countries were facing "a difficult moment" in Iraq. But Mr Bush noted that yesterday was the 65th anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour, the event that propelled the US into the Second World War, in which Britain and the US had fought side by side. They had faced difficult moments then but had prevailed, just as they would in this conflict.

But differences in emphasis were evident. Mr Bush seemed only half-heartedly to accept the link between the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the crises in Lebanon and Iraq, all of which involve a clash between moderation and extremism, as the Prime Minister believes.

Meanwhile, Mr Blair could be facing a tough sell on his forthcoming trip. The Palestinians have yet to form a unity government between Hamas and Fatah in which the former unconditionally accepts Israel's right to exist. For his part, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has rejected any link between Iraq and his own country's "controversies" with the Palestinians, and ruled out an early restart to talks with Syria.

How the Bush/Blair relationship unfolded

February 2001

Tony Blair and George Bush hold their first face-to-face talks at Camp David. Blair is determined to preserve Britain's much-vaunted special relationship.

Summit score: Bush 1, Blair 1.

What happened next: Cordial relations cemented.

September 2001

Mr Blair is first out of the traps, flying to Washington to stand 'shoulder to shoulder' with Bush after the 9/11 attacks. In public, Blair's response looks more assured. In private, he urges Bush not to be hasty.

Summit score: Bush 0, Blair 1.

What happened next: The war in Afghanistan.

April 2002

At a crucial summit in Texas, Blair gives Bush a private pledge that Britain will back his moves to oust Saddam Hussein. They say nothing in public.

Summit score: Bush 4, Blair 0.

What happened next: The long march to war 11 months later begins.

July 2003

After an apparently successful war, the PM is greeted as a hero when he addresses the US Congress. He urges the US to avoid isolationism.

Summit score: Bush 1, Blair 2.

What happened next: En route from Washington to Tokyo he is told that the government scientist David Kelly had disappeared.

November 2004

In the US, Blair wins a public pledge that Bush will expend his 'capital' on breaking the deadlock in the Israel-Palestinian peace process. Bush says a Palestinian state could be created within four years.

Summit score: Bush 0, Blair 1.

What happened next: Not much, to Mr Blair's frustration (again).

May 2006

The leaders acknowledge that the problems in Iraq have lasted much longer than they anticipated but vow to stay the course.

Summit score: Bush O, Blair 0.

What happened next: The insurgency continues.




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Worldly Weirdness


Shiveluch Volcano Eruption Begins In Kamchatka

5.12.2006

Eruption of the Shiveluch volcano has begun on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the local branch of the Geophysical Service of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) reported.
According to the service experts, "A strong seismic event that continued for about half an hour" was registered on the volcano early on Tuesday. It was accompanied by spew of ash from the volcano crater and volcanic rock descent from the slopes.

According to data obtained from satellites, the volcano has spewed a cloud of ash to a height of about six kilometres. The plume moved to the north at a distance of 100 kilometres. An avalanche came down on the volcano slope along the Baidarnaya River bed. There has been no damage and threat to nearby settlements. The nearest populated locality - Klyuchi is located 50 kilometres from the volcano.

Shiveluch is one of the most active Kamchatka volcanoes. It is 3,283 metres high. Its eruptions are of explosive nature and are difficult to forecast. The volcano's preceding eruption was registered in September 2005.



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'Honey, I shrunk the particle accelerator'

PARIS, Dec 6, 2006 (AFP)

French physicists say they have developed a table-top-sized particle accelerator, a gadget that normally would need the equivalent of several large rooms.

Jérome Faure and Victor Malka at the ENSTA/CNRS laboratory near Paris injected electrons into a plasma wave created by a single intense laser pulse.
Their work, reported on Thursday in the weekly British journal Nature, builds on a two-year-old discovery in which scientists ionized helium, forming a plasma wave on which the electrons rode, like surfers catching an ocean break.

The French advance is to improve the technique so that the electron beam, previously unstable and highly variable, is stable and regulated, thanks to a second laser pulse that fires electrons like a slingshot into the plasma wave.

Particle accelerators are used in deep physics to try to understand the nature of fundamental matter and also have medical uses, such as destroying cancer cells by radiotherapy.

The work by Faure and Malka is still in its infancy, accelerating only electrons and not the other particles used in radiotherapy.

An early use would be to provide very short pulses of accelerated particles that could be used in radiography. It could delve beneath the surface of alloys, such as aircraft landing gear, to test for metal fatigue, Faure told AFP.



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Scientists say malaria fuels AIDS spread in Africa

By Will Dunham
Reuters
7 Dec 06

WASHINGTON - Malaria may be helping spread the
AIDS virus across Africa, the continent hardest hit by the incurable disease, scientists said on Thursday.

The way the two diseases interact greatly expands the prevalence of both among people in sub-Saharan Africa, a team of scientists said in a study in the journal Science.

Malaria, a mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite, greatly boosts viral load -- the amount of human immunodeficiency virus in the blood of infected people -- making them more likely to infect a sex partner with
HIV, they stated.
"Higher viral load causes more HIV transmission, and malaria causes high HIV viral load," said lead study author Laith Abu-Raddad of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and the University of Washington.

Abu-Raddad, an AIDS researcher, estimated that malaria has helped HIV infect hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa. AIDS was first identified a quarter century ago.

At the same time, HIV fuels malaria's spread because HIV-infected people are more susceptible to malaria as a result of HIV ravaging the immune system, the body's natural defenses, the researchers said.

AIDS and malaria are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. Abu-Raddad said scientists were puzzled when they realized that the risky sexual behavior by people in the region was not by itself sufficient to explain the swift spread of HIV, so other factors must be involved.

They focused their work on Kisumu, a Kenyan city by Lake Victoria where HIV and malaria are both common. They said 5 percent of HIV infections can be blamed on the increased HIV viral load due to malaria, and 10 percent of adult malaria cases can be blamed on HIV.

Since 1980, 8,500 more people got HIV infections, and there were 980,000 more episodes of malaria (a person can get it more than once) in a city whose adult population is 200,000, the study found.

PUBLIC HEALTH EFFORTS

The findings have implications for public health efforts, Abu-Raddad said, showing the importance for authorities to tackle these diseases together.

Of the 39.5 million people worldwide infected with HIV, 24.7 are in the poor countries of sub-Saharan Africa. About 2.1 million of the world's 2.9 million AIDS deaths in the past year were in this region.

Malaria kills more than a million people annually, mostly young children in sub-Saharan Africa.

The researchers produced their results with a mathematical model using HIV and malaria infection data gathered in Malawi by James Kublin of the Hutchinson Center. This enabled them to quantify for the first time the synergy between malaria on HIV and its toll on people.

Scientists previously determined that a lack of male circumcision and the incidence of genital herpes also were facilitating the spread of HIV. Abu-Raddad noted that circumcised men are much less likely to get HIV, and that genital herpes opens a door for HIV to infect a person.

Abu-Raddad said malaria now can be considered a third serious factor facilitating the spread of HIV.

The two diseases drive one another even though they have different modes of transmission -- malaria by mosquito and HIV predominantly by sexual intercourse, Abu-Raddad noted.

Abu-Raddad said once an HIV person gets malaria, his or her viral load goes up and stays higher for six to eight weeks, making the person far more infectious to others.



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Plastics 'poisoning world's seas'

By Maggie Ayre
Producer, Costing The Earth
BBC
7 Dec 06

Microscopic particles of plastic could be poisoning the oceans, according to a British team of researchers.

They report that small plastic pellets called "mermaids' tears", which are the result of industry and domestic waste, have spread across the world's seas.

The scientists had previously found the debris on UK beaches and in European waters; now they have replicated the finding on four continents.

Scientists are worried that these fragments can get into the food chain.


Plastic rubbish, from drinks bottles and fishing nets to the ubiquitous carrier bag, ends up in the world's oceans.

Sturdy and durable plastic does not bio-degrade, it only breaks down physically, and so persists in the environment for possibly hundreds of years.

Among clumps of seaweed or flotsam washed up on the shore it is common to find mermaids' tears, small plastic pellets resembling fish eggs.

Some are the raw materials of the plastics industry spilled in transit from processing plants. Others are granules of domestic waste that have fragmented over the years.

Either way, mermaids' tears remain everywhere and are almost impossible to clean up.

Raw materials

Dr Richard Thompson at the University of Plymouth is leading research into what happens when plastic breaks down in seawater and what effect it is having on the marine environment.

He and his team set out to out to find out how small these fragments can get. So far they've identified plastic particles of around 20 microns - thinner than the diameter of a human hair.

In 2004 their groundbreaking study reported finding particles on beaches around the UK. Historical records of samples taken by ships plying routes between Britain and Iceland confirmed that the incidence of the particles had been increasing over the years.

Now the team has extended its sampling elsewhere in Europe, and to the Americas, Australia, Africa and Antarctica.

They found plastic particles smaller than grains of sand. Dr Thompson's findings estimate there are 300,000 items of plastic per sq km of sea surface, and 100,000 per sq km of seabed.

So plastic appears to be everywhere in our seas. The next task was to try and find out what kind of sea creatures might be consuming it and with what consequences.

Thompson and his team conducted experiments on three species of filter feeders in their laboratory. They looked at the barnacle, the lugworm and the common amphipod or sand-hopper, and found that all three readily ingested plastic as they fed along the seabed.

"These creatures are eaten by others along food chain," Dr Thompson explained. "It seems an inevitable consequence that it will pass along the food chain. There is the possibility that chemicals could be transferred from plastics to marine organisms."

Other contaminants

There are two ways in which this might happen. Firstly, the Plymouth scientists want to establish whether there is the potential for chemicals to leach out of degraded plastic over a larger area after the plastic has been ground down.

The second aspect of this research is focusing on what happens when plastic absorbs other contaminants.

So-called hydrophobic chemicals such as PCBs and other polymer additives accumulate on the surface of the sea and latch on to plastic debris.

"They can become magnified in concentration," said Richard Thompson, "and maybe in a different chemical environment, perhaps in the guts of organisms, those chemicals might be released."

Whether plastics present a toxic challenge to marine life and subsequently to humans is one of the biggest challenges facing marine scientists today.

The plastics industry's response is that much of the research is speculative at this stage, and that there is very little evidence that this transfer of chemicals is taking place in the wild.

It says it is doing its bit by replacing toxic materials used as stabilisers and flame retardants with less harmful substances.

Whatever the findings eventually show, there is little that can be done now to deal with the vast quantities of plastic already in our oceans. It will be there for decades to come.

Costing The Earth: Mermaids' Tears will be broadcast on Friday 8 December on BBC Radio 4 at 1500 GMT.

You can also listen online for 7 days after that at Radio 4's Listen again page.



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JAL pilot's UFO story surfaces after 20 years

Japan Today
8 Dec 06

One December evening in 1986, reports Shukan Shincho (Dec 7), two Kyodo News journalists presented themselves by appointment at the London hotel room of JAL pilot by the name of Terauchi. He had a story for them - but should he be telling it? Should they be listening? Are UFOs serious?

Journalism is a skeptical trade, and as for pilots, even if they do spot strange lights, objects and movements in the sky for which they can conceive no other explanation, they are expected to keep their suspicions to themselves. Their livelihood depends on passengers' confidence. Talk of UFOs does not encourage it.

So Terauchi, in granting the interview, was stepping out on a limb. He later paid the price.
On Nov 17, 1986, he told the Kyodo journalists, he was chief pilot on JAL flight 1628, Narita-bound from Paris. The first stop was Keflavik, Iceland; the second, Anchorage, Alaska. At 5:10 p.m. local time the plane, a Boeing-747 jumbo, was flying 10,600 meters over Alaska. It was dusk, not quite dark.

"Suddenly," Terauchi said, "600 meters below, I saw what looked like two belts of light. I checked with the Anchorage control tower. They said nothing was showing on their radar."

But something was emitting those lights, and whatever it was seemed interested in the jumbo, for it adjusted its speed to match to match the plane's - "like they were toying with us," said Terauchi.

That went on for seven minutes or so. "Then there was a kind of reverse thrust, and the lights became dazzlingly bright. Our cockpit lit up. The thing was flying as if there was no such thing as gravity. It sped up, then stopped, then flew at our speed, in our direction, so that to us it looked like it was standing still. The next instant it changed course. There's no way a jumbo could fly like that. If we tried, it'd break apart in mid-air. In other words, the flying object had overcome gravity."

Five minutes later, the object vanished in the gathering darkness, but soon another, much larger object, "several tens of times larger than a jumbo jet," which itself is some 70 meters long, appeared, bathed in blue light. Again the control tower radar registered nothing. Terauchi noticed unusual silhouettes over Fairbanks, Alaska. The object vanished. The jumbo landed at 6:24 p.m. and the passengers disembarked, not so much as suspecting what a harrowing experience their pilot had been through.

What to make of this? It's tempting to say Terauchi's imagination got the better of him; but he's an ex-fighter pilot with more than 10,000 flying hours under his belt. He would know, if anyone would, how to keep his imagination in check. Another theory Shukan Shincho hears is that the lights the pilot saw were from Jupiter and Mars, which in fact would have been visible on the jumbo's flight path on the night in question. It's possible, but again - would a man with Terauchi's experience and training be so easily fooled?

There are other possibilities, among them a secret U.S. military operation or development, about which nothing is known precisely because it is secret. Or maybe it really was what Terauchi says it was - a UFO. In any case, Terauchi was shortly afterwards grounded by JAL for talking to the press. He was given a desk job, and only reinstated as a pilot years afterwards. Now 67 and retired, he lives quietly with his wife in a small town in north Kanto, and talks about the adventure as little as possible.

"I spoke to a doctor - he said it was an illusion," he tells Shukan Shincho. "You saw something you weren't meant to see," his wife says consolingly. That, if nothing else, seems certain.



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Only in a Psychopathic World: Exhibition praises Genghis, creator of the 'Pax Mongolica'

By Louise Jury in Istanbul
Published: 08 December 2006

In the year 1206, a central Asian nomad called Temujin used his political savvy and charm to unite previously feuding tribes and found the largest empire that has ever existed.

He was proclaimed universal leader and his exploits as the all-conquering warrior of the great Mongol empire - which at its height in the 13th and 14th centuries stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Europe - have resonated through the centuries. His name, of course, was Genghis Khan.

When a group of geneticists concluded three years ago that 16 million men across Eurasia shared such a curious family tree they must all be descended from the same ancestor, and that, incredibly, Genghis Khan fitted the bill, it only added to the myth of the testosterone-fuelled warmonger.
But now a new exhibition marking the 800th anniversary of the foundation of the Mongol empire wants to challenge popular perceptions of the man who did it.

Genghis Khan and his Heirs: the Great Mongol Empire, which opened in Istanbul yesterday, suggests the warrior chief's reputation as a bloodthirsty warrior has been warped. Instead, it hails him as a tolerant, meritocratic law-giver whose reign - and that of his many descendants - led to the profitable flourishing of commerce and ideas from the Mediterranean to China for 200 years. Though no surprise to the Mongolians, who have long revered Genghis as thefather of their nation, the show looks like quite a makeover.

Opening the exhibition at the Sakip Sabanci Museum, its director, Nazan Olcer, said Genghis Khan's major achievement was the creation of the so-called Pax Mongolica which offered security to the entire region and enabled travellers such as Marco Polo to move freely along the Silk Road.

"This great come-and-go meant an immense commercial and artistic exchange between the West and the East," she said. "That was his long-lasting legacy."

For a man once voted one of the most important political leaders of all time by National Geographic, and man of the millennium by The Washington Post, the blanks in his known history are numerous.

Even the face peering out from giant posters across Istanbul is a 14th-century depiction. And the primary source for the biography of Genghis Khan is The Secret History of the Mongols, written in China after his death.

What is accepted is that Temujin was born around 1162 to an impoverished family of nomads. He was married at around the age of 16 to Borte, and pledged his allegiance to Toghrul, a close ally of his father who was the leader of the Keraits. When his wife was kidnapped by the Merkits he raised an army to get her back, and succeeded. Further conquests followed until he had united the Merkits, Naimans, Mongols, Uighurs, Tatars and other previously warring tribes under his rule, an unprecedented achievement.

In 1206 he was acknowledged the leader of the tribes, and within a century the Mongol empire had extended across the steppe lands of Iran and Russia to the plains of Hungary - provoking panic across Europe.

"Last year a people invaded the Ruthenian empire and destroyed an entire clan," wrote Caesarius von Heisterbaen in Germany in 1222. "We do not know who they are, where they came from and where they are going."

Genghis Khan and his heirs brooked no resistance. When Pope Innocent IV wrote in 1245 asking Genghis's son Ogedei, known as the Great Khan, to stop slaughtering people, especially Christians, the response was a scarcely disguised threat to Christendom to submit, or else.

But although he could be brutal, Genghis Khan was meritocratic compared with earlier tribal chiefs. His sons, who continued his work in China - under the fabled Kubla Khan - Persia and Russia, allowed indigenous culture to remain, so that Mongol influence can be hard to discern.

Dr Susanne Wichert-Meissner, of the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn - which has previously hosted the exhibition - said: "The conquered people were not forced to adopt a foreign culture, as Genghis Khan chose to use their diverse skills and cultures to his own benefit."

The Mongols remained nomadic, and Khan did not establish a city base until 1220, when the need for an administrative centre to support his mission prompted the founding of Karakorum - where German, French and Turkish archaeologists are now digging up new information.

But gaps in our understanding remain. Genghis Khan died on a military campaign in 1227, but the site of his burial remains unknown. "He built an empire like no other in history, the largest in the world," Dr Wichert-Meissner said. "He's one of the most famous personalities in history, but he didn't leave palaces or a magnificent grave behind."



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Slandering Chavez


The Times's Anti-Chávez Bias

Thursday, Dec 07, 2006By: Amitabh Pal - The Progressive

The New York Times seems to have it in for Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. The paper's Latin America bureau chief, Simon Romero, has a big anti-Chávez bias, and it shows.

Take Romero's story on Chávez's massive electoral triumph the past weekend. The lead reads: "President Hugo Chávez won a landslide victory in the presidential election on Sunday. But campaign officials for the opposition candidate contended that the results were tainted by intimidation and other irregularities." The headline writer adopted the same tone. "Chávez Wins Easily in Venezuela, but Opposition Protests," the headline read, while the subhead stated: "Challenger's Vote Exceeds Predictions."
Now, charges of fraud should be reported on, but Chávez's margin of victory should have made Romero question the opposition's accusations, instead of giving them such prominence. The fact that these assertions were half-hearted can be seen by the fact that Chávez's opponent, Manuel Rosales, conceded defeat the same day.

Curiously, it seems that the Times's web editorial staff recognized the problematic aspects of Romero's piece. The online version reads quite differently, with the headline and opening sanitized and the subhead taken out altogether.

Romero continued his anti-Chávez crusade the day after Chávez's triumph. "If President Hugo Chávez rules like an autocrat, as his critics in Washington and here charge, then he does so with the full permission of a substantial majority of the Venezuelan people," his piece opened. The pull quote for the piece referred to "some heads being chopped," come January. (Interestingly, the person quoted is Steve Ellner, a progressive scholar who has written on Venezuela for publications such as In These Times, and his full quote is much less hostile to Chávez.) Another person cited in the piece says that "Chavez is not a dictator, but he's not a Thomas Jefferson either." Well, who is? Not too many current world leaders have Jefferson's caliber, including the person currently occupying his post.

Romero's hostility toward Chávez was also obvious in the run up to the presidential election. In a story two days before election day, he chose to highlight a crime wave in Venezuela, and quoted the opposition presidential candidate Rosales (without providing any balance) blaming Chávez for the phenomenon.

"Chávez nourishes the anarchic forces that are tearing Venezuela apart with a discourse advocating aggression on all fronts," Rosales told the Times. And the Times accepted this tendentious sociological analysis without question.

Romero is not the only person at the Times with an anti-Chávez agenda. After all, the editorial staff at the Times gleefully supported the 2002 U.S.-backed military coup against Chávez, a duly elected leader. In a classic case of doublespeak, the Times stated that "Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator." The Times gently explained to its readers that Chávez "stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader." Chávez's triumphant return three days later forced the Times to eat crow.

I have mixed feelings about Chávez. Although his social programs are commendable and his defiance of the Bush Administration's agenda for the hemisphere is praiseworthy, his military swagger and showboating leave me cold. Still, he has won multiple elections and referendums since 1998, and in spite of his attempts to pack the courts and spew vitriol at his opponents, his democratic legitimacy can't be denied. (See the coverage in The Progressive by my colleague, Liz DiNovella, of a crucial 2004 referendum.) The Times, on many an occasion, barely acknowledges this fact.

Given the Times's history on this issue, perhaps this isn't surprising. As ex-Times reporter Stephen Kinzer's "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq" documents, the Times has been very willing to go along with the official agenda when it comes to governments deemed hostile to the United States. In the case of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, whose CIA-orchestrated ouster in 1954 bequeathed Guatemala a near-genocidal dictatorship, the Times went so far as to remove, at John Foster Dulles's behest, its disobedient reporter (Sydney Gruson) from the country.

No need for the Times to do that with Romero. He is faithfully recording Washington's wishes.



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VENEZUELA-US: Another Chance?

Thursday, Dec 07, 2006By: Humberto Márquez - IPS

CARACAS, Dec 7 (IPS) - The outcome of Venezuela's presidential elections may hold out a possibility of a thaw in relations with the United States, within a hemispheric context of greater openness to negotiation and dialogue.

"We've always looked for ways to deepen the dialogue with the government of President Chávez, and our hopes are that maybe at this moment he will show a greater interest," said U.S. Undersecretary of State for Latin America Thomas Shannon.

"We do not want a relationship of confrontation," he added, saying the U.S. was hoping for more positive relations in areas like trade, energy and the fight against drugs and terrorism.
After crushing his opponent, Manuel Rosales, by 63 to 37 percent Sunday, President Hugo Chávez said that "if they want to talk as equals, we are willing to engage in dialogue, but I doubt that the government (of George W. Bush) is sincere. It has financed conspiratorial activities..."

The Venezuelan leader accuses the U.S. government of financing the short-lived April 2002 coup in which he was overthrown by dissident senior military officers and businessmen.

Chávez called for "transparent dialogue, without conditions, that respects our sovereignty."

U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield said "The two governments have publicly sent signals and messages...It is premature to say when we are going to start the talks or whether we are heading in that direction. However, the U.S. administration is ready, enthusiastic and willing to do so."

But "Both governments must approach each other, and the process must be gradual," he added.

Referring to Shannon's statements, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said it was "a good start for dialogue between the United States and Venezuela...It is also good that there is reciprocity."

In Washington, "there seems to be a shift towards greater pragmatism, based on a clear improvement in the last few weeks in the global climate of international relations in favour of peace and negotiation," Carlos Romero, director of graduate studies in international relations at Venezuela's Central University, told IPS.

Among the elements of that global context, Romero pointed to the new search for a bipartisan foreign policy in the U.S. in the wake of November's legislative elections, in which the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress; European Union attempts to forge closer ties with Russia and China; and Beijing's efforts in talks with North Korea.

In Latin America, meanwhile, the moderate nature of left-leaning governments in large countries like Argentina and Brazil should help curb the potential radicalism of presidents-elect Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. In addition, Raúl Castro, who currently holds the reins in Cuba while his brother Fidel convalesces, has said he is open to talks with Washington.

"Furthermore, and regardless of how paradoxical it may seem, Venezuela...is one of the most stable countries in Latin America today, with hardly any political violence," said Romero.

U.S. State Department press officer Eric Watnik said "We look forward to having the opportunity to work with the Venezuelan government on issues of mutual interest."

Venezuela provides the U.S. market with 1.2 million barrels a day of oil, making it the United States' fourth biggest supplier, after Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

Overall trade between the two countries, which has almost doubled over the last three years, could reach 50 billion dollars by the end of 2006, according to the binational chamber of commerce in Caracas.

Analysts in the United States have also referred to the need for a change in the way Washington deals with its differences with the Venezuelan government.

Cynthia Arnson, head of the Latin America programme at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington, said "My sense is that the U.S. can do more to work multilaterally to contain Chávez and not respond to every rhetorical provocation.." That way, "long-term U.S. interests will be better served," she argued.

"However, the administration is not of one mind on dealing with Chávez, so it's very hard to predict where policy will go in the next months and years," she added.

Chávez set out Wednesday for the Southern Cone region, after receiving Nicaragua's Ortega. He will meet with presidents Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, Tabaré Vázquez of Uruguay, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil before taking part Friday and Saturday in the South American summit in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Michael Shifter, vice president of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based forum for opinion leaders and policymakers on Western Hemisphere affairs, agreed that "The best thing is not to go for the bait, and respond to (Chávez's) provocations. I think the U.S. has learned that hasn't worked."

"But I don't think the U.S. should ignore him either; he's got a clear agenda and enormous resources, and I think the U.S. would be wise to try to engage a little bit more with the Latin American governments that are looking for ways to deal with Washington," he said.

"His victory underscores that the United States needs to be more involved; it's been much too withdrawn and indifferent to what's happening in the region," he told IPS in Washington. "The U.S. needs to close the big gap between the agenda in Washington and the agenda in Latin America, which is more concerned with social questions. The U.S. has seemed indifferent to that. What we know is that Latin American governments that show some concern about the plight of the poor are rewarded."

Brownfield said that just as Venezuela and the United States have "traditionally been very cooperative in...areas such as drug trafficking, oil and terrorism"...."We have serious, deep and wide differences in such areas as socialism, capitalism, free trade, hemispheric organisation, and relations with countries like Iran and North Korea."

Chávez, who sees his resounding victory as a mandate to set out on "a Venezuelan route to socialism," has been at the forefront of those who have opposed the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) pushed by Washington, while promoting South American integration -- in a "multipolar world" -- through the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and, most recently, Venezuela.

The Venezuelan government has also reached deals for joint business ventures as well as purchases of military hardware with countries like Russia, China and Iran, while expressing support for Iran's nuclear programme.

Sunday's elections also brought certain international recognition for the opposition, which managed to unite around a single candidate who, in a 180-degree shift from the strategy followed in the past few years, immediately acknowledged defeat while accepting the election results as valid.

Watnik said "The opposition demonstrated its ability to put forth an important, peaceful and democratic campaign and it garnered a significant share of the vote."

Vicki Gass, with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), said "The ray of light is that the opposition didn't claim fraud....(because) had they done so, they would've been isolated completely."

"The opposition now has to determine a more strategic way of dealing with Chávez and engaging him instead of just calling him a dictator. That much is positive," she added.

In Shifter's view, "For the first time, the opposition showed some political skill...I think the main lesson is that really they need to have political experience and should not go back to having labour and business leaders run the opposition."

"They have a tremendous opportunity to build on this"

Arnson said "The only real surprise of (Sunday's) election is how strong the showing was for the opposition."

According to Gass, "The reality is that the situation in Venezuela has changed forever. It will never go back to where the majority of the population was excluded from having a voice in government on policies that really affect them. (The U.S.) can recognise that and work with it."

"Unfortunately, this administration is looking for a way to explain the so-called "pink tide" in Latin America - Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, almost Mexico, and of course Venezuela. The U.S. is trying to find a reason for this, and rather than acknowledging and appreciating the very real democratic debate that's going on in these countries, they're deciding it's the evil influence of some actor, and that's Hugo Chávez."

In the Southern Cone countries, Chávez's victory was welcomed as beneficial to regional integration, especially on the energy front. Both Lula and Kirchner had wished the president luck in the final stretch of his campaign.

But Amorim specifically commented on Chávez's proposal to reform the constitution to allow for indefinite reelection.

"If he tries to do that, I suppose he won't do so by decree, but in a manner that takes into account the people's will. There is a strong current in Venezuela opposed to that. The possibility of alternating in power, in equal conditions in elections, is very important for democracy," Brazil's foreign minister warned.

* Jim Lobe in Washington contributed to this report.



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US Acknowledges Venezuelan Presidential Elections as Democratic

Wednesday, Dec 06, 2006
By: Steven Mather - Venezuelanalysis.com

Caracas, Venezuela, December 6, 2006 (Venezuelanalysis.com) - The US government implicitly acknowledged the legitimacy of Venezuela's December 3rd presidential election on Monday, where Hugo Chávez comfortably retained his position as president for the next 6 years.

After Chávez' victory had been confirmed, White House National Security Council spokesperson Kate Starr made an official statement. "We congratulate the Venezuelan people for demonstrating their commitment to a democratic process", she said.
This change of tone was echoed by US Undersecretary of State for Latin America, Thomas Shannon. In his victory speech, President Chávez said it was "another defeat for the devil", referring to President George W Bush. In contrast, Shannon said, "We do not want a relationship of confrontation [with Venezuela]."

"We've always looked for ways to deepen the dialogue with the government of President Chávez, and our hopes are that maybe at this moment he will show a greater interest", he added.

Starr also said that the US would, "continue to seek a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government in areas of mutual interest."

Chávez himself on hearing the conciliatory comments did respond positively, while remaining cynical as to the real intentions of the US. "If they want to speak on equal terms we accept", he said. But he added, referring to previous US behaviour towards Venezuela, "How are we going to have good relations with a government that has financed conspiratorial activities here?"

Chávez went on to list the kinds of things he would expect to be on the agenda of a meeting with the US government. These including the war in Iraq and the extradition of Luis Posada Carriles. Posada Carriles is wanted in Venezuela to stand trial for his alleged involvement in blowing up a Cuban Airliner in 1976 when 73 civilians lost their lives.

The softened tone of the US government's remarks come after the defeated Venezuelan opposition also took the first steps to a more conciliatory way in dealing with their failure to remove Chávez by extra-democratic means. Defeated candidate Manuel Rosales conceded the election early on Sunday night saying he accepted the result, "The truth is that even with a closer margin, we recognize that today they defeated us, but we will stay in the struggle, in the fight, we will stay in the streets," said Rosales.

Rosales also had words for his previous allies who he obviously thought might not agree with his decision to concede. He said that he would not lie to Venezuelans about the elections because the truth would come out in the end.

In other parts of the world the victory of Chávez was also acknowledged. "President Lula viewed Chávez' victory as the expression of a wider process of ongoing social and political changes in Latin America, as appears from recent elections in the hemisphere," a spokesperson for the Brazilian government said.



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Cancer-ridden Castro may not live to see in new year

By Leonard Doyle, Foreign Editor
08 December 2006

The ailing Cuban President Fidel Castro is battling terminal cancer and could be dead by Christmas, senior Western diplomatic sources have said. Observers close to the Cuban regime have reported that the leader is suffering from an aggressive form of stomach cancer and has refused radiation therapy or any other form of treatment.

Cuban officials are notoriously tight-lipped over the health of their President which they treat as a closely guarded state secret. While occasionally they have broken their silence to report that Mr Castro is suffering from a non life-threatening illness, these claims have been roundly discounted by Western sources.
Mr Castro's death, when it comes, is expected to have repercussions far beyond the shores of Cuba. On the one hand there are fears of an exodus of Cubans towards the US.

Equally, concerns have been raised that hardline anti-Castro groups in south Florida will stage their own attempt to destabilise the regime by sending a flotilla of ships to the island in expectation that Cubans will be prepared to rise up against the government - a scenario with potentially disastrous consequences.

Either way, political developments in Cuba have the potential to influence domestic politics in the US. When, in 2000, the then president Bill Clinton allowed the child Elian Gonzalez to be sent back to his homeland, the Cuban vote turned solidly Republican - and many blame the controversy for Al Gore's subsequent loss of the presidential election that year. Now, as the 2008 presidential campaign grinds into action, Cuba will again become an increasingly sensitive topic in America, especially as speculation surrounding Mr Castro's health mounts.

Cubans themselves are used to being told very little about the inner workings of their government on security grounds, but dissidents say uncertainty over the country's political future has fuelled impatience with the secrecy surrounding his health. While posters proclaiming "80 more years" of Castro's leadership are still hanging all over the capital, Havana, and the country decked the halls on Saturday for his birthday celebrations - for which he was himself absent - many Cubans doubt their leader will ever govern again.

Despite repeated assurances by the authorities - the most recent came last week as Vice-President Carlos Lage Davila spoke at the end of a conference on Mr Castro's place in history - that Mr Castro will return to lead Cuba for years to come, more and more people suspect he is close to death, even though they have been told little about his condition other than that he underwent emergency surgery to stop intestinal bleeding in July and is now recovering. "It's strange they have not said anything about Fidel," Orlando, a telephone company worker and government backer, told Reuters. "They must have their reasons, but I'm worried. It has been a long time since we heard about him."

Even at his 80th birthday celebrations, held with much fanfare over the weekend, Mr Castro did not get a mention other than a cursory "Viva Fidel" at the end of a speech by his brother, designated successor and acting President, Raul Castro. "People are convinced he has cancer," said Joel, a social worker. "We all expected to see him at the parade, and nobody said a word."



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