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Editorial: The Haman Syndrome or Why do Jews answer a question with a question?

By Israel Shamir


A talk given in Paris on October 5, 2006 at the presentation of Notre-Dame des Douleurs, the French translation of Shamir's book Our Lady of Sorrow

The Jews learned much from a stupid mistake made by their enemy, Haman, a character in the biblical Book of Esther. Prime Minister Haman was asked: "What shall be done to the man whom the King delights to honour?" The dummy answered: "He should be given the greatest honours". Of course, Haman thought that the King Ahasuerus was referring to himself when he asked Haman the question. It quickly became clear that Haman made a mistake: the King had in mind his bitter enemy Mordecai; and Haman was forced to pay obeisance to the Jew.

Should one try to be fair and just? Ulysses, Homer's wanderer, said definitely yes, for the Gods hate injustice. Not, if you want to get laid, as Michel Houellebecq so vividly shows in his novel on the defeated revolution of 1968, Elementary Particles. It appears that once people tried to be fair, and if they weren't, they felt rather ashamed of themselves; and that now they have given up on fairness. Perhaps the Gods of Ulysses who hated injustice have changed their minds? Or rather, did mankind change its Gods?

The beginning of the great change can be traced ultimately to humanism, that is, to Europe's severance of man's ties to the Divine in its rush for individual freedom and happiness. But even without direct reference to God, fairness continued to be based on religious feeling. Thus, in the century of Reason and Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant stated that the instinct for fairness is a moral law within us, corresponding to the starry sky above us, another veiled reference to God. Behave in such a way that your deeds may be emulated by others and serve as a universal rule, quoth Kant's Categorical Imperative, or in other words, "Act according to that maxim you would like to be a universal law".

Despite its secular appearance, the Kantian attitude is based on a hidden and very Christian presumption of the equality of men (also shared by Muslims, Confucians, Buddhists). But if we were to accept a presumption of Judaic law, we'd come to a very different conclusion. According to Judaic law, some men are inherently more equal than others, and no one universal law can cover both the higher and the lower species. There is one law for the Chosen Minority and another law for the Native and Unwashed Majority, and a third law yet for their interaction (This view is shared by Hindu Brahmans, but they did not influence us). The Judaic ethic became the rule in the countries where the natives were defeated or subjugated most profoundly, that is in the United States and Israel. Since 1968, this double-standard ethic has made deep inroads into our Kantian world to the point of subverting all political discourse in respect to justice and fairness.

A law is just if it is stipulated in general terms, and applied to specifics: Do not murder. In Kantian (or Christian) ethics, this prohibition must fit all to be fair. But in traditional Judaic ethics, "do not murder" means only "you must not kill Jews". Killing other, (lesser) beings, does not even qualify as "murder". In full agreement with this understanding, last month the US deported an 80-year old German woman who was a former concentration camp guard, but never demanded the extradition of the Israeli killers of American sailors. Israel jails Arabs for life who murder Jews. But a Jew who murdered fifty Arabs was fined one cent.

If you approve of the general rule: Do not possess nuclear weapons, then, in a Kantian world, this prohibition must refer to all states - or at least to all states that did not possess such weapons by the time the NPT treaty was concluded. But from a Judaic perspective, a US official was right in proclaiming that "we won't live with a nuclear North Korea or Iran", though they live quite happily with a nuclear Israel.

The Jews learned much from a stupid mistake made by their enemy, Haman, a character in the biblical Book of Esther. Prime Minister Haman was asked: "What shall be done to the man whom the King delights to honour?" The dummy answered: "He should be given the greatest honours". Of course, Haman thought that the King Ahasuerus was referring to himself when he asked Haman the question. It quickly became clear that Haman made a mistake: the King had in mind his bitter enemy Mordecai; and Haman was forced to pay obeisance to the Jew.

This story has been repeated and discussed by Jews for millennia, and these fruitful discussions have taught them: before answering any general question, you must find out where you stand in the equation. In other words, do not be Kantian, be Jewish. If Haman were a Jew (and he was not) he would answer the royal question with a question: "Is this person a Jew?" and only after knowing that would he feel comfortable to proceed. Thus, modest home-grown psychologists that we are, we shall add a new illness to the long list of mental pathologies: the Haman Syndrome, a mental sickness acquired from learning the error of Haman, which leads to the inability of applying Kant's categorical imperative.

Suffering from the Haman Syndrome, Jews use a catch-all phrase: "How can you compare?" in order to defeat the Kantian universal approach. If a Jew complains that Palestinians kill Jewish civilians, try to answer with "You kill their women and children". You will get an indignant: "How can you compare!" - maybe accompanied by a list of differences: they kill by body-strapped explosives, we kill by guided missiles, etc, and the most important but rarely voiced: we kill goyim, but they kill Jews!

But who cares what the Jews think? What is important is that the US and its allies have adopted their outlook. When the Jews elected as Prime Minister Menachem Begin, an old terrorist and the man who bombed the King David Hotel and killed 90 men, women and children, the West accepted Begin as Israel's democratic choice. But when the Palestinians democratically elected a majority government led by Hamas, (with its own terrorist links), the Jews subjected Palestine to a blockade, incarcerated Hamas MPs and seized Palestinian monies - all with full support of the West. When Jews starve and kill Palestinians in Gaza, it's business-as-usual. But when the Iranian President called to dismantle the Jewish supremacy regime, he was summoned to a Western court as a potential genocidaire.

Here's another example of the general vs. the specific. If you want to obtain the release of your POWs, go and snatch some of your enemy's soldiers or civilians in order to be in a better position to bargain for them. Right or wrong? Well, if you are the Jewish state, and you snatch a Lebanese citizen - let us call him Mustafa Dirani - in order to save your POW Ron Arad, you are "caring for your soldier". But if you are Lebanese and snatch a Jewish soldier to secure the release of your POWs, it is an outright provocation and a naked act of aggression (according to the Jewish enlightened left of Amos Oz).

One has to be a devoted Hamanian to understand why the US's nuking of Hiroshima was a legitimate act of warfare, while Pearl Harbor was an atrocity; why Stalin's GULAG was an atrocity but Guantanamo is legitimate, why bombing Haifa is a war crime, but shelling Gaza is not, why the deportation of Jewish civilians by Germans was genocide, but the deportation of German civilians by the Poles was not.

Is a naval blockade an act of war? That's a good question. If it is the Egyptian blockade of Israeli shipping to Eilat, it's an act of war and it should be met by all-out war, as it was in 1967. But if it is an Israeli blockade of Lebanon, or Gaza, it's only a measure of permissible self-defence.

If you deny a massacre, it is surely upsetting to the kin of massacred. May it be done? After the Israeli air force bombed and killed dozens of Lebanese children at Qana in Lebanon, the Jewish media published hundreds of items denying it. They said that the pictures were either staged or Photoshop-altered, that the photo of a dead child, or a truckload of dead bodies were brought in from elsewhere. But when the British historian David Irving applied this same critique to the photographs of Auschwitz , he was called 'négationniste' (Holocaust Denier - Fr.) and sentenced to three years of jail. Udo Walendy served time in jail for doubting authenticity of Jewish photos, but the Jews who doubt Lebanese photos or outright deny the massacres of Deir Yassin and Qana are very much at large.

Now, the Jews are not the only people in need of exception. Indeed, their peculiar ethics became the ethics of the new, thoroughly godless post-1968 ruling class. Their history and traditions became the banner of men with the Haman syndrome. The Jews became the pet of the preferred minorities waging merciless wars upon the majorities all over the world. In order to confuse the rest, they would unite in one breath the exclusive minority of stockbrokers with underprivileged minority of black immigrants against the vast majority of ordinary people. Their obsession with minorities, be it lesbian single mothers or HIV-positive illegal immigrants, has a reason: in this way they seize the moral high ground for their own minority rule. This is also the reason why so many members of the majority are annoyed with unprivileged minorities, be it Blacks or Gays: they correctly (if subconsciously) feel that the people who promote minority causes do not really give a damn about the ordinary majority.

In countries where hard-core Judaic ethics rule - the US and Israel - the majority is brought to a new low. The native majority of Jewish-ruled Palestine is disenfranchised, dispossessed and its working places were outsourced to imported guest-workers. The majority of nominally Jewish workers are forced to part-time jobs or to "self-employment" in order to save on social benefits. In the US, "American employers are waging a successful war against wages", writes Paul Krugman in the IHT. "After-tax corporate profits have more than doubled, because workers' productivity is up, but their wages aren't. Wal-Mart workers' children were either on Medicaid or lacked health insurance, and still they want to pay their workers even less by denying them permanent employment".

Donald Luskin, an admirer of Israel and Ayn Rand, attacked Krugman for his "antisemitism" (he did not denounce Mahathir) and wrote: "The measure of a man is what he worries about. President Bush is a big man who worries about big things like protecting America from global terrorism. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman - Bush's most vicious media opponent and America's looniest liberal pundit - is a little man who worries about little things, whether retail workers are being paid too little by Wal-Mart." We are also little men who worry about little things for we know that the big things like war on terrorism are done in order to pay us less.

Those who suffer from the Haman Syndrome are aware that people won't take their oppression in their stride. That is why their economic down-pressure is accompanied by terror against majorities. In Israel it was always legal to torture and imprison without trial. Now the US has its Patriot Act and Military Commissions Act, bringing it to the Israeli level. A wise Palestinian professor at Columbia University, Rashid Khalidi correctly said that the Mearsheimer/Walt paper overestimated the influence of the Jewish Lobby on foreign policy but also underestimated its influence on domestic policy such as The Patriot Act. This is exactly a point that we have been making all along: the Jewish Lobby's primary goal is not Palestine, but your freedom.

I was asked whether it is necessary to refer to Jews at all, given that not only Jews, and not all Jews, support the rule of the Minority. Indeed, the origin is not important, for everyone makes one's choice whether to stick with the trampled-upon majority, or to aspire to be a member of a chosen minority. The true heroes of mankind were the minority members who crossed over to the side of majority. Jesus of Nazareth was born a prince of the House of David, his maternal grandfather was an important man at the Temple, while Siddhartha Gautama was brought up in a palace ready to inherit his father's kingdom. Still these princes, Christ and Buddha, opened the way to majority. Many people of Jewish origin also made this trek. But Jewish organisations are practically always on the side of minorities, trying to make an exception for Jews even while among the chosen moneyed caste.

One of their favourite tools is persecution of those who wish to measure Jews by the same yardstick as the rest of men. Alas, I am one of those. I called for a full equality of Jew and non-Jew in Israel/Palestine, and my fellow Israeli citizens did not mind it, but the French Jews got me indicted in France for "defaming Jews". This sounds weird. Why should the French care what an Israeli citizen says to other Israeli citizens about their Jewish ethics? Is Palestine a part of France? Does France consider its sovereignty world-embracing? Should the French feel very proud that their writ reaches as far as my Jaffa? Well, no. This is the only case where a French court would interfere. Otherwise, they would wisely desist, as they desisted when French Jews Flatto, Gaydamak etc. ran away to Israel with stolen French money. In my case, the French Republic is just doing its small bit in upholding Jewish exceptionalism.

This protection is exceptional: could the Turks of Paris go to a French court against Orhan Pamuk, the great Turkish writer, for defaming Turks (some Turks thought so), and would a French court find Pamuk guilty? Well, it is not a very likely story. The Turks won't ask for it, and the French won't grant it. There is only one nation above the law that can get away with it.

Is it because the French do not want to offend a religion? When the offended religion is Christianity or Islam, its adherents are supposed to just bite their lip. An offensive anti-Muslim book by Oriana Fallaci was found kosher by a French court (some Muslims, unaware of Haman, had the temerity to sue her). But when Jewish writers (such as French Emmanuel Levinas) attributed the mistreatment of Jews by Nazis to ... Christianity, no court interfered. But if the offended religion is Judaism, its offenders go to jail. It's as simple as that.

There is a good reason why laws are territorial. We all commit offences against some law in some land. When you smoke grass in the Netherlands, you know that it would be illegal under, say, French law; but you know that you are safe in the Netherlands. When you drink wine in Paris, you know that you commit an offence under the laws of Saudi Arabia, but you are not in Saudi Arabia, so you do not have to care. In the USSR, it was illegal to read Solzhenitsyn, but French publishers could print his Archipelago. But one offence is perfectly extra-territorial, and wherever you commit it, you can be punished - this is an offence against Jews.

In order to make their exceptional position clear, the Jewish organisation that sues everybody for offending Jews, the CRIF, now defends the right of a French teacher Robert Redeker to insult Islam. Redeker described Mohammed as a "ruthless and looter warlord, a Jew slaughterer and a polygamist". This definition applies to King David as well; he had 18 wives, was a ruthless warlord and slaughtered a lot of Jews. Polygamy was an offence Muhammad shared with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, while every king who began a dynasty was a ruthless warlord to start with and slaughtered a lot of people, though not necessarily Jews. Who cares if Jews or non-Jews were slaughtered? If you ask this question, you are not subject to the Haman Syndrome.

Why should we bother and pay attention to this universal adoration of Jews? Not only for the sake of Palestine must we attend to - and end - this obsession. Our future and the future of our children is at stake. France is also a victim of minority rule, or rather of the minority's war against the majority. When Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative candidate front-runner for French presidency next year, declared himself a "friend of America and a friend of Jews" during his trip to Washington last week, he did not mean that he loves Gefilte Fish and Hamburgers (no Frenchman is that dumb); he gave a cryptic sign that he will support the Minority against the Majority.

Instead of oscillating between the Left of Blair and the Right of Sarkozy, united in their love of rich minorities, we may seek for the lost paths leading to majority rule. The Left may continue the unfinished work of the revolution '68 from where it failed, betrayed and misused for the advancement of the Judaic ethics by the likes of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Todd Gitlin and Joschka Fischer. The Right may reinvent the masculine spirituality of Chesterton, Eliot, Evola and Guenon. Together they may turn the people away from the threshold of slavery to the gates of freedom, destroy the imposed authority of the mainstream media and the universities, and undermine the plan "drawn up well away from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society's victims by serene and lucid minds" (Le Corbusier), thus restoring the justice and fairness of Kant's imperative, instead of the perverse exceptionalism of the Haman Syndrome.
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Editorial: Chávez's Citizen Diplomacy

by Liza Featherstone
The Nation
Dec 14 06

The program has come under fire from the American right for its association with Chávez, whom the Bush Administration has painted as a dictator and even a terrorist threat. Recent TV ads promoting it--in which Citizens Energy praises "our friends in Venezuela"--have particularly infuriated the likes of Fox's Sean Hannity and inflamed conservative talk-show hosts, who are calling for a boycott of Citgo. (According to Citgo president Felix Rodriguez, the boycott and conservative attacks have had no effect on the company's revenues so far.) But Citizens Energy spokesman Brian O'Connor says his organization has asked every major oil company and every OPEC nation to provide such assistance to poor Americans; Citgo and Venezuela have been the only ones to agree. "We are very much in solidarity with the people of Venezuela," says Blanca Ramirez, treasurer of Spofford Hills, which was taken over by residents after a landlord abandoned it in the late 1970s. "But in a way," she muses, "they are even more in solidarity with us."

Spofford Hills is depressingly located across the street from a juvenile prison. On this day, however, the mood was upbeat as a large green truck drove up to the building and began delivering winter heating oil, a gift likely to save each of the co-op's sixty-two families about $200 this winter. Like many poor Americans, especially in the country's northern regions, the residents of Spofford Hills--a mix of working people, the elderly and public-assistance recipients--have in recent years, with the soaring cost of fuel, struggled to stay warm during the chilly season. "Last winter there were days we had to go without heat and hot water," says Ramirez, who is the mother of a 4-year-old. "We couldn't afford it! We had to use space heaters and extra blankets--everybody tried to do the best they could." For the many elderly people in the building, the cold nights were a particular hardship. "I was afraid for her," Moryama Flores, a home attendant and building resident, says of her mother, who also lives in the building. "She was coughing a lot. She made many complaints." Says Ramirez, "This year, all these old people will probably not be suffering."

The ceremony at Spofford Hills included speeches from Kennedy, Rodriguez, Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez and New York Democratic Representative José Serrano, who has been an active force behind the program. Though it was undeniably unusual to see Democratic politicians, mainstream nonprofits and multinational corporations carrying out--and praising--the vision of a Latin American socialist leader, the tone was that of a straightforward, feel-good political event. Yet the proceedings began to take on a less-scripted and zanier quality when, just as the official remarks concluded, a couple of masked youth from the building next door dropped a big red banner, yelling "Viva Hugo Chávez!" No one seemed to have any idea who those guerrilla enthusiasts were. Undaunted and amused, everyone feasted on a Caribbean spread of yams, chicken and pie, as the hip-hop group Rebel Diaz played loud rap music, to which a smiling Rodriguez, dressed in jeans and work boots, gamely danced.

Though most of the US media remain hostile to Chávez, the fuel-assistance program is showing some Americans another side of the man and his government. Patrice White, a vocational counselor to the disabled who lives with her husband and three daughters in the Bronx's Mount Hope neighborhood, which began receiving Venezuelan oil last winter, is impressed that Chávez delivered on his promise to help poor Americans. "It was refreshing," she says. "Hugo Chávez is not an American politician. With our politicians, it seems like 80 percent of what they say doesn't happen." White was also impressed by the program's efficiency: "You'd think there would be lots of red tape."

Venezuela's reasons for running this program seem varied. Undeniably, it represents a bit of self-promotion on Chávez's part. More important, there is the delicious opportunity to insult the Bush Administration, which has close ties to leaders of the 2002 coup that briefly unseated the democratically elected Chávez, and to befriend those Americans who have the least reason to support conservative Republicans like Bush. But the program makes an even broader statement than that: By showing that the richest nation on earth requires foreign "assistance" to meet its citizens' basic needs, Venezuela reveals our most profound failure as a system. As Patrice White says, "It could be seen as a slap in the face to American capitalism. But I digress!"

When I speak with Felix Rodriguez, probably the only Texas oilman to pepper his conversation with words like "solidarity," he's full of kind words for America and its people. But he politely implies that Citgo wants to show Americans--and the world--another model of capitalism. "When people say, 'Citgo is a good company,'" he says, "we want that to mean not just that we are profitable, and not just that we are humanitarian. We want to--we have to--do both."

Perhaps most important, though, the heating-oil program is what writer and New York University historian Greg Grandin, who has spent time in Venezuela studying the Chávez government, calls "grassroots diplomacy." It provides Venezuela a way of building relationships with organizations that serve America's poor and working-class people, as well as with the people themselves.

In addition to the practical help, it is this last aspect of the program that most interests Bronx community activists. "We didn't want anyone coming here just to make a point," says Wanda Salaman, executive director of Mothers on the Move, a group that fights to improve the quality of life in the South Bronx, "but we understood the point." Intrigued by the opportunity to build a relationship based on understanding between peoples, rather than simply swipes between leaders, Mothers on the Move and other community groups established a coalition called Petrol Bronx, not only to insure accountability--that is, to make sure that Citgo's program continues to benefit the people it's supposed to help--but also to use it as an opportunity to educate their communities about Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution" and to teach Venezuelans about conditions in the Bronx.

RodStarz of Rebel Diaz, who lives in the building next door to Spofford Hills, is working with Petrol Bronx to organize a hip-hop delegation to Caracas. "Young people here are being incarcerated at an alarming rate," he tells me, gesturing at the prison across the street. "The system in the United States is built for people like us to fail. Venezuela's trying to build something better."

Venezuela has encouraged this citizen diplomacy by bringing beneficiaries of the heating-oil program to Caracas. Along with sixty other beneficiaries, Patrice White traveled to Venezuela last April. Many other tenants in her building turned down Venezuela's invitation, spooked by State Department travel warnings branding the country as a dangerous destination for Americans. Even White's husband urged her to stay home. But she's glad she went. "I just fell in love with the place," she raves. "We all had a ball, and all of us want to go back." A guest on Chávez's radio show, White was impressed by his respect for his people's intelligence: He spent four hours explaining how Venezuelan oil reserves could be used to build stronger relationships with people in other nations.

Annie Simoneau, a homeowner in rural Vermont and a mother of six (four of her own and two foster children) who received Citgo's assistance last winter, also went on the April trip to Venezuela, with her husband, an apprentice electrician. She was moved by the respect they enjoyed--an unusual feeling for working-class people in the United States. "They [Venezuela] put us up at the Hilton and made us feel on top of the world," she recalls. "I'm not so much into politics--I just went over to thank him [Chávez]." But Simoneau says she also wanted to see the country's social programs and meet its citizens. She expected that Venezuelans might be hostile to American visitors, given relations between Chávez and Bush, but found none who were. "It was person-to-person. They entertained us, gave beautiful speeches, and for who?" She pauses, and marvels. "The poor people of America."

Person-to-person diplomacy may be increasingly important as the American right continues to attack Chávez. Having met Chávez, White speaks of him as if he is a well-meaning friend whose actions sometimes need to be explained to others. After the Venezuelan leader called Bush "the devil" in a speech to the United Nations, for example, several small Native Alaskan villages refused Venezuela's oil assistance (tribal officials did not return calls from The Nation). When White heard about that speech, she says, "I laughed. I was surprised, but I think he wears his heart on his sleeve and is a very genuine person." It's easy to understand, she adds: After all, the United States sometimes acts like a "bully." Simoneau's reaction to the incident is similarly indulgent. "He's very emotional," she says of Chávez.

Of course, not everyone will get the chance to travel to Venezuela, and some remain puzzled by Chávez and his motives. But with winter looming, even the skeptics are grateful for his help. "I hope what Hugo Chávez is doing for us, he's also doing for his own people," said Josephine Cruz, a Spofford Hills board member who works as a secretary in New Jersey. "But we got the oil. That's the main thing."
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Editorial: We Didn't Disappear - The Struggle for Equality Inside Israel

Jonathan Cook
Al-Ahram Weekly
Dec 14 2006

Although individual Arab political parties have made similar criticisms of the state before, it is the first time in its history that the High Follow-Up Committee - a cautious and conservative body, mainly comprising the heads of Arab local authorities - has dared to speak out. The committee is seen as setting the consensus for Israel's one in five citizens who are Palestinian.

The most contentious issue raised in the document, called "The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel", is Israel's status as a Jewish state. The authors - leading academics and community activists - argue that Israel is not a democracy but an "ethnocracy" similar to Turkey, Sri Lanka and the Baltic states.

Instead, says the manifesto, Israel must become a "consensual democracy" enabling Palestinian citizens "to be fully active in the decision-making process and guarantee our individual and collective civil, historic and national rights."

An editorial in Israel's liberal Haaretz newspaper denounced the document as "undermining the Jewish character of the state" and argued that it was likely its publication would "actually weaken the standing of Arabs in Israel instead of strengthening it".

The campaign among Israel's Arab parties for a state of all its citizens began in the mid-1990s after it was widely understood that under the terms of the Oslo Accords Israel's Palestinian population would remain citizens of the State of Israel. Until then the minority had kept largely out of the debate about its future, fearing that expressing a view would prejudice negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian leadership.

The demand for a state of all its citizens has wide backing among the Palestinian minority: a recent survey by the Mada Al-Carmel Centre revealed that 90 per cent believed a Jewish state could not guarantee them equality, and 61 per cent objected to Israel's self-definition.

However, Israeli prime ministers, including Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, have always characterised the call for a state of all its citizens as tantamount to sedition. In a speech last week, Avigdor Lieberman, the new minister of strategic threats, repeated a similar line, telling policy-makers in Washington: "he who is not ready to recognise Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state cannot be a citizen in the country."

As well as highlighting the various spheres of life in which Palestinian citizens are discriminated against, the manifesto makes several key demands that are certain to fall on stony ground.

The High Follow-Up Committee argues that the Palestinian minority must be given "institutional self-rule in the field of education, culture and religion". Israeli officials have always refused to countenance such forms of autonomy. Instead, the separate and grossly under-funded Arab education system is overseen by Jewish officials; the status of the Arabic language is at an all-time low; and the government regularly interferes in the appointment of Muslim and Christian clerics, as well as controlling the running of their places of worship and providing almost no budget for non-Jewish religious services.

The manifesto also demands that Israel "acknowledge responsibility for the Palestinian Nakba " - the catastrophic dispossession of the Palestinian people during Israel's establishment in 1948 - and "consider paying compensation for its Palestinian citizens".

As many as one in four Palestinian citizens are internal refugees from the war, and referred to as "present absentees" by the Israeli authorities. They were stripped of their homes, possessions and bank accounts inside Israel, even though they remained citizens. Most homes were either later destroyed by the army or reallocated to Jewish citizens.

An internal government memorandum leaked several years ago showed that most of the internal refugees' money, supposedly held in trust by a state official known as the Custodian of Absentee Property, had disappeared and could no longer be traced.

Another controversial demand is for a radical overhaul of the system of land policy and planning in Israel, described in the manifesto as "the most sensitive issue" between Palestinian citizens and their state. Israel has nationalised 93 per cent of the territory inside its vague borders, holding it in trust not for its citizens but for the Jewish people worldwide. The land can be leased, but usually only to Jews.

Israel's Palestinian citizens, on the other hand, are restricted to about three per cent of the land, although they do not control much of the area nominally in their possession. Gerrymandering of municipal boundaries means that Arab local authorities have been stripped of jurisdiction over half of their areas, which have been effectively handed over to Jewish regional councils.

The manifesto calls for an end to other discriminatory land practices: the exclusion of Palestinian citizens from planning committees; the refusal of such committees to issue house-building permits to Palestinian citizens; the enforcement of house demolitions only against Palestinian citizens; and the continuing harmful interference by international Zionist organisations, particularly the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund, in Israel's land and planning system.

The chairman of the High Follow-Up Committee, Shawki Khatib, said: "We've already seen the reality of which the Arab public says to the Jewish public, 'I want to live together, and I really mean it', but the Jewish public has still not reached the same conclusion. This document is a preliminary spark. Its importance is not in its publishing, but in what happens after it."

The High Follow-Up Committee was established in 1982, in the wake of Land Day in 1976 when six unarmed Palestinian citizens were shot dead by Israeli security forces during demonstrations against a wave of land confiscations by the state to advance its official goal of "Judaising" the Galilee.

The Follow-Up Committee has lost much of its status over the past decade, widely seen as too unwieldy a body to represent the Palestinian minority's needs effectively. Members, drawn from the heads of local authorities and major Israeli Arab organisations and parties, do not have to submit to direct election and reach their decisions through consensus, which has often paralysed the committee into inaction. The manifesto is viewed as an attempt to reassert the committee's authority.

In recent years Arab political factions have called for direct elections to the Follow-Up Committee, but the Israeli government has intimated that it would consider an Arab "parliament" as an attempt at secession and react harshly.

In a related development, the Mossawa advocacy centre presented a position paper at a conference in Nazareth this month, arguing that internal refugees should be allowed to return to villages that existed before 1948. "The move by refugees of 1948 to their villages will not change the demographic balance or endanger the Jews," said Jafar Farah, head of Mossawa. "Unlike the [Palestinian] refugees in Arab states, we are [already] here."

Jonathan Cook is a British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. Visit his website, which includes all his articles on the Middle East published in international newspapers, English-language Arab publications and specialist magazines since 2001.
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Enough Already Iraq!


Iraq set for final flourish

Agencies
Kahleej Times
Dec 15 06

IRAQ hope to crown their first Asian Games appearance for 20 years by grabbing football gold today and bring a brief respite from the bloody strife which has torn their country apart.


Iraq, whose last soccer gold came in 1982, face hosts Qatar who have reached the final on a wave of patriotism off the field but inspired on it by the promptings of Uruguayan-born striker Sebastian Soria.

Football was always Iraq's most likely route to a first gold here but they have reached the final the hard way.

Three coaches of the senior team quit because of death threats, officials have been kidnapped and one even murdered.

Against such a depressing background, they could have done without having to play the qualifying tournament, which started here over three weeks ago, before enduring a bad start to their group games by losing 1-0 to China.

"My team are exhausted," admitted Iraq coach Yahya Manhel.

"They have played so many matches but I have 20 years experience as a coach and I have urged the players on."

For the young players in the squad, victory on Friday will also open up the door for lucrative contracts with foreign clubs with many Qatari league sides already keeping a close on eye on the more promising.

At the moment, just one member of the squad plays outside Iraq.

He is skipper Younes Khalef who is a regular feature with former Q-League champions Al Gharrafa.

He is suspended for the final after picking up a yellow card for time-wasting in the 1-0 semifinal win over South Korea.

"I felt so sorry to get the yellow card," said Khalef. "But I will be supporting the team, as will every Iraqi, and hope to win the gold medal."

Qatar have never got beyond the quarter-finals before and, as hosts, will be desperate to crown their own Games with a golden flourish on the final day.

The match has been switched to the compact 12,000-seater Al Saad Stadium where the supporters sit right up to the touchline.

Organisers denied that the change of venue was prompted by any security fears or of seeing more and more rows of empty seats, a feature which has scarred many events here.

But Qatar coach Dzemaludin Musovic believes the switch will suit his side who have bounced back from their group game defeat to Uzbekistan to make the final.

"The players are very positive and have got better match by match," said Musovic, who has also led the senior side to the Asian Cup finals, after their surprise 2-0 semi-final win over Iran in the semifinals.

"That was our best performance and the fans played their part. They are one with the team which means Qatar will always be difficult to beat when they play here." Soria is the team's top scorer with four goals and is one away from pulling level with Uzbekistan's Alexandr Geynrikh (5) as top marksman. But he is more interested in helping his new country to gold.
"I haven't seen much of Iraq," said Soria. "But I know they are a very strong team. "When I play I try to help my team win. Of course, if I score more goals it will mean that Qatar will have more chances to win the gold medal."



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McCain calls for more troops in Iraq

By THOMAS WAGNER
Associated Press
December 14, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Sen. John McCain took his controversial proposal for curbing Iraq's sectarian violence to Baghdad on Thursday, calling for an additional 15,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops and joining a congressional delegation in telling Iraq's prime minister he must break his close ties with a radical Shiite cleric.

The lawmakers' trip came as the bloodshed showed no signs of abating. At least 74 more people were killed or found dead, including 65 bullet-riddled bodies bearing signs of torture. And gunmen in military uniforms kidnapped as many as 70 shopkeepers and bystanders from a commercial area in central Baghdad in what was apparently an attack against Sunnis; at least 25 were later released, police said.
McCain's position puts him at odds with American public opinion and with the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended withdrawing substantial number of U.S. troops over the coming year. The Army in recent days has been looking at how many additional troops could be sent to Iraq if President Bush decides a surge in forces would be helpful.

Army officials say only about 10,000 to 15,000 troops could be sent and an end to the war would have to be in sight because the deployment would drain the pool of available soldiers for combat. Further, many experts warn, there is no guarantee a surge in troops would work to settle the violence.

"We would not surge without a purpose," the Army's top general, Peter J. Schoomaker, told reporters Thursday in Washington. "And that purpose should be measurable."

McCain said he realizes that few Americans favor deploying more U.S. troops to Iraq, and that if such a move proved unsuccessful in the unpopular war it could hurt his presidential ambitions.

But the Arizona Republican said Americans must realize that if U.S. troops leave Iraq in chaos, groups such as al-Qaida "will follow us home and that we will have a large conflict and greater challenges than those that we now face here in Iraq."

"The American people are confused, they're frustrated, they're disappointed by the Iraq war, but they also want us to succeed if there's any way to do that," McCain told reporters in Baghdad.

He said conditions in some areas of Iraq have improved since his last visit in March, but "I believe there is still a compelling reason to have an increase in troops here in Baghdad and in Anbar province in order to bring the sectarian violence under control" and to "allow the political process to proceed."

Two other senators in the delegation, Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said they agreed.

"We need more, not less, U.S. troops here," Lieberman said.

Another senator in the group, moderate Republican Susan Collins of Maine, disagreed.

"Iraq is in crisis. The rising sectarian violence threatens the very existence of Iraq as a nation," she said. The current U.S. strategy in Iraq has failed, but "I'm not yet convinced that additional troops will pave the way to a peaceful Iraq in a lasting sense," Collins said.

"My fear is that if we have more troops sent to Iraq that we will just see more injuries and deaths, that we might have a short term impact, but without a long-term political settlement," she said.

Collins' remarks appeared to reflect the findings of the Iraq Study Group, which concluded that sustained increases in U.S. troops would not solve the fundamental problem and that violence would renew once those forces left the area.

While the senators were meeting with U.S. and Iraqi officials in Baghdad, Iraq's Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, was in Washington, where he called on the Bush administration to set a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops. Al-Hashemi said the timetable should be "flexible" and depend on development of an Iraqi security force.

"You've done your job," al-Hashemi, who met with Bush this week, said at the United States Institute of Peace, a U.S.-financed think tank. Currently, however, "there is across-the-board chaos in my country," he said.

Graham said he was shocked by the situation in Baghdad.

"The first time I came here with Sen. McCain we went rug shopping. Yesterday, we moved around in a tank. It's one of the most dangerous places on the planet," he said.

The congressional delegation, which also included Republicans Sen. John Thune of South Dakota and Rep. Mark Kirk from Illinois, left Baghdad on Thursday to tour the southern port city of Basra and Ramadi, the insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad.

Lieberman said the senators met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, and urged him to break his ties with Muqtada al-Sadr and disarm the anti-U.S. cleric's Mahdi Army militia, which has been blamed along with Sunni Arab insurgents for the sectarian violence and ruthless attacks on U.S. forces.

Al-Sadr controls 30 of the 275 parliament seats and is a key figure in al-Maliki's coalition.

Lieberman said the delegation left its meetings with al-Maliki, President Jalal Talabani and other Iraqi officials believing "there is a force of moderates within the context of Iraqi politics coming together to strengthen the center here against the extremists."

He said the delegation was "quite explicit" about "how important it is that the Iraqis themselves begin to take aggressive action to disarm the militias, to stop the sectarian violence and to involve all the people in country to governance," including promised provincial elections.

But the senator also said moderates in parliament may look for another leader if al-Maliki fails to do that.

"What the U.S. needs and wants, and has to demand, is that in return for all that we're putting on the line here is that they take on the extremists," Lieberman said. "That's what this battle is all about."



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John McCain's Shameless Call for Escalation in Iraq

By Allan Uthman
Buffalo Beast
December 15, 2006

"Straight talking" John McCain's call for thousands more troops in Iraq is just a pathetic ploy to seem like a patriot for the presidential elections.

"I understand the polls show only 18 percent of the American people support my position. But I have to do what's right... In war, my dear friends, there's no such thing as compromise. You either win or you lose." -- Senator John McCain

Funny -- it's the same way with elections.
So John McCain has joined Bush in throwing a shit fit over the Iraq Study Group's recommendations. What's bothering him? Well, it's certainly not the fact that no one who participated in the ISG had the foresight to oppose the war in the first place. McCain yelled at Baker and Hamilton last week because they didn't like his proposal to increase troop strength in Iraq by a number somewhere between 20 and 40 thousand. But the real bone in McCain's increasingly freakish craw? If the ISG recommendations are followed -- an unlikely event considering Bush's classic "whatever" dismissal -- US combat troops will be out of Iraq before McCain has a chance to get his election on.

While McCain's insistence on "re-invading" Iraq and holding out for a miracle has been assailed as unrealistic except by diehard hawks and Bush loyalists, it has also been absurdly misinterpreted as the brave, bold stance of a man who puts the welfare of his nation above his own presidential aspirations. The common take is that McCain is "jeopardizing" his electability by continuing to support an unpopular war. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said McCain is "swimming against the tide." CNN's Wolf Blitzer gushed that it was "a Profiles in Courage kind of statement." Even the UK press got in on the act, with the Times of London's Bronwen Maddox arguing the report "damages" McCain, making him look "like the nation's maverick, not the next president." Anatol Lieven wrote on the Guardian's website that McCain "seems to have committed himself to a course which could very well cost him the presidency in 2008."

These opinioneers are either lying or stupid. Mainstream journalists are loath to engage in "straight talk" about McCain in deference to his heroic legend. In the simplistic, shorthand narrative of American political coverage, McCain's flashcard has the word "integrity" on it in big red letters. It's as if a few years of torture and imprisonment renders one immune to ambition, vanity or dishonesty for a lifetime. That may sound callous, but the truth is that McCain has time and again proven willing to change his tune on issues of conscience for maximum convenience, and has even admitted as much. In May, McCain told Fox News' Chris Wallace all about it: "I've found in my life that when I do what I think is right... it always turns out in the end OK. When I do things for political expediency, which I have from time to time, it's always turned out poorly."

Asked for an example, McCain elaborated: "I went down to South Carolina and said that the flag that was flying over the state capitol, which was a Confederate flag, was -- that I shouldn't be involved in it, it was a state issue. It was an act of cowardice," he said, admitting he had done it to help his chances in the South Carolina primary and seeming only to regret the act because he "lost anyway."

Early indicators of the depths to which McCain will stoop to win include his freshly appointed campaign manager, professional scumbag Terry Nelson. Nelson, Bush's national political director for his 2004 reelection campaign and an unindicted coconspirator named in Tom Delay's money-laundering indictment, is responsible for the infamous below-the-belt white bimbo ad which helped sink Harold Ford, Jr.'s senatorial campaign this year by exciting the powerful anti-miscegenation Neanderthal demographic in Tennessee. The appallingly racist ad drew so much heat that Nelson was fired by Wal-Mart, but McCain apparently has lower standards.

Further examples of McCain's shamelessness come in the form of flip-flopping: On abortion, from "I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations" in 1999 to "I do believe that it's very likely or possible that the Supreme Court should -- could overturn Roe v. Wade, which would then return these decisions to the states, which I support" last month. On the gay marriage amendment, from "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans" in 2004 to "reconfirming" his support for the same amendment to Baptist gasbag Jerry Falwell and doing two commercials for an Arizona ban. On Falwell himself, who McCain called an "agent of intolerance" only two years ago, only to eat shit at Falwell's Liberty University this year and now supporting teaching the idiot theory of Intelligent Design in schools. McCain opposed Bush's tax cuts, but has since voted to make them permanent.

The list goes on and on, making it incredibly clear to any knowledgeable observer that John McCain is just another go-along-to-get-along bullshit artist -- in other words, a senator. But reporters and pundits don't just avoid the subject; they deny it with an irrational certitude. The Washington Post's Harold Meyerson personified press fealty to McCain in an Op-Ed on the 13th: "McCain's position, at least, is sincerely held, as befits a candidate whose calling card is his integrity."

That's cute, isn't it? Meyerson offers no explanation or argument as to how he determined McCain's sincerity -- there is none -- he just says it is so, and you're supposed to buy it. "Integrity" is the long-established meme attached to McCain, and intellectually lazy mainstream journos aren't particularly interested in breaking new rhetorical ground there.

Some more sophisticated analysts acknowledge McCain's tradition of bullshittery, suggesting that McCain's call for more troops is a savvy feint, considering the unfeasibility of such a plan in the face of depleted troop reserves. Cokie Roberts called it "a somewhat convenient position, because he can always say, 'No one tried to win the war the way that I suggested to win it.' " But I don't think so. McCain seemed genuinely pissed that the ISG didn't consider his proposal, and I think I know why. The reality is this: John McCain is running for president. Just like any other serious candidate, everything McCain says and does for the next (and the last) two years is calculated to help him win in 2008. If McCain thought calling for an immediate withdrawal would help his chances, he'd do that. Hell, if he thought doing a choreographed dance number on the senate floor to the tune of "Love Machine" would help his poll numbers, he'd be working out the steps with Paula Abdul right now. If McCain wants the war to intensify, you can bet he thinks it's a good long-term strategy to win -- the election.

The idea that the war hurts McCain is just plain dumb. Americans may regret the war, but most Republicans still hate the idea of admitting defeat. McCain's hawkishness will help him secure the GOP nomination, perhaps the most difficult obstacle between him and the White House -- and the reason for all the fundamentalist footsy with Falwell. And a still-roiling quagmire in Iraq would be huge boon for McCain in a run against soft-on-slaughter Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, his most likely opponent.

McCain isn't any more responsible for the war in Iraq than Hillary, for one, so the idea of voters punishing him for supporting it makes no sense. And who do you think voters will trust to guide the country to an acceptable solution in an ever-worsening war, the celebrated 'Nam POW or the smarty-pants feminist? Hillary has and will continue to talk tough about the war, but she just can't win a bloodthirstiness contest against McCain.

By contrast, in the improbable event the Iraq mess is largely over by November 2008, McCain seems old and irrelevant rather than strong and reassuring. What issue does McCain really have without the war? Gay marriage? The ISG recommendation to pull out the troops by 2008 completely FUBARs McCain's program, and that's why he pulled the Popeye routine on Baker and Hamilton. McCain wants this stupid, pointless, sucker's war to drag on, maybe even get worse. He needs something to rescue us from. He can't win without it. And hey, what's a few thousand more corpses if it means he gets to be president?



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Army Top General Calls for More Troops in Iraq

By LOLITA C. BALDOR
Associated Press
December 14, 2006

WASHINGTON - The Army's top general warned on Thursday that his force "will break" without thousands more active duty troops and greater use of the reserves. He issued the warning as President Bush considers new strategies for Iraq.

As part of the effort to relieve the strain on the force, the Army is developing plans to accelerate the creation of two new combat brigades, The Associated Press has learned.

According to defense officials, the plan may require shifting equipment and personnel from other military units so the two new brigades could be formed next year and be ready to be sent the war zone in 2008. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are not final.
Noting the strain put on the force by operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker said he wants to increase his half-million-member Army beyond the 30,000 troops already authorized in recent years.

Though he didn't give an exact number, he said it would take significant time, saying 6,000 to 7,000 soldiers could be added per year. Schoomaker has said it costs roughly $1.2 billion to increase the Army by 10,000 soldiers.

Officials also need greater authority to tap into the National Guard and Reserve, long ago set up as a strategic reserve but now needed as an integral part of the nation's deployed forces, Schoomaker told a commission studying possible changes in those two forces.

"Over the last five years, the sustained strategic demand ... is placing a strain on the Army's all-volunteer force," Schoomaker told the commission in a Capitol Hill hearing. He added, "At this pace ... we will break the active component" unless reserves can be called up more to help.

Accelerating the creation of two combat brigades would give the Army greater flexibility to allow units to return home for at least a year before having to go back to the battlefront. Brigades average 3,500 troops.

Since 2003, the Army has been restructuring in order to increase the number of brigades in each combat division from three to four. The purpose is to increase the pool of brigades available for troop rotations into Iraq and Afghanistan and to make each brigade more self-sustaining.

White House spokesman Tony Snow declined to characterize Bush's response to Schoomaker's comments, but he said Bush "takes seriously any of the requests from the service branch chiefs."

Schoomaker's testimony and the new Army plans came as Bush continues his assessment of the Iraq war. Bush held three days of urgent meetings with top generals and other advisers. Federal agencies have presented their options to Bush and the White House National Security Council and are providing additional details and answering questions.

The military options being considered include a short-term surge in troops to stem the violence and an increased effort to train and equip Iraqi forces.

Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Schoomaker acknowledged that Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq, is looking at several military options, including shifting many troops from combat missions to training Iraqi units.

The Army in recent days has been looking at how many additional troops could be sent to Iraq if the president decides a surge in forces would be helpful. But, Army officials say, only about 10,000 to 15,000 troops could be sent and an end to the war would have to be in sight because it would drain the pool of available soldiers for combat.

"We would not surge without a purpose," Schoomaker told reporters. "And that purpose should be measurable."

A number of administration officials have suggested privately that - while Bush has considered the possibility of a short-term troop increase - there is no consensus from the military on the wisdom of injecting a large number of additional troops.

Another option under discussion is increasing the number of U.S. troops who are placed inside Iraqi army and police units as advisers, boosting the training of the Iraqi forces so they can more quickly take control of their own security.

Military leaders also want adjustments in troop levels to be accompanied by political and economic improvements that could reconcile rival sectarian factions and put young people to work.

Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, meanwhile, urged the Bush administration to set a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. At a news conference in Washington, al-Hashemi, a Sunni leader who met with Bush this week, said the timetable should be "flexible" and depend on development of a capable Iraqi security force.

"You've done your job," he said at the United States Institute of Peace, a U.S.-financed think tank. Currently, however, he said, "there is across-the-board chaos in my country," with roaming bands of murderers.

Comment: In his Farewell Speech to the nation, former President General Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a warning to the American people about Generals:

"Threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise . . . Our military establishment today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime . . . Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economical, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State House, every office of the Federal government . . .

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist . . .

"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes . . ."


During Eisenhower's two terms in office, federal military expenditures reached a high of $350 billion, $182 billion more than defense expenditures under Truman, despite the fact that his term coincided with the end the Second World War and the Korean conflict. If the cost of veterans' benefits and the portion of the national debt attributable to military expenses are added to this figure, it can be said that 77% of the United States budget in 1960 was devoted to paying for the wars of the past and preparing those of the future.

The Pentagon was not only the most important buyer of arms in the world, but also the world's largest corporation. In 1960, the Pentagon had assets totaling $60 billion. It owned more than 32 million acres of land in the United States, and 2.5 million overseas. Its holdings were twice as large as those of General Motors, US Steel, AT and T, Metropolitan Life, and Standard Oil of New Jersey combined. Few states in the union -- and few countries in the world -- have a budget as large as that of the Defense Department, and one-third have a smaller population.

In 1960, Charles J. Hitch wrote a book entitled The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age, which introduced a new concept of military strategy. He suggested that the army and defense requirements should be subordinated to the national economy on a long and short-term basis. John F. Kennedy told Congress:

"Our arms must be subject to ultimate civilian control and command at all times, in war as well as peace. The basic decisions on our participation in any conflict and our response to any threat -- indeed all decisions relating to the use of nuclear weapons, or the escalation of a small war into a large one -- will be made by the regularly constituted civilian authorities. This requires effective and protected organization, procedures, facilities and communications in the event of attack directed toward this objective, as well as defensive measures designed to insure thoughtful and selective decisions by the civilian authorities. This message and budget also reflect this basic principle . . .

"The primary purpose of our arms is peace, not war -- to make certain that they will never have to be used -- to deter all wars, general or limited, nuclear or conventional, large or small -to convince all potential aggressors that any attack would be futile -- to provide backing for diplomatic settlement of disputes -- to insure the adequacy of our bargaining power for an end to the arms race. The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution. Neither our strategy nor our psychology as a nation -- and certainly not our economy -- must become dependent upon the permanent maintenance of a large military establishment. Our military posture must be sufficiently flexible and under control to be consistent with our efforts to explore all possibilities and take every step to lessen tensions, to obtain peaceful solutions and to secure arms limitations. Diplomacy and defense are no longer distinct alternatives, one must be used where the other fails -- both must complement each other . . .

"Our arms will never be used to strike the first blow in any attack. This is not a confession of weakness but a statement of strength. It is our national tradition. ... The national interest must be weighed against special or local interests."



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War without End - "Fixing" the War

By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
14 Dec 06

This is an old tale. Long forgotten. But like all good political bedtime stories, it's well worth telling again.

Once upon a time, there was a retired general named Paul Van Riper. In 1966, as a young Marine officer and American advisor in Vietnam, he was wounded in action; he later became the first president of the Marine Corps University, retired from the Corps as a Lieutenant General, and then took up the task of leading the enemy side in Pentagon war games.

Over the years, Van Riper had developed into a free-wheeling military thinker, given to quoting Von Clausewitz and Sun-tzu, and dubious about the ability of the latest technology to conquer all in its path. If you wanted to wage war, he thought, it might at least be reasonable to study war seriously (if not go to war yourself) rather than just fall in love with military power. It seemed to him that you took a risk any time you dismissed your enemy as without resources (or a prayer) against your awesome power and imagined your campaign to come as a sure-fire "cakewalk." As he pointed out, "Many enemies are not frightened by that overwhelming force. They put their minds to the problem and think through: how can I adapt and avoid that overwhelming force and yet do damage against the United States?"

As a result, Van Riper took the task of simulated enemy commander quite seriously. He also had a few issues with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's much vaunted "military transformation," his desire to create a sleek, high-tech, agile military that would drive everything before it. He thought the Rumsfeld program added up to just so many "shallow," "fundamentally flawed" slogans. ("There's very little intellectual content to what they say... 'Information dominance,' 'network-centric warfare,' 'focused logistics' -- you could fill a book with all of these slogans.")

In July 2002, he got the chance to test that proposition. At the cost of a quarter-billion dollars, the Pentagon launched the most elaborate war games in its history, immodestly entitled "Millennium Challenge 02." These involved all four services in "17 simulation locations and nine live-force training sites." Officially a war against a fictional country in the Persian Gulf region -- but obviously Iraq -- it was specifically scripted to prove the efficacy of the Rumsfeld-style invasion that the Bush administration had already decided to launch.

Lt. Gen. Van Riper commanded the "Red Team" -- the Iraqis of this simulation -- against the "Blue Team," U.S. forces; and, unfortunately for Rumsfeld, he promptly stepped out of the script. Knowing that sometimes the only effective response to high-tech warfare was the lowest tech warfare imaginable, he employed some of the very techniques the Iraqi insurgency would begin to use all-too-successfully a year or two later.

Such simple devices as, according to the Army Times, using "motorcycle messengers to transmit orders, negating Blue's high-tech eavesdropping capabilities," and "issuing attack orders via the morning call to prayer broadcast from the minarets of his country's mosques." In the process, Van Riper trumped the techies.

"At one point in the game," as Fred Kaplan of Slate wrote in March 2003, "when Blue's fleet entered the Persian Gulf, he sank some of the ships with suicide-bombers in speed boats. (At that point, the managers stopped the game, 'refloated' the Blue fleet, and resumed play.)" After three or four days, with the Blue Team in obvious disarray, the game was halted and the rules rescripted. In a quiet protest, Van Riper stepped down as enemy commander.

Millennium Challenge 02 was subsequently written up as a vindication of Rumsfeld's "military transformation." On that basis -- with no one paying more mind to Van Riper (who, this April, called openly for Rumsfeld's resignation) than to Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki when, in February 2003, he pointed out that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to occupy Iraq, the "transformational" invasion was launched -- with all the predictably catastrophic results now so widely known.

The Millennium Challenge 02 war games were already underway when, late that July, Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 (the British equivalent of the CIA), returned to London from high-level meetings in Washington to report to Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top officials. In a secret meeting, he told them that the decision for war in Iraq had already been made by the Bush administration and that now, in a memorable phrase, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

On May 1st, 2005, notes from this meeting, dubbed "the Downing Street Memo," were leaked to the London Sunday Times. Thanks to that memo and other documents, it's now commonly accepted that the Bush administration "fixed" the intelligence around their war of choice. But Lt. Gen. Van Riper's forgotten story should remind us that they also "fixed" the war they were planning to fight.

Between then and now, when it came to Iraq, there wasn't much that wasn't "fixed" in a similar manner. Only recently, James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group report described the way levels of violence in Iraq were grossly underreported by U.S. intelligence officials -- in one case, only 93 "attacks or significant acts of violence" being officially recorded on a day when the number was well above 1,000. As the report politely summed up this particular fix-it-up methodology, "Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals."

But here's the thing: The Iraq Study Group, too -- like every other mainstream gathering of advisors, officials, or pundits -- "fixed" the intelligence. Think of the ISG as the clean-up-crew version of the Blue Team of Millennium Challenge 02. Before they even began, Bush family consigliere Baker and cohorts ensured that, while the ISG would be filled with notable movers and shakers from numerous previous administrations, no one on it, nor any expert "team" advising it would represent the one point of view that a majority of Americans have by now come to support -- actual withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq on a set timeline.

You would not, for instance, find retired Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, the former Director of the National Security Agency, who has openly called for the U.S. to "cut and run" from Iraq, on the panel. Despite the report's harsh descriptions of the last three years of failed policy and some perfectly sane negotiation suggestions, it dismissed the idea of such a withdrawal out of hand -- because such a dismissal was simply built into the group's very make up.

It turns out, of course, that when you control both sides of a war game or the range of opinion on a panel, you are assured of the results you're going to get. The problem comes when you only control one side of a situation; and when, as American commanders learned in the early days of the Korean War and again in Vietnam, whether due to racism or imperial blindness, you also discount and disrespect your enemies.

Unfortunately for the Bush administration, it turned out that, while you could fix the war games and the intelligence, you couldn't be assured of fixing reality itself, which has a tendency to remain obdurately, passionately, irascibly unconquerable. Yes, you could ignore reality for a while. (The President, when being told a few hard Iraqi truths in 2004 by Col. Derek Harvey, the Defense Intelligence Agency's senior intelligence officer for Iraq, reportedly turned to his aides and asked, "Is this guy a Democrat?") But you couldn't do it forever, not when the Lt. Gen. Van Ripers of Iraq refused to step aside and you weren't capable of removing them; not when you couldn't even figure out, most of the time, who they were. It was then that the fixers first found themselves in a genuine fix, from which none of Washington's movers and shakers have yet been willing to extract themselves.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt




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Why Withdrawal Is Unmentionable - Staying the Course with James Baker and the Iraq Study Group

By Michael Schwartz
TomDispatch
14 Dec 06

The report of James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group has already become a benchmark for Iraq policy, dominating the print and electronic media for several days after its release, and generating excited commentary by all manner of leadership types from Washington to London to Baghdad. Even if most of the commentary continues to be negative, we can nevertheless look forward to highly publicized policy changes in the near future that rely for their justification on this report, or on one of the several others recently released, or on those currently being prepared by the Pentagon, the White House, and the National Security Council.

This is not, however, good news for those of us who want the U.S. to end its war of conquest in Iraq. Quite the contrary: The ISG report is not an "exit strategy;" it is a new plan for achieving the Bush administration's imperial goals in the Middle East.
The ISG report stands out among the present flurry of re-evaluations as the sole evaluation of the war by a group not beholden to the President; as the only report containing an unadorned negative evaluation of the current situation (vividly captured in the oft-quoted phrase "dire and deteriorating"); and as the only public document with unremitting criticism of the Bush administration's conduct of the war.

It is this very negativity that brings into focus the severely constrained nature of the debate now underway in Washington -- most importantly, the fact that U.S. withdrawal from Iraq (immediate or otherwise) is simply not going to be part of the discussion. Besides explicitly stating that withdrawal is a terrible idea -- "our leaving would make [the situation] worse" -- the Baker report is built around the idea that the United States will remain in Iraq for a very long time.

To put it bluntly, the ISG is not calling on the Bush administration to abandon its goal of creating a client regime that was supposed to be the key to establishing the U.S. as the dominant power in the Middle East. Quite the contrary. As its report states: "We agree with the goal of U.S. policy in Iraq." If you ignore the text sprinkled with sugar-coated words like "representative government," the report essentially demands that the Iraqi government pursue policies shaped to serve "America's interest and values in the years ahead."

Don't be fooled by this often quoted passage from the Report: "By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq." The ebullient interpretations of this statement by the media have been misleading in three different ways. First, the combat brigades mentioned in this passage represent far less than half of all the troops in Iraq. The military police, the air force, the troops that move the equipment, those assigned to the Green Zone, the soldiers that order, store, and move supplies, medical personnel, intelligence personnel, and so on, are not combat personnel; and they add up to considerably more than 70,000 of the approximately 140,000 troops in Iraq at the moment. They will all have to stay -- as well as actual combat forces to protect them and to protect the new American advisors who are going to flood into the Iraqi army -- because the Iraqi army has none of these units and isn't going to develop them for several years, if ever.

Second, the ISG wants those "withdrawn" American troops "redeployed," either inside or outside Iraq. In all likelihood, this will mean that at least some of them will be stationed in the five permanent bases inside Iraq that the Bush administration has already spent billions constructing, and which are small American towns, replete with fast food restaurants, bus lines, and recreation facilities. There is no other place to put these redeployed troops in the region, except bases in Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, none of which are really suited to, or perhaps eager to, host a large influx of American troops (guaranteed to be locally unpopular and a magnet for terrorist attacks).

Third, it's important not to ignore those two modest passages: "subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground" and "not necessary for force protection." In other words, if the Iraqi troops meant to replace the redeployed American ones are failures, then some or all of the troops might never be redeployed. In addition, even if Iraqi troops did perform well, Americans might still be deemed necessary to protect the remaining (non-combat) troops from attack by insurgents and other forces. Given that American troops have not been able to subdue the Sunni rebellion, which is still on a growth curve, it is highly unlikely that their Iraqi substitutes will do any better. In other words, even if the "withdrawal" parts of the Baker report were accepted by the President, which looks increasingly unlikely, its plan has more holes and qualifications than Swiss cheese.

Put another way, no proposal at present on the table in Washington is likely to result in significant reductions even in the portion of American troops defined as "combat brigades." That is why this statement says that the combat troops "could be out of Iraq," not "will be out of Iraq" in the first quarter of 2008.

So, the ISG report contemplates -- best case scenario -- "a considerable military presence in the region, with our still significant [at least 70,000 strong] force in Iraq, and with our powerful air, ground, and naval deployments in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar..." Given a less-than-optimum scenario, the American presence in Iraq would assumedly remain much higher, perhaps even approaching current levels. As if this isn't bad news enough, the report is laced with qualifiers indicating that the ISG members fear their new strategy might not work, that "there is no magic formula to solve the problems of Iraq" -- a theme that will certainly be picked up this week as the right-wing of the Republican Party and angry neocons continue to blast at the report.

Danger to Empire

Why was the Iraq Study Group so reluctant to advocate the withdrawal of American troops and the abandonment of the Bush administration's goal of pacifying Iraq? The likely explanation is: Its all-establishment membership (and the teams of experts that gave it advice) understood that withdrawing from Iraq would be an imperially momentous decision. It would, in fact, mean the abandonment of over two decades of American foreign policy in the Middle East. To grasp this, it's helpful to compare the way most Americans look at the war in Iraq to the way those in power view it.

Most Americans initially believed that the U.S. went into Iraq to shut down Saddam Hussein's WMD programs and/or simply to topple a dangerous dictator (or even a dictator somehow connected to the 9/11 attacks). Of course, had that really been the case, the Bush administration should have withdrawn almost immediately. Even today, it could, at least theoretically, withdraw and declare victory the day after Saddam Hussein is executed, since the WMDs and the 9/11 connection were evanescent. In this scenario, the dismal post-invasion military failure would represent nothing but the defeat of Bush's personal crusade -- articulated only after the Hussein regime was toppled -- to bring American-style democracy to a benighted land.

Because of this, most people, whether supporters or opponents of the war, expect each new round of policy debates to at least consider the option of withdrawal; and many hold out the hope that Bush will finally decide to give up his democratization pipe dream. Even if Bush is incapable of reading the handwriting on the Iraqi wall, this analysis encourages us to hope that outside advisers like the ISG will be "pragmatic" enough to bring the message home to him, before the war severely undermines our country economically and in terms of how people around the world think about us.

However, a more realistic look at the original goals of the invasion makes clear why withdrawal cannot be so easily embraced by anyone loyal to the grandiose foreign policy goals adopted by the U.S. right after the fall of the Soviet Union. The real goals of the war in Iraq add up to an extreme version of this larger vision of a "unipolar world" orbiting around the United States.

The invasion of 2003 reflected the Bush administration's ambition to establish Iraq as the hub of American imperial dominance in the oil heartlands of the planet. Unsurprisingly, then, the U.S. military entered Iraq with plans already in hand to construct and settle into at least four massive military bases that would become nerve centers for our military presence in the "arc of instability" extending from Central Asia all the way into Africa -- an "arc" that just happened to contain the bulk of the world's exportable oil.

The original plan included wresting control of Iraqi oil from Saddam's hostile Baathist government and delivering it into the hands of the large oil companies through the privatization of new oil fields and various other special agreements. It was hoped that privatized Iraqi oil might then break OPEC's hold on the global oil spigot. In the Iraq of the Bush administration's dreams, the U.S. would be the key player in determining both the amount of oil pumped and the favored destinations for it. (This ambition was implicitly seconded by the Baker Commission when it recommended that the U.S. "should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise")

All of this, of course, was contingent upon establishing an Iraqi government that would be a junior partner in American Middle Eastern policy; that, under the rule of an Ahmed Chalabi or Iyad Allawi, would, for instance, be guaranteed to support administration campaigns against Iran and Syria. Bush administration officials have repeatedly underscored this urge, even in the present circumstances, by attempting, however ineffectively, to limit the ties of the present Shia-dominated Iraqi government to Iran.

Withdrawal from Iraq would signal the ruin of all these hopes. Without a powerful American presence, permanent bases would not be welcomed by any regime that might emerge from the current cauldron in Baghdad; every faction except the Kurds is adamantly against them. U.S. oil ambitions would prove similarly unviable. Though J. Paul Bremer, John Negroponte and Zalmay Khalilzad, our three ambassador-viceroys in Baghdad, have all pushed through legislation mandating the privatization of oil (even embedding this policy in the new constitution), only a handful of top Iraqi politicians have actually embraced the idea. The religious leaders who control the Sunni militias oppose it, as do the Sadrists, who are now the dominant faction in the Shia areas. The current Iraqi government is already making economic treaties with Iran and even sought to sign a military alliance with that country that the Americans aborted.

Still Staying the Course

Added to all this, from Lebanon to Pakistan, the administration's political agenda for the "arc of instability" is now visibly in a state of collapse. This agenda, of course, predated Bush, going back to the moment in 1991 when the Soviet Union simply evaporated, leaving an impoverished Russia and a set of wobbly independent states in its place. While the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton did not embrace the use of the military as the primary instrument of foreign policy, they fully supported the goal of American preeminence in the Middle East and worked very hard to achieve it -- through the isolation of Iran, sanctions against Iraq, various unpublicized military actions against Saddam's forces, and a ratcheting upward of permanent basing policies throughout the Gulf region and Central Asia.

This is the context for the peculiar stance taken by the Iraq Study Group towards the administration's disaster in Iraq. Coverage has focused on the way the report labeled the situation as "grave and deteriorating" and on its call for negotiations with the previously pariah states of Iran and Syria. In itself, the negotiation proposal is perfectly reasonable and has the side effect of lessening the possibility that the Bush administration will launch an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in the near future.

But no one should imagine that the "new" military strategy proposed by Baker and his colleagues includes dismissing the original goals of the war. In their letter of transmittal, ISG co-chairs James Baker and Lee Hamilton declared:

"All options have not been exhausted. We believe it is still possible to pursue different policies that can give Iraq an opportunity for a better future, combat terrorism, stabilize a critical region of the world and protect America's credibility, interests and values."

This statement, couched in typical Washington-speak, reiterates those original ambitious goals and commits the ISG to a continuing effort to achieve them. The corpus of the report does nothing to dispel that assertion. Its military strategy calls for a (certainly quixotic) effort to use Iraqi troops to bring about the military victory American troops have failed for three years to achieve. The diplomatic initiatives call for a (certainly quixotic) effort to enlist the aid of Syria and Iran, as well as Saudi Arabia and other neighbors, in defeating the insurgency. And the centerpiece of the economic initiatives seeks to accelerate the process of privatizing oil, the clearest sign of all that Baker and Hamilton -- like Bush and his circle -- remain committed to the grand scheme of maintaining the United States as the dominant force in the region.

Even as the group called on the President to declare that the U.S. "does not seek permanent military bases in Iraq" once the country is secure, it immediately hedged this intention by pointing out that we "could consider" temporary bases, "if the Iraqi government were to request it." Of course, if the Bush administration were somehow to succeed in stabilizing a compliant client regime, such a regime would surely request that American troops remain in their "temporary" bases on a more-or-less permanent basis, since its survival would depend on them.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the ISG report is its embrace of the Bush administration's imperial attitude toward the Iraqi government. Although the report repeatedly calls for American "respect" for Iraqi "sovereignty" (an implicit criticism of the last three years of Iraq policy), it also offers a series of what are essentially non-negotiable demands that would take an already weak and less-than-sovereign government and strip it of control over anything that makes governments into governments.

As a start, the "Iraqi" military would be flooded with 10,000-20,000 new American "advisors," ensuring that it would continue to be an American-controlled military, even if a desperately poor and recalcitrant one, into the distant future. In addition, the ISG offered a detailed program for how oil should be extracted (and the profits distributed) as well as specific prescriptions for handling a number of pressing problems, including fiscal policy, militias, the city of Kirkuk, sectarianism, de-Baathification, and a host of other issues that normally would be decisions for an Iraqi government, not an American advisory panel in Washington. It is hardly surprising, then, that Iraqi leaders almost immediately began complaining that the report, for all its bows to "respect," completely lacked it.

Most striking is the report's twenty-first (of seventy-nine) recommendations, aimed at describing what the United States should do if the Iraqis fail to satisfactorily fulfill the many tasks that the ISG has set for them.

"If the Iraqi government does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security, and governance, the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government."

This could be interpreted as a threat that the United States will withdraw -- and the mainstream media has chosen to interpret it just that way. But why then did Baker and his colleagues not word this statement differently? ("... the United States should reduce, and ultimately withdraw, its forces from Iraq.") The phrase "reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government" is probably better interpreted literally: that if that government fails to satisfy ISG demands, the U.S. should transfer its "political, military, or economic support" to a new leadership within Iraq that it feels would be more capable of making "substantial progress toward" the milestones it has set. In other words, this passage is more likely a threat of a coup d'état than a withdrawal strategy -- a threat that the façade of democracy would be stripped away and a "strong man" (or a government of "national salvation") installed, one that the Bush administration or the ISG believes could bring the Sunni rebellion to heel.

Here is the unfortunate thing. Evidently, the "grave and deteriorating" situation in Iraq has not yet deteriorated enough to convince even establishment American policymakers, who have been on the outside these last years, to follow the lead of the public (as reflected in the latest opinion polls) and abandon their soaring ambitions of Middle East domination. If they haven't done so, imagine where George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are in policy terms. So far, it seems everyone of power or influence in Washington remains committed to "staying the course."

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, as well as on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet websites, including Tomdispatch.com, Asia Times, Mother Jones.com, and ZNet; and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email address is Ms42@optonline.net.

copyright 2006 Michael Schwartz




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Diplomat's suppressed document lays bare the lies behind Iraq war

By Colin Brown and Andy McSmith
Independent Online
Dec 15 06

The Government's case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

A devastating attack on Mr Blair's justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain's key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act.

In the testimony revealed today Mr Ross, 40, who helped negotiate several UN security resolutions on Iraq, makes it clear that Mr Blair must have known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. He said that during his posting to the UN, "at no time did HMG [Her Majesty's Government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests."

Mr Ross revealed it was a commonly held view among British officials dealing with Iraq that any threat by Saddam Hussein had been "effectively contained".
He also reveals that British officials warned US diplomats that bringing down the Iraqi dictator would lead to the chaos the world has since witnessed. "I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed)," he said.

"At the same time, we would frequently argue when the US raised the subject, that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."

He claims "inertia" in the Foreign Office and the "inattention of key ministers" combined to stop the UK carrying out any co-ordinated and sustained attempt to address sanction-busting by Iraq, an approach which could have provided an alternative to war.

Mr Ross delivered the evidence to the Butler inquiry which investigated intelligence blunders in the run-up to the conflict.

The Foreign Office had attempted to prevent the evidence being made public, but it has now been published by the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs after MPs sought assurances from the Foreign Office that it would not breach the Official Secrets Act.

It shows Mr Ross told the inquiry, chaired by Lord Butler, "there was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW [chemical warfare], BW [biological warfare] or nuclear material" held by the Iraqi dictator before the invasion. "There was, moreover, no intelligence or assessment during my time in the job that Iraq had any intention to launch an attack against its neighbours or the UK or the US," he added.

Mr Ross's evidence directly challenges the assertions by the Prime Minster that the war was legally justified because Saddam possessed WMDs which could be "activated" within 45 minutes and posed a threat to British interests. These claims were also made in two dossiers, subsequently discredited, in spite of the advice by Mr Ross.

His hitherto secret evidence threatens to reopen the row over the legality of the conflict, under which Mr Blair has sought to draw a line as the internecine bloodshed in Iraq has worsened.

Mr Ross says he questioned colleagues at the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence working on Iraq and none said that any new evidence had emerged to change their assessment.

"What had changed was the Government's determination to present available evidence in a different light," he added.

Mr Ross said in late 2002 that he "discussed this at some length with David Kelly", the weapons expert who a year later committed suicide when he was named as the source of a BBC report saying Downing Street had "sexed up" the WMD claims in a dossier. The Butler inquiry cleared Mr Blair and Downing Street of "sexing up" the dossier, but the publication of the Carne Ross evidence will cast fresh doubts on its findings.

Mr Ross, 40, was a highly rated diplomat but he resigned because of his misgivings about the legality of the war. He still fears the threat of action under the Official Secrets Act.

"Mr Ross hasn't had any approach to tell him that he is still not liable to be prosecuted," said one ally. But he has told friends that he is "glad it is out in the open" and he told MPs it had been "on my conscience for years".

One member of the Foreign Affairs committee said: "There was blood on the carpet over this. I think it's pretty clear the Foreign Office used the Official Secrets Act to suppress this evidence, by hanging it like a Sword of Damacles over Mr Ross, but we have called their bluff."

Yesterday, Jack Straw, the Leader of the Commons who was Foreign Secretary during the war - Mr Ross's boss - announced the Commons will have a debate on the possible change of strategy heralded by the Iraqi Study Group report in the new year.


Comment: Blair has been lying all along of course. He has wriggled his way out of any wrongdoing precisely because of the naivete of so many ministers and law lords that such psychopathy can exist. Blair has proven he has no conscience whatsoever. His ability to avoid justice for his criminal actions also shows that he has had considerable help behind the scenes. With Blair's own corruption on peerages still being investigated, it seems the noose is tightening for the Prime Minister now that he has done his job. The late Robin Cook MP an outspoken critic of Blair's policy towards Iraq and "suicided" David kelly would surely have something to add to Ross's findings. How convenient that they are no longer here to add their valuable voices of dissent. We must therefore continue to add our own.

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Former British diplomat makes public secret evidence on Iraq

AFP
15 Dec 06

Previously secret written evidence submitted to an inquiry on British intelligence failures in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was made public, with a former diplomat alleging that "at no time" did the government assess that Iraq posed a threat to Britain.

According to the statement originally submitted by Carne Ross to Lord Robin Butler's 2004 inquiry into the intelligence relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Ross said that during his posting to the United Nations, "at no time did HMG assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests."
Ross was First Secretary in the British mission to the UN from December 1997 to June 2002. He said that the preparation of the infamous dossier on Iraq's supposed WMD progremme began before he left.

The evidence was made public on House of Commons's Foreign Affairs Committee website on Thursday.

In it, Ross, who resigned from the Foreign Office in 2004 in protest over the war, states that "it was the commonly-held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained.

"I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed).

"At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the US raised the subject, that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."

Neither Prime Minister Tony Blair's Downing Street office, nor the Foreign Office, commented on the evidence when contacted by AFP.

Ross went on to say that with the exception of about a dozen Scud missiles which were not accounted for, "there was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW (chemical weapons), BW (biological weapons) or nuclear material" within Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

He continued: "There was moreover no intelligence or assessment during my time in the job that Iraq had any intention to launch an attack against its neighbours or the UK or US."

He added that, aside from Israel, none of Iraq's neighbours voiced concern that they would be attacked by it.

The former diplomat said that "inertia" within the Foreign Office and the "inattention of key ministers" contributed to Britain never making "any coordinated and sustained attempt to address sanctions busting".

Ross had been threatened that he could be prosecuted under British legislation that requires government employees to keep secret certain official information, particularly matters of national security.

Despite the risk of breaking the law, Ross told the committee in November that he would be "happy to share" the evidence he gave to the Butler inquiry as it had been weighing on his conscience.

He has since founded Independent Diplomat, a non-profit diplomatic advisory service.



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Iraqis can't be blamed for the chaos unleashed by invasion - Bush and Blair must bear prime responsibility

Jonathan Steele
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian

A rare joke was circulating among Iraqis shortly before their prime minister met George Bush in Amman recently. What would the US president be demanding? Answer: a timetable for Iraqis to withdraw from Iraq.

It was a barbed reference to the huge number of Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homeland since the US invaded and presided over a catastrophic collapse in security. Up to 3,000 are leaving every day, according to the UN.
The joke also encapsulated the growing Iraqi feeling that the Americans are reaching the climax of a three-year exercise in shifting blame. Whatever has gone wrong in Iraq, it was always the Iraqis' fault. First they looted their own country in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's downfall. Then they let foreign jihadis and suicide bombers come in and attack the Americans. Now they are indulging in an orgy of sectarian violence and mindless revenge killings which are beyond the powers of the kind and well-meaning Americans to control. Could anyone have imagined that ingratitude for liberation would ever reach such depths? The only way to save Iraq is to remove every Iraqi. Messrs Perle, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz would then have an empty field on which to build their model Middle Eastern state.

The line that "it's all up to the Iraqis now" also runs through the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report, albeit in a subtle form. The report calls for Iraq's neighbours to play a constructive part in stabilising the country. It calls on the US military to accelerate the training of Iraqi troops and give them better equipment. But the central thrust is that Iraqis have to solve their own problems. They cannot expect the US to have an open-ended commitment to help.

The report has had a poor reception, partly because of the discordance between its various tones. The analysis is radical, while the recommendations are moderate. Its opening sentences - "the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating ... there is no path that can guarantee success" - have been highlighted excessively by the mainstream US media because they seem to be an attack on Bush's conduct of the war and his Panglossian state of denial about the horrors of life for Iraqis. That is one reason why Bush is delaying his own reaction until the New Year. He does not want to appear to agree with the diagnosis.

Baker-Hamilton contains some important warnings to policy makers. It points out that out of the 1,000 US embassy staff in Baghdad only six speak Arabic fluently. Fewer than 10 analysts in the Defence Intelligence Agency have more than two years' experience in charting the insurgency, so it is no surprise that they consistently misunderstand it.

The report says 61% of Iraqis approve of attacks on US and British forces. If one assumes crudely that Kurds (who form around 20% of the population) oppose such attacks, and Arab Sunnis (who also form about 20% of the population) support them, this means that two-thirds of Iraq's Shias also support them - a very high proportion among a population that suffered under Saddam and now dominates the government. Faced with such widespread hostility, is a US or British military presence sustainable?

Baker and Hamilton do not raise the question. They argue for continuing the occupation for years ahead - a point that media comment has tended to ignore. Their main military recommendation, a withdrawal of US combat units by the spring of 2008, is in line with the programme that the US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, has been pursuing for months. Their political recommendations, including the call for US talks with Iran, echo the policies being pushed by Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador in Baghdad. He had been authorised to hold talks with Tehran this time last year, until the neocons got cold feet and persuaded Bush to stop him.

It may be precisely because Baker and Hamilton are so close to current US policy that their report has been attacked by Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, as well as by Shia leaders - including the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. Baker and Hamilton have become the fall guys. It is hard for Talabani and Maliki to attack Bush frontally, so they go after the people who seem to speak in his name.

The report's central political tenet, like Khalilzad's, is that there has to be a tilt back towards the Sunnis and a restoration of a strong Iraqi state with guaranteed oil revenues in central hands. This is the only way to reduce the Sunni-led insurgency and avert the dangers of Iraq's fragmentation. The Kurds see this as a retreat from the new federal constitution they fought for. Shias worry about a transfer of power back to the Ba'athists.

The only two points of genuine radicalism in Baker-Hamilton are their call for dialogue with the nationalist Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, and an amnesty that "will be difficult for the United States to accept" - perhaps a hint that even those who killed Americans will have to be pardoned.

National reconciliation is the key, and Iraq's latest effort at that is due to get under way at a conference in Baghdad tomorrow. It has been postponed several times, and it is not yet clear how inclusive the guest list is. Nor does it seem likely that the Maliki government and his Kurdish allies want to make fundamental overtures to the Sunnis. Nevertheless, Iraq is at a moment of particular political ferment, which now also includes the secular former prime minister Ayad Allawi, who is advocating a national salvation front.

It may all fizzle out, just as Bush's policy announcements in the New Year may amount to a mouse rather than a mountain. But the essential point about the Iraq tragedy remains what it has been since April 2003. Bush and Blair bear the prime responsibility for the chaos their ill-conceived invasion unleashed. The problem of sectarian violence can only be solved by Iraqis. National reconciliation, if it happens, has to be Iraqi-led. But the US and Britain are not innocent bystanders, good Samaritans, or neutral guarantors against a civil war. There have been too many occasions already - from the so-called transfer of sovereignty in June 2004 to the inauguration of the first elected government in May this year - when they have said "it's up to the Iraqis now" while remaining in ultimate charge. Only when they leave Iraq will sovereignty truly revert.

Blair's posturing in the Middle East next week will be meaningless. He would have done more for his legacy if he had used his Washington visit last week to endorse Baker-Hamilton's bleak analysis, accept some of the blame, and tell Bush privately or publicly that the time has come for radical change.



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No Safety for Women in Iraq

By Dahr Jamail and Ali Al-Fadhily
IPS News
December 15, 2006

Nobody is safe. Taysseer Al-Mashadani, the Sunni woman minister from the al-Tawafuq political party was abducted by members of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi army militia July 1 this year. After being held for nearly three months, she was only released after much pressure was applied from both the U.S. and Iraqi governments.

Thousands of other women have not been so lucky. Many have been executed, assaulted, or released only after their families paid considerable ransom money.

Few women like to talk about what they have to go through. "I was taken by Americans for three days recently," Um Ahmed said in Baghdad. "They told me they would rape me if I didn't tell them where my husband was, but I really didn't know."
She said that she was turned over to the Iraqi National Guard "who were even worse than the Americans."

Her husband eventually surrendered to the U.S. military, but she continued to be held "to apply pressure on him to confess things he never did," she said. "They told him they would rape me right in front of him if he did not confess he was a terrorist. They forced me to watch them beat him hard until he told them what they wanted to hear."

The Organisation for Women's Freedom in Iraq has estimated from anecdotal evidence that over 2,000 Iraqi women have gone missing in the period from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 until spring 2006.

But numbers are not always reliable here. Thousands of cases of abduction of women are never reported for fear of public disgrace.

According to a study published by the Washington-based Brookings Institute Dec. 4, between 30 to 40 Iraqis were being kidnapped every day as of March this year. "The numbers on this table may be lower than the actual number of kidnappings as the Iraqi Police suggest wide underreporting," the study noted.

These estimated numbers have drastically increased from a reported rate of two kidnappings a day in Baghdad in January 2004, and are up from the 10 a day reported in the capital city in December 2004 according to this study.

Untold numbers of women, believed by many to be in the thousands, have been abducted for money, and others have been abducted for sectarian reasons. "My family had to pay 30,000 dollars to have me released," a 25year-old woman said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Several abducted women have later been found dead, sometimes beheaded. Others are never seen again.

Fifty-two-year-old Um Wasseem from Baghdad was abducted by U.S. forces and held at the Baghdad airport detention camp, her family said. She was eventually released after political pressure from family and friends who had some political muscle.

"I wish she had not been released," her 20-year-old son said. "Militias then abducted her, and we found her body torn to pieces in March this year."

Many Iraqi academics and aid workers say most of those being kidnapped now are women.

"Women in Iraq used to go to work, participate in social activities and even take part in politics," sociologist Shatha al-Dulaimy said in Baghdad. "Iraqi women studied and worked side by side with men, and they formed at least 35 percent of the national working power in various fields of work until the U.S. occupation came. The occupation has brought nothing but suffering, death or kidnapping to women here now."

The U.S. administration promised Iraqi women a better life with new opportunities, but the reality after three-and-a-half years of occupation is far different. Iraqi women were promised 25 percent of the seats in parliament. As it turned, out, the Iraqi National Assembly has 85 women in a total of 275 members following elections held Dec. 15, 2005. But that has not translated into more rights for women across Iraq.

"We are just a part of the décor arranged by Americans who wanted to convince the world of the 'tremendous' change in Iraq," a female member of the Iraqi parliament said on condition of anonymity. "Our (women's) voice is never heard inside or outside parliament."

Female members of the new Iraqi Parliament take little part in major political decisions or when it comes to forming committees. Many female members were elected for religious or tribal reasons, she said.

The MP expressed concern over a rise in "religious extremism" because people are being "led by clerics who spent their lives learning how to make women obey their orders and present them with the best services at home." Such extremism has been a large factor in the rising number of women being kidnapped, she said.

"What women's rights?" asked 38-year-old schoolteacher Assmaa Fadhil. "Those who talk about it are ignorant people who want women to be slaves and concubines rather than partners in life. They are using old traditions to crush women and keep them away from any real participation in society."

Fadhil says lack of respect for women's rights has increased the threat of women getting abducted simply as they step out of their homes.

"Most of us now stay at home unless we absolutely must go out for food," Fadhil said. "Because we know so many women who have been kidnapped, it is only a matter of time for us if we continue traveling around the city."

Denial of rights for women in the name of Islam is not what Islam is all about, Sheikh Ahmed of the Sunni religious group, the Association of Muslim Scholars, said. "Muslim women are granted full rights of work and social participation. It is tradition that limits women's activity nowadays, rather than religion."

Most Iraqi women are fearful about their future as long as the country is led by Islamists.

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who reports from Iraq.



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Insurgents attack Iraqi president's convoy

Indo-Asian News Service
December 14, 2006

Unknown gunmen opened fire at the convoy of Iraqi President Adel Abdul Mehdi in western Baghdad on Thursday, said an interior ministry official.

"Mehdi was with the convoy when the gunmen attacked, but it was not known whether there was any casualty," the official said on condition of anonymity.

He said: "We have just called in a US military support according to an urgent demand from Mehdi's lieutenant who said they were surrounded by the attackers."

It was not clear whether Mehdi was hurt in the attack, he added.

In a separate incident, a car bomb went off near an Iraqi army patrol almost at the same area, causing undetermined casualties, a well-informed police source said.

"A car bomb parked near the Nafaq al-Shurta (police tunnel) area detonated at about 11:20 a.m. (0820 GMT) near a passing Iraqi army patrol," the source said.

It was not clear whether there was any casualty as the Iraqi army guarding the area cordoned off the scene, he said.

However, witnesses said an Iraqi army Humvee was ablaze.




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Britain's case for war in Iraq under fire

By Deborah Haynes
Reuters
15 Dec 06

LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair's case for war in Iraq was dealt a fresh blow this week with the release of once-secret evidence from a former British diplomat who dismissed the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

Carne Ross, who was responsible for handling Britain's Iraq policy at the United Nations from 1998 to 2002, also accused the government of overstating the danger posed by
Saddam Hussein's regime to support the invasion, according to written testimony given to an inquiry into the run-up to the March 2003 conflict.
"During my posting, at no time did HMG assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests," Carne wrote in evidence submitted to the Butler inquiry in June 2004, which was made public on Thursday.

"It was the commonly-held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained."

Ross said when the United States raised the topic of regime change he and others would argue against such a move, "primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."

"With the exception of some unaccounted-for Scud missiles, there was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW, BW or nuclear material," Ross said.

THREAT ASSESSMENT

Ross, who left his post in June 2002, also said he had asked colleagues at the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defense about the threat assessment in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion.

"None told me that any new evidence had emerged to change our assessment; what had changed was the government's determination to present available evidence in a different light," Ross said.

He said he talked about this with government weapons expert David Kelly, who committed suicide in 2003 after being named as the source for a BBC story saying the case for the Iraq war had been exaggerated.

He also said Britain failed to crack down on Iraq when it was in breach of U.N. sanctions due to "inertia" in the Foreign Office and "the inattention of key ministers," adding such a move would have provided a real alternative to war.

The testimony had been kept secret because Ross said he feared he might face prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

But the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, a body of lawmakers in the lower house of Parliament, published the evidence after seeking assurances from the Foreign Office, according to the Independent newspaper.

A comment was not immediately available from Blair's office.

Lord Butler's report, released in July 2004, absolved the prime minister of distorting intelligence but contradicted claims Iraq's banned weapons were ready for use and showed that vital caveats were dropped from the spies' assessments.

Ross resigned from the Foreign Office in September 2004. He has since founded Independent Diplomat, which offers advice to inexperienced governments and political groups.



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They saw the uniforms and knew to run

By Borzou Daragahi,
Los Angeles Times
Dec 15, 06

BAGHDAD - "They're here! They're here!"

The panicked cry rose from the crowd of shoppers and businessmen, sending them into a stampede past storefronts and shocked onlookers. Men, women and children fell over handcarts and folding chairs, knocking one another down, hiding behind buildings and seeking shelter in shops.

None knew who "they" were: uniformed men firing weapons in the air and herding people into trucks, just a few hundred yards from the edge of the U.S.-guarded Green Zone.

But most had suspected such a day might come to the Sinak market of downtown Baghdad. All knew to run at first sight of the uniformed gunmen who have become signature elements of the all-too-common mass kidnappings in the Iraqi capital.

"We weren't really surprised," said Hossein abu Marwa, an employee of an air conditioner shop in the sprawling market. "We face such threats on a daily basis. Sometimes we hear they're coming from this side or that side. We don't know who is shooting. We don't know who is coming. Are they the resistance? Are they armed criminals? You don't know if they're Sunni. You don't know if they're Shiite."

This time, at least five dozen people disappeared within minutes, stuffed into four delivery trucks and hauled away toward eastern Baghdad.

An Interior Ministry official reported later that at least 23 of the shopkeepers had been released unharmed in northern Baghdad, after showing their captors identity cards bearing names associated with Shiite Muslims.
The fate of previous victims of mass kidnappings has been brutal: Most show up dead within days, often with signs of torture, such as drill holes.

Thursday's abduction took place in and around the auto-supply section of the open-air Sinak wholesale market, a few hundred yards from the headquarters of Iraq's Defense Ministry.

It began around 10 a.m. when a convoy of about a dozen sport utility vehicles of the type often used by official security forces screeched into the market and sealed off the main roads, witnesses said.

Heavy gunfire erupted almost immediately.

Ghaith Abdul-Kahdem, owner of three shops in the marketplace, had been stuck in traffic and was arriving late for work, just as the kidnapping was unfolding. He heard the shots and saw police vehicles and quickly hid under a bridge.

"I saw the four-wheel-drive cars arrive, about 10 of them, as well as trucks for transporting prisoners," he said. "I immediately realized something grave was going on."

The shopkeepers said they clutched their guns as the drama began, fearful of criminals. When they realized the invaders came heavily armed and in official dress, they put their weapons away.

"They were men in uniform," said Ahmad Jassem Saadi, 39, the owner of a leather jacket shop. "What could I do?"

"The raiders were selective at first," Abdul-Kahdem said. "But after a while they started grabbing anybody."

Saadi and other shopkeepers stood at the doors of their businesses and watched. "They detained a group of people, and then they started taking other sellers and even passersby," he said.

"The people struggled. They were taken by force and put into trucks."

Some described the trucks as the type used to transport milk and meat products.

Others said they were like armored vehicles used for transporting cash.

They began to fill up.

Abdul-Kahdem watched helplessly as the men stuffed four of his employees into the trucks.

The gunfire continued. The panic mounted.

Hassan Khafaji, shopping for a part to repair his broken-down 1990 Oldsmobile, lay on the ground as the shooting continued. He crawled to an alley, stood up and fled.

"I just kept running and running until I got somewhere safe," he said.

Yassin Hashim, who works at a refrigerator motor shop within the market's labyrinth of alleyways, helped an elderly man to his feet after the jittery mob knocked him to the ground. "He was too weak to get away," Hashim said.

"Some people were running and screaming," Saadi said. "Others were frozen in their place, watching."

"They were just looking for a place to hide," Hashim said. "Some people thought there were snipers."

The ordeal was over within 15 minutes, witnesses said. A detachment of Iraqi soldiers arrived and sealed off the area. Some witnesses described the kidnappers as police commandos, but a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said the suspects wore army uniforms.

Afterward, Saadi gathered around a group of shopkeepers consoling a Christian restaurant owner, a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair, who was weeping. His son had been taken. "It was painful and I felt very sad," Saadi said.

By then, around 11:30, the streets had emptied. There were no customers and no shopkeepers. "I couldn't work," Saadi said. "We closed up the shop and went home."






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Around the World in 80 Clicks


EU summit focuses on constitution

BBC News
Friday, 15 December 2006

Reform of European Union institutions is set to dominate the second and final day of its year-end summit in Brussels.

Finnish PM Matti Vanhanen said the new constitution, rejected last year by French and Dutch voters, should not be thrown out entirely.

EU leaders are also pledging a strategy on migration and may endorse a compromise on future EU enlargement.

Finland holds the EU presidency until the end of the month when it hands over to Germany.
On 1 January, the EU body increases to 27 countries with the accession of new members Bulgaria and Romania.

'Real progress'

BBC world affairs correspondent Nick Childs says there is a clear message from the summit that constitutional reform in the EU is back on the agenda.

Mr Vanhanen said member states had moved from a period of silent reflection after the French and Dutch rejections of the new constitution to what he called more active thinking.


We understand the need to combine the strategic vision of enlargement with the capacity of integration of the European Union
Jose Manuel Barroso,
Commission president

Leaders tackle EU future
Q&A: EU enlargement

He pointed out that 18 countries had ratified the constitution and that member states agreed treaty reform was necessary.

The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, said he believed there would be real progress during the German presidency.

However, our correspondent says the issue of reform of institutions, and of decision-making procedures, is likely to remain controversial.

On the equally difficult issue of enlargement, EU leaders are expected to endorse a compromise to ease voter concerns in many countries.

The compromise would require strict adherence to accession criteria for aspiring states but would not, in Mr Vanhanen's words, close any doors.

Mr Barroso added: "We understand the need to combine the strategic vision of enlargement with the capacity of integration of the European Union."

EU foreign ministers this week decided to partially suspend accession talks with Turkey because of Ankara's failure to open its sea and air ports to EU-member Cyprus.

The tougher EU line will affect such hopefuls for membership as Serbia, Croatia and Macedonia.

On migration, the summit has endorsed plans to boost patrols off Spain and Italy as tens of thousands of people continue to try to reach Europe from Africa each year.

There will also be laws drafted to allow in skilled African workers and more aid measures to tackle African poverty.

The EU leaders are to endorse their conclusions from the summit at about 0900 GMT and a press conference will follow at 1200 GMT.




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Tougher entry rules stall EU enlargement

Nicholas Watt, Will Woodward and David Gow in Brussels
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian


European leaders last night placed the brakes on further enlargement of the EU when they toughened the conditions that aspiring members would have to meet. In response to growing "enlargement fatigue", they agreed measures to lengthen Turkey's membership negotiations and complicate the process for other hopefuls.

The EU will soon increase from 25 to 27 nations with the inclusion of Romania and Bulgaria on January 1.

The EU leaders agreed to drop the setting of a target date for a country's admission to the union until negotiations were "close to completion". The 10 countries which joined the EU in 2004 were given dates early in their negotiations in a move thought to diminish the EU's ability to enforce reforms in candidate countries.
The EU will also address "difficult issues", such as judicial reforms and the fight against corruption, early in talks. Many EU countries believe Romania and Bulgaria are being admitted before these issues have been properly addressed.

Finally the EU makes clear that the "pace of enlargement must take account of the capacity of the union to absorb new members". This is a strengthening of the "absorption capacity" test.

The changes, which come days after the EU agreed to punish Turkey for failing to open up its ports to Greek Cypriot shipping, were welcomed last night by those politicians who are wary of enlargement. Nicolas Sarkozy, the frontrunner to become the centre-right's candidate in next year's French presidential election, is passionately opposed to Turkish EU membership. He said: "I am very pleased with the decision proposed by the [European] commission, which will be adopted by the heads of government, to finally be firm with Turkey."

A German official said that at the meeting Mr Sarkozy hinted he could veto Turkey's membership if he were elected president in May. A referendum is to be held in France on every new enlargement of the EU after Croatia joins the EU, probably in 2010.

The pact on enlargement last night was a compromise between countries such as France, where voters rejected the EU constitution in 2005 in part because of fears at the pace of the union's growth, and Britain, which champions the process.

But the UK is facing pressure because France and Germany have made clear that the EU cannot enlarge until it sorts out its constitution. Britain stresses that the constitution will be a matter for the German presidency.

Tony Blair is due to travel to the Middle East soon in support of what he has described as an "arc of moderation", which includes moderate Muslim countries such as Turkey. That was "also an important reason why we support Turkish membership of the EU", the prime minister's official spokesman said.



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George W. Bush's Hero: Mugabe extends term to declare himself the 'President-for-life'

By Our Special Correspondent in Harare
15 December 2006

Under the leadership of the former school teacher, Zimbabwe has suffered a precipitous slide in living standards, life expectancy and economic output that has rooted the country at the bottom of global quality-of-life indices.
Robert Mugabe has effectively appointed himself as President-for-life in Zimbabwe after extending his present term by two years until 2010. The ruling ZANU-PF party will this week endorse a controversial amendment that would maintain the 82-year-old's grip on power and prolong his country's status as an international pariah.

Mr Mugabe has already given his assent for the presidential poll - currently scheduled for March 2008 - to be "harmonised" with the parliamentary elections in 2010. His cabinet, the Politburo, has already agreed, making a necessary resolution at the party's annual conference this weekend a mere formality. The proposal has also been adopted by eight of the ruling party's 10 provincial executives.

The extension will take Mr Mugabe's rule up to 30 years, and put him among the select few of Africa's longest-serving despots - while scotching earlier hopes that he would step down in 2008 in order to concentrate on writing his memoirs. Under the leadership of the former school teacher, Zimbabwe has suffered a precipitous slide in living standards, life expectancy and economic output that has rooted the country at the bottom of global quality-of-life indices.

Local press has reported that some ZANU-PF officials were unhappy with the extension because they wanted a new leader in 2008 in a bid to rebuild bridges with Western donors who have suspended aid.

But analysts believe Mr Mugabe could well go on beyond 2010, particularly if the country's economic woes continue, which they are bound to for the foreseeable future amidst sky-rocketing inflation - currently at 1,098 per cent - and widespread food shortages.

Last week, Didymus Mutasa, the minister for land and land reform, suggested that Mr Mugabe should be given an official lifetime presidency - though this would only serve to confirm what many Zimbabweans believe to be true already.

But it is a sentiment Mr Mugabe himself echoed in a recent interview. "I will retire, of course, someday, but it all depends on the circumstances. I can't retire if my party is going to be in a shambles," Mr Mugabe was quoted as saying in the state-run Herald newspaper.

Officially, the proposed extension is touted as a cost-saving measure, so both presidential and parliamentary polls can run together in 2010. But critics say it gives Mugabe a chance to avoid the voters' wrath in 2008 amidst a collapsing economy.

"He doesn't want to fight an election in 2008 - he doesn't want to put people's anger to the test," the Harare-based political analyst John Robertson said. Government policies, such as the seizure of white-owned commercial farms for distribution to landless blacks, have been blamed for a 40 per cent contraction in gross domestic product (GDP) since 1998.

Mr Mugabe has denied the charges, blaming the country's woes on Western economic sanctions orchestrated by the former colonial power, Britain. Others say the extension gives Mr Mugabe the chance to wrest control of a succession struggle that threatens to tear ZANU-PF apart.

"This [extension] will also give Mr Mugabe the chance to purge the party of all undesirables. It has nothing to do with saving costs," said Reggie Moyo, spokesman for the government watchdog the National Constitutional Assembly.

ZANU-PF remains bitterly divided following Mr Mugabe's decision in late 2004 to appoint Joyce Mujuru, a relative political lightweight, as vice-president. Political factions aligned to Mrs Mujuru and the rural housing minister Emmerson Mnangagwa have been jostling ever since for Mr Mugabe's blessing.



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The Dems & Bush's Deeply Flawed Lat. Am. Policy?

Council on Hemispheric Affairs
"Scoop" Independent News
Friday, 15 December 2006,

Will Democrats Cut and Run from Bush's Deeply Flawed Latin American Policy?

- Bush's Latin American policy and what can be expected now that the Democrats control both Houses of Congress
- Up to now, the Democrats have either ignored or lacked much wisdom on regional issues

Is there, or will there be, a revitalized Democratic Latin American policy as distinct from the farrago of ineptitude witnessed under the Bush administration?
To begin, in Bush's eye, the Cold War remains. The head of his personal list of enemies is Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, and, of course, Fidel Castro. While this may be a faithful characterization of the Bush hemispheric strategy, it does not differ that much from the opportunism and occasional meretricious initiatives of the Clinton administration and its all-encompassing pursuit of free trade. Clinton's controversial trade agenda predictably developed a sharp cleavage over policy both within the Democratic and Republican parties as well as between them.

NAFTA was the Vanguard

Recalling the extremely close vote over one of Clinton's premier foreign policy initiatives - the passage of NAFTA in 1994 - his operatives had to depend upon a higher percentage of Republican than Democrat legislators to achieve a narrow victory. A heavy majority of Democratic legislators mobilized against NAFTA while the Republicans overwhelmingly supported it. The same political division is likely to once again occur if the hemisphere-inclusive FTAA trade bill ever manages to reach the floor of Congress and is voted upon.

Clinton's Latin American Docket


Upon taking office, President Clinton and his administration envisaged a strictly defined, trade-dominated agenda towards Latin America. Looking back on his largely failed regional policy, one can see that the delimited nature of its focus on trade and more trade was the key ingredient of its relative lack of success. If there was any exception to the Clinton administration's mainly languorous interest in the region, it was its Jacobin orientation toward Cuba-related issues. In the first Clinton campaign, the Democratic candidate cynically moved to the right to outflank the first President Bush by taking a more bellicose stand on Havana; he therein relentlessly socked away at Castro in order to push Bush aside so as to obtain a share of the campaign donations and tap into the political clout of Miami's Cuban-American community.

Clinton apparently felt no great loss in sacrificing a balanced Cuba policy in favor of shrill invective, as well as as artful tactic to win over Florida's vital Electoral College votes. The Clinton administration soon revealed that there were a great number of dark spots in its snapshot of the region. If one accepts that such benchmarks as social justice, pressing environment issues, the aspiration for a just society, as well as the conviction that the implementation of hemispheric inclusiveness is where U.S. regional policy should be, then both the Clinton and the successor Bush administrations got it wrong both in theory as well as in practice.

An Impoverishment of Vision

For the Bush administration, there was a lingering line of now irrelevant Cold War ideology that would have been best to foil and then sweep away, because the basis for such concerns were eliminated with the demise of the Soviet bloc in 1991. Nevertheless, without the distraction of the anti-Soviet crusade still at work, the battlefield was left clear for a right-wing Republican absorption of Clinton's thirst for trade deals, which, after all, was basically entirely congruent with traditional Republican values. In addition to this mix however, was a potent brew of neo-con negativity from a dramatically radicalizing Bush State Department, particularly emanating from its Bureau of Western Hemispheric Affairs. This office had been rendered even more extremist by the strident orientation of its first Assistant Secretary of State, Otto Reich and his equally rabid successor, Roger Noriega. For these envenomed regional players, trade matters could be left to the Treasury and the White House's Trade Office, while they continued with their main lethal obsession that sprang from their determination to bring down the Castro regime and any other rogue states that looked or sounded like Havana. This was the assessment that they would apply before implementing any other major regional policy-making initiatives, and was also the yardstick used to evaluate the worth of other Latin American leaderships. Where nations stood within the region in relation to Castro and what they were doing to isolate Hugo Chávez, in addition to whether they were prepared to join the coalition of the willing on Iraq, became the visa-to-friendship between these countries and the current administration.

In fact, any amateur historian could have told Clinton - as well as the Bush administrations - that Cold War ideology did not die in the early 1990s, as Clinton once claimed - it merely had gone underground where it would hibernate until a more propitious season for it to thrive came along. At the beginning of the Bush administration's term, an intense ideological posturing began in addition to the reassertion of the pro-free trade docket, while anti-Castro diatribes that were tempered to new extremes of hardness, were once again launched at the aging Cuban strongman.

At this point, a fast-breaking scenario began to unfold. The Soviet era's Cold War compass was still sympathetically spinning for the Bush administration and its impact was not only theoretical. Meanwhile, memories of that period were profoundly and irrationally honored in U.S.-backed Latin American national security doctrines, even though the themes of privatization programs, bilateral free trade pacts, and market integration had substituted a new vocabulary and a new emphasis for Washington's new regional jihad - the war against terrorism. Meanwhile, the ideologues - Reich and Noriega - free of any admonishment by their seniors due to the distractions posed by the Iraq War, could now, undisturbed, commit themselves to their life's work of mopping up Castro, and later Chávez.

While such a gameplan would be good enough for Know-Nothing Americans and affluent Latin Americans led by their local captains of industry, along with the new professional class who were admirably suited to feast off of expanding commerce, it turned out to be pretty thin gruel for the chronically poor, the indigenous, and the millions of a given population who found themselves part of the rural and urban unemployed and underemployed. For those seeking even slightly improved standards of living and a portal into a better life, the contrast was embittering.

Clearing the Decks for Trade

During the time that it has ruled, the Bush administration's paramount mistake with regional issues has been that, in its concentrated quest for orthodox trade models that adhere to traditional conservative ideals and the raw ideology that was targeted at a number of Latin American leftist bull's eyes, it acted as if it had found the globe's most potent concoction. This was reflected in militant proselytizing for the full implementation of the Washington Consensus trade model, first devised under Clinton. But the fact was that, at this end of the political spectrum, those of that persuasion were only nursing an illusion. Like Hitler's Third Reich, Washington's game plan for expunging a radical strain from anywhere in the hemisphere where it surfaced, would not last for a thousand years, but scarcely a decade.

Because of their preoccupation with the time-consuming Iraq debacle, senior U.S. policy makers had hardly any quality moments to soothe a maladroit strategy or to soberly assess the proper mixture of good ideas and high quality personnel. In this respect, they were unable to field what could pass as a successful regional policy, value-driven both in concept and practice. Such a plan would want to reflect both rectitude and a readiness to address their national interests as well as Washington's. Poverty abatement, social justice issues, and attending to the correct practices, whose lack would otherwise hobble society's reasonable expectations, and prevent a commitment to an authentic rather than a faux democracy, which would be part of the recipe.
But the neo-cons charged with working hemispheric issues under Bush - who were particularly fertile in the Defense and State Departments - neither represented an undeniable strong moral force nor were comparable to the Pope's army in the service of an indisputable cause. Rather, they were little better than a gaggle of bullies and ill-motivated Pharisees, who used perverse versions of such concepts as democracy, human rights, and market liberalization to express their selective indignation against those on the left, including such leftist luminaries as Ecuador's Rafael Correa or Bolivia's Evo Morales, let alone Chávez, and of course, Castro, all of whom were accused by U.S. officials at one time or another of being the dupe of some progressive cause.

Selective Indignation

Of course, a policy based upon the pursuit of social justice and a respect for a nation's authentic sovereignty would be the antithesis of what the Bush policy was plying in Latin America. The role played by its questionable certification process, for example, which almost entirely relied upon spurious evidence and cooked data to make its case regarding Venezuela's supposedly unacceptable performance in such areas as drugs, terrorism, and human trafficking, ended up by being little more than self-discrediting. An example of this was intelligence czar John Negroponte's recent establishment of a special Cuban-Venezuelan unit with great fanfare and whose implications were perfectly clear, since the only other special units were those set up for North Korea and Iran. Moreover, one of Negroponte's previous avatars - as ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s - could be handily cited as how to be deeply involved in covering up something like Contra death squad activities against Hondurans opposed to U.S. policy in Nicaragua, and get away with it by repeatedly claiming, as Negroponte did, amnesia during his confirmation hearing to be ambassador to the UN, where he denied any such role before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, despite impressive in-depth evidence to the contrary.

Parallel to when Negroponte's especially set-up Cuban-Venezuelan unit became operational, the State Department, ever since Chávez's landslide win in the presidential race, has switched directions and is now ostensibly trying to engage Venezuela in joint projects. After repeated bashings of Venezuela and castigating that Caracas was unworthy of being certified for its cooperation in Washington's anti-drug war, it abruptly changed its line. State Department spokesman Scott McCormack redacted the Bush administration's usual tart language that it lavishes on Chavez, calling on Caracas to "work together." He noted that "we have been able to work pretty effectively together." Ironically, McCormack is extending his hand to Chavez over the very transgressions on Chávez's part, whose alleged failure the Bush administration recently used to discredit Caracas, as exemplified by the U.S. denying Caracas its anti-drug certification.

A Prescription for Success

If Washington now means to turn its attention to salvaging its currently deformed relations with it southern neighbors, it must come to the realization that to be a true friend of the hemisphere, it must approach the table with a policy in which each constituent nation must be allowed to go in its own direction and generate its own autonomous choice of global options, in order to service each one's unique perspectives, as has not been the case of Washington's style of dealing with Cuba and Venezuela. This means that it should not be automatic, or necessarily entirely kindred to the White House's hypertrophied passion for control and definition.
Washington's regional policy today is one frozen in time, concretized by a non-stop effort to defame and marginalize, as has been the case with its attempts to war in this matter against Cuba and Venezuela, as well as to try to tarnish individuals and movements throughout the continent whose mortal offense could begin with their rejecting the thesis that what is private is intrinsically superior to what is public, and that the private corporation should be equal to the state in its legal personality. This is not so much a policy as it is a self-indulgent wayward gambol that has little appeal to either Latin American leaders or their multiple publics.

To initiate a policy of relevance which at the same time is hallmarked by gravitas, while it reaches out for opportunities for constructive engagement with Latin American nations that previously have been demonized as rogue powers, Washington must first honestly address its differences with Cuba and Venezuela. This must be carried out not through imposing some Miami-pandering Republican-authored diktat, but by means of a convergence of a mature application of traditional diplomatic skills. The result of such efforts should, in turn, be fused to a balanced policy based on addressing some of the main economic, political and social issues plaguing the entire hemisphere. Some of the latter could involve the heavy hand of debt burdens, the shortage of investment capital, or the snares of profound differences over immigration policy.

This trajectory could at least provide U.S. negotiators and those speaking for an increasingly united Latin America, with some basis for hope for a successful resolution of some of the most long-lived differences existing today between Washington and its two Caribbean basin foes. Even if one is quick to dismiss such musings as a pipe dream, it still remains critically important that an awareness of the debilitating impact of a series of misguided State Department policies on the hemisphere must be nursed in order to reverse the detrimental effects. Perhaps Latin America could appeal to the U.S. Democrat leadership to take a bold move inspired by the Baker-Hamilton mission to tackle the regional problem as a cluster project, but this time applying the formula in the Western Hemisphere rather than the Middle East. Here the Democrats can say that we will solve the Cuba and Venezuela issues, but we will do it as a cohort involving all of the regional players, similar to the proposal, that Iran, Syria and Palestine are included in solving the question of Iraq.

The Democratic Alternative

U.S.-Latin American relations under President Clinton now seem barely discernable from the harshly politicized bad patches of the Bush era. It is this seamless fusion that is so disturbing, as well as the conviction that little is likely to change in the near future under those who will continue to control the White House until early 2009. This is reason enough to treasure the few instances where Democrats showed more than random spunk and some slightly less formulaic insights into the complexities of the triangular relations between the U.S., Cuba and Venezuela.

Generally, the Democratic leadership has either ignored or all too often trivialized the importance of regional relations, numbly accepting an obsolescent and grossly sterile manner of relating to Cuba. It might be useful to prescribe a more simple approach to the Democrats on how to make amends - simply do everything opposite of what was done yesterday when it comes to U.S.-Latin American strategies. Meanwhile, the combative rhetoric borrowed from a Republican lexicon will soon be handed over to Democratic counterparts. The question is whether the Democrats will make use of it or unlikely enough decide to go their own way. For example, presidential contender John Kerry, during his last presidential race, found that Hugo Chávez's "close relationship with Fidel Castro has raised serious questions about his commitment to leading a truly democratic government." Could they not say the same about Kazakhstan or thirty or forty other countries, some of them close allies of the U.S.? This relatively unlettered remark may have been one of the few occasions that Kerry has referred to the region at all.

In general, mainstream Democratic speechmakers consistently used dismissive language when it came to references to Chávez, let alone Castro. Anti-Chávez rants peaked with his recent "devil" speech delivered at the UN on the occasion of the duel between the U.S. and Venezuela, over who would fill the two-year Latin American seat on the UN's Security Council. For Nancy Pelosi, "Hugo Chávez fancies himself a modern day Simon Bolivar but all he is an everyday thug," while the venerable House Democrat and Black Caucus leader, New York's Charles Rangel, contributed the shameless piece of puffery that "You don't come into my country; you don't come into my congressional district and you don't condemn my president." U.S.-Venezuelan and Cuban relations deserve better than that, especially because there are a number of knowledgeable senators, which would include Kennedy, Leahy, Dodd and Harkin, who readily come to mind, as well as Congressman Delahunt of Massachusetts.

The Irreducible Agenda

The issues of immigration, terrorism, drugs, energy questions and incipient rivalries with China over resources and new investments in Cuba, should afford a lively time for U.S.-Latin America relations in the near future, even though it is likely to generate more heat than light. It is not too much to say that the incoming Democratic leadership remains sadly under-equipped to coherently debate a range of serious issues that deserve to be ventilated beyond sound bites and canned quips.

When it comes to regional ties, with only few exceptions, the entire U.S. Congress is all but functionally illiterate, so that an attempt to ferret out a "Democratic" as distinguished from a Republican Latin American policy will likely be a thankless task. When it comes to hemispheric relations, the Democratic leadership is hardly more conversant than its Republican colleagues. If there is any way to improve U.S. policy, it must be as a result of more than happenstance. It must come about due to specific people responding to specific needs that are being recognized at the highest places in governance. An array of important hemispheric issues must be made the subject of a free-wheeling, and constructive debate that would serve the common interests of the entire hemisphere. This process hopefully will end up conveying a spirit of flexibility, mutual respect, and a recognition that no one nation, including the U.S., has a monopoly on good thinking or upon gracious vision, or possesses the unique capacity to innovate and move the region along its own natural path in friendship and mutual respect. It is something that has to be worked towards.

*************

This analysis was prepared by COHA Director Larry Birns, and is a slightly modified version of an article appearing in the winter issue of the Democratic Left, a publication of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

This analysis was prepared by COHA Director Larry Birns
December 13th, 2006
Word Count: 3000

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US 'plot' to grab South America's water is all wet

By Andres Oppenheimer
MIAMI HERALD’S
Thursday, December 14, 2006

In recent trips to several Latin American countries, I have been asked the same question: Is the region bound to get rich because it has the world's biggest reservoir of water, which may become the most precious commodity in the 21st century?
In recent trips to several Latin American countries, I have been asked the same question: Is the region bound to get rich because it has the world's biggest reservoir of water, which may become the most precious commodity in the 21st century?

Before we get into whether this theory-which has become very popular on Latin American Internet blogs-has any basis, let's look at the facts.

There is no question that there is a global water problem: The World Health Organization says that 1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe water. On the other hand, Latin America has more water than any other region in the world: 42 percent of the planet's water.

Still, many Latin American countries, especially Mexico, suffer from water shortages. Rapid urbanization, unregulated industrialization, poor farming practices, corruption and massive leakages have crippled water distribution systems in many countries in the region.

Some Latin American presidents, such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales, claim that Latin America is already a much-coveted region because of its water resources. Chavez said in a September 29 speech that "water is more important than oil."

According to a recent report by National Geographic News, the daily Web report of The National Geographic Magazine, "conspiracy theorists fear the United States is secretly taking control of South America's largest underground reservoir of fresh water."

Such fears center on the Guarani Aquifer, which stretches over 460,000 square miles beneath parts of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. "Local distrust of US-backed lending institutions, along with the presence of US troops in Paraguay, has spawned suspicions that Washington is exerting slow control over the Aquifer as insurance against water shortages in the United States," the article says.

Among the most vocal champion of this theory is Argentina's Nobel Peace Prizewinner, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who is quoted in the article as claiming that US military training programs in Paraguay are part of a grand US plan to grab South America's water reservoirs. "The United States already has water problems in its southern states," Perez Esquivel said.

Most international water experts say this is rubbish.

First, the United States may have some water problems in the West, not in the South, they say.

Second, compared to Europe, Asia or Africa, the United States faces much less of a water problem.

Third, and by far most important, water is not likely to become a rapidly disappearing natural resource, they say.

On the contrary, water may become more easily available in the future, because one of the most important technological innovations of the 21st century will be drought-resistant crops. These crops will allow farmers to grow food using half of the water they use now, they say.

That will be a watershed technological advance, because about 70 percent of all water currently used in the world is not used for home consumption, but for agricultural irrigation.

"New technologies will dramatically reduce the use of water for agriculture," says Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, a water specialist with Florida International University. "In 10 or 20 years, you will have widespread commercial use of drought-resistant crops. In addition, you will have a much more generalized use of drip irrigation, which has long been used in countries such as Israel and South Africa."

My opinion: I agree. Industry experts tell me that drought-resistant crops may be widely available even earlier, within the next five years.

The whole water debate reminds me of the once popular theory of 18th century economist Thomas Malthus, who said that because the world population increases geometrically (1, 2, 4, 16, etc.) while food supply only increases arithmetically (1, 2, 3, etc.), the world was heading toward mass starvation.

Malthus did not take into account technological innovation. The "green revolution" of the mid-20th century led to massive increases in cereal production in the developing world, which let countries like India-which suffered from chronic famines-become a food exporter.

The same thing may happen with the water scare. While Latin America should take care of its water reservoirs, it would help itself by spending more of its energies on improving education and attracting investments, like China and India, rather than by waiting to be propelled to the First World by its natural resources.




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Washington and Caracas again on talking terms

AFP
15 Dec 06

Washington and Caracas are again on talking terms, the US ambassador has said after meeting the Venezuelan foreign minister, a major step aimed at ending years of frosty relations.

"I just had a conversation, and in my opinion a very positive one, with the foreign minister," US ambassador William Brownfield told reporters after his meeting with Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela's top diplomat Friday. "I believe that today we start a bilateral dialogue, this is the first step."

Maduro, who said that Washington had called for the meeting, described the talk as "frank, very clear," as well as "cordial within the tension that can be created by a conversation where we speak with frankness."

US-Venezuelan relations have been strained since President Hugo Chavez took power eight years ago with populist, pro-Cuba policies and virulently anti-US rhetoric.

But the United States is also Venezuela's largest trading partner, and Venezuela the source of about 11 percent of all US oil imports.

The meeting comes just one day after the top US State Department official for hemispheric affairs, Tom Shannon, had positive words for the December 3 election that swept Chavez into a second six-year term as president.

"You all know that the Venezuelans have enough reason to mistrust statements that could come from the United States government," said Maduro.

But Venezuelans also have the "maturity ... to sit down to dialogue in a respectful manner" with the US government.

Brownfield said that the two discussed issues of common interest, and both governments "coincided in a system or a process to touch these themes in the future.

"I believe we began with ... a recognition by both governments of the electoral results in November in the United States and in December here in Venezuela," Brownfield said, referring to the opposition Democrats taking control of the US Congress and Chavez' re-election.

"Hopefully this dialogue, this first step today, will produce more productive and positive dialogue in the coming year," he said.

In April 2002 Chavez accused the US government of supporting a military coup against him, and in September he famously described the US president as "the devil" at the United Nations General Assembly.

Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel said on Tuesday that his government would remain "very cautious" with regards to Shannon's comments that Washington wanted to improve its relations with Caracas.

Shannon in October replaced conservative Roger Noriega in his State Department post.

"If the United States wants dialogue, Venezuela will always keep the door open. But I doubt they are sincere in this," Chavez said on Tuesday, his first news conference since his re-election.

"It is possible to talk to the devil, but you need human strength," said Chavez.

Brownfield acknowledged that substantive talks will take time.

"We have to walk before we run, we are going to start with small steps," he said. "Hopefully the next time that I speak with you I have more concrete results to mention."



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Castro near death - Not much longer

Reuters
15 Dec 06

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cuban President Fidel Castro is very ill and close to death, U.S. Intelligence chief John Negroponte said in an interview published on Friday.

"Everything we see indicates it will not be much longer ... months, not years," Negroponte told The Washington Post.

The Cuban leader, 80, has not appeared in public since he underwent emergency intestinal surgery and temporarily handed over the presidency to his younger brother, Raul Castro, on July 31.

Castro has been in power since 1959.

A delegation of 10 U.S. lawmakers who favor easing sanctions against Communist-run Cuba was due to arrive in Havana on Friday for a three-day visit.

The delegation has asked to meet with the acting president who has said he is open to talks with Washington.




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Japan creates first defense ministry since WWII

AFP
15 Dec 06

Japan's parliament has enacted laws to create a full-fledged defense ministry and to instill patriotism at schools, breaking two taboos lingering since defeat in World War II.

The bills were legislative victories for embattled Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a passionate advocate of a more assertive Japan, who has faced slipping poll ratings and on Friday survived a no-confidence motion.

The upper house approved the bill to create a cabinet-level defense ministry for the first time since 1945, upgrading the "Defense Agency" which had lower rank and influence. The lower house already passed it.
Abe, the first premier to be born after the war, has put a top priority on creating a defense ministry and eventually rewriting the US-imposed 1947 constitution that declared Japan a pacifist country.

The bill enjoyed wide support, with the largest opposition party joining the ruling coalition.

But Abe faced fierce criticism over his other reform, which would require schools to teach students about "respecting tradition and culture and loving the nation and homeland."

"This is of historic significance, shedding light on the basic principles of education in the new era," Abe said after the hard-fought victory in his first parliament session since becoming premier in late September.

"Based on the spirit of the education law, we will drive to revive our education to build a respectful, beautiful nation," he said in a statement Friday.

But liberals say that patriotic education has echoes of imperialist Japan during World War II when the emperor was considered a demi-god.

A united four-party opposition boycotted discussions on the education bill, arguing the priority should be in fighting bullying in schools, and on Friday sponsored a no-confidence vote against Abe.

He easily survived the motion, as his coalition holds a wide majority. But Abe's poll numbers have slipped sharply since the start of the month as voters question his commitment to reforms.

A Jiji Press poll of 2,000 voters released Thursday put approval for Abe's cabinet at 41.9 percent, a drop of 9.5 points since November.

Officials have admitted stage-managing questions at "public meetings" with ministers and Abe's Liberal Democratic Party readmitted lawmakers who were ousted in a purge by his reformist predecessor Junichiro Koizumi.

"The opposition parties cannot have confidence in the Abe cabinet as it is trying to carry out a false type of reform," said Naoto Kan, a senior leader of the largest opposition Democratic Party.

Under the ministry reform, Defense Agency Director-General Fumio Kyuma would take the title of defense minister from January, although Japanese troops would still be called the "Self-Defense Forces".

Previous attempts to create a defense ministry stalled over political sensitivities in light of Japan's past aggression and fears of upsetting neighboring countries.

Despite its official pacifism, Japan has one of the world's biggest military budgets at 4.81 trillion yen (41.6 billion dollars) a year.

Japan has steadily been assuming a more visible military presence to counter its post-war image as solely an economic power.

In a groundbreaking move, Japan sent troops on a reconstruction mission to Iraq, the first time since 1945 that it had deployed to a country where fighting was underway.

Besides the strong symbolism, the bill would also give the defense ministry more power in internal wrangling by letting it submit its own budget requests.



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Taiwan president's wife collapses at her corruption trial

AFP
15 Dec 06

The wife of Taiwan's embattled President Chen Shui-bian has collapsed shortly after she pleaded not guilty at the start of her high-profile trial on corruption and forgery charges.

Wu Shu-chen, accused of illegally claiming 14.8 million Taiwan dollars (450,000 US dollars) in personal expenses from state funds, was rushed to nearby National Taiwan University Hospital after she fainted during a recess.

"Not guilty," Wu replied earlier in the day when questioned by the chief judge Friday.

The morning session, which was broadcast live to reporters at an auditorium, was briefly interrupted by her absence.
"She was very tired ... her condition was urgent but her blood pressure and body temperature were returning to normal. We have to closely monitor her condition," said a hospital spokesman.

The court session resumed around 14:30 pm (0630 GMT) and ended two hours later without the wheelchair-bound Wu, as the 54-year-old remained in hospital for observation. The next hearing was scheduled for Friday next week.

"We will obtain a statement (on Wu's condition) from the hospital as the judges required," said Wu's chief lawyer Ku Li-hsiung.

The landmark corruption case could end Chen's presidency as the leader has promised to resign if his wife is found guilty.

Prosecutors last month indicted Wu and three presidential aides and named Chen a suspect in the scandal.

All three aides also pleaded not guilty. The president, who has denied any wrongdoing, escaped immediate prosecution because of presidential immunity.

The corruption charge carries a minimum seven-year prison term and forgery at least one year.

The ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Friday pointed a finger at the court for the way it treated the first lady.

"We are shocked by this and we felt sorry for her. I urge (the court) to show more concern and respect for her. The court lacks humanity in the way it handles the case," said DPP parliamentary whip Ker Chien-ming.

The indictment of Wu, the first Taiwanese leader's wife to be prosecuted, sent political shockwaves through the nation and forced the DPP to suspend her membership for 18 months.

Wu, paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair since she was run over by a van in 1984, was once her husband's leading asset on the campaign trail. She has been in poor health in recent months.

The president has admitted using false receipts to claim money from a fund set aside for affairs of national importance, but insists that it was used for "secret diplomatic missions" that he could not disclose.

Prosecutors, however, found that at least 1.5 million dollars were spent on diamond rings and other luxury items for his wife.

The opposition says it suspects a lot of the money went into the pockets of the president and his family.

Despite mounting calls for him to resign over a string of corruption scandals implicating himself and his family, Chen has insisted he will stay until his second and final term ends in May 2008.

His son-in-law, Chao Chien-ming, has gone on trial for insider trading, and a verdict is expected later this month.

Chen Che-nan, a former senior presidential aide, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for graft by a district court Wednesday.

Last month, Chen survived a third parliamentary vote aimed at ousting him after the opposition failed to garner enough support.

Two earlier recall motions failed to pass in June and October.



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South Korea builds world's largest garbage-fuelled power plant

AFP
13 Dec 06

SEOUL (AFP) - South Korea has opened the world's largest garbage-fuelled power plant and expects to reduce its imports of heavy oil by 500,000 barrels a year as a result.

The 50-megawatt plant, designed to provide power to more than 180,000 households, began operating on Tuesday. It sits on a mammoth garbage dump in the city of Incheon west of Seoul, the ministry said in a statement.

For fuel, it uses only the methane gas naturally generated from the decomposing garbage on the site.


"It reduces greenhouse gas emissions by burning away methane and avoids buring more fossil fuel for electricity," Park Han-Eop, an official of the ministry's waste treatment division, told AFP.

The plant will save the country the import of 500,000 barrels of heavy oil and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.37 million tonnes per year, he said.

A private firm, Eco Energy, invested 77 billion won (83 million dollars) in building the power plant in return for operating it for 11 years before handing the commercial rights over to the government, he said.

South Korea has 12 other landfill gas power plants either being built or operating across the country. They are mostly small-sized plants producing one to six megawatts.

South Korea currently relies heavily on nuclear power plants which supply 40 percent of demand. It imports all its oil needs.



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Stirring Up the Pot


White House Sez: Syrian visits hurt progress - (Yeah, they might learn the truth!)

By DEB RIECHMANN
Associated Press
December 14, 2006

WASHINGTON - The White House said Thursday that trips to Syria by U.S. lawmakers are a public relations victory for a government that is thwarting democratic reform in the Middle East.

The Bush administration has tried to discourage lawmakers from going to Syria, White House press secretary Tony Snow said. "We think it's inappropriate."

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., emerged from a meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus on Wednesday, saying Assad was willing to help control the Iraq-Syrian border. Nelson said he viewed Assad's remarks as "a crack in the door for discussions to continue. I approach this with realism, not optimism."
Snow said the trip by Nelson, a member of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, and future visits to Syria expected by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., send an unhelpful, mixed message to the Syrians.

"We want to make sure that they understand that just because they have visitors does not mean that the position of the United States government has changed," Snow said.

Taking issue with the White House, Dodd said in a statement that members of Congress "need to go to hotspots not just garden spots. I can't think of a more critical part of the world than the Middle East and I can't think of a more critical player in affecting events in the region for good or for bad than Syria."

Kerry spokesman David Wade said the senators were engaged in fact finding, not negotiating. "If Ronald Reagan could talk to the 'evil empire,' surely United States senators with a responsibility to American troops can visit Syria," Wade said, referring to Reagan's description of the former Soviet Union.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group recommended that the administration engage in direct talks with Syria, but President Bush has reacted coolly to that suggestion.

"The point is that even lending a further specter of legitimacy to that government undermines the cause of democracy in the region," Snow said about Nelson's trip.

Nelson's spokesman Dan McLaughlin called the remarks a "baseless attack" and said the White House was producing the "same old tired, mean-spirited partisan politics" that were unhelpful to the situation in Iraq. McLaughlin defended Nelson's trip as par for the course for a senator who sits on three oversight committees: Armed Services, Foreign Relations and Intelligence.

"In Syria, he met with a man he's met with twice before - not to negotiate, which is the president's job, but to talk and gather facts and report back to Congress and the State Department," McLaughlin said. "Senators meet with heads of state all the time."

The United States has limited diplomatic ties with Syria because of its support of Hezbollah and Hamas, which the United States considers terrorist organizations. Bush expressed reluctance to seek help from Damascus on Iraq until the Syrian government curbs that support and reduces its influence in Lebanon.

"The Syrians should have absolutely no doubt that the position of the United States government is the same as it has been," Snow said.



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Civilians flee Somali town as government and Islamist rebels prepare for war

Xan Rice, east Africa correspondent, and Simon Tisdall
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian

Hundreds of civilians were reported to be fleeing their homes in central Somalia yesterday as the prospect of a war between Islamist militants and government forces, backed by Ethiopian troops and artillery, appeared to draw closer.

The exodus was under way in the area around Baidoa, the last big town under the control of the western-backed transitional government. Baidoa is under siege on three sides by fighters from the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) movement and rival forces are reportedly only a few miles apart in some places.
The UIC, which controls the capital Mogadishu and most of southern Somalia, has given Ethiopia until Tuesday to withdraw its troops from the country. If it fails to do so the Islamists, who are backed by Ethiopia's enemy, Eritrea, say they will attack. Ethiopia, which officially denies having combat troops in Somalia, has rejected the ultimatum.

Western diplomats are seeking ways to bring the Islamists and the Somali government together but little progress has been made. "We still have a tiny window of opportunity to avert war," said a European diplomat in Nairobi yesterday. "But it needs a huge effort ... to get both sides talking."

The US, which tacitly backs Ethiopia's intervention, pushed through a UN security council resolution this month authorising an African protection force to enter Somalia in support of the government. The UIC responded by calling for jihad against any foreign forces sent to the country. The US embassy in Nairobi condemned the UIC's ultimatum yesterday as "irresponsible" and called for negotiations to resume. "Given the existing, heightened tensions in Somalia, this ultimatum further destabilises the situation and undermines international and regional efforts to encourage credible dialogue," the US statement said.

The African Union also voiced alarm yesterday, calling on members to urgently contribute troops to the protection force.

"Somalia has remained a non-state and we have allowed things to rot," said Alpha Oumar Konare, the AU's chairman. "Obviously we are not going to wage war. But there can be no balanced dialogue if the transitional government is not helped and supported." The UN's envoy, François Lonsény Fall, urged a quick resumption of the so-called Khartoum dialogue that stalled in the autumn. Those talks are due to resume on Tuesday.

But hopes that conflict can be avoided faded after Ali Mohamed Gedi, Somalia's prime minister, said war seemed inevitable and his troops were ready for the fight. Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia's prime minister, said his country hoped to avoid war but complained that it was being attacked by the UIC and its Ethiopian Muslim allies. "Since last summer the Islamic Courts have been training and equipping and smuggling armed elements - hundreds of them - into Ethiopia and they have clashed with the security services," Mr Zenawi said recently.

While the two-year-old government has failed to win support from the Somali population, the Islamists have widespread approval. Having kicked the warlords out of Mogadishu in June, and brought order to the city for the first time in 15 years, they quickly spread their influence. Ethiopia is distrusted by most Somalis, who are wary of foreign intervention.

The Islamists' rise also worries the US, which accuses them of links to al-Qaida. In a bid to slow the courts' progress Washington backed the Mogadishu warlords against them - unsuccessfully.



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France admits air raids on Darfur neighbours

By Alex Duval Smith
The Indepebndent
15 December 2006

France yesterday defended recent fighter jet raids on towns bordering Sudan's Darfur region by claiming the aggressive action was aimed at preventing regional chaos.

In the past two weeks, with minimal publicity, Mirage F1 jets have attacked and scattered a rebellion in north-eastern Central African Republic (CAR). But reports from the ground say the operation has had a devastating impact on civilians.
A French Defence Ministry spokesman said the action - which included regular Mirage sorties in neighbouring Chad where tens of thousands of refugees from Darfur are living - was in line with international calls to stabilise the region.

He claimed that without action there was a danger of a "Somalisation" of the region."We want to ensure that the Darfur crisis does not take on a further dimension. The region is crucial if we want to put a peace force in Darfur," he said.

After opposition from the Sudanese President Omar El Beshir, plans to send 20,000 United Nations peacekeepers to Darfur have been axed. Mr Beshir will only accept a beefed-up African Union force with UN logistical support.

The French operations in CAR have been centred on repelling rebels which the government claims are - like the Darfur militias - backed by the Sudanese regime. Others say the rebels of the Union des Forces Démocratiques pour le Rassemblement (UFDR) are disgruntled allies of CAR President François Bozizé who helped him come to power in a 2003 coup and are dissatisfied with his ruling of the country along ethnic lines. Both the rebels and Sudan deny they have any links.

In early November, the UFDR took the north-eastern town of Birao, which has a population of 30,000 people, as well as Ouadda-Djalle and Sam Ouandja.

President Bozizé asked for French help and Paris added 100 troops to the 200 already stationed in the country. These, including paratroopers, are on the ground with the CAR army and with Fomuc - soldiers brought in from regional allies Chad and Gabon.

According to the UFDR, the raids over several days at the start of December included an attack on Birao with six Mirage F1 fighters and four helicopter gunships. It claims the attack forced thousands of civilians to flee towards Darfur and southern Chad.

A French armed forces spokesman yesterday refused to give details of whether bombs, missiles or machinegun-fire had been used by the jets.

Humanitarian groups have not yet succeeded in reaching Birao but in phone calls to residents they have heard reports of executions and rapes by the CAR army.

The rebellion, according to the CAR army, was finally crushed on Monday with the capture of Ouadda-Djalle. However, there are fears that the rebels, who have scattered, will relaunch their offensive.

Nganatouwa Goungaye Wanfiyo, president of the Central African Human Rights League, said France's intervention on the side of the CAR army had been out of all proportion and may have increased the risk of a Darfur-style ethnic conflict. "They have just delayed the problem and worsened it. The opposition wants dialogue with Bozizé, that's all."




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New rape allegations against French troops during Rwandan genocide

AFP
15 Dec 06

More female survivors of Rwanda's 1994 genocide have accused French troops of raping them, in allegations of sexual abuse by peacekeepers that France had in the country at the time.

Testifying Thursday before a Rwandan government-appointed panel probing alleged French complicity in the mass killings, two women told in detail how they been violated at the ages of 12 and 14 respectively.

Both witnesses were granted anonymity by the inquiry commission, which was forced to briefly suspend its fourth day of a second round of public hearings when one member collapsed in tears during the testimony of the then 14-year-old.
The woman, a member of Rwanda's Tutsi minority that made up the vast majority of the some 800,000 victims of the genocide, claimed she had been handed over to a French soldier by extremist Hutu militia in southwest Rwanda.

"I resisted when he tried to unzip my skirt," she said, sobbing continuously from behind an opaque screen as she recounted the alleged attack near the Nyarushishi refugee camp in the former province of Gikongoro.

"He tore my skirt pushed me onto a mattress on the floor and then he forced my legs open," she said.

"I felt like I was dying," she said. "There was blood everywhere and I couldn't breathe. I spent the night in the bush because I couldn't walk back home. I prayed for death, that would have been much better."

The second female witness also claimed to have been raped by a French soldiers after Hutu militiamen delivered her to a military base.

"They destroyed me," she said through tears. "They killed me. I thought the white men were going to save me."

A third, slightly older woman, said she had been walking with her husband when French troops ordered them into trucks, took them to a unidentified location and separated her from her spouse in a room.

"A white man putting on a blue beret found me in the room and raped me," she said. "When he was done, he threw me out of the room and ordered me to join my husband and the other men in front of a nearby building."

Another witness, a soldier in the former French-backed Rwandan government's army, said he and colleagues had brought young Tutsi girls from Nyarushishi refugee camp and nearby hideouts to French troops in exchange for canned meals.

"On one occasion, they refused to pay me and my friends for a girl we were bringing them," he told the panel. "We threatened to kill her. They told us to go ahead. We did it before them."

Thursday's witness claims came a day after two other women told the commission they had been raped by French troops and testimony from ex-militiamen that French soldiers had driven them to sites to massacre Tutsis.

France's defence ministry on Thursday rejected the rape accusations as baseless, accusing the Rwandan panel of political bias.

"This procedure, which has nothing to do with searching for the truth, can only elicit one reaction, and that is indignation," said ministry spokesman Jean-Francois Bureau.

"These accusations are being made without a shadow of proof, for purely political motives," he said, predicting that the panel "will do all it can to bring charges against the French army."

Rwanda accuses France of complicity, if not direct involvement, in the genocide through its training of the country's former army and alleged support for the extremist Hutu Interahamwe militia.

France denies the charges and says its troops instead helped save Tutsis by running a UN-endorsed humanitarian mission in Rwanda at the height of the genocide.

France backed the Hutu-led government of the late Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, whose assassination triggered the genocide, against Tutsi rebels headed by now President Paul Kagame.

Seething anger over France's alleged role and allegations by a French judge against Kagame and current senior Rwandan officials in Habyarimana's death led Kigali last month to sever diplomatic relations with Paris.

The inquiry panel is charged with determining if there is enough evidence to file suit against France for damages at the world court.



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Tens of thousands displaced after Congo clashes -UN

By Joe Bavier
Reuters alertnet
14 Dec 06

KINSHASA, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Fighting between Congolese rebels and the U.N.-backed army has displaced more than 50,000 people in the east, some of them beyond the reach of aid workers who risk being caught up in the violence, the U.N. said.

Congolese soldiers and U.N. peacekeepers have repeatedly battled fighters loyal to renegade General Laurent Nkunda since late November in and around the town of Sake, about 30 km (19 miles) west of Goma, capital of North Kivu province.Around 49,000 people were displaced following a failed government attack on Nkunda's forces over the weekend, the U.N.'s humanitarian coordination agency OCHA said on Thursday. A further 6,000 had fled into neighbouring Uganda.

An estimated 12,000 more were stranded in the town of Kitchanga, according to information given to the United Nations by a local relief organisation, beyond the reach of aid workers because the security situation there was so unstable.

"The main problem for humanitarian agencies is that as long as there is no real ceasefire, we could end up getting caught up in a surprise attack and in the middle of the crossfire," Patrick Lavand'homme, head of OCHA in North Kivu, told Reuters.

Democratic Republic of Congo has just held its first democratic elections in more than four decades, with incumbent President Joseph Kabila winning a tense Oct. 29 run-off. The polls were meant to draw a line under decades of war and chaos.

Despite the official end in 2003 of a six-year civil war that killed an estimated 4 million people, Congo's eastern provinces have seen continued sporadic fighting.

Relief agencies have begun distributing food to those they could reach but Lavand'homme said many of those who fled the latest fighting had still not been located.

Congo's army has been massing troops in the southern portion of North Kivu near Goma since late November when Nkunda's fighters seized Sake, raising fears among aid workers that the government is planning a new offensive against the general.

U.N. forces in support of the Congolese army used helicopter gunships, heavy weapons and armoured vehicles in several days of fighting against Nkunda's forces, eventually driving them out of Sake and killing at least 150 of his fighters.

The U.N.'s peacekeeping mission in Congo said it considered the dissident general and his two renegade brigades an internal matter which it hoped could be resolved through negotiations.

"We always try to resolve these problems politically and not militarily," U.N. spokesman Kemal Saiki told journalists at a weekly press conference on Wednesday. "We are hoping for a peaceful resolution."

Nkunda, formerly a general in the Congolese army, led his soldiers in a mutiny against Kabila in 2004, claiming his rebellion sought to protect his fellow Tutsis.

He is currently under an international arrest warrant for war crimes allegedly committed during a week-long occupation of the eastern city of Bukavu.

The relatively small province of North Kivu currently hosts more than half a million internal refugees, about half of Congo's total displaced population.




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Bombers hit Afghanistan as NATO launches operation

By Terry Friel
Reuters
15 Dec 06

KABUL - Two suicide bombers, one dressed in an Islamic burqa, killed at least two Afghan soldiers and wounded a foreigner on Friday as hundreds of British-led troops launched a major operation in the Taliban's heartland.

European Union leaders vowed on Friday to do more to help
Afghanistan stamp out its growing insurgency and get back on its feet, citing plans to help in sectors from health to justice and policing.

A suicide car bomber killed two Afghan soldiers and injured at least one NATO soldier in an attack on a convoy in the restive southeastern province of Paktia, police said.

Another male suicide bomber dressed in a burqa -- the all-covering dress worn by some Islamic women -- wounded two more Afghan soldiers in neighboring Paktika province.

And as winter sets in and fighting enters its traditional annual lull, hundreds of NATO troops backed with armor moved into Kandahar, the Taliban's birthplace in the deserts of the south.

This year's fighting has been the worst since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001 and there has been a dramatic increase in suicide bombings -- a tactic rarely used a year ago and still not as common here as in
Iraq.

At least 4,000 people have been killed in 2006, a quarter of them civilians.

TALIBAN HAVEN

Overnight, hundreds of British, Estonian and Danish troops, backed by scores of armored vehicles, moved from Helmand province to north of the Arghindab River valley in neighboring Kandahar in one of the biggest operations in recent weeks.

British commanders say the area is a haven for Taliban guerrillas in a province that in September saw a massive NATO offensive involving thousands of soldiers. Alliance commanders say it killed several hundred insurgents.

"We're here on an intelligence-led mission against the Taliban," said operation commander Lieutenant-Colonel Matt Holmes. "You can tell by the size of our presence that we mean business."

Kandahar has seen some of the country's fiercest fighting this year and most of the more than 40 Canadians killed since 2001 have died there.

"All right, let's party," said British Marine Taff Blower as members of his Lima Company, 42 Commando, set out in their Viking armored personnel carriers overnight.

After months of NATO commanders in the deserts and snow-covered mountains asking for more soldiers, European Union leaders meeting in Brussels pledged to intensify their efforts in Afghanistan, but offered no more troops.

"Security and development in Afghanistan are mutually dependent," they said in a joint statement, adding that the bloc wanted to ensure development help reached all parts of the impoverished country.

EU officials bristle at suggestions within the alliance that the bloc -- 19 of whose members are also in NATO -- could be doing more, and point not only to the European troop presence but their longstanding reconstruction program.

The draft NATO summit communiqu� promises more reconstruction and development aid, but NATO generals, Afghan leaders and other analysts say money pledged by Afghanistan's allies is not being spent on time and military victories are not being backed by an improvement in the economy or living standards.

Several EU members have troops in Afghanistan but some, including France, Germany and Italy, have said their contingents cannot be sent to the more dangerous parts of the country except in emergencies.

Britain, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, Denmark and Australia have troops deployed in the dangerous south.

"We have to realize that military means alone are not sufficient to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan," Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, whose country has 300 soldiers in the south, told reporters in Brussels.



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War Whore "Wrong Way" Rice rejects engaging Iran, Syria on Iraq

Reuters
15 Dec 06

WASHINGTON - U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice has rejected a bipartisan panel's recommendation that the Bush administration engage
Syria and Iran in efforts to stabilize Iraq, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

The "compensation" required for any such deal might be too high, Rice told the paper in an interview.

Rice said she did not want to trade away Lebanese sovereignty to Syria or allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon as a price for peace in Iraq, the Post reported.

She also argued that neither Syria nor Iran should need incentives to help achieve stability in Iraq, the Post reported.
"If they have an interest in a stable Iraq, they will do it anyway," Rice said.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group included talks with Iran and Syria among its key recommendations it presented to the White House last week for dealing with the worsening chaos in Iraq.

The group, led by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, urged that its report be adopted as a whole.

President George W. Bush is reviewing policy in Iraq and plans to outline a shift in course early next year.

Rice told The Washington Post that Bush could be "quite expansive" in the policy review and that the new plan would be a "departure." However, she told the newspaper that Bush would not radically change any of his long-term goals or commitment to Iraq.

Rice said the administration's goal over the next two years was to help Iraqis marginalize extremists and create a moderate middle that can hold the country together, the Post reported.

The newspaper said she acknowledged that violence may not have ended before the administration leaves office in about two years' time, but said she hopes that Iraqis would "get to a place that is sustainable" by the end of 2008.

Rice also said the administration would not retreat from its push to promote democracy in the Middle East and reiterated her commitment to pursuing peace between Palestinians and Israelis, the Post said.

"Get ready. We are going to the Middle East a lot," Rice said.



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Pakistan accused of supporting Taliban

By ALISA TANG
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER - Seattlepi.com
Tuesday, December 12, 2006

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- President Hamid Karzai directly accused Pakistan's government Tuesday of supporting the Taliban insurgency in his country, hours after a suicide attacker exploded himself in an Afghan governor's compound, killing eight.
Taliban militants have increasingly targeted government officials. Since September, they have killed one provincial governor, narrowly missed another, and killed several district-level police, intelligence and administrative chiefs.

The attacks are aimed at undermining the government of Karzai, who on Tuesday employed some of his toughest rhetoric yet against Pakistan, Afghanistan's eastern neighbor and a U.S. ally.

"The problem is not Taliban. We don't see it that way. The problem is with Pakistan," Karzai told foreign journalists during a trip to Kandahar, the Taliban's former stronghold."

He said the Taliban took power with support from Pakistan, calling it "more than a boss."

"The state of Pakistan was supporting the Taliban, so we presume if there is still any Taliban, that they are being supported by a state element."

Pakistan, a former backer of the Taliban government ousted by U.S.-led forces in 2001, denies that its intelligence agencies still give tacit support to the militants. It says it is doing all it can to patrol the border, which is populated on both sides by Pashtun tribes from which the Taliban draws its support.

Pakistani officials blame the instability in southern and eastern Afghanistan on a failure by Afghan and international forces to bring security and development to the lawless region and public dissatisfaction with Karzai's government.

A purported Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, claimed responsibility for Tuesday's suicide attack.

The bomb went off in a parking lot and Helmand Gov. Mohammed Daud escaped injury, although a district chief was killed. It was the second deadly attack near Daud's office in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, in less than three months. Eight other people were wounded.

Tuesday's suicide bomber - identified by the Taliban spokesman as an Afghan named Mullah Famiullah - approached Daud's compound on foot. His bomb went off as the police guards tried to search him, officials said.

The explosion killed six guards, Washer district chief Abdul Sattar Khan and an unidentified civilian.

Helmand is a center of Afghanistan's vast opium and heroin industry as well as Taliban resistance, and has seen some of the heaviest fighting this year. The bombing came one day after the province's deputy governor, who is the brother of Helmand's former governor, was fired. The two are seen by many as linked to the drug trade.

A British soldier was killed in a clash with insurgents in the province Tuesday.

Karzai was in neighboring Kandahar province, where he traveled with Western diplomats - including U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann - and the chief of NATO forces in Afghanistan to discuss how to prevent civilian casualties in military operations.

A series of civilian deaths during NATO fighting with Taliban militants and in the chaotic aftermath of suicide attacks has fueled Afghan anger.

"We are rightly angered by it and worried by it. NATO is also worried by it, and is working with us to reduce such casualties," Karzai said.

In the latest civilian death, U.S.-led coalition and Afghan forces killed a 13-year-old girl and wounded an 8-year-old girl in a raid in eastern Khost province that also claimed the lives of four suspected militants who had opened fire when challenged to surrender.

According to a tally by The Associated Press based on reports from Afghan, NATO and coalition officials, nearly 4,000 people have died in violence during 2006 - mostly militants but also including about 300 civilians.

Meanwhile, in a video message obtained by AP Television News in Pakistan, Afghan insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar claimed that U.S. troops would be forced out of Afghanistan like the Soviets before them.

Hekmatyar, a former prime minister and fugitive leader of the Hezb-e-Islami militant group that supports the Taliban-led insurgency, also touted the Republican defeat in the U.S. midterm elections as a victory for Islamic militants.

"It seems that every bullet that mujahedeen had fired toward the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan has turned into a vote against Bush," Hekmatyar said. It was not clear where or when the three-minute video was made.



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Who's running Lebanon?

Robert Fisk
The Independent, UK
15 December 2006

Some four years before his murder, when he was still Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri angrily told me a story of his struggle with Hizbollah. We were walking in the garden of his Beirut palace at Qoreitem - he reasoned that, even though his phones were all tapped, the Syrians had probably not bugged the flower beds with listening devices - and his hands were shaking with rage.

"They wanted to bring some of their 'martyrs' who had died fighting the Israelis and bury them in front of the Beirut international airport," he muttered. "Can you imagine what that would have meant? We want to show the world our new Beirut and the graves of Hizbollah members would be the first thing that every visitor to Lebanon would see. And once buried there, they could never be removed. I managed to stop it."
"How?" I asked. But Hariri just flicked his right hand in the air dismissively. There must have been some compromise with Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the chairman of Hizbollah. He wouldn't say.

Only Nasrallah now knows what that compromise was, because the airport is now renamed the Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport - for last year, he was to become the "martyr" associated with the gleaming new terminal and runways - and Nasrallah's own followers are camping out in the centre of Beirut, less than 100 metres from Hariri's grave, demanding the destruction of the elected government supported by Hariri's own son Saad. Nasrallah's son Hadi was killed in a suicidal attack on the Israelis before their withdrawal in 2000, and the Hizbollah leader - true to the necrology associated with his faith - insisted that he receive only congratulations, rather than condolences, for his son's death in battle.

You need to be in Martyrs' Square to understand the absolute conviction with which the Shiites of Lebanon - the largest religious sect in Lebanon, although not a majority - are protesting at the government led by Rafiq Hariri's former economic adviser and friend, Fouad Siniora. Hundreds of Hizbollah security men in white baseball caps cordon off roads so that there can be no contact with the Lebanese troops guarding Siniora's ancient Ottoman serail, in which the Prime Minister and his allies are eating, sleeping and - possibly - working.

They check all bags, like plain-clothes policemen (which, of course, is exactly what they think they are). But their Shiite ministerial colleagues have resigned; so the Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druze in the administration are now supposed to rule Lebanon without those cabinet members who may now represent up to 38 per cent of the population.

If Hizbollah's insistence that the government should resign is unconstitutional, so too, it seems, is Siniora's cabinet now that it no longer contains Shiites. Last Sunday's massive rally in Beirut ended in a peaceful return to their homes by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, policed once again by Hizbollah. Many Lebanese unwisely concluded that this symbolised failure - that Hizbollah's supporters had not been emotionally roused enough to provoke violence - but they were wrong. The discreet ending of the day's rally showed Hizbollah's discipline, not its weakness.

Nor should the government forget how fiercely and how ruthlessly Hizbollah fought the Israelis for 34 days last summer. It may not have been the "divine victory" of which Nasrallah boasted, but it was certainly a defeat for the Israelis, who, when a few thousand of them did manage to fight their way into Lebanon, were appalled to find that some of the Hizbollah fighters possessed Israeli uniforms and - much more seriously - Israel's own aerial photo-reconnaissance pictures of Hizbollah's Lebanese positions, complete with their Hebrew markings.

Hizbollah is a strict and moralistic organisation, but it uses drugs as currency and the assumption in southern Lebanon is that Hizbollah men traded narcotics with Israeli border guards in return for the photographs. Some of the Hizbollah read Hebrew and quickly worked out which of their bunkers had been identified and which remained unknown to the Israelis. So when the war began on 12 July, Hizbollah had already evacuated the caves known to the Israelis and waited for its enemy in the concrete emplacements that it knew the Israelis had not discovered.

Whether you loathe or admire Hizbollah, this was a startlingly professional intelligence operation by the Middle East's most powerful army. And while the resistance was fighting within only a few hundred metres of the Israeli border - at one point attacking an Israeli Merkava tank whose crew simply ran for their lives, abandoning their vehicle and even leaving behind its heavy machine gun - Siniora was on television, wiping away his tears and pleading for a ceasefire. Hence Nasrallah's profound contempt for Siniora's current government, a repugnance that is leeching dangerously into the various religious sects that provide Lebanon with a political system so complex that even some members of the Lebanese parliament cannot understand it.

An opinion poll by Beirut's Centre for Research and Information, for instance, suggests that 73.1 per cent of the population support the creation of a national unity government - the very demand made by Hizbollah. But the breakdown of this figure into religious groups shows that 94 per cent of Shiites and 50 per cent of Christians believe Siniora's cabinet is no longer legitimate, while 83 per cent of Sunnis and 90 per cent of the Druze believe exactly the opposite.

Ex-general Michel Aoun is the quaint, frightening and messianic Maronite leader whose supporters provide the high number of Christians opposed to Siniora. Aoun, who spoke at Sunday's rally in a baseball cap and shirt of bright orange - the colour of his very odd Free Patriotic Movement - provides the essential multi-confessional element that permits Nasrallah to claim that the anti-government protests are not just Shiite. Many Sunni Muslims, Druze and pro-government Christians believe that Aoun's real reason for this pact with the "Party of God", which the US State Department calls "terrorist", is that he wants to become the president of Lebanon. Just why anyone wants to rule Lebanon remains a mystery to me and to many Lebanese, but under the country's hopeless sectarian pact, the president must be a Christian Maronite - which is what Aoun happens to be.

Several cabinet ministers think that Aoun has gone off his rocker. For almost two years - until the Syrians bombed him out of the presidential palace in east Beirut with American permission in 1990 - he deluded himself into believing that he was the president of Lebanon, ruling the country with just three ministers, all of them Christians and one of them an army general, after his would-be Muslim colleagues walked out.

All the while, another Lebanese government ruled in the west of Beirut, an administration that eventually turned out to be the real administration when Aoun fled his burning palace in an armoured vehicle - dressed only in his pyjamas - to plead for asylum at the home of the French ambassador. During this weird period of Lebanese history, Aoun was in the habit of regarding himself as a latterday Napoleon, referring to his "rival" prime minister, the saintly Selim el-Hoss, as Pontius Pilate. When I once suggested to Aoun that this really revealed that he thought he was Jesus Christ, he promptly banned me from Christian east Beirut - until he ended up fighting not only the Syrians but his right-wing Christian allies led by the militia killer Samir Geagea, who today supports the Siniora government.

Readers who find all this a little operatic can imagine the effect it has on the Lebanese. But it all made sense of Aoun's character trait on Sunday when he virtually demanded (with Hizbollah's acquiescence, of course) the setting up of a rival government - presumably led by himself as President - with Shiite ministers and a few Christian party faithful alongside to represent the Prime Minister and others.

This wouldn't be just déjà vu; it would suggest some deep flaw in Aoun's personality that drives him to demand national unity while constantly trying to divide the nation. He found no problem in trying to run Lebanon without Muslim ministers in 1990 - but is outraged at Siniora for trying to remain Prime Minister without Shiite cabinet members today.

In fact, Hizbollah is far more intelligent than to send "Napoleon" back to the Baabda palace. Aoun will be swiftly dispatched - in Lebanon, of course, you have to be careful of using words like this - and the presidency offered to some honourable figure such as Riad Salami who, like all governors of the Lebanese Central Bank, is colourless and boring enough to fulfil his role with due obedience.

Nasrallah is right when he deplores the confessional system in Lebanon, in which the Christian Maronites - perhaps 29 per cent of the country - must hold the presidency, while the Sunnis are prime ministers and the Shiites are given the job of speaker of parliament. As long as it is sectarian, Lebanon cannot become a modern state. The problem is that without being sectarian, Lebanon will no longer exist.

Anyone who has lived in Beirut as long as I have - just over 30 years - occasionally experiences an odd phenomenon which I refer to as the "obvious question" syndrome - the appalled realisation that some extraordinary fact of life here has never been seriously studied or received sufficient reflection.

How is it, I ask myself these days, that this tiny country of perhaps only 5 million people - less than the population of London in a state smaller than the Home Counties, with neither oil nor military power - can obsess and capture and alternatively torture or love the United States, Israel, Syria, Iran, UN forces from France, Italy, Germany, Spain, India, Fiji, China, Turkey, Ireland, Ghana, Poland, you name it - and repeatedly dominate entire weeks of UN Security Council business?

This week, the UN's top investigator into Hariri's murder will make yet another report to the UN Secretary General that may - or may not if George W Bush follows James Baker's advice of befriending Syria for help in Iraq - once more finger the assassins of Damascus for the crime.

Partly, Lebanon exerts its influence over far more dangerous and powerful nations because of its strategic geographical location in the Middle East. North of Beirut, on the wall of the Nahr el-Kelb - the Dog river - can still be found the commemorative plaques, steles, memorial tablets and carvings of other armies that have passed through Lebanon, often to disaster.

There are the remains of Roman, Phoenician, Crusader, Mameluke, Ottoman, French and British armies - along with the Australians, we "liberated" Beirut from Vichy France in 1941 - and even a modern inscription recording the Israeli army's retreat from this country in 2000, placed there by Siniora's nemesis and Syria's best friend, the current President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon.

But this cannot explain Lebanon's fascination. Its towering mountains - which give this country its epic, wide-screen quality - have been the curse of invaders, and the Crusaders themselves felt so threatened by the suicide killers of the "hashashin" - they came via Baghdad - that they preferred to travel along the coast by sea rather than risk the Muslim archers in the hills. That, by the way, is why each of Lebanon's Crusader castles - little "green zones" in Tripoli, Batroun, Byblos, Beirut, Sidon, Tyre - were built exactly a day's sailing from each other.

No, I think it is the Lebanese themselves and their ability to condense into their tiny nation all the contradictions - religious, cultural, political, social - of the massive and fearful region upon which Lebanon sits, in both senses of the phrase, on the edge. Every Middle East crisis will be reflected here in miniature, in ghostly but still disturbing form, by its highly intelligent, cosmopolitan people.

The Iranian Revolution? Why, many of its senior Iranian prelates once taught - or were taught - in the Shiite religious schools east of Tyre. The Israeli-Palestinian war? Well, between 200,000 and 360,000 Palestinian refugees live in cruel poverty in the slum camps of Lebanon, survivors - and sons and daughters and grandsons and grand-daughters of the survivors - of the great Arab exodus from Palestine when Israel came into existence in 1948.

When Israel wanted to crush Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories, it tried to wipe out the Palestinian guerrilla presence in Lebanon with a bloody and vain invasion in 1982, which ended in the frightful slaughter of Palestinians by Israel's allies in the Sabra and Chatila camps. When the Iran-Iraq war began, its rival supporters fought each other in the streets of Beirut. When the war ended, Saddam Hussein shipped many of his now idle tanks and armour to none other than General Aoun - because Aoun was fighting Iraq's Syrian Baathist enemies.

Lebanon almost destroyed the Reagan administration when Oliver North tried to purchase America's hostages in Lebanon in what was to become the Irangate scandal. When Iraq descended into anarchy after America's 2003 invasion, Sunni Lebanese and Palestinians left from Tripoli and Sidon to become suicide bombers against US forces in Iraq, while the sectarian conflict in Mesopotamia ran like an earthquake tremor through the Sunnis and Shiites of Lebanon.

Sayed Hussein Fadlallah, the most learned Shiite scholar in Lebanon - the Americans green-lighted a car bomb assassination attempt funded by the Saudis to kill him but only managed to massacre 72 innocent civilians - has both scholar-pupils and cousins in Iraq, one of whom was murdered two years ago.

The usual anonymous "senior US intelligence officials" were trotted out in the American press last month to claim that Hizbollah was training members of the Mahdi army of Moqtada el-Sadr in Iraq. It was nonsense, but proof that the US administration still sees a fanatic behind every beard in Lebanon; just as the Iranians believe that Lebanon is always on the brink of a US takeover - which is exactly what Nasrallah claims Siniora is now preparing for Washington.

Yet was it not Fadlallah who once announced that Lebanon was "the lung through which Iran breathed"? Were the Iranians not controlling the hostage-takers of Lebanon in the 1980s? I once ended up in a series of bizarre - and fearfully dangerous - attempts to secure the release of my American journalist friend Terry Anderson from seven years of captivity, and ended up lunching with a man who had flown from Tehran to offer me Terry in return for four Iranian government officials kidnapped in Lebanon, one of whom they claimed was in prison in Saddam's Iraq, the other in Israel. If they had been murdered, the Iranians would like their bodies.

So I embarked on a fruitless search for corpses before the same Iranian asked if I would like to persuade the Americans to send them some missiles instead - at which point I immediately walked out of the quicksand, not realising that Oliver North was already in the mud, up to his neck.

But Nasrallah's other ally, Syria, is the Arab state whose shadow falls most darkly over Lebanon. Syria's leadership is largely Alawite - a branch of Shiism - and Syria is also Iran's only Arab ally. I wrote in The Independent years ago that if the Syrian army ever left Lebanon, the civil war would restart - and that if it didn't, Syria would make sure it did. Which is exactly what the Lebanese now suspect Syria is threatening to accomplish via Hizbollah. This is why Siniora's men talk about an attempted Iranian-Syrian coup d'état. This is why the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, is convinced that Syria's military retreat last year is now being reversed by a frightening neighbour which - through the murder of anti-Syrian figures in Lebanon - is now trying to return. A "national unity" government would provide more power to Syria's Lebanese allies.

Both Lebanon and Syria gained their independence from the French in 1946 and they share the same history and language. But as Hazem Saghieh pointed out in the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat this month, Syria chose "unity" while Lebanon chose "liberty". The Syrian flag, with its governessy and ferocious eagle, rarely flew contentedly next to Lebanon's gentle cedar tree banner. Syria has always looked outwards, towards Arab brotherhood and nationalism, first imagined by King Faisel the First, the spiritual father of Syria who vainly sought an Arab version of the Turkish Ottoman empire.

Lebanon looked inwards, at its internal sectarian divisions, its divided cities. If Syria called itself the "beating heart of Arabism", Lebanon was content to be "the only democracy in the Middle East" - though both claims were happier on paper than they were on the ground. Syrian populism challenged Lebanese individualism. Saghieh claims that Syria was formed on the national model of Germany or Italy, while Lebanon was inspired by the political pacts that created Switzerland and Belgium. Syria has its own confessional divisions - I used to watch the pained expressions of its ministers whenever I mentioned the unmentionable: the Alawite faith of the President, the Kurds, the Sunni majority. But these divisions are to be ignored. Lebanon is Eve, the seducer. Syria is Adam. And Eve was once part of Adam's body.

But into the Middle East we have again sent our military forces, in unprecedented numbers, and given our Israeli allies weapons in unprecedented numbers. And the Muslims - you can see their faithful reflection in the lakes and rivers of Lebanon - appear to be winning the war. We have been engulfed in Iraq and are being crushed in southern Afghanistan. Israel was defeated by Hizbollah and cannot suppress the Palestinian intifada. Civil wars or near civil wars have broken out in the lands of our occupation.

And now the same fate taps Lebanon on the shoulder. Oh yes, America will stand firmly at the side of Siniora's democratically elected government against Iran's axis of evil and the devil-Baathists of Syria. But Siniora, "our man" in Lebanon, is in deep trouble.

What we are watching across the whole region is the steady but increasing collapse of American imperial power. It will not be a joyous event. It may prove to be terrifying. It will definitely be bloody. And Lebanon may now be the mirror that proves it all true.



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Out to Get Ya!


Extremely odd behavior from the Washington Post re: the President's Rumsfeld lie

Friday, November 10, 2006
Glenn Greenwald

(updated below - Update II)

It is now conclusively clear that President Bush lied last week, several days before the election, when he vowed definitively to reporters that Donald Rumsfeld would remain as Defense Secretary for the next two years. At the time he made that statement, he was deep into the process of replacing Rumsfeld, if not already finished, and the President knew that the statement he made about Rumsfeld was false at the time he made it. That is the definition of "lying."


(updated below - Update II)

It is now conclusively clear that President Bush lied last week, several days before the election, when he vowed definitively to reporters that Donald Rumsfeld would remain as Defense Secretary for the next two years. At the time he made that statement, he was deep into the process of replacing Rumsfeld, if not already finished, and the President knew that the statement he made about Rumsfeld was false at the time he made it. That is the definition of "lying."

There can be no reasonable dispute about this, since the President at his Press Conference not only admitted lying when he told the reporters that Rumsfeld would stay, but he even went on to explain his reasons for lying ("the reason why is I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer"). The decision was clearly a fait accompli before the election, as the President himself said: "win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee."

The President's admission of lying was so glaring that even Byron York immediately described it as such (as did other conservatives such as James Joyner). So what are the consequences, the implications, the fallout? So far, virtually nothing, and the behavior of The Washington Post shows why that is the case:

As I noted in the post I wrote two days ago about the President's Rumsfeld lie, The Washington Post article which reported on the Press Conference, written by Michael Fletcher and Peter Baker, detailed the Rumsfeld lie and even described what the President did with unusual candor, i.e., that the President "appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters." It's so unusual to see a major newspaper accurately report on the President's dishonesty that I noticed and praised the Post's candor ("It's encouraging (although it should be commonplace) that the Washington Post is calling this what it is"). At the time, as I quoted in my post, this is what the Post article reported about the President's Rumsfeld explanation:


At his news conference, Bush called the election results a "thumping" but vowed to maintain his policy of refusing to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq "before the job is done." Bush indicated that he had made the decision to replace Rumsfeld before the elections, but he said he had not held a "final conversation" with the defense chief or talked to Gates at the time he told reporters in response to a question last week that Rumsfeld would be staying on.

Asked about that comment, Bush said he made it because "I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign," Bush said. He appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters, saying, "And so the only way to answer that question and to get you onto another question was to give you that answer."

He added later, "Win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee.

But at some point, the Post fundamentally changed this article (without leaving any indication that it did so). Now, in that same Post article, the passage I quoted about the President's having acknowledged that he "misled reporters" is gone entirely -- just disappeared, deleted with no trace -- and instead one finds only this:

He said that he had begun to contemplate Rumsfeld's exit before the election -- even while he was publicly vowing that he would keep the defense secretary through the end of his term and insisting that polls forecasting Republican defeat were wrong. "I thought we were going to do fine yesterday," Bush insisted. "Shows what I know." But "win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee."

At some point, the Post changed what was the accurate reporting -- that Bush expressly acknowledged that he "misled" reporters because he had "indicated that he had made the decision to replace Rumsfeld before the elections" -- by claiming in the new version that he merely "contemplated" Rumsfeld's exit before the election. Worse, the Post deleted entirely the accurate statement that the President "appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters." (If one does a search of the Post for the deleted paragraphs, the article will still come up in the Post's search engine, but the entire passage is nowhere to be found in the article).

Ironically, the explanation for why this happened may be found in today's Howard Kurtz column, the whole point of which is to explore the unbelievably stupid question of whether Bush's lie about Rumsfeld was "on par with [meaning: as bad as] President Bill Clinton's hair-splitting defense in the Monica S. Lewinsky investigation that 'it all depends on what the definition of is is'"? In other words, was Bush's pre-election "untruth" about management of the Iraq war as bad as Clinton's lie about sex with Monica? In the course of pondering that idiocy (even quoting "experts" comparing the two lies), Kurtz says this:

Did the president of the United States make a rare admission on national television that he had told an untruth?

Or had he merely engaged in a dodge of the sort that is common in politics?

Journalists by nature shy from pinning the "liar" label on any political leader, but President Bush's acknowledgments that he had not been forthcoming about his plans to dump Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have kicked up a fuss at the White House and sparked a debate about the limits of presidential evasion.

As Kurtz's own column illustrates, journalists most certainly do not "shy away from pinning the 'liar' label on any political leader." All of the wise and brave pundits and other Beltway luminaries -- one after the next -- fell all over themselves calling Bill Clinton a "liar" continuously because he claimed not to have had sex with Monica Lewinksy. In that instance, they were more than happy to use the word "liar" as clearly and freely as can be imagined.

Journalists "shy away" from pinning the "liar label" not -- as Kurtz claims -- "on any political leader," but on the specific political leaders who currently occupy the White House. And for proof of that, Kurtz need look no further than his own newspaper, which appears to have engaged in some sort of Stalinist-like purging of history by zapping out of existence the Post's accurate detailing of the President's Press Conference admission of lying.

So the President got caught lying to the American people, several days before an election, about a matter of unquestionable importance -- namely, who will manage our war in Iraq and, more broadly, will the President change how the war is being managed? And not even the President claims there was some national security "justification" for lying. It was a pure political calculus: "I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign."

(And incidentally, this is not the first time Bush lied this way; last May, he assured reporters that Treasury Secretary John Snow was not leaving and specifically stated that Snow "has not talked to me about resignation," even though Snow had already told the President he was leaving and the decision to replace Snow had already been made and finalized). All Howie Kurtz can do is wonder whether this was as "on par with" the Greatest Evil Ever -- Bill Clinton's lie about Monica Lewinsky.

Why did The Washington Post delete the passage in its own article detailing how the President misled reporters when he answered their questions about Rumsfeld? Presidents simply do not have the right to lie to Americans about important matters of public concern, particularly before a major election. If we don't embrace and enforce that standard, what standard exists? And if newspapers like the Post are too afraid to detail dishonest statements that come from our highest political officials -- to the point where they publish such revelations only to then surreptitiously delete them -- what possible purpose do journalists serve?

UPDATE: It seems that some people (including certain bloggers) are missing the point of this post completely. The crux of the post is not about Bush's lie regarding Rumsfeld, but instead, is about how The Washington Post reported this lie, and then un-reported it. Some of the confusion may be my fault (although the post title, by itself, seems to make that sufficiently clear), but this comment from sysprog is highly clarifying and, in its own right, worth reading.

UPDATE II: Even Newt Gingrich recognizes that the President essentially acknowledged at his Press Conference that he lied about Rumsfeld, and Gingrich objects:

"We need candor, we need directness," said Gingrich, a potential 2008 presidential candidate."We need to understand the threats we faced with are so frightening and so real, the danger that we'll lose two to three American cities so great, that we cannot play games with each other, cannot manipulate each other, we have to have an open and honest dialogue, and I found yesterday's staments at the press conference frankly very disturbing."

He condemned Bush's admission that in making last week's statement about Rumsfeld, he had known he was being misleading.

"It's inappropriate to cleverly come out the day after an election to do something we were told before the election would not be done," Gingrich said. "I think the timing was exactly backwards and I hope the President will rethink how he engages the American people and how he communicates with candor."

Gingrich has all kinds of politically self-interested motives for trying to distance himself this way from this increasingly and unprecedentedly despised President, but he is right about what the President did. If Byron York, James Joyner and Newt Gingrich can all recognize and say that the President admitted to lying at his Press Conference, why did The Washington Post delete that passage and deprive its readers of that knowledge?





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Neil Cavuto Giddy That Democrat Tim Johnson Had a Stroke

by Melanie
News Hounds
"We watch FOX so you don't have to."
December 13, 2006


Can you imagine the uproar that would emanate from the right if a member of the "liberal media" reacted this way just hours after a Republican senator suffered a possible stroke? We'd be hearing about it for weeks. Not only that, but Cavuto was particularly coldhearted given that he has survived cancer and now suffers from multiple sclerosis, which, one would think, would endow him with special empathy for people suffering serious medical emergencies. The right has become so ruthless that it has apparently jettisoned compassion much less good old fashioned manners.
At 4:10 p.m. EDT today (December 13, 2006) Neil Cavuto interrupted his "business news" show with this:

Alright. I just want to bring in this alert that's come into our newsroom right now. U.S. Senator Tim Johnson, he's a Democrat of South Dakota, has, we're getting reports that he had a stroke at his office today and is being hospitalized. That's all we know at this point. Nor do we know the 59 year old's condition. This happened just today.

Keep in mind that the new senate takes over on January 4 and it's right now 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans and 2 Independents, but ostensibly it will be a Democratic body.

We don't know how the fallout from all of this or, again, the severity of Senator Johnson's condition. We'll keep you posted.


At 4:14 p.m. EDT Fox aired the FOX NEWS ALERT graphic and Cavuto said:

Alright. We are getting some updates now that South Dakota Senator Jim Johnson, a Democrat, has checked out at a hospital -- was in a hospital -- after suffering a possible stroke. That's all we know at this point.

This always takes on some added urgency with the new senate taking over in ah, January 4. That will be a senate as close to evenly divided as you can get, 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans, 2 Independents, who will essentially vote as Democrats, thereby the Democratic body. But keep in mind that if this situation with the senator were to worsen, the governor of South Dakota is a Republican, Michael Rounds and could, in an extreme case, appoint someone of his choosing within his party so this could even be a succession issue in the senate.

But, for now, let's not ponder that, more the senator's own health which we hope is good. He has suffered an apparent stroke. He is being checked out as we speak.


Fox aired another FOX NEWS ALERT at 4:23 p.m. EDT and Cavuto continued:

Alright. Just before the new senate is to take hold one of its key members has apparently had a stroke. That's the indications [sic] we're getting from the Associated Press that Senator Tim Johnson, a Democrat of South Dakota, was taken to a George Washington University Hospital suffering from a possible stroke. That is all we know.

You know that as close as the senate, the new senate is, with 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans and 2 Independents who ostensibly will be voting along the Democratic side, that this is close as a tick to anything, anything that hints that that could possibly be changed, [inaudible] the health condition of any one of 100 members gets overly scrutinized, perhaps here as well.

Um, again, keep in mind as well that the Governor of South Dakota is a Republican, Michael Round. Should the senator's condition worsen, ah it will be up to the Governor to find a replacement. We're not nearly at that stage. I only raise the issue because this senate is that close and these things are that important. Reaction now from former congressman Tom DeLay. Congressman, what do you make of this?


(Cavuto's emphasis.)

DeLay was on to do a segment about how Hillary Clinton will definitely run for president in 2008, but even he wasn't prepared to go as far as Cavuto:

Well, Neil, let's, let's make sure that Senator Johnson is in trouble. I mean, this is a pretty mean town and you're right; I am not saying you're being mean. Ah, let's just keep him in our prayers and hope that he's going to be alright.


At 4:44 p.m. EDT, Cavuto asked guest Jon Kyl (R-AZ) (on to bash Ben Nelson (R-FL) for meeting with Syria's President, Bashar Al-Assad) whether he could "add anything or any insights," and, like DeLay, Kyl wasn't ready to declare Johnson incapacitated or dead quite yet:

I certainly can't add anything except my prayers for Tim. Tim and I served together in the House. We've been together in the Senate now for a decade and I certainly hope he's alright and I'll be saying a prayer for him.




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House considers independent ethics panel - But Don't Hold Your Breath With Pelosi in Charge

By ERICA WERNER
Associated Press
December 14, 2006

WASHINGTON - House leaders are creating a bipartisan task force on whether to establish an independent ethics panel to police the House, Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi said Thursday.

Pelosi, D-Calif., said Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio has agreed to the idea. The task force has not been set up yet, but it will be expected to report back in March, she said.

Pelosi offered no details on what the outside ethics group might look like, saying that would be up to the task force.
"There is no question that the ethics process in the last couple of years has lost the confidence of the American people," Pelosi told a news conference. "I'm hopeful that it's possible that we can have an outside entity that will restore that confidence."

Congress has been hit by a series of ethical black eyes, including the page scandal, the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, and the bribery scandal that sent former Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham to prison.

The House ethics committee has been largely inactive throughout. It concluded last week that Republican lawmakers and aides failed for a decade to protect male pages from sexual come-ons by former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., but that no rules were broken and no one should be punished.

Establishment of a permanent outside enforcement entity has been a priority of ethics reformers, but such proposals have failed to become law in the past. In March, the Senate voted 67-30 to reject creation of an Office of Public Integrity to oversee ethics violations by lawmakers.

Among the no votes were incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who will head the Senate Rules Committee, which has jurisdiction over ethics and lobbying.

Feinstein is concerned that an outside panel could be abused by people aiming to publicize grudges, spokesman Howard Gantman said. She will not include the proposal in ethics legislation she is introducing next month but is considering holding a hearing on such ideas.

Members of the Senate ethics committee have objected to an outside panel, saying they could investigate wrongdoing themselves. Some lawmakers also believe the Constitution gives members of Congress the responsibility to police themselves, not give the job to outsiders.

Some senators plan to revive the public integrity office idea next year, including Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Democrats Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.

Democrats have complained about a "Republican culture of corruption," a theme of November's elections in which they wrested control of Congress from the GOP. They promised to vigorously pursue an ethics overhaul; Pelosi pledged to enact lobbying changes as part of her agenda for Congress' first 100 legislative hours.

Proposals include banning lobbyist-paid meals and gifts and privately funded travel, forcing lobbyists to disclose more of their activities and requiring lawmakers and senior staff to wait two years instead of one to lobby their former colleagues after leaving Capitol Hill.

Democrats also want to make lawmakers disclose authorship of "earmarks," the home state spending projects often slipped into bills with little disclosure. Lawmakers would have to disclose any post-employment job negotiations.

Bills that would put in place some of these changes passed the House and Senate this year, but negotiators could not reach agreement on final legislation. The efforts were criticized as too weak by watchdog groups.

Fred Wertheimer, president of the ethics watchdog group Democracy 21, welcomed Pelosi's proposal. "Unless we replace the current failed enforcement process with a new one, we face the same problem of ethics rules being ignored that we've seen in the past," he said.

For at least one of Pelosi's House Democrats, her plan did not go far enough.

"I would conclude that the study process is unnecessary," said Rep. Mike Castle, D-Del., contending an outside enforcement entity should be offered as part of Pelosi's first 100 hours. "My goal is to make this ethics process as strong as possible, and that doesn't include studies - it only includes action."



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Republicrats To Voters: "The People Have Spoken! Now Shut The F**K Up!"

BY GARY CORSERI
Thomas Paine's Corner
14 Dec 06

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." --John F. Kennedy


It's Howdy Doody Time ...

They've done it again.

They flim-flammed and bamboozled us, got us marching, got us hoping.

We manned the phones, wrote letters to editors, herded ourselves to Diebold ballot machines, held up our purple thumbs for all the world to see-all 45% of us.
We done our civil duty, paid our biennial dues, and now we can go home and watch the A-team beat the B-team on our HDTV. Spectator sports and spectator politics. An elephant never forgets. Pin the tail on the donkey!

And what's the result? They kick out that nasty popinjay Rumsfeld. The 76-year-old sycophant-warmonger takes his millions and jockeys his Hummer into a Montana sunset. He's replaced by a younger, less abrasive, more managerial, Bush-41-minted Robert Gates.

Boys and Girls, let's hear it for Buffalo Bob and Clarabelle! They got to us in our Frosty Flakes years, and they've kept the game going ever since.


Diogenes and Zeno's Paradoxes

Actually, I did not vote.

I didn't vote not because I wanted to be in the majority of non-voters (!), but because of two ancient Greeks: Diogenes of Sinope and Zeno of Elea.

Diogenes lived in the world's first democracy in Athens. He saw it rise, expand into the imperial Delian League, and he saw it fall. (Actually, by the time he arrived on the scene, after the good citizens of Athens had poisoned Socrates, it was much more a matter of falling.)

Diogenes hated pretense. He was a "street person" with attitude-and brains. He liked dogs better than people. (Hence his philosophy of "cynicism," from the Greek kyon, for "dog.") Dogs don't bullshit. Dogs make lousy politicians.

There are many stories about Diogenes' outrageousness. Or, maybe he was just clear-headed. (Asked in public how a man might avoid the temptations of the flesh, he masturbated then and there. "Would that I could as easily assuage my hunger by rubbing my belly," he said.)

One day, Alexander the Great shows up in Athens. (Odd that we still call this barbarian "the Great." He was off to conquer the splendid civilization of his day-Darius's Persia, a prosperous empire that was more like a federation of equal sovereigns, living in peace with its neighbors.) Diogenes is living in an old tub at the time, and Alexander, who has heard about him from his teacher Aristotle, out of respect for philosophy, pays him a visit.

Alexander says something like this: "Dude, I'm bad ... I'm the most powerful bastard in the whole wide world. Emperors piss in their Depends when they hear my name. I can make and break people like clay puppets. But just because Uncle Ari says you're a notable dude, I'm going to grant you whatever you wish."

Diogenes looks up from the old tub and he sees the sun glinting off the top of Alexander's helmet. Alex casts a wide, long shadow and Dogman feels a chill in it. "Don't stand between the sun and me," he replies.

And that's pretty much how I feel about the Republicrats now. I want what they can't or won't give me-the world's best antiseptic. Sunshine. Warmth. And truth.

The second reason I didn't vote has to do with Zeno's paradoxes and the Iraq Study Group.

Zeno preceded Dogman by about a hundred years. That was during the heyday of Athenian democracy when "citizens" got to vote directly on shards and there was a shard trail, if you will. Of course, there were more than a few paradoxes in this "democracy," including the fact that women didn't vote and the class depended on the labor of slaves.

Zeno was one of those philosophes who saw the limitations of human thought and logic.
Eight of his "paradoxes" are extant. My favorites go something like this: A body in motion is actually a body at rest at any particular moment. (It's only in the past 100 years or so, since Kodack, that the average person can actually see what Zeno was getting at. Think of stop-action photography capturing the moment Jack Ruby's bullet enters Lee Harvey Oswald's gut. In the next few moments, everything will change. No trial for Oswald, no leaks. Kaput. Finished business. A moment frozen in the amber of time. Like this one, say-like every moment, containing all possibilities within it.)

A related paradox having to do with time tells us everything we need to know about the Iraq Study Group's 79 "recommendations." One of those recommendations is, basically, to cut the number of U.S. troops in half, and train the Iraqis to take up the slack. This is how we're supposed to get to a point where the Iraqis will be able to sustain a democratic society which will join us in our Global War on Terror.

But Zeno tells us it'll never work. If you keep moving halfway to your goal, you never get there.

It's like one of those other "recommendations." Start up the Peace Process again, the one between Israel and Palestine.

Hello? Haven't we been down this road a hundred times already? There was Oslo, Camp David, even a Bush 43 "roadmap." Lots of feints and jabs and jaunts and taunts in the past 60 years, but what "Peace Process"? Did Tolstoy write a book called "War and Peace Process"?

There is either peace or no peace-i.e., war or cold war or preparations for war. We have lived with war, cold war or preparations for war for about 100 years now and the Iraq Study Group will not get us out of this imbroglio.

Managers love crises-makes them feel important. This Group of Ten is providing us a quarterly report about managing the crisis in our foreign relations. They emphasize "moving forward" because they dare not look back at how we got into this mess. Call it the No Blame Game. But if we don't understand how we got here-the lies and complicity of Republicrats-how can we "move forward" without committing the same crimes? The Iraq Study Group's report is a recipe for recidivism.

The Study Group earnestly requests that their recommendations not be "cherry-picked"; i.e., take all 79 as a whole. And, ah, who exactly elected these seers to tell us how to run the Superpower's foreign policy?

And who are these seers? The Bush family's consiglieri, Jim Baker, the guy who strong-armed the Supreme Court into appointing Bush Jr. president in 2000. Then there's co-chair Lee Hamilton, who also co-chaired the 9/11 Commission hearings, behind closed doors, which basically whitewashed the appointed president's responsibility for 9/11.

There's Vernon Jordan and Leon Panetta, Clinton administration operatives, whose presence ensures that criticism will be deflected from the nearly full-fledged Democratic support for this now "Long War," (soon to metamorphose into the "The Interminable War.").

There's Sandra Day O'Connor, Madam Justice, who, questioned by Margaret Warner on PBS about the "recommendation" that the U.S. engage in talks with Iran, responded: We spoke to Stalin during World War II and he was our enemy, wasn't he? (Ms. Warner may have been overly polite in not pointing out that Stalin was one of our two principal allies in that revisionized conflagration.)

So, working in secret, these suspect characters present the nation with their fait acompli, expecting our plaudits and full compliance.

Just as surely as they have removed the citizenry from the process of their deliberations, they have attempted to remove from the citizenry the process of review and oversight-the real work of democracy.

A clever ploy which Zeno would have foreseen in the timing. Wind the reel back nine months and you've got a very worried Republicratic elite kavetching to itself: "Holy Shit! this war is going bad. We've got an idiot in the White House, scary Cheney behind him, and a lot of bloody hands in the House and Senate. And the People are waking up. They're reading the Internet and they're getting ideas."

So, a Baker type comes along and he says, "Let's move forward. Yeah, there's going to be an election in about 8 months. We're gonna send out the Cheerleader to do his shtick, and maybe our puppets Maliki and Talabani will hold things together in Iraq long enough to fool the schlimazels again. But, if we don't succeed, if our Democrat allies actually move forward, we'll boot out Rummy and put everything on hold. We tell the schlimazels we need another month for the Iraq Study Group's report, and then we come out with 79 impossible recommendations to be take whole-cloth. More confusion. Instead of clear-cut proposals that everyone can agree on, we plow the debating ground for the 2008 election. Obama? Hillary? McCain? It doesn't matter. So long as the schlimazels never lose faith in the process!"

Hannah Arendt put it this way: "What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part. Repetition, somewhat over-rated in importance because of the common belief in the masses' inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important because it convinces them of consistency in time."

The show must go on.


What now?

Eighteen months ago, I wrote an article called "25 Reasons to Impeach George W. Bush." It appeared at CounterPunch and a few other sites around the world. It was posted at Representative John Conyers' website.

Eighteen months ago was the time to push for impeachment, the time for Dems to show backbone--if they've ever had any--, to make a clean break from the Republicrats.

It's not going to happen now. The Dems will concentrate on 08--pushing H.C. and Obama, diverting us with the sideshow until it becomes the main show.

I heard Representative Cynthia McKinney, Ray McGovern and Chris Hedges speak a few nights ago at a World Can't Wait meeting. I'd never heard any of them speak in person before and they and the other speakers were impressive.

I voted for McKinney in Georgia two years ago. (Yeah, I'll actually vote if I think there's a real choice. Most of the time, there isn't.)

World Can't Wait is pushing for impeachment now. I think it's a waste of time, sapping the energy of the Left.

We need new paradigms.

Soon after the Cold War ended, that was the catchphrase of the day. Even Gorbachev got in on it. New paradigms.

Then King George Bush 41 came along and said, To hell with New Paradigms! What we need is a New World Order.

I respect McKinney's call-it-like-it-is, no-holds-barred, feisty style. We don't live in an age of niceties-not when we're blowing up children and wreaking havoc for the sake of Big Oil and the Military Industrial Complex.

I respect Ray McGovern, who was 27 years with the C.I.A., and, basically, a year or so ago, had the guts to tell Rumsfeld he was full of shit, we weren't winning in Iraq and weren't going to win in spite of Rumsfeld's obscurantism. We need to listen to insiders like Ray McGovern and Paul Craig Roberts, who have seen the light and made their 180's. They write for some of the best sites on the Internet. They write lucidly, and they've got the creds.

That said, let's understand: we'll never get anywhere on the Left if we don't start thinking out of the box.

Gabriel Kolko, whom CounterPunch's editors characterize as the best historian on wars in the 20th century, posted a recent article in which he claims, "We can rule out the Left, that artifact of past history. Socialism ceased being a real option long ago, perhaps as early as 1914 ... I need not say more than that it is no longer a threat to anybody." Perhaps Mr. Kolko has been so focused on wars in the 20th century, he has missed the narrative line of socialist development in Latin America. Perhaps he has missed the story in France where Segolene Royal is set to become the next Prime Minister, and in Spain, where President Zapatero pulled Spanish troops from the Bush-Blair fiasco nearly three years ago. Perhaps he missed Prodi's success in Italy-and much more.

This is not the time to write the Left's epitaph, but it's certainly time for some new thinking.

The Right are always going to outspend us. Since the Supreme Court declared (in Buckley v. Valeo), the equivalence of money and free speech, the Right have been buying the biggest megaphones and calling it democracy! Is this what the Bill of Rights means by freedom of speech? It appears that some of us have a hell of a lot more of it than others.

The media consolidation of the 90's-let's thank Michael Powell, Colin's boy for overseeing that-made it still harder for the Left to be heard. The Right can outspend the Left ten bucks to one-and these are roadblocks we can't get through.

We can't get through, but we can go around. We go around by out-witting, out-thinking, out-imagining the Right. They have their billion-dollar think tanks, and we have people who can think for themselves and meet around the hearth of the Internet.

Old strategies must be re-examined. Voting in meaningless elections is intolerable. Rubber-stamping rubber-duck candidates lends credence to a system that is losing credence daily. (Kolko writes in that same article: "The system has become increasingly vulnerable ... since about 1990, and the formal demise of 'communism.'")

Communism, that kind of centralized, authoritarian planning may be dead, but the Left and Socialism are not. Communism is a closed system with orders originating from the top, carried out by minions upon a disenfranchised populace. In its basic structure it's like Fascism, which accounts for much of the confusion in the minds of Sandra Day O'Connor and "patriotic" Americans. The U.S. has had Fascistic elements from its inception. How else account for the Alien and Sedition Laws, the genocide against Native Americans, slavery, etc.? How else account for a war to seize the resources of the Middle East for the sake of Big Oil's profits and our Defense establishment?

Socialism depends on a feedback loop. It has to be decentralized to work right. Information is fluid, transforming and transformative.

A major problem with the Left today is that it doesn't seem to know who or what it is.
Hence, it gets lost in the Republicratic maze.

In that maze, someone suggests a demonstration-"make a lot of noise." After I attended the 200,000-strong anti-war demonstration in D.C. in September, '05, I asked a Leftist acquaintance, "What now?" He shrugged. So, essentially, did everybody else. Then half of them went out to vote for Republicrats.

The Republicrats have a stranglehold on this system and we're not going to change anything unless we hit them where it hurts-in their wallets.

We can make all the noise we want, demonstrate and clamor for impeachment, but we'll never change anything because Karl Rove and the "grown-ups" are already planning the next show-stopper for some eight months or more down the road. They understand what Zeno understood: all forward movement consists of a series of frozen moments, any one of which they can "spin" off in totally new directions.

The American Left needs to re-think its options. I don't think we use boycotts nearly enough. O'Reilley, Limbaugh, Hannity say something stupid on their shows. Make a list of their sponsors. Disseminate that list. Refuse to buy those products.

We need to reach out to Leftist parties and organizations in other countries. They need our support and we need theirs. The Canadian health care system, one of the best examples of "socialized medicine" in the world, is under assault by the privatization junkies. That affects all of us. We need to think out of our box, beyond our borders. The French award working mothers 3 years paid maternity leave and the guarantee of a job to return to. The U.S. awards unpaid leave of 12 weeks. (But we allow the invidious Rupert Murdoch to post chicken heads on French ministers when they prudently warn us against military adventurism in Iraq! Did any Republicrat call down Murdoch for his blatant warmongering propaganda?) Mexico's Lopez Obrador refuses to cede ground to an election swindle by Felipe Calderon. That's our struggle, too.

How much can we sacrifice? Live in a tub like Diogenes for the sake of our principles, to make a point? Unlikely.

Can we burn up our credit cards, live more simply, create our own creative communities, turn our backs upon this gluttonous, zero-sum game culture? Why not?

Once I lived in a middle-class neighborhood of weekend lawn-cutters. Every weekend, my neighbors were out there on their 1,000-2,000-dollar tractor mowers, trimming their mowing their lawns. "Couldn't we all just chip in and buy one mower for the block?" I once asked and got lockjawed responses.

Hit'em where it hurts. Educate people about money. We need to re-birth the counter-culture and re-establish alternative communities. We need to re-imagine the Arts. (Didn't they used to be about people? We've always had a fair bit of fantasy-art in America, especially in our cinema. But wasn't there once more than the slick and the sick?)

Frankly, in the long run, we need to call a Constitutional Convention. A Republicrat candidate in Maryland, a law professor-vanity candidate for Governor, who just wanted to show his pretty face and exude professorial style, told me that the Constitution was "deeply flawed," but, nevertheless, we had to support it.

And I answered, the Bill of Rights, yes, and some of the amendments which advance human rights, yes, but must I really support the Electoral College and a bi-cameral system that awards citizens in Wyoming some 70 times the voting power in the Senate as citizens in California? Can we not use referenda, as they do in other countries, as is built into the new Venezuelan constitution, to re-call an unpopular president, one who has violated his oath of office repeatedly, as has Dictator/Decider George 43? Isn't a document that defines slaves as 3/5 human-something of which to be ashamed?

We need to think in new directions, out-think, out-imagine these devious Republicrats.

Fabian and fabulist George Bernard Shaw could see the world in a grain of sand. "Nothing can save society," he wrote, "except the clear head and the wide purpose." And, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Gary Corseri has taught in public schools and prisons in the U.S., and at US and Japanese universities. His work has appeared at ThomasPaine'sCorner, DissidentVoice, Sky, Village Voice, The New York Times, Redbook magazine, City Lights Review, Palestine Chronicle, TeleSurtv.net, Common Dreams, Prison Planet, WorldProutAssembly, Atlanta-PBS, etc. His books include: Manifestations (edited); Holy Grail, Holy Grail; and A Fine Excess. He can be contacted at: corseri@verizon.net.



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Anthrax Attack on U.S. Congress Made by Ft. Detrick, Md., Scientist and Covered Up by FBI, Expert Says

by Sherwood Ross
Dec 14 2006

The perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attack on Congress likely was a government scientist employed at the Army's Ft. Detrick, Md., bioterrorism lab having access to a "moonsuit" that made it possible to safely process and manufacture super-weapons-grade anthrax, a bioterrorism authority says.

Although only a "handful" of scientists had the ability to perpetrate the crime, the culprit, or culprits, among them may never be identified as the FBI ordered the destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, Ia., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens, the authority said.


This action made it impossible "to pin-point precisely where, when, and from whom these bio-agents had originated," said Dr. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois at Champaign.

Boyle, who drafted the U.S. Biological Weapons Convention of 1989 that was enacted by Congress, says destruction of the Ames anthrax "appears to be a cover-up orchestrated by the FBI."

Calls for comment to two FBI press offices in Washington, D.C., on this charge were not returned. Members of the Senate have been pressing the FBI for additional information on its investigation, thought to be ongoing.

If impartial scientists could have performed genetic reconstruction of the anthrax found in letters mailed to Senators Daschle(D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy, (D -Vt.), "the trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret but officially-sponsored U.S. government biowarfare program that was illegal and criminal" in violation of biological weapons conventions and U.S. laws, Boyle said.

"I believe the FBI knows exactly who was behind these terrorist anthrax attacks upon the United States Congress in the Fall of 2001, and that the culprits were U.S. government-related scientists involved in a criminal U.S. government biowarfare program," Boyle said.

The anthrax attacks killed five people, including two postal workers, injured 17 others, and temporarily shut down the operations of the U.S. Congress, Supreme Court, and other Federal entities.

Boyle, a leading American authority on international law, said after the attacks he contacted senior FBI official Marion "Spike" Bowman, who handles counter-terrorism issues, and provided him with the names of the scientists working with anthrax. Boyle told Bowman the Ft. Detrick scientists were not to be trusted.

In addition to then destroying the anthrax, the FBI "retained every independent life-scientist it could locate as part of its fictitious investigation, and then swore them all to secrecy so that they cannot publicly comment on the investigation or give their expert opinion," Boyle said.

Boyle pointed out that Bowman is the same FBI agent "who played a pivotal role in suppressing evidence which in turn prevented the issuance of a search warrant for the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th al-Qaeda hijacker on 11 September 2001, which might otherwise have led to foreknowledge and therefore prevention of those terrorist attacks in the first place."

A self-confessed al-Qaeda operative, Moussaoui was detained on immigration three weeks before 9/11 when a Minnesota flight school reported he was acting suspiciously.

Boyle asked if Bowman received an FBI award in Dec., 2002, for "exceptional performance" because of his capacity "to forestall investigations, because of where they may lead?" He goes on to inquire, "Could the real culprits behind the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and the immediately following terrorist anthrax attacks upon Congress ultimately prove to be the same people?"

Because of its "bogus investigation," Boyle says, "the greatest political crime in the history of the United States of America since its founding on 4 July, 1776---the anthrax attacks on Congress, which served not only to deliver a terrorist threat on its members, but actually to close it down for a period---may remain officially unresolved forever."

"Could it truly be coincidental, " he continued, "that two of the primary intended victims of the terrorist anthrax attacks --- Senators Daschle and Leahy---were holding up the speedy passage of the pre-planned USA Patriot Act∑an Act which provided the federal government with unprecedented powers in relation to U.S. citizens and institutions?"

Leahy is incoming Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and may have a personal interest in holding hearings to learn who tried to kill him. An anthrax-laced letter to Leahy turned up in a search of Capitol Hill mail in the week of October 15, 2003. The letters sent to Leahy and Daschle were both postmarked from a Trenton, N.J.-area post office.

During its probe of the anthrax attack, the Justice Department identified Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, a biological defense scientist and one-time government employee, as "a person of interest." Dr. Hatfill, a medical doctor, took a post in 1997 at Ft. Detrick but left to work the next year for a private firm that helps the government create defenses against germ weapons. Dr. Hatfill repeatedly denied any role in the anthrax attacks and said he knows nothing about anthrax production, The New York Times reported.

Boyle's views are contained in his book "Biowarfare and Terrorism", published by Clarity Press, Inc., of Atlanta, Ga. His previously published titles include, "Foundations of World Order," "The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence," and "Destroying World Order." Dr. Boyle holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude and a Ph.D. in political science, both from Harvard.

In a forward to the book, Dr. Jonathan King, Professor of Molecular Biology at M.I.T. and a founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, said the government's "growing bioterror programs (described by Professor Boyle) represent a significant emerging danger to our own population."

A harsh critic of Pentagon biowarfare activities, Boyle points out in inflation-adjusted dollars the U.S. spends more on them today than it did on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb in World War II. He has accused the Bush administration of diverting the bio-tech industry "towards biowarfare purposes" and of making corrupting payoffs to Academia to turn university scientists to the pursuit of biowarfare work.



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Federal judge issues split decision on new Military Commissions Act

By David G. Savage
Los Angeles Times
14 Dec 06

WASHINGTON - In the first legal decision on a federal law that denies access to U.S. courts to detainees in the war on terrorism, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that foreign prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, could not sue for freedom.

But, in a split decision, U.S. District Judge James Robertson also ruled that the law's denial of that right to the more than 12 million legal immigrants living in the United States was unconstitutional.

The first part of the ruling affirmed what Congress intended when it passed the Military Commissions Act in October. The decision came in the case of Salim Hamdan, the onetime driver to Osama bin Laden, who won what appeared to be a landmark victory in the Supreme Court in June.
Taking up Hamdan's lawsuit, the high court's justices said President Bush had overstepped his power when he created a system of military tribunals for foreign-born alleged terrorists.

In response, Congress passed a law authorizing military tribunals. In addition, it moved to deny access to the courts to "aliens" accused by the president of being terrorists or "unlawful combatants."

Critics in the Senate said the provision was written so broadly that it took away legal immigrants' right of habeas corpus. This right allows people who are arrested and imprisoned to go before a judge and plead for freedom.

In Wednesday's ruling, Robertson said lawmakers had the legal power to close the courts to the detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

"Congress unquestionably has the power to establish and define the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts," he wrote in a 22-page opinion. Until some recent decisions, he said, it had always been understood that "an alien captured abroad and detained outside the United States" did not have a right to sue in a federal court.

Hamdan was captured in Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay is, technically, sovereign territory of Cuba, Robertson noted.

However, the Constitution protects the right of habeas corpus for people living in the United States, the judge said.

Meanwhile, the incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Wednesday he would subpoena Bush administration officials if they refuse requests for documents and testimony, including two long-sought memos detailing its detention and treatment of terror suspects overseas.

One is a presidential order signed by Bush authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to set up secret prisons outside the United States to house terrorism suspects. The other is a 2002 Justice Department memorandum outlining "aggressive interrogation techniques" that could be used against terror suspects.

"I expect to get the answers. If I don't ... then I really think we should subpoena," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company



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REVAMPING US FOREIGN POLICY, Part 1 - Full speed ahead, with menace

By W Joseph Stroupe
Asia Times
15 Dec 06

Both the US Republicans and the Democrats - virtually all of whom voted for war in Iraq in 2003 - face the moment of truth in the form of the awful, escalating consequences of a foolhardy and reckless invasion of an oil-rich Islamic Middle East nation.

The Democrats' post-election euphoria will be short-lived indeed; they've rejoiced at seeing President George W Bush get an Iraq-war-inspired no-confidence "thumpin'" and at their winning the US
Congress, but they've thereby virtually inherited from the sovereign US electorate the task of somehow getting the United States out of its deepening Middle East quagmire - and, it is hoped, without it suffering a concomitant geopolitical insolvency, at a critical juncture in modern history when ever more potent and opportunistic challengers to US global power and dominance are rising in the East and when their proxies are (not coincidentally) rising across the Middle East.

The majority of the US electorate think the Democrats lack a real plan, and they do lack one. Their hope to formulate one that is workable based on the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG) Report is likely to turn out to be a vain expectation at best or the realization of a cruel political betrayal at worst.

The Democrats need, at a minimum, a plan that simultaneously forces Bush to change course, to bend to their will by getting the US out of Iraq soon, insulates them from blame for whatever happens in Iraq afterward while making that blame stick to Bush, and credits them with any US "win" that may somehow result in Iraq and the region after the withdrawal of forces. That is far more than a tall order, and the ISG is not much political help in this regard to the Democrats.

After the November congressional elections, Bush initially appeared to have finally come down off his single-minded, supercilious fantasies and ideological denial to begin to face the harsh reality of massive US over-reach in Iraq. His showing defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld the door and nominating Robert Gates to take his place as Pentagon chief fed the image of a president humbled and willing to listen to new ideas.

However, that facade is slipping as Bush is still refusing to modify the fundamentals of his long-standing "stay the course" policy by taking the Democrats' suggestions seriously. He is still refusing to engage in meaningful talks with Iran or Syria and seriously to consider timetables, benchmarks and a phased withdrawal from Iraq.

Bush has stepped up the bellicose talk directed at Iran and is massively reinforcing US military power in and near the Persian Gulf and also doing likewise within operational range of North Korea. Furthermore, he has reassured top Israeli leaders that they need not fear that his resolve to deal forcibly with Iran has been weakened one iota. Israeli leaders exited jubilant from their recent meeting with Bush.

As Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney asserted before the election, they were not up for re-election and no matter what the voters said, the two would continue to do what they believed were the right things for the national security of the United States.

In fact, Seymour Hersh reports in the The New Yorker magazine that one month before the election, Cheney asserted in a national-security discussion at the Executive Office Building that the administration would be undeterred from pursuing the military option against Iran by any Democratic election victory. The report has credibility because after the election, Bush reassured Israeli leaders of his resolve to use military force to stop Iran, as noted above.

At every turn in foreign policy, the Bush administration will battle and/or simply ignore the Democrats, seeking to discredit their proposals and undermine their unity, wherever there is a clash with what the administration believes is right. On foreign policy this remains an entirely unrepentant administration, notwithstanding its post-election pretenses of a switch to bipartisanship, the insistence that it listens to new ideas, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's calls for soft-power strategies and negotiations with Iran and Syria, and the personnel change at the Pentagon, the meaning and importance of which have been significantly overplayed by the media.

Now that the "dreaded" election losses for the Republicans have been delivered, what further foreign-policy-based political loss is there for the Bush administration to fear? Why should the administration substantively give in to the Democrats on foreign-policy issues? Short of taking the enormously difficult and risky step of pulling the plug on funding, what can the Democrats actually do now to stop the administration from largely continuing its foreign-policy line for two more years?

The Democrats have their hands full trying to find a way actually to constrain, change the course of, or otherwise humble and check the power of the current administration. The conduct of foreign policy is the prerogative of the executive branch, after all. Under mounting pressure from the Democrats to begin pulling US troops out of Iraq - something that would certainly plunge Iraq and likely the region itself into the uncontrolled fires of sectarian chaos - Bush knows his time to act is probably much shorter than the two years he has left in office.

So, rather than to bridle and make compliant this administration, the effect of the Democratic win has every appearance of emboldening and rushing Bush on a dash toward furthering his own foreign-policy goals while he is still in a position to do so.

Long-overdue success or hastened failure?

But even if Bush had finally come to the point where he was genuinely getting in touch with the position of the electorate and with the reality of the total incompetence and profound destructiveness of his fundamentalist-evangelical, ideologically oriented, militaristic foreign policy, and even if he genuinely wanted to find a multilateral and peaceful solution to the Iraq and wider Middle East crises that employed soft-power levers, is there any real basis for concluding that the door of opportunity to such solutions has not long since slammed irreversibly shut?

The mounting fear is that attempting now at this late date, in the aftermath of strategic blunder piled on top of strategic blunder, to "save" US fortunes in Iraq and the wider Middle East may be turning out to be an exercise in futility. US regional/geopolitical fortunes were massively imperiled, and likely squandered, nearly four years ago when Washington shoved strategic alliances and multilateral considerations aside to occupy Iraq.

When the US and Britain rushed to the military option first they simultaneously scorned as contemptible the germ of traditional, fruitful, multilateral soft-power strategies and they extraordinarily sowed instead the seeds of widespread, thorny, noxious "weeds". How will they now reap instead the tantalizing mangoes, grapes and pomegranates of strategic victory and success?

They have little or no viable chance of doing so. By their distinctly ham-handed militaristic approach they unleashed virulently anti-US counter forces and strategies that have become deeply ingrained across the region. They virtually locked themselves, the wider West and the Middle East region itself into an impasse whose only "solution" is yet additional military action.

Soft-power levers

In the lead-up to the Iraq invasion of 2003, the Bush and Blair administrations blatantly dismissed every semblance of genuine multilateralism and diplomacy and the traditional, strategically oriented soft-power levers in a consequences-be-damned dash to heave themselves on the military levers alone.

For nearly four years since then they have conceitedly and overconfidently continued to disregard both opening and opportunity to extricate themselves from a mounting quagmire they blindly refused to acknowledge, snubbing all along the way the repeated calls to adopt a policy of genuine engagement of the region's players in a comprehensive solution.

They have continued to pursue one-dimensional militarized "solutions" at the near-total sacrifice of all their former soft-power standing and leverage. They have thereby gravely undercut the meaningful cooperation and confidence of their allies and deeply alienated their rivals across the region and beyond.

The US and Britain now occupy a position of profound weakness as respects any possession of genuine and compelling regional/global leverage and they fully own a miserable negotiating position, and their rivals (the "evildoers") fully understand how that provides them the opportunity to capitalize on US/British misfortunes and weaknesses that are largely self-inflicted.

In any negotiations for a grand (or any lesser) solution, the US and Britain would either be mostly forced to accept the favorite terms of Iran and Syria or be left largely unable to verify compliance with and enforce the better terms of an agreement, even if they could get a promise from the regional players to adhere to desirable terms. This is an eventuality the US and Britain simply cannot accept because it would further propel Iran toward its goal of regional ascendancy over the oil-rich Arab regimes - that is the nightmare scenario for the West.

Opportunistic and clever Iran now has the US and Britain pinned into a position of strategic disadvantage, and it fully knows it. So do the much larger sponsoring powers Russia and China. These two have with adroit strategies employed Iran, Syria and other Middle East entities as their proxies and willing adherents in an insidious game to erode further, and even collapse, the Middle East and global leverage and influence of the US.

Syria is offering to "help" the US in Iraq - but it has said the US must first set a definite date for withdrawal of its forces from Iraq. Additionally, ascendant Iran and Syria have massively upstaged a weakened US and Britain by inviting the Iraqi leadership to a closed three-way summit to discuss and plot Iraq's direction. The Iraqi president has accepted the invitation. These are examples of the kind of "help" the US can expect from its regional rivals now that it owns the severely weakened position described above.

In the view of the Bush administration, Iran and Syria have already acquired too much regional influence and leverage and they are misusing those assets to cut directly across US interests and goals. To sit down at this point with them to negotiate an Iraq or wider Middle East solution would only further elevate their respectability, position, influence and leverage and make the US appear as a weak supplicant by comparison. This would boost Iran and Syria along the path of achieving regional control and even dominance.

From the Bush administration's perspective, the only conditions under which the two can be brought into negotiations are that they must first agree unconditionally to bow to the will of the US on a number of key issues. These include Iran's nuclear program and on Syria's exercising of undue influence within Lebanon.

In other words, the administration expects the two virtually to cave in first before it will engage them in an Iraq or wider regional solution. The same is true of Iran and Syria - they expect the US virtually to cave in by "changing its attitude" of seeking to cut them down to size in the region before they will agree to sit at the same negotiating table with the US. Both sides have become more, not less, intransigent as the Iraq situation nears crisis stage. Therefore, any prospect of serious and fruitful negotiations between the US and the two key players is extremely remote, at best.

Top US officials recently stated that they wished to engage Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich regimes (rather than Iran and Syria) in an intensified effort to end the mounting sectarian chaos in Iraq. However, it is unclear along what lines such regimes would specifically be asked to become engaged. These are Sunni regimes. Would they be asked to assist in tangible ways to help stabilize and strengthen the current Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government? It is not likely they would be interested in helping to boost the already worrying rise of Shi'ites in the region.

Many experts have recognized that Iraq's sectarian militias must be disarmed if the violence is to be stemmed. Would the Sunni regimes be asked to assist the US military in its efforts to disarm Iraq's Sunni and Shi'ite militias? That would be a recipe for regionwide conflagration because it would risk spreading rather than containing Iraq's bloody sectarian rivalries.

Additionally, any move by the Sunni regimes to assist materially in the disarming of Iraq's Shi'ite militias and the weakening of the Shi'ite faction would risk an explosion of Shi'ite rage among their own people, since every one of the Sunni regimes must deal with its own large domestic Shi'ite population. If the US somehow succeeds in getting the Sunni regimes more tangibly involved, it will be an impending sign not of a solution to Middle East instability, but of a loss of control over the situation, its spinning out of control.

Even if the US engages in real negotiations with Iran and Syria over the Iraq crisis, the Sunni regimes are extremely unlikely to cast their lot with a severely weakened United States in any negotiations over a regional solution that would end up codifying de facto Persian dominance of the Gulf.

Yet those very regimes have no viable solution among themselves - they cannot stem Iran's regional rise. With the US increasingly in impending forfeiture in Iraq, they may wish to play Israel secretly as counterweight to Iran, but even the hint of such a policy shift risks the total alienation of their vehemently anti-Israel populace and the prospect of sharply increased domestic unrest and an overthrow of the current Sunni regimes. That would play directly into Iran's hands: the oil-rich Arab regimes are strategically stuck, and they know it.

Military, military and more military


Against this backdrop, ongoing Iranian efforts to "bear-hug" Iraq and intimidate other Gulf Arab states into a Tehran-led alliance are intensifying. Iran is suspected in the November 4 explosion and fire in one of Kuwait's refineries, and Shi'ite unrest and ever more serious threats against the Sunni regimes in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region. These are only some of the more easily recognizable tactics employed by Tehran to herd the Gulf Arab states into an alliance.

According to recent reports from the Middle East Newsline, for agreeing to ally with Tehran it will "reward" regimes by ceasing its provocative destabilization tactics. The growing Arab openness to such a regional "solution" deeply concerns Washington, which is now pointedly increasing its naval military presence inside and within striking distance of the Persian Gulf.

Additionally, Iran's recent 10-day Great Prophet II war games shocked the West with respect to Iran's ability to launch many dozens of assorted ballistic missiles in perfect coordination in mock retaliation against an Israeli/US/European attack. This demonstrated that all US bases in the Middle East and even Europe are in Iran's retaliatory striking range.

Only days after Iran's coordinated ballistic-missile launches, France successfully test-launched its newest nuclear-tipped ballistic missile, obviously pleased to let that test launch serve as a non-verbal warning to Iran that it faces a potent European retaliation if it targets Europe with its own missiles. Taking the measure of the powerful and growing US naval armada now in and near the Persian Gulf along with European North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, it is no stretch to surmise that something much more than a mere passive containment of Iran may be in the offing much sooner rather than later.

What is the likely purpose behind the mounting US and European NATO naval forces in and near the Persian Gulf, if not merely for an ongoing and passive attempt at containment of Iran? Diplomatic attempts at the United Nations aimed at strapping Iran with punishing sanctions over its nuclear pursuits have miserably failed, and they are most likely to continue to fail. Russia and China will see to that. Iran has shown a stubborn determination to continue its nuclearization at almost any cost. If the West absolutely cannot get what it wants solely within the confines of conventional interpretation of UN measures, then it is preparing to accomplish the stalwart isolation of Iran by hyper-extending those measures to a significant degree.

The strategy of the West that is building here against Iran is illuminated by an examination of what has transpired in the North Korea crisis. Pyongyang played into the West's hands by forging ahead with its October nuclear test and thereby galvanizing the UN Security Council, which subsequently voted to place sanctions on the regime.

The measures were not nearly everything the US wanted, and left much to be desired in the way of stringency and comprehensiveness, but they provided a diplomatic rallying point. Under this, US allies could gather to construct what is for all practical purposes a supplementary coalition ostensibly equipped and designed to enforce UN measures, but which actually seeks to go significantly beyond the conventional interpretation and intent of the provisions of the Security Council. This means naval and other sanctions and a virtual embargo/blockade targeting North Korea.

South Korea has steadfastly refused to join the de facto supplementary coalition. But key European naval powers are actively participating with the United States, as is Australia. The US is rapidly building its military forces in the region to prepare for the ever more likely eventuality of a military strike on North Korea. Thus it has the muscle to back up its efforts at getting a cave-in of the regime at the negotiating table. While such a cave-in is still not very likely, the US and its allies pursue the possibility anyway. But they keep the full-blown military option at the ready to be exercised when it is deemed that time has run out on "diplomacy".

This is the "diplomacy" of the gun barrel - "measured" options along the military line, namely embargo and blockade designed to weaken and collapse the regime, with a crushing air campaign held at the immediate ready.

Apparently, Russia and China were caught significantly off guard by the US strategy - they assumed that by ensuring inherent weaknesses and limitations in the Security Council measure against North Korea, the US would in effect be stifled.

They miscalculated. If Iraq represented the numbskulled and disastrous US/British unilateralist strategy of UN circumvention, North Korea and Iran represent their newest (though not entirely surprising), West-slanting multilateralist strategy of UN hyper-extension. This is the strategy of getting even a weakened measure at the Security Council that can subsequently be interpreted (hyper-extended) to serve as a rallying point for "measured" multilateral military action.

The US hopes that by pursuing its military options in a measured sequence and in parallel with diplomatic efforts at the United Nations, rather than by shoving aside the UN to rush to the all-out military option first, then it can garner enough support among its allies to place strapping sanctions on rogue regimes and then either bend them or instigate actual regime changes.

There is also the distinct possibility that the regimes targeted with the embargo/blockade will strike out at the naval assets and provide the US with the "justification" to unleash a full-blown air campaign. Fully realizing and appreciating that strategy, Russia has begun to push to get Iran's case taken out of the Security Council and returned to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, and both Russia and China have issued warnings about the dangers of backing North Korea and Iran into a corner.

The flood of military assets into and around the Persian Gulf signifies an impending naval embargo or blockade of Iran designed to attempt to weaken and collapse the regime over several months, with a crushing air campaign held at the immediate ready.

Simultaneously, according to recent reports by intelligence expert Bill Gertz, Arab intelligence sources say the US and Britain have given Western-supported Iranian opposition groups the go-ahead to sabotage energy and other assets and otherwise destabilize the Iranian regime from the inside.

On November 10, a bomb exploded in Ahwaz, the most active oil production center in Iran's Khuzestan.

Stricter financial and banking sanctions have been put into place by the US and its allies. The Iranian regime acknowledged that fact when it recently stated it was decreasing its dollar-based transactions to an absolute minimum because of added US financial measures against it. US strategy is recently showing more finesse and has a more potent covert component, as compared with the much more ham-handed strategies of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It may be that we are witnessing the beginnings of the influence of new Pentagon head Robert Gates and the former team of president George H W Bush.
Why would Europe possibly be interested in participating with the US in an impending naval embargo of Iran and perhaps a massive military strike on the radical Iranian regime? The achievement of Iran's goals of regional hegemony would place Europe in grave energy-based jeopardy, because of its heavy reliance on Middle East oil. Iran's notable advancement toward achieving that goal on the ground since the 2003 US-British invasion of Iraq is not letting European leaders sleep well at night.

Despite the Europeans' apparent single focus on diplomatic solutions, they fully realize that if diplomacy fails (and it surely is miserably failing to put Iran back into Pandora's box), then the radical regime and its destabilizing agenda must be halted - period. The Europeans dislike military options, but they dislike being virtual energy-based hostages even more.

What if Russia and China see to it that no Security Council measure against Iran is adopted or, if one is adopted, that it specifically rules out the kind of hyper-extension the US seeks to employ? The US can be expected to move forward with its plans to implement stalwart sanctions and an embargo or blockade anyway, and it will likely get key European support in tangible ways, but with the usual public condemnations. If anyone thinks the US is going to be thwarted in its plans to attempt to cut Iran down to size sooner rather than later, then they haven't been paying sufficient attention.

Iran is rapidly progressing and is now dangerously close to achieving its regional aim of dominating the oil-rich Persian Gulf, all without the possession of any nuclear weapons. Employing its multiple and potent regional tentacle-like proxies and its mounting energy-based leverage, Iran is advancing on the position that will enable it to herd the oil-rich Arab regimes largely along the lines it wishes. It has far more influence in Iraq and across the region than does the US, whose leverage has collapsed. It is almost single-handedly guiding Iraq's direction and is fully able to hand a complete forfeiture to the US in Iraq, and in the wider Middle East region as a direct result.

The recommendations of the ISG, of Tony Blair, of Henry Kissinger and of many others for direct US-Iran negotiations on the mounting Iraq crisis are a full-blown acknowledgement that Iran (and to a lesser degree its ally Syria) holds the trump card. In the event of the US being made to suffer a forfeiture in Iraq, in the aftermath of the catastrophic collapse of US influence, Iran is firmly positioned to pick up all the geopolitical pieces with which to finish construction of the radical Islamic regional hegemony it seeks. The Bush administration is absolutely right about one thing - if the United States fails in Iraq, the "evildoers" will achieve a triumph of incalculable expense for the US and the West.

Again, it must be powerfully emphasized that Iran is well along the path to achieving such goals without the possession of even one nuclear weapon. Therefore the nuclear issue, though certainly incorporating a significant degree of validity, is mostly being cynically used by the US and Europe to "sex up" the Iran issue, as it were, to get notoriety for the problem of what to do about Iran's regional ambitions and conveniently to justify early and collective action - even massive military action - if diplomacy fails, as it surely appears to be failing.

Yet though the issue has been sexed up by the West, Iran's push to continue with its nuclear program is fueling a strident Sunni Arab quest for nuclearization, with the region's states looking to the East - to Russia and China - for the incubation required to bring them up to Iran's nuclear speed.

That has concomitant and extremely toxic repercussions for the West as the oil-rich Arab regimes align ever more closely with the East in a growing array of spheres, further placing the West's strategic energy security in doubt. The crucial Middle East region is quickly slipping away from the West, and Western leaders know it fully. As the tipping point nears and the West stares into the abyss of a Middle East clearly dominated by Iran and its proxies and leaning heavily toward the East, actions that only recently were viewed as "crazy" and unjustified come to be viewed in a more justifiable light as all else fails, and the full range of military options against Iran has risen to become the foremost.

The consequences of recklessness
The Pandora's box of regionwide radical Shi'ite-Iranian ascension, thrust open in 2003 by Bush and foolishly backed by virtually all of Washington, is widely and rapidly spreading all manner of "evils" and "curses" on the world, from the US perspective. The oil-rich Middle East is being plunged into ever deeper radicalism and instability. Radical political-militarist Iranian tentacles such as Hamas and Hezbollah are making regional advances, while anti-Americanism thrives and US leverage collapses.

The fervent Iranian agenda - a Middle East dominated by a de facto Shi'ite caliphate anchored in Tehran - is much closer now than before the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice-Blair "axis vs evil" pushed its way into Baghdad to take out the only viable restraint on Iranian regional ascendancy. In its supposed zeal to battle "evil", that axis has only more firmly established "evil".

The highly militaristic strategies the US is largely left with in its mission to try to put those "evils" back into the box are ones that carry enormous risk. At the same time, the range of soft-power options and strategies carries greatly diminished potency, along with the very real risk of bolstering the status and leverage of the very regimes the US is trying to put back into Pandora's box.

Not only is there deep anxiety about the potential for strong Iranian-Shi'ite retaliation throughout the region in the event that the West begins to take "measured" military action against the regime in Tehran, there is another far more serious risk, especially for the West - the prospect of a serious deterioration in its relations with Russia, China and their energy-exporting global partners. The latter have collectively acquired potent energy-based economic and geopolitical leverage over the West and have acutely tired of continued US global dominance and the current unipolar order.

With tensions running ever higher between the West and the rising East, a spark like that of military action against Iran or North Korea could re-ignite a neo-Cold War, the consequences of which would be much worse for the West than for the East this time around.

Many observers saw the recent Democrat election victory as signaling the arrival of the long-awaited change in the direction of US foreign policy, a turn back toward multilateral soft-power strategies and away from the destructiveness of the neo-con line of the past six years. However, those six years of destructive policies and their deeply entrenched and mounting deleterious effects cannot be erased merely by the "magic wand" of an election win.

The US has tied itself into a knot of unprecedented complexity and tensile strength. Cutting across that knot by further militaristic strategies will unleash an array of pent-up regional and global forces the US isn't remotely prepared to deal with successfully.

It hasn't begun to position itself in a place of independent economic strength, energy independence and geopolitical strength - quite the opposite is true as the knot tightens around the US. The current US administration will cut across that knot very soon because the mounting crises in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and North Korea are all reaching their "moments of truth" virtually simultaneously and are therefore pushing it to do the "cutting" before all is lost.

Next: Why multipolarity is a misnomer

W Joseph Stroupe is author of the new book Russian Rubicon: Impending Checkmate of the West and editor of Global Events Magazine, online at www.GeoStrategyMap.com.

(Copyright 2004-2006 GeoStrategyMap.com & W Joseph Stroupe. All rights reserved.)






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Manly Bullies in Britain


Eliza Manningham-Buller MI5 chief to resign after only four years in charge

Dan Bell
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian

The head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, announced last night that she would be stepping down from her post after three decades with the security service, but only four years in her current job.

Though apparently planned in advance, the move comes at a delicate time for national security. Only last month, Dame Eliza, 58, revealed that the security services were aware of 30 serious plots by Islamic extremists, and as many as 200 British-based "networks" involved with terrorism. The security services also knew of 1,600 people who were actively engaged in, or facilitating, terrorist plots, either in Britain or abroad.
The change will add further upheaval at a time when the prime minister is considering proposals by John Reid, the home secretary, for a "radical shake-up" of the anti-terrorist operation by British security services.

In a statement released last night, Dame Eliza said: "By April 2007 I shall have been an officer of the security service for 33 years, the last 10 as either deputy director general or director general. I decided in early 2005 that it would be time by then to stand down.

"I have been privileged to lead the service when it is facing the two challenges of a very serious threat and the consequent need to grow and change at a dramatic rate to tackle that threat. I am confident that the service will continue to serve the UK to the best of its ability. I shall watch its progress with great interest."

Dame Eliza, who has a reputation for circumspection and competence, has expressed grave worries over the scale and speed of indoctrination among young Muslim teenagers, who were being "groomed to be suicide bombers".

In statements that contradicted Tony Blair's assurances that terrorism in the UK has nothing to do with British foreign policy, she has said that it was clear from "martyrdom" videos that suicide bombers were motivated by their interpretation of UK foreign policy as "anti-Muslim", particularly Britain's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr Reid last night paid tribute to her contribution to the security service. "Eliza has given 33 years of dedicated service to the nation and we owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude. For the last 10 years she has served as deputy director general and director general of the security service, leading the service through a time of significant change and growth. Her contribution to the security of our nation has been invaluable and I pay tribute to her unstinting efforts on our behalf."

Mr Blair paid tribute to her leadership after the July 7 2005 terrorist attacks in London. "For this, and for the unstinting contribution she has made to the nation's security, we owe her a debt of gratitude," he said. "[She] has dedicated herself to the protection of this country, our people, and our way of life. She has led the security service through a time of significant change and growth, as it responded to the challenge of international terrorism."



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Eliza Manningham-Buller - MI5 Chief - Neo-Fascist?

Cassiopedia

The Honourable Dame Elizabeth Lydia Manningham-Buller, (Dame Eliza) DCB (born 14 July, 1948) is the current director general (DG) of MI5, the British internal national security agency, appointed in October 2002.

The second daughter of a former Lord Chancellor and Attorney General, Reginald Edward Manningham-Buller, 1st Viscount Dilhorne, Dame Eliza was educated at Northampton High School and Benenden School.

She worked as a teacher for three years at Queen's Gate in London, having read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford from 1971 to 1974, before joining the Security Service.
Specializing in counter-terrorism rather than MI5's then more-normal counter-espionage, Dame Eliza was active at the time of the Lockerbie bombing by Libya in 1988.

She was a senior liaison working out of Washington, D.C. to the US intelligence community over the period of the first Gulf War, before leading the newly-created Irish counter-terrorism section from 1992 when MI5 were given the lead responsibility for such work (from the Metropolitan Police).

Having been promoted to the Management Board of the Security Service the next year, Dame Eliza became the director in charge of surveillance and technical operations, later becoming director of Irish counter-terrorism.

She was appointed deputy director general in 1997, and finally succeeded Sir Stephen Lander as director general in 2002, the second woman to take on the role after Dame Stella Rimington.

In September 2005 she made a speech which outlined the need for a debate about civil liberties, in the in the wake of more extreme terrorism, suggesting that Britain has to define what civil liberties are to be held as sacred and how far some can be undermined if necessary.

Her brother is John Manningham-Buller, 2nd Viscount Dilhorne. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath in 2006.
[edit]
Marriage

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller is married to David, whose surname has never been disclosed publicly; he has five children by his previous marriage, who are Dame Elizabeth's stepchildren.

"Her husband, David, is the son of a former lieutenant-colonel and a former lecturer in moral philosophy at St Andrews University. He has recently retrained as a carpenter. An Irish Catholic by birth, he is said to have once held strong left-wing views. According to friends, he did not know his future wife's profession during their courtship"



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Flashback: Eliza Manningham-Buller: Life in the shadows

Andrew Walker
BBC News profiles unit
7 October 2002

During the early 1980s, only five people knew that Oleg Gordievsky, the deputy head of the KGB at the Soviet embassy in London, was actually a double agent. One of this exclusive group was MI5's senior officer dealing with Soviet affairs, Eliza Manningham-Buller.

As Gordievsky recently acknowledged, Manningham-Buller's ability to keep a secret saved his life.

Despite the fact that two of her assistants shared an office with Michael Bettany, a traitor working for the KGB, Gordievsky's crucial role was never mentioned.

One word in front of Bettany, who recently completed an 18 year sentence for spying for the Soviets, and Gordievsky would have been on the first plane to Moscow and an inevitable date with an executioner's bullet.
Gordievsky says that her appointment is "the best news for the service in a decade."

Born in 1948, the Honourable Elizabeth Lydia Manningham-Buller's refined background is clear for all to see.

He father, Sir Reginald (later Lord Dilhorne), served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor in the Conservative administrations of Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Pantomime

In 1961, as attorney general, he played a crucial role in exposing the traitor George Blake, by allowing MI6 officers to interrogate Blake.

"Just make sure you bring him back alive," he quipped at the time. They did, but only after Blake had confessed.

A contemporary of Princess Anne at the exclusive girls' public school, Benenden, Eliza Manningham-Buller's forthright character brought her the nickname "Bullying Manner".

She read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where it is believed MI5 first attempted to recruit her, much to her father's distress.

While at Oxford, she starred as the Fairy Godmother in a production of Cinderella directed by Giles Brandreth.

After graduating, she worked as a teacher at the swanky Queen's Gate school in London. Among her pupils there was the future journalist and cookery writer, Nigella Lawson.

But, after three years, she finally joined MI5. It was 1974, the Cold War was at its frostiest and Eliza Manningham-Buller soon progressed form typing up transcripts of tapped telephone conversations between Warsaw Pact diplomats to becoming a fully-fledged spycatcher.

Unlike her predecessor as director general, Dame Stella Rimington, Eliza Manningham-Buller has vast experience as an operational intelligence officer.

An expert on counter-terrorism, she was heavily involved in the Lockerbie investigation, served as MI5's liaison officer in Washington and became director of the agency's Irish counter-terrorism branch, spearheading the fight against the Provisional IRA.

Since 1997, when she was appointed MI5's deputy director general, Eliza Manningham-Buller has had responsibility for the organisation's day-to-day work and its relations with other agencies, both at home and abroad.

Dame Stella has welcomed her successor's appointment. "Eliza is a highly intelligent, very experienced and very kind person", she says.

But she has this warning, "the media will focus on what she looks like and what clothes she wears because she's a woman."

But critics say that her accession to the top job simply reveals the deeply conservative nature of the agency and its unwillingness to countenance modernisation.

On the domestic front, Eliza Manningham-Buller lives in Bath with her husband, David, whom she married in 1991, and his five children from an earlier marriage. Despite the pressures of her job, she is still said to cook a roast Sunday dinner for her family every week.

Today, her professional life is dominated by the fight against al-Qaeda. She flew to Washington on 12 September 2001 to liase with her counterparts in the CIA and FBI and is recently said to have told Tony Blair that he is on an al-Qaeda hit-list.

But, for every fact we do know of Eliza Manningham-Buller's life, there are probably a thousand other secrets, revealed only to the clandestine warriors at MI5's headquarters at Thames House in London.



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Flashback: Eliza Manningham-Buller sez: Defeating terror may mean giving up rights

By Michael Evans, Defence Editor
The Times, London
10 Sept 2005

THE head of MI5 has publicly backed Tony Blair's warning that the rules of how Britain combats the threat of terrorism have to change.

In a break with tradition, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, Director-General of MI5, allowed a confidential speech that she had given to Dutch intelligence officers to be published on the agency's website yesterday. She gave a warning that an erosion of civil liberties might be necessary to stop more British citizens from being killed by terrorists.

Her intervention will provide ammunition for the Prime Minister and Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, in their battle with the courts over dealing with suspected terrorists. It will also bolster the Government's struggle to introduce rules to make it easier to deport foreign preachers of hate.
The arrests of radical clerics, promised by Mr Clarke, have been delayed, and European ministers at an anti-terrorism conference in Newcastle this week frustrated his plan to store mobile phone records for a year.

Dame Eliza does not specify which human rights need to be compromised to help the intelligence agencies and police to cope with the threat of attacks, but her intervention is certain to intensify the debate among MPs and human rights groups.

Dame Eliza insisted that MI5 would not be "coerced" into sharing intelligence with friendly agencies.

Mr Clarke faced strong opposition to his call for tougher counter-terrorism laws after the July 7 and July 21 attacks in London, when he addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week.

Dame Eliza, speaking in The Hague on September 1 at a meeting to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service, made it clear that she had serious concerns about trying to counter the terrorist threat without greater powers, even if that meant encroaching on human rights.

Echoing words used by the Prime Minister, Dame Eliza said: "The world has changed and there needs to be a debate on whether some erosion of what we all value may be necessary to improve the chances of our citizens not being blown apart as they go about their daily lives."

She admitted that the July attacks in London had been "a shock" to MI5 and to the police, but said that intelligence was always going to be fragmentary and incomplete.

She praised the response of the public to the bombings and people's refusal to be cowed. Most people, she said, understood that the attacks were "on all our citizens, whatever the ethnic origins".

The central dilemma for MI5 and other agencies, and for the Government, was trying to protect British citizens "within the rule of law when intelligence does not amount to clear-cut evidence and when it's fragile".

Dame Eliza said that she wished to do nothing that would damage "hard-fought-for [human] rights". But trying to contain terrorism in a democratic society was "not straightforward".

FROM TEACHER TO SPYMASTER
# The Honourable Dame Elizabeth Lydia Manningham-Buller was born on July 14, 1948, the second daughter of former Attorney-General and Lord Chancellor, Reginald Edward Manningham-Buller, 1st Viscount Dilhorne

# Educated at Northampton High School and Benenden School

# Taught at the Queen's Gate school in London for three years, having read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, before joining the Security Service

# Senior liaison officer in Washington with the US intelligence community during the first Gulf War, before leading the new Irish counter-terrorism section from 1992

# Appointed Deputy Director-General of MI5 in 1997. Rose to Director-General in 2002, becoming the second woman in the role

# Married with five stepchildren



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Flashback: Eliza Manningham-Buller sez: More Britons are turning to terror

By Michael Evans
The Times, London
10 November 06

Hundreds of young British Muslims are being radicalised, groomed and set on a path to mass murder, the head of MI5 said yesterday.

In a stark public warning, Dame Eliza ManninghamBuller, the Director-General of MI5, revealed that the Security Service's caseload had risen by 80 per cent since January and now involved about 30 "Priority 1" plots.

It has identified 200 terrorist networks involving at least 1,600 people, many under the direct control of al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.

"More and more people are moving from passive sympathy towards active terrorism through being radicalised or indoctrinated by friends, families, in organised training events here and overseas," she said. "Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers."
Dame Eliza said that she was alarmed by the "scale and speed" of the radicalisation, which security sources later said had intensified since the 7/7 bombings. "It is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalised and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow citizens, or their early death in a suicide attack or on a foreign battlefield," she said.

"Killing oneself and others in response is an attractive option for some citizens of this country and others around the world. [The] threat is serious, is growing and will, I believe, be with us for a generation. It is a sustained campaign, not a series of isolated incidents. It aims to wear down our will to resist."

Dame Eliza admitted that, despite a major recruitment drive, just 6 per cent of MI5's staff came from ethnic minorities. This compares with 8 per cent in the Metropolitan Police. Security sources insisted that change was happening and, of 400 people recruited this year, 14 per cent were from ethnic minority groups.

Dame Eliza's comments came in an address to a discreet audience from the Mile End Group run by Peter Hennessy, Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary, University of London.

She timed her stark assessment to coincide with the conviction of Dhiren Barot, the al-Qaeda planner who was jailed for 40 years this week for plotting car bomb and dirty bombs attacks in London.

In her speech she said the methods used by terrorists had become more sophisticated.

"Today we see the use of home-made improvised explosive devices," she said.

"Tomorrow's threat may, and I suggest will, include the use of chemical, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology," she said.

Her assessment of 30 Prior- ity 1 plots is a significant increase on the 24 "major conspiracies" referred to by John Reid, the Home Secretary, in August.

Both police and security sources have given warning that Britain has become the No 1 target for al-Qaeda.

The significant Muslim population and the constant flow of British-born Pakistanis visiting their families in Pakistan every year have been cited as providing al-Qaeda with opportunities for converting young people to terrorism.

"My officers and the police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1,600 identified individuals (and there will be many we don't know) who are actively engaged in plotting or facilitating terrorist acts here and overseas," Dame Eliza said.

Those terror networks "often have links back to al-Qaeda in Pakistan and, through those links, al-Qaeda gives guidance and training to its largely British foot soldiers here on an extensive and growing scale".

The head of MI5's speech, which was approved by ministers, comes after recent warnings given by Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard's Counter Terrorism Command, and by Mr Reid. They both said that the terrorist threat would be long and enduring.

FULL SPEECH

Following is the full text of a speech delivered on November 9, 2006 by Eliza Manningham-Buller, Director-General of MI5, on the terrorist threat facing the UK:

The International Terrorist Threat to the UK

I have been Director General of the Security Service/M15 since 2002. Before that I was Deputy Director General for five years. During that time, and before, I have witnessed a steady increase in the terrorist threat to the UK. It has been the subject of much comment and controversy. I rarely speak in public. I prefer to avoid the limelight and get on with my job. But today, I want to set out my views on:

* the realities of the terrorist threat facing the UK in 2006;
* what motivates those who pose that threat
* and what my Service is doing, with others, to counter it.


I speak not as a politician, nor as a pundit, but as someone who has been an intelligence professional for 32 years.

2. Five years on from 9/11, where are we? Speaking in August, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, the head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch of the Metropolitan Police, described the threat to the UK from Al-Qaida-related terrorism as 'real, here, deadly and enduring". Only last week the Home Secretary said the threat will be "enduring - the struggle will be long and wide and deep." Let me describe more fully why I think they said that. We now know that the first Al-Qaida-related plot against the UK was the one we discovered and disrupted in November 2000 in Birmingham. A British citizen is currently serving a long prison sentence for plotting to detonate a large bomb in the UK. Let there be no doubt about this: the international terrorist threat to this country is not new. It began before Iraq, before Afghanistan, and before 9/11.

3. In the years after 9/11, with atrocities taking place in Madrid, Casablanca, Bali, Istanbul and elsewhere, terrorists plotted to mount a string of attacks in the UK, but were disrupted. This run of domestic success was interrupted tragically in London in July 2005. Since then, the combined efforts of my Service, the police, SIS and GCHQ have thwarted a further five major conspiracies in the UK, saving many hundreds (possibly even thousands) of lives. Last month the Lord Chancellor said that there were a total of 99 defendants awaiting trial in 34 cases. Of course the presumption of innocence applies and the law dictates that nothing must be said or done which might prejudice the right of a defendant to receive a fair trial. You will understand therefore that I can say no more on these matters.

4. What I can say is that today, my officers and the police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1600 identified individuals (and there will be many we don't know) who are actively engaged in plotting, or facilitating, terrorist acts here and overseas. The extremists are motivated by a sense of grievance and injustice driven by their interpretation of the history between the West and the Muslim world. This view is shared, in some degree, by a far wider constituency. If the opinion polls conducted in the UK since July 2005 are only broadly accurate, over 100,000 of our citizens consider that the July 2005 attacks in London were justified. What we see at the extreme end of the spectrum are resilient networks, some directed from Al-Qaida in Pakistan, some more loosely inspired by it, planning attacks including mass casualty suicide attacks in the UK. Today we see the use of home-made improvised explosive devices; tomorrow's threat may include the use of chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology. More and more people are moving from passive sympathy towards active terrorism through being radicalised or indoctrinated by friends, families, in organised training events here and overseas, by images on television, through chat rooms and websites on the Internet.

5. The propaganda machine is sophisticated and Al-Qaida itself says that 50% of its war is conducted through the media. In Iraq, attacks are regularly videoed and the footage downloaded onto the internet within 30 minutes. Virtual media teams then edit the result, translate it into English and many other languages, and package it for a worldwide audience. And, chillingly, we see the results here. Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers. We are aware of numerous plots to kill people and to damage our economy. What do I mean by numerous? Five? Ten? No, nearer....... thirty that we know of. These plots often have links back to Al-Qaida in Pakistan and through those links Al-Qaida gives guidance and training to its largely British foot soldiers here on an extensive and growing scale. And it is not just the UK of course. Other countries also face a new terrorist threat: from Spain to France to Canada and Germany.

6. A word on proportionality. My Service and the police have occasionally been accused of hype and lack of perspective or worse, of deliberately stirring up fear. It is difficult to argue that there are not worse problems facing us, for example climate change... and of course far more people are killed each year on the roads than die through terrorism. It is understandable that people are reluctant to accept assertions that do not always appear to be substantiated. It is right to be sceptical about intelligence. I shall say more about that later. But just consider this. A terrorist spectacular would cost potentially thousands of lives and do major damage to the world economy. Imagine if a plot to bring down several passenger aircraft succeeded. Thousands dead, major economic damage, disruption across the globe. And Al-Qaida is an organisation without restraint.

7. There has been much speculation about what motivates young men and women to carry out acts of terrorism in the UK. My Service needs to understand the motivations behind terrorism to succeed in countering it, as far as that is possible. Al-Qaida has developed an ideology which claims that Islam is under attack, and needs to be defended. This is a powerful narrative that weaves together conflicts from across the globe, presenting the West's response to varied and complex issues, from long-standing disputes such as Israel/Palestine and Kashmir to more recent events as evidence of an across-the-board determination to undermine and humiliate Islam worldwide. Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kashmir and Lebanon are regularly cited by those who advocate terrorist violence as illustrating what they allege is Western hostility to Islam.

8. The video wills of British suicide bombers make it clear that they are motivated by:

* perceived worldwide and long-standing injustices against Muslims;
* an extreme and minority interpretation of Islam promoted by some preachers and people of influence;
* their interpretation as anti-Muslim of UK foreign policy, in particular the UK's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.


Killing oneself and others in response is an attractive option for some citizens of this country and others around the world.

What Intelligence can do

9. As I said earlier, I have been an intelligence officer for some 32 years. And I want again to describe what intelligence is and is not. I wish life were like 'Spooks', where everything is (a) knowable, and (b) soluble by six people. But those whose plans we wish to detect in advance are determined to conceal from us what they intend to do. And every day they learn. From the mistakes of others. From what they discover of our capabilities from evidence presented in court, and from leaks to the media. Moreover intelligence is usually bitty and needs piecing together, assessing, judging. It takes objectivity, integrity and a sceptical eye to make good use of intelligence: even the best of it never tells the whole story. On the basis of such incomplete information, my Service and the police make decisions on when and how to take action, to protect public safety. Wherever possible we seek to collect evidence sufficient to secure prosecutions, but it is not always possible to do so: admissible evidence is not always available and the courts, rightly, look for a high standard of certainty. Often to protect public safety the police need to disrupt plots on the basis of intelligence but before evidence sufficient to bring criminal charges has been collected. Moreover we are faced by acute and very difficult choices of prioritisation. We cannot focus on everything so we have to decide on a daily basis with the police and others where to focus our energies, whom to follow, whose telephone lines need listening to, which seized media needs to go to the top of the analytic pile. Because of the sheer scale of what we face (80% increase in casework since January), the task is daunting. We won't always make the right choices. And we recognise we shall have scarce sympathy if we are unable to prevent one of our targets committing an atrocity.

And the Service?

10. As I speak my staff, roughly 2,800 of them, (an increase of almost 50% since 9/11, 25% under 30, over 6% from ethnic minorities, with 52 languages, with links to well over 100 services worldwide), are working very hard, at some cost to their private lives and in some cases their safety, to do their utmost to collect the intelligence we need. The first challenge is to find those who would cause us harm, among the 60 million or so people who live here and the hundreds of thousands who visit each year. That is no easy task, particularly given the scale and speed of radicalisation and the age of some being radicalised. The next stage is to decide what action to take in response to that intelligence. Who are merely talking big, and who have real ambitions? Who have genuine aspirations to commit terrorism, but lack the know-how or materials? Who are the skilled and trained ones, who the amateurs? Where should we and the police focus our finite resources? It's a hard grind but my staff are highly motivated: conscious of the risks they carry individually; and aware that they may not be able to do enough to stop the next attack. We owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude and I thank them. On July 8 last year I spoke to all my staff. I said that what we feared would happen had finally happened. I reminded them that we had warned that it was a matter of when, not if, and that they were trained to respond - indeed many had been up all night, from the intelligence staff to the catering staff. I told them that we had received many messages of support from around the world, and that we, along with our colleagues in the police and emergency services, were in the privileged position of being able to make a difference. And we did. And we have done so since.

11. My Service is growing very rapidly. By 2008 it will be twice the size it was at 9/11. We know much more than we did then. We have developed new techniques, new sources, new relationships. We understand much better the scale and nature of what we are tackling but much is still obscure and radicalisation continues. Moreover, even with such rapid growth, we shall not be able to investigate nearly enough of the problem, so the prioritisation I mentioned earlier will remain essential but risky. And new intelligence officers need to be trained. That takes time as does the acquisition of experience, the experience that helps one with those difficult choices and tough judgements.

What else can others do?

12. That brings me on to my final point. None of this can be tackled by my Service alone. Others have to address the causes, counter the radicalisation, assist in the rehabilitation of those affected, and work to protect our way of life. We have key partners, the police being the main ones and I'd like today to applaud those police officers working alongside us on this huge challenge, those who collect intelligence beside us, help convert it into evidence for court, and face the dangers of arresting individuals who have no concern for their own lives or the lives of others. The scale and seriousness of the threat means that others play vital roles, SIS and GCHQ collecting key intelligence overseas, other services internationally who recognise the global nature of the problem, government departments, business and the public.

13. Safety for us all means working together to protect those we care about, being alert to the danger without over-reacting, and reporting concerns. We need to be alert to attempts to radicalise and indoctrinate our youth and to seek to counter it. Radicalising elements within communities are trying to exploit grievances for terrorist purposes; it is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalised and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow UK citizens, or their early death in a suicide attack or on a foreign battlefield.

14. We also need to understand some of the differences between non-Western and Western life-styles; and not treat people with suspicion because of their religion, or indeed to confuse fundamentalism with terrorism. We must realise that there are significant differences between faiths and communities within our society, and most people, from whatever origin, condemn all acts of terror in the UK. And we must focus on those values that we all share in this country regardless of our background: Equality, Freedom, Justice and Tolerance. Many people are working for and with us to address the threat precisely for those reasons. Because: All of us, whatever our ethnicity and faith, are the targets of the terrorists.

15. I have spoken as an intelligence professional, describing the reality of terrorism and counter-terrorism in the UK in 2006. My messages are sober ones. I do not speak in this way to alarm (nor as the cynics might claim to enhance the reputation of my organisation) but to give the most frank account I can of the Al-Qaida threat to the UK. That threat is serious, is growing and will, I believe, be with ç us for a generation. It is a sustained campaign, not a series of isolated incidents, It aims to wear down our will to resist.

16. My Service is dedicated to tackling the deadly manifestations of terrorism. Tackling its roots is the work of us all.

Comment: A Fascist Propaganda Queen fer shure!

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Flashback: Eliza Manningham-Buller Involved in Lockerbie False Flag Op

Anything that defies my sense of reason

How much do you value your rights?

So asks the BBC in light of Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of Britain's security service, MI5, stating that the 60-or-so million people in this country who aren't fully-paid up members of Al Qaeda should have even more of their essential civil liberties removed in the continued war on an abstract noun. Of course, quite how one views these things is all about context and perspective so let's endeavour to introduce some of each of these qualities by having a look at a couple of 'highpoints' in the career of Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller.
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, "was heavily involved in the Lockerbie investigation" after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above a small town in Scotland. For those that don't recall the events of 1988:

Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up as it flew over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, when 12-16 oz of plastic explosive was detonated in its forward cargo hold, triggering a sequence of events that led to the rapid destruction of the aircraft. Winds of 100 knots scattered passengers and debris along an 88-mile corridor over an area of 845 square miles. Two hundred and seventy people from 21 countries died, including 11 people on the ground. [FreeDictionary]



Recently, a former Scottish police chief gave lawyers a signed statement stating that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated. "The officer, who was a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland, supports earlier claims by a former CIA agent that his CIA bosses "wrote the script" to incriminate Libya."

So, we can learn from this that Manningham-Buller had heavy involvement in an investigation into a devastating terrorist attack in the UK and that she didn't manage to expose that a key piece of evidence had been manufactured by the CIA. This suggests that Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller's heavy involvement in the investigation wasn't really much use in bringing the investigation to a judicious conclusion. Hardly grounds for promotion to the head of MI5, one would think. Or, if it is, there's a whole tranche of questions that need asking about the purpose of MI5. Only 20 years later does something vaguely resembling the truth of the Lockerbie bombing emerge and, still then, only when the conscience of an elderly ex-copper gets the better of him.

The question in relation to Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, her involvement in the rather redundant Lockerbie investigation and her recent comments must now be; should a person with such a dubious record of detecting the true causes of the terror around the world be tasked with removing the civil liberties of the population that she failed in the Lockerbie investigation 20 years ago?

While you're pondering that one, consider also the small matter of Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller's position as a senior liaison to the US intelligence community, working out of Washington, over the period of the first Persian Gulf War when the Bush klan first tried to rid the world, apparently, of Saddam Hussein.

"Why would this be an issue?" you might ask. Well, the CIA went to great lengths to empower Saddam Hussein back in the sixties so any offensives which the Bush father/son partnership, their administrations, and the CIA might wish to launch on the country and leadership that they themselves (and Don) engineered in the sixties, are immediately rendered far more questionable than the already incredibly questionable reasons for so doing.

To understand anything about Iraq, it is essential to understand that Iraq was described by Britain in 1947 as a, "stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history," and, "a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination." It is also essential to understand that this "stupendous source of strategic power" passed from Ottoman rule to British hands during World War I and was then led by a British-appointed monarch whose job description was, "A king who will be content to reign but not govern." This all worked very well until the British appointed monarch was overthrown by the restless locals in 1958 and replaced with a republic under Brigadier Abd al Karim Qasim.

Monarchy has never taken kindly to anyone that dares challenge their self-appointed divine right to rule, and being overthrown anywhere tends to stick in the craw of monarchy just a little. So, when the "vital prize for... world influence or domination" had been lost to a people's republic of neutralism and nationalism that had no use for monarchy or their interests, something had to be done by the conquering imperial forces to re-establish their global influence and domination.

Enter, stage left [hand path], one Saddam Hussein and the CIA.

In 1959 Baath party elements led by Saddam attempted to gun down Qasim, but failed. Saddam was wounded in the attempt (read: 'shot himself in the leg') and fled (hobbled?) to Syria and then Egypt - a considerable feat of border-crossing after having just attempted to assassinate the incumbent leader of the people's republic. Saddam was sentenced to death in absentia only returning to Iraq when his Baath party were in a position of power.

Bearing in mind the Lockerbie investigation-debacle and the recent history of Iraq that has been shaped by British and, more recently, American conquering forces who largely engineered Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, the involvement of Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller in both the Lockerbie investigation and the Iraq invasions of Bush Snr and Jnr, provides a high degree of insight into the nature of the person who now suggests citizens of the UK should be subjugated further by still greater losses of essential liberties.

Oh, how great this democracy of ours. How much do you value your rights?



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Flashback: Blair: What he really knew - Did Eliza Know?

Kamal Ahmed, political editor
Sunday August 24, 2003
The Observer

The Prime Minister's private RAF 146 jet climbed high into a blue summer sky en route from Liverpool to London. It was 4 July, lunchtime, and Tony Blair was coming to the end of a whistle-stop tour of the North East of England. Two days of speeches and meetings had been part of a Downing Street plan to push the health service up the media's agenda. It was failing.

The night before, after dining in his private room at the Liverpool Marriott Hotel where he was staying with his wife, Blair put in one of his regular calls to Jonathan Powell, his Chief of Staff at Number 10. Powell had some 'pretty important news' to impart. Someone from the Ministry of Defence had come forward and suggested they might be the source.
Blair knew what he meant. 'The Source' had become regular parlance around the corridors of Downing Street. Rogue elements, senior intelligence officials, someone with an axe to grind. Who, precisely, had told Andrew Gilligan of the BBC that the Government had 'sexed up' the case for war against Iraq?

The phone call to Powell, on the evening of 3 July, was the first time the Prime Minister could start to focus. It was the ignition point, start of the roller coaster. Over the next seven days, in a remarkable series of meetings, letters and memos, the Downing Street machine, aided and abetted by a willing MoD, could finally get a grip.

Lord Hutton. Week two. The inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly has heard four more days' evidence. A few more layers have been peeled away.

We now know that Alastair Campbell, Blair's Director of Communications, made 15 suggestions on altering the key September dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. We know that Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, tried to limit what the Foreign Affairs Select Committee could ask Kelly because of fears his views on Iraq would be 'uncomfortable'.

We know Gilligan sent emails to members of that same committee suggesting lines of questioning that would be 'devastating' for the Government. We know senior executives at the BBC were unaware of these emails and that they came to the inquiry from the Liberal Democrats. We know the inquiry wants to know why.

We know Kelly confided to a friend that one day he would be found 'dead in the woods' if the war against Iraq ever went ahead. We know demons of 'moral ambiguity' tormented him.

We know a lot more. This week the Prime Minister will take to the witness stand. His reputation will sit alongside him. Blair once said he was a 'pretty straight sort of guy'. That will now be tested.

Hutton will concentrate on two strands. First, the compilation of the dossier. Who hardened it up? Why did John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, agree to 'tightening the language' over the issue of whether Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to do so? Was the threat from Saddam Hussein imminent? Or simply theoretical?

Second will come a forensic dissection of the remarkable week that followed the phone call from the Liverpool Marriott to Powell. Seven days when Downing Street 'left it to the MoD'. And left their fingerprints all over it.

Scarlett demanded ownership of the dossier. He, and no one else, was responsible for its content, he said. But he knew the politicians were floating in the background. During that crucial week he received a letter from a senior official in the Defence Intelligence Services about Kelly. He sent it on to Number 10. Scribbled at the top, in Scarlett's loopy handwriting and signed off 'JS', are eight words. 'The Prime Minister might find this interesting.'

Jonathan Powell was sitting at home when the first call came through from the Downing Street switchboard. It was that same evening, Thursday, 3 July, fourteen days before Kelly started his walk to the woods near his home where he was to die.

It was Hoon on the other end of the line. What Powell, the key link man in Number 10, would tell Blair a few hours later was told to him. A possible source had come forward.

The first building block of what was to be the Prime Minister's strategy during this whole affair was set in train that night. Blair told Powell it should be dealt with by the MoD. But he wanted to be kept in very close contact with what was happening. And he would make it absolutely clear what he felt.

When Blair has made clear what he thinks, others act accordingly. He does not have to write it down. He doesn't even have to say anything very much. Opinions become 'known'.

The next day at 6pm Powell was summoned to a meeting in Sir David Manning's office. Manning, Blair's chief foreign policy adviser, had also been told about Kelly. With Manning was Sir David Omand, chief intelligence co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office and conduit for all intelligence matters that bounce between MI5, MI6 and the Government. Alongside him was Scarlett.

The four men talked Kelly. Omand said he had been contacted by Sir Kevin Tebbit, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, and had got more details of the 'important development' they all knew about. Tebbit would send a letter to Omand detailing what he knew. Omand agreed to fax it on to Chequers, where Blair had arrived that afternoon after his short flight.

The letter was the next building block for Blair's strategy. 'An official in the MoD has volunteered that he had discussions with Andrew Gilligan on 22 May, one week before Gilligan's allegation about the interference in the production of the September dossier and the "45 minute story",' Tebbit wrote.

Was he authorised to speak to the media? 'Not in this case,' Tebbit wrote. He underlined the word 'not'.

Blair's entourage saw a chink. Kelly had admitted meeting Gilligan. But he claimed he had told the BBC reporter not enough to be the source of the later allegations. Had Gilligan embellished his reporting? This would be crucial.

What should be done? Powell, Manning, Scarlett and Omand immediately began discussing putting Kelly before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, which was in the process of completing its inquiry into the case for the war against Iraq. Gilligan had been a key witness to the inquiry. What if Kelly fatally undermined the BBC reporter? That would be very useful.

The allegation of 'cover-up' had stalked the Government throughout Blair's period of office. Cover-up over Bernie Ecclestone and a £1 million donation. Cover-up over the relationship between Cherie Blair and a con man, Peter Foster. Cover-up over Lakshmi Mittal, an Indian steel magnate and Labour donor whom the Prime Minister had helped secure a multi-million-pound business deal in Romania.

On each occasion the revelations had come out drip by damaging drip. This time the public would know about Kelly. One way or another.

'The thought was we would be accused of covering things up if this salient piece of information was not made available to the FAC [Foreign Affairs Committee],' Powell told the inquiry last week.

That weekend Powell was climbing in the Black Mountains in North Wales. On Saturday morning his mobile phone rang. It was Alastair Campbell, who had also spoken to Hoon. But their conversation had gone further. Hoon had discussed a 'plea bargain' with Kelly. The government scientist would come forward in return for being given some leeway on disciplinary action.

Campbell was worried. Cover-up was again creeping around his mind.

Tebbit wrote a second letter. An article in the Times that morning had suggested more clues about the source of the BBC claims, Tebbit believed. How long could the Government hold out? A sense of panic drifted into the mix.

Manning was copied the letter. As was Andrew Turnbull, the Cabinet Secretary; Sir Michael Jay, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office; and Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5.

In civil service circles it is known as 'fingerprinting'. Get as many people as possible in the decision-making circle. If it all goes wrong, blame is diffused.

Over the weekend Hoon, Campbell and Powell exchanged telephone calls. Campbell felt a push should be made to give the information on Kelly to the FAC. He even suggested telling the BBC Governors. Powell called Blair, who suggested Campbell, at the centre of the allegations, was not best placed to make the key decisions on the matter.

Blair demanded more information. He said the governors and the FAC must be kept out of the loop for now. Kelly was interviewed again on Monday by the MoD. That evening, Powell called Omand. Omand confirmed the second interview had strengthened suspicions that Kelly was the source. The FAC and the Intelligence and Security Select Committee would have to be told.

The MoD was already working on a press statement. Copies were sent to Campbell and Powell. They scribbled notes on them. Suggestions about the BBC being named. Acknowledgement that Gavyn Davies, the Chairman of the Governors, would be told. Leave it to the MoD, Blair insisted. But the fingerprints were there.

The key meeting was at 11.45 on Tuesday, 8 July, two days before Kelly's name appeared in the press. Blair had returned from the Liaison Committee in the House of Commons where no one had mentioned the source of the BBC report.

In his Downing Street 'den', the Prime Minister met with the inner circle - Campbell, Powell, Manning, Scarlett and Omand. A note of that meeting provided to the Hutton inquiry and the first written evidence of the Prime Minister's view is contained in Cabinet Office, Document 1, 0004, and revealed here.

'Meeting to discuss actions in light of the re-interview,' the note says. 'Acceptance that in light of the second interview no option but to make public the fact that someone has come forward who might be the source. Discussion of redrafting of MoD press notice. Discussion giving name of source to BBC privately. Prime Minister again stressed that Tebbit and Omand should b[e] in lead.'

That note indicates where the decision was taken. Hoon and Tebbit were given responsibility for the 'naming strategy'. But Downing Street provided the momentum. With one word, Blair could have stopped the policy in its tracks.

But there was the allegation of cover-up. During Blair's trip on the RAF 146 on that summer afternoon of 4 July, he was interviewed by The Observer. Asked about his attitude to the BBC story, his jaw clenched with anger. 'It was about as serious an attack on my integrity as there could possibly be,' he said.

Blair once said he was a 'pretty straight sort of guy'. The public had to know the truth. Kelly was part of that. So the public had to know about Kelly. The roller coaster had started running.



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Britain stops talk of 'war on terror'

Jason Burke
The Observer
Sunday December 10, 2006

Cabinet ministers have been told by the Foreign Office to drop the phrase 'war on terror' and other terms seen as liable to anger British Muslims and increase tensions more broadly in the Islamic world.

The shift marks a turning point in British political thinking about the strategy against extremism and underlines the growing gulf between the British and American approaches to the continuing problem of radical Islamic militancy. It comes amid increasingly evident disagreements between President George Bush and Tony Blair over policy in the Middle East.

Experts have welcomed the move away from one of the phrases that has most defined the debate on Islamic extremism, but called it 'belated'.
'It's about time,' said Garry Hindle, terrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London. 'Military terminology is completely counter-productive, merely contributing to isolating communities. This is a very positive move.'

A Foreign Office spokesman said the government wanted to 'avoid reinforcing and giving succour to the terrorists' narrative by using language that, taken out of context, could be counter-productive'. The same message has been sent to British diplomats and official spokespeople around the world.

'We tend to emphasise upholding shared values as a means to counter terrorists,' he added.

Many senior British politicians and counter-terrorism specialists have always been uneasy with the term 'the war on terror', coined by the White House in the week following the 9/11 attacks, arguing that the term risked inflaming opinions worldwide. Other critics said that it was too 'military' and did not adequately describe the nature of the diverse efforts made to counter the new threat.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, recently stressed the threat from growing radicalisation among young British Muslims. Whitehall officials believe that militants use a sense of war and crisis and a 'clash of civilisations' to recruit supporters, and thus the use of terms such as 'war', 'war on terror' or 'battle' can be counter-productive.

Though neither Blair nor Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, has used the term 'war on terror' in a formal speech since June, President Bush continues to employ the term liberally. The American leader spoke of how he hoped that Iraq would become 'an ally in the war on terror' during a joint press briefing with Blair in Washington last Friday.

A spokesman for the US State Department yesterday told The Observer that there was no question of dropping the term. 'It's the President's phrase, and that's good enough for us,' she said.

The White House website has a page devoted to explaining the 'war on terrorism', the terminology preferred by the Pentagon, and how it will be won. In April this year Bush compared the 'war on terror' to the Cold War in a keynote speech.

Not all British government figures are abiding by the advice, issued by the Foreign Office's Engaging with the Islamic World Unit. Writing in the Sun recently, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, referred to 'our police and armed forces in the front line of the war on terror'.

'One of the problems will be getting all parts of government to abide [by the new guidelines],' said Hindle, the RUSI expert. 'Whether the Home Office will want to follow remains to be seen. And politicians all have their own agendas.'



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Patronage Without Peer


'National interest' halts arms corruption inquiry - Criminals Covering Up for Other Criminals

David Leigh and Rob Evans
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian

A major criminal investigation into alleged corruption by the arms company BAE Systems and its executives was stopped in its tracks yesterday when the prime minister claimed it would endanger Britain's security if the inquiry was allowed to continue.

The remarkable intervention was announced by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, who took the decision to end the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into alleged bribes paid by the company to Saudi officials, after consulting cabinet colleagues.
In recent weeks, BAE and the Saudi embassy had frantically lobbied the government for the long-running investigation to be discontinued, with the company insisting it was poised to lose another lucrative Saudi contract if it was allowed to go on. This came at a time when the SFO appeared to have made a significant breakthrough, with investigators on the brink of accessing key Swiss bank accounts.

However, Lord Goldsmith consulted the prime minister, the defence secretary, foreign secretary, and the intelligence services, and they decided that "the wider public interest" "outweighed the need to maintain the rule of law". Mr Blair said it would be bad for Britain's security if the SFO was allowed to go ahead, according to the statement made in the Lords by Lord Goldsmith. The statement did not elaborate on the nature of the threat.

BAE claimed that it was about to lose out on a third phase of the Al-Yamamah deal, in which the Saudis would buy 72 Typhoon aircraft in a deal worth £6bn. The Saudis had also hinted that they would do a deal with the French instead if the inquiry pushed ahead. A 10-day ultimatum was reportedly issued by the Saudis earlier this month.

A PR campaign headed by Lord Bell saw MPs from all parties urging the dropping of the investigation, citing fears that jobs would be lost in their constituencies. But in its statements last night the government said commercial considerations had played no part in the decision.

The decision was condemned last night as naked political interference in a criminal case. Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat chief of staff, said the government had succumbed to Saudi pressure. "I think it's because the inquiry has been making substantial progress that it's been brought to an end," he said.

The SFO's director, Robert Wardle, issued a terse statement saying he had dropped the Saudi end of the investigation "following representations that have been made both to the attorney general and the director of the SFO concerning the need to safeguard national and international security".

Shares had begun to rise in BAE and major suppliers such as Rolls-Royce in the last two days, as rumours reached the City that a deal had been done to appease the Saudis. Lord Goldsmith's statement was unusual in that it did not refer to the claimed threats to British jobs, but instead concentrated on "national security".

The destruction of its inquiry will be a severe blow to the SFO which has spent more than £2m on what was its most extensive current investigation, and taken hundreds of pages of statements from witnesses. One witness who gave evidence to the SFO, Peter Gardiner, a director of a travel agent used to make alleged slush fund payments, said last night: "It's an interesting signal that this gives to industry and the world I am thinking of the hundreds of hours I have wasted and all the personal problems this has caused me."

BAE, in a statement, said it welcomed the dropping of the inquiry. But the company and its executives may not yet be out of the woods. The attorney general has allowed investigations to continue into BAE activities in Romania, Chile, the Czech Republic, South Africa and Tanzania, which legal sources say are making strong progress.

The UK made overseas bribery illegal in 2002, under US pressure. Labour ministers subsequently claimed they were determined to stamp out corruption, but in practice no prosecutions have taken place under the new law.

Clare Short, Mr Blair's former cabinet colleague, said: "This government is even more soiled than we thought it was. It means that BAE is above the law."

She added: "The message it sends to corrupt businessmen is carry on - the government will support you."

Liberal Democrat Lord Goodhart said: "If, as appears to be the case, this further investigation is being stopped because of potential damage to security, intelligence and diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, doesn't that amount to blackmail by Saudi Arabia, to prevent this matter going forward?"

Attorney general's statement

"It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest. No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.

The prime minister and the foreign and defence secretaries have expressed the clear view that continuation of the investigation would cause serious damage to UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation, which is likely to have seriously negative consequences for the UK public interest in terms of both national security and our highest priority foreign policy objectives in the Middle East."

Comment: That's the same excuse that has been used to kill any real investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy - it "divides the country" or is "not in the national interest." That's probably the same old saw they'll finally dig up for investigating 9/11. What it really amounts to is that criminals in charge of nations want to be left alone in their pursuit of their own interests at the expense of the well-being of the people.

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Police quiz Blair inside Downing St on peerages

Patrick Wintour, Vikram Dodd and Will Woodward
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian


Tony Blair yesterday became the first serving prime minister to be interviewed as part of a criminal investigation when Scotland Yard officers running the "cash for peerages" inquiry questioned him for two hours in Downing Street.

The prime minister kept the meeting with detectives a closely guarded secret, and did not even confide to members of his cabinet it was due to take place.

Mr Blair was interviewed as a witness and not as a potential suspect, an indication that he is unlikely to face criminal charges himself. Downing Street and the Metropolitan police indicated privately that unless fresh evidence emerges they do not expect Mr Blair to be interviewed again. Police sources indicated, however, that the focus of their attention had swung back to Lord Levy, the party's chief fundraiser and Mr Blair's personal Middle East envoy.
They stressed they had not chosen the timing of the interview with Mr Blair, leaving No 10 open to the charge that its officials had hoped to dampen the explosive impact of Mr Blair's interview in the cacophany of other events.

The government selected yesterday to close 2,500 post offices, drop a Serious Fraud Office inquiry into allegations that BAE had paid bribes to senior figures in the Saudi royal family in return for contracts, and publish a white paper on the future of British airports. Lord Stevens had also made clear weeks ago that he intended to publish his report into the death of Princess Diana yesterday.

Chris Grayling, a member of the shadow cabinet, said: "Five years after Labour launched the concept of burying bad news, Mr Blair's spin doctors are back to their old tricks." A Labour insider said it appeared to be "take out the trash day".

Police questioned Mr Blair about the circumstances in which he nominated four party lenders for peerages, and whether there had been any conspiracy to keep from the Lords Appointments Commission that all four had lent the party considerable sums ahead of the 2005 election.

Mr Blair was told before yesterday's interview that he would not be questioned under caution so he chose only to have a civil service notetaker present, rather than a lawyer.

The prime minister kept the timing of the interview from some of his most senior officials as well as cabinet colleagues.

Mr Blair's spokesman would not say how many officers were involved in the interview, although it is understood that Acting Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who is heading the inquiry, was not among them.

Witness interviews are not usually tape recorded and those being questioned are free to leave at any time. Mr Blair's official spokesman was only informed after the interview had been completed and within 20 minutes hastily convened a briefing of political journalists in the Commons.

During the course of yesterday's questioning, Mr Blair was said to have defended his actions in awarding the peerages in terms he has used in public before. The four nominations under question are those offered to Barry Townsley, Chai Patel, Sir David Garrard and Sir Gulam Noon. Collectively they lent Labour £4.25m ahead of the 2005 election.

Mr Blair's spokesman said: "The prime minister explained why he nominated each of the individuals and he did so as party leader in respect of the peerages reserved for party supporters as other party leaders do. The honours were not, therefore, for public service but expressly party peerages given for party service. In these circumstances, the fact that they had supported the party financially could not conceivably be a barrier to their nomination."

Mr Blair apparently robustly pointed out that party donors are in themselves carrying out a public service.

But the Lords Appointments Commission blocked the nominations only after learning the quartet had lent money to the party. It is alleged that Lord Levy advised the four to give loans, and even suggested they change their nomination forms to remove any reference to a financial connection. Commercial loans do not have to be disclosed in public, either to the government regulator, the Electoral Commission, or to the Lords Appointments Commission.

If the police are to place charges against Lord Levy, they would have to have secured witness statements from some of the nominees saying that Lord Levy suggested their cash would lead to a peerage. Lord Levy was contacted by Labour shortly before the last election to undertake a last-minute fundraising spree, as it became clear the Conservatives were going to greatly outspend Labour.

Although it is conceivable the police will re-interview Mr Blair, and this time under caution, the guidance suggested this is not the case.

The prime minister's spokesman said: "I have no reason to believe that there will be any other interviews. That's a matter for the police. I don't talk to the police." Asked whether Mr Blair had got the impression he faced another interview, he replied: "I say that with good reason."

However, Angus MacNeil, the Scottish National party MP whose complaint triggered the investigation, said that Mr Blair could face further questioning.

"This revelation will be shaking the very foundations of Westminster," he said. "We know that a number of Downing Street officials have been questioned many times by the police and this could be only the first of such a series of questions for the prime minister, also."

The Metropolitan police wants to put a file to the Crown Prosecution Service's lawyer in the new year. Detectives have already sent material including potentially incriminating emails and other documents from those involved in the money-raising process for Labour to the CPS for their advice. Prosecutors have been giving their assessments of the strength of evidence and on investigative avenues detectives may want to follow.

Comment: With friends like Levy, Blair doesn't need enemies. Lay down with dogs, get up with fleas. From Wikipedia:

Michael Abraham Levy, Baron Levy (born 11 July 1944) is a Labour member of the British House of Lords and the major fundraiser for the UK Labour Party party and several Jewish and Israeli charities. A long-standing friend of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, Lord Levy has acted as his special envoy to the Middle East since 2002. Levy was arrested and questioned in connection with the "Cash for Peerages" inquiry by the Metropolitan Police on 12 July 2006. After six hours of questioning he was released on police bail. On 20 September 2006 he was questioned a second time, and again released on bail.

Born in Stoke Newington, North London, to devout Jewish immigrant parents of modest means, Levy was educated at Grocers, later known as Hackney Downs Grammar School, where he became head boy. Initially working as an accountant, he made his fortune during the 1960s and 1970s as an impresario, managing singers such as Alvin Stardust and Chris Rea. He founded Magnet Records, the home of the popular 1970s/80s ska band Bad Manners. Levy sold Magnet Records to Warner Brothers in 1988 for £10m. Guitarist Chris Rea, said of Levy, "He is extremely tough, one of the hardest bastards I have ever met, but I would leave my children with him rather than anyone else." The music producer Pete Waterman described him as "the greatest salesman I have ever met. He would be able to sell sand to the Arabs."

Levy first met Tony Blair at a dinner party in 1994, hosted by Israeli diplomat Gideon Meir,[4] the two having a common friend in Eldred Tabachnik, a senior barrister (now a QC and a former president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews) at 11 King's Bench Walk, the chambers founded by Derry Irvine where Blair had trained in the early 1980s.[5] They soon became close friends and tennis partners. Levy ran the Labour Leader's Office Fund to finance Blair's campaign before the 1997 General Election and received substantial contributions from such figures as Alex Bernstein and Robert Gavron, both of whom were ennobled by Blair after he came to power. Levy, himself, was created a life peer in 1997 as Baron Levy, of Mill Hill in the London Borough of Barnet. Since making his maiden speech on 3 December 1997, Levy has not spoken in a debate at the House of Lords.

He is a supporter of Labour Friends of Israel and has been described by The Jerusalem Post as "undoubtedly the notional leader of British Jewry". He is also a member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the leadership of UK Jewish community. Levy has close ties with the Israeli Labour Party and maintains a home in Tel Aviv. His son, Daniel Levy, is active in Israeli political life, and has served as an assistant to the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and to Knesset member Yossi Beilin. Levy has praised Blair for his "solid and committed support of the State of Israel" and has been described as "a leading international Zionist".


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'National interest' halts arms corruption inquiry

David Leigh and Rob Evans
The Guardian
Friday December 15, 2006

A major criminal investigation into alleged corruption by the arms company BAE Systems and its executives was stopped in its tracks yesterday when the prime minister claimed it would endanger Britain's security if the inquiry was allowed to continue.

The remarkable intervention was announced by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, who took the decision to end the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into alleged bribes paid by the company to Saudi officials, after consulting cabinet colleagues.
In recent weeks, BAE and the Saudi embassy had frantically lobbied the government for the long-running investigation to be discontinued, with the company insisting it was poised to lose another lucrative Saudi contract if it was allowed to go on. This came at a time when the SFO appeared to have made a significant breakthrough, with investigators on the brink of accessing key Swiss bank accounts.

However, Lord Goldsmith consulted the prime minister, the defence secretary, foreign secretary, and the intelligence services, and they decided that "the wider public interest" "outweighed the need to maintain the rule of law". Mr Blair said it would be bad for Britain's security if the SFO was allowed to go ahead, according to the statement made in the Lords by Lord Goldsmith. The statement did not elaborate on the nature of the threat.

BAE claimed that it was about to lose out on a third phase of the Al-Yamamah deal, in which the Saudis would buy 72 Typhoon aircraft in a deal worth £6bn. The Saudis had also hinted that they would do a deal with the French instead if the inquiry pushed ahead. A 10-day ultimatum was reportedly issued by the Saudis earlier this month.

A PR campaign headed by Lord Bell saw MPs from all parties urging the dropping of the investigation, citing fears that jobs would be lost in their constituencies. But in its statements last night the government said commercial considerations had played no part in the decision.

The decision was condemned last night as naked political interference in a criminal case. Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat chief of staff, said the government had succumbed to Saudi pressure. "I think it's because the inquiry has been making substantial progress that it's been brought to an end," he said.

The SFO's director, Robert Wardle, issued a terse statement saying he had dropped the Saudi end of the investigation "following representations that have been made both to the attorney general and the director of the SFO concerning the need to safeguard national and international security".

Shares had begun to rise in BAE and major suppliers such as Rolls-Royce in the last two days, as rumours reached the City that a deal had been done to appease the Saudis. Lord Goldsmith's statement was unusual in that it did not refer to the claimed threats to British jobs, but instead concentrated on "national security".

The destruction of its inquiry will be a severe blow to the SFO which has spent more than £2m on what was its most extensive current investigation, and taken hundreds of pages of statements from witnesses. One witness who gave evidence to the SFO, Peter Gardiner, a director of a travel agent used to make alleged slush fund payments, said last night: "It's an interesting signal that this gives to industry and the world I am thinking of the hundreds of hours I have wasted and all the personal problems this has caused me."

BAE, in a statement, said it welcomed the dropping of the inquiry. But the company and its executives may not yet be out of the woods. The attorney general has allowed investigations to continue into BAE activities in Romania, Chile, the Czech Republic, South Africa and Tanzania, which legal sources say are making strong progress.

The UK made overseas bribery illegal in 2002, under US pressure. Labour ministers subsequently claimed they were determined to stamp out corruption, but in practice no prosecutions have taken place under the new law.

Clare Short, Mr Blair's former cabinet colleague, said: "This government is even more soiled than we thought it was. It means that BAE is above the law."

She added: "The message it sends to corrupt businessmen is carry on - the government will support you."

Liberal Democrat Lord Goodhart said: "If, as appears to be the case, this further investigation is being stopped because of potential damage to security, intelligence and diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, doesn't that amount to blackmail by Saudi Arabia, to prevent this matter going forward?"

Attorney general's statement

"It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest. No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.

The prime minister and the foreign and defence secretaries have expressed the clear view that continuation of the investigation would cause serious damage to UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation, which is likely to have seriously negative consequences for the UK public interest in terms of both national security and our highest priority foreign policy objectives in the Middle East."



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Lord Michael Levy - Friend of Tony Blair

RedStar Research

"Although a multi-millionaire, he only paid £5,000 in tax in 1998-9 and less than £10,000 in 1997-8 as he said he wasn't working. He runs a private company called Wireart, an investment company which was based in an oversea tax haven until 1997. Wireart paid him £160,000 (plus £50,000 expenses) for work as a management consultant in 1998-9 at the time he wasn't working. Since 1992 he has been Chairman of Jewish Care, one of the UK's biggest charities (he was asked to join by the Tory minister Lord Young), raising as much as £60 million."
Lord Levy is one of the most important fundraisers for the Labour Party and Tony Blair's unofficial envoy to the Middle East. He met Blair at a dinner party in 1994 held by Gideon Meir, a senior Israeli diplomat, and became his tennis partner. Levy was in charge of donations to the 'private trust' which funded Tony Blair's office before the 1997 election (which reached £7 million), and is now the chief fundraiser for the 'high value' donors account at the Labour Party, along with his deputy Amanda Delew (who worked with him at Jewish Care). He is reported to have raised £12 million for the 'high value' fund before the 1997 election, becoming known as 'Mr Cashpoint'. Straight after the election he was given a peerage. He used to work with Dr Henry Drucker, whose company Oxford Philanthropic was brought in by the Labour Party to advise on gaining large corporate donations, but they fell out over Drucker's description of Labour's 'blind trust' funds as 'evil' (the trusts have since all been closed down). At one meeting with Levy in his Totteridge mansion, Levy apologised to Drucker for not offering him a cup of coffee, but explained 'You'll have to do without as none of the servants are about and I don't know how to work the machine myself.'

He set up Magnet Records in 1972 with help from Maurice Oberstein, Head of CBS Records, and made millions from artists like Alvin Stardust, Chris Rea, Dollar, Darts and Bad Manners, at one point was selling 8% of all records in the UK. Some former employees of Magnet have complained that he was a tyrant who shouted at staff and threw ashtrays around. He sold Magnet to Warner Brothers in 1988 for £10 million and later set up another record company called M&G (named after himself and his wife Gilda), where he paid himself a salary of £308,657. He sold M&G in 1997.

Although a multi-millionaire, he only paid £5,000 in tax in 1998-9 and less than £10,000 in 1997-8 as he said he wasn't working. He runs a private company called Wireart, an investment company which was based in an oversea tax haven until 1997. Wireart paid him £160,000 (plus £50,000 expenses) for work as a management consultant in 1998-9 at the time he wasn't working. Since 1992 he has been Chairman of Jewish Care, one of the UK's biggest charities (he was asked to join by the Tory minister Lord Young), raising as much as £60 million.

hase House, Levy's home in Totteridge (north London), has 5 large bedrooms, 3 sitting rooms, tennis court, swimming pool, a games room, palm trees, a large garage for his chauffeur-driven Jaguar and Bentley and a seperate annexe for his servants. He spent £1.3 million refurbishing the house after he bought it in 1997 for £1.3 (his previous house was sold for £3.4 million). The rooms are lined with marble, granite and limestone.

He also owns a villa in Herzliya Pituah, an exclusive suburb of Tel Aviv in Israel, which he bought after selling another villa nearby for £4 million. He has acted as a fundraiser for Ehud Barak, the Israeli Prime Minister, and maintains a close relationship with him. His son Daniel worked for the Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, to whom Levy contributed campaign funds. Both his children live in Israel.

His role as unofficial envoy for the Middle East took him to 8 different countries in 1999, staying in British Embassies, including Syria, Jordan, Oman, Qatar, Israel, Egypt and Lebanon (where he was accused by the Lebanese Government of bringing them the Israeli position and the British Ambassador had to issue a statement to try and calm the situation down). He was also provided with cars, drivers and staff support. The Embassy in Amman, Jordan, arranged a lunch for him to meet Jordanian politicians.



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Flashback: Lord Levy: Labour's fundraiser - Blair's Buddy

BBC
17 March 06

The Commons public administration committee is to ask chief Labour fundraiser Lord Levy to answer questions on his role in arranging unpublicised loans of millions of pounds from businessmen nominated for peerages.

Born in rundown Hackney, east London, to immigrant parents of modest means, Lord Levy now lives in a mansion in Totteridge, north London, complete with swimming pool and tennis courts.

But Michael Abraham Levy, now 61, has never forgotten his working-class Jewish roots or lifelong commitment to the Labour Party.
Educated at Fleetwood primary school, where he was head boy, and Hackney Downs grammar school, he went on to become an accountant.

But he made his money as an impresario in the 1960s and 1970s, managing singers including Alvin Stardust and Chris Rea, and as the founder of Magnet Records who gave the public Bad Manners.

Having sold the company to Warner Bros for £10m, he met Tony Blair at an Israeli diplomatic dinner in 1994, the year he became Labour leader.

The two soon became tennis partners, and Mr Blair made him a life peer - Baron Levy of Mill Hill - after Labour's landslide election victory in 1997.

Lord Levy has told David Osler, the author of Labour Party plc: New Labour as a Party of Business, he and Mr Blair, are "like brothers".

In 2000, the prime minister made Lord Levy his personal envoy to the Middle East, with an office inside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The same year, the multi-millionaire came under fire when it was revealed he had only paid £5,000 in tax during the financial year 1998-99 - equivalent to that paid on a salary of £21,000.

Lord Levy told BBC News: "Over the years I have paid many millions of tax. And, if you average it, each year it comes to many hundreds of thousands of pounds.

'Lord Cashpoint'

"In that particular year, I was giving my time to the Labour Party and the voluntary sector, and I just lived off of capital."

Lord Levy also hit the headlines as the Labour Party's chief fundraiser - or, as the press dubbed him, "Lord Cashpoint".

Many of those he tapped for money were not Labour supporters and they were often highly controversial.

It was Lord Levy who secured the £1m donation to Labour from Formula One millionaire Bernie Ecclestone.

The money was repaid by the party to avoid accusations that it had been used to "buy" policies.

Dr Henry Drucker, whose company Oxford Philanthropic was brought in by the Labour Party to advise on gaining large corporate donations, told the Guardian about a meeting at Lord Levy's mansion.

Apologising for not offering him a cup of coffee, Lord Levy had said: "I'm afraid you'll have to do without as none of the servants are about, and I don't know how to work the machine myself," Dr Drucker told the Guardian.

But potential donors received more lavish hospitality.

Mr Osler told BBC News how Lord Levy used "charm and schmooze" to secure donations.

"Lord Levy is famously a very good host. He will invite people round for dinner.

"He will invite people to his home and maybe invite them to play tennis on his private tennis court and say, 'Well, Tony might just turn up'.

"Tony does turn up, they play a round of tennis, Tony leaves.

"Twenty minutes later, he will be sweet-talking them into making a donation, and many people are only too happy to cough up."

Not all visitors to his home are as amenable, though. In 2003, Lord Levy was hit over the head with a shovel and handcuffed by burglars who escaped with cash and jewellery.

Jewish charities

Currently president of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, Lord Levy has said he will stop fundraising for Labour when Tony Blair goes.

He now thinks political parties should be funded by the state.

The peer has also worked for Jewish charities, consolidating several into Jewish Care.

He and his wife Gilda have a son, Daniel, who used to work for former Israeli justice minister Yossi Beilin, and a daughter.



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Killing People to Show Killing People is Bad


Slow death prompts renewed calls to end US executions

Richard Luscombe, Miami
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian

Campaigners in the US have renewed calls for the abolition of the death penalty after a convicted murderer took more than half-an-hour to die and needed a second dose of lethal chemicals.

Witnesses reported that Angel Nieves Diaz, who killed the manager of a Miami nightclub in a robbery 27 years ago, was grimacing with pain and still moving more than 20 minutes after the first injections at the Florida state prison in Starke.
"They executed him twice," said Mark Elliot, director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. "He was still conscious when they put in the chemicals that burn the internal organs. It's exactly like being burned at the stake from the inside."

Diaz, 55, had fought a lengthy legal battle with the state, arguing that death by lethal injection constituted a cruel and unusual punishment.

His final appeal to the US supreme court was rejected an hour before his execution.

His death comes at a time of national debate about the use of injections. A similar case is before the courts in California, where convicted murderer Michael Morales is arguing the method is inhumane. The three-drug cocktail of sodium thiopental, an anaesthetic; pancuronium bromide, which paralyses the body; and potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest, is used in 37 US states.

Gretl Plessinger, a spokeswoman for Florida's Department of Corrections, said that Diaz was snoring soon after the first injection, did not regain consciousness and felt no pain throughout. She said a second dose was given because he had liver disease, which slowed his metabolism, but acknowledged that he had taken an unusually long time to die.

The last two executions at Starke were completed within 15 minutes. A statement from Florida governor Jeb Bush's office said: "A pre-existing medical condition of the inmate was the reason tonight's procedure took longer than recent procedures carried out this year."

Mr Elliot said Diaz's death would increase the scrutiny of lethal injections. "His execution, and the way it was mishandled, could lead to a change in the way executions are carried out nationwide," he said.

"If you hang somebody and the rope breaks and you hang them again, you've succeeded in executing them, but you've still botched the original execution."

The execution was the 21st of Mr Bush's eight-year tenure as Florida governor and the last before he leaves office on January 2. His brother George Bush, the US president, oversaw 152 executions in his six years as governor of Texas.

Florida lawmakers voted to switch to lethal injection in 2000 after a series of bungled executions using the electric chair. In the most notorious incident, in 1997, flames shot from the head of a prisoner during an execution.



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Executions in the United States

Death Penalty Information Center

Executions in 2006

Upcoming Executions

Historical Executions: The Espy File - Executions in the United States, 1608-1987, viewable in PDF format

Methods of Execution - Description of each method, with state procedures and numbers of executions by method

Botched Executions - Incidences of Serious Problems in the Actual Execution of Inmates since 1976




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BEFORE THE NEEDLES - Hanging, Electric Chair, Gas Chamber, Firing Squad and other historic methods of Capital Punishment

Rob Gallagher

THE HISTORY OF EXECUTIONS IN AMERICA BEFORE LETHAL INJECTION
(Plus a Few Thousand Lynchings)

Prior to the execution of Gary Gilmore (sitting before the firing squad) saying "Let's do it.", thousands of people had been legally executed in the United States. Click HERE to get all the details.




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US campaigners rally after botched chemical execution

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
15 December 2006

Anti-death penalty activists have seized on an execution in Florida where a prisoner took more than half an hour to die after requiring a second dose of lethal chemicals.

Witnesses said that Angel Nieves Diaz, 55, a Puerto Rican convicted of murdering a bar manager in Miami in 1979, appeared to grimace before he died. Officials said it took 34 minutes for him to be declared dead - and then only after a second dose of three chemicals.

A spokeswoman for the Florida department of corrections,said that the second dose had been required because Diaz suffered from a liver condition which altered the action of the chemicals. She told reporters: "It was not unanticipated. The metabolism of the drugs to the liver is slowed."
But Mark Elliot of the group Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said the execution showed that the prisoner had been conscious after the administration of a supposedly lethal dose.

"Witnesses said he was moving and trying to speak," he said. "This shows that Florida has no business being in the execution business. Our system is broken from top to bottom."

In a statement, Florida governor Jeb Bush said the state had followed correct procedures. He added: "A pre-existing medical condition of the inmate was the reason the procedure took longer than recent procedures carried out this year."

Diaz's cousin told Associated Press that his family had not known that he suffered from liver disease.

In his final appeal the US Supreme Court Diaz challenged the execution chemicals saying they constituted a "cruel and unusual punishment". His appeal was rejected an hour before the execution began.

Moments before his execution, Diaz again denied the murder. There were no eyewitnesses but Diaz's girlfriend, had told police he had been involved in the killing.

The governor of Diaz's native Puerto Rico, which abolished capital punishment in 1929, had sought clemency for him.



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French murder verdict upheld - 82 years on - The System is Rotten Everywhere

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian

It was one of the biggest French murder mysteries of the past 100 years: a killing with no corpse and a convicted murderer who always said he was innocent.

Guillaume Seznec, a Breton sawmill owner, was sentenced to a life of hard labour in a penal colony in French Guiana in 1924 for murdering a dignitary and friend whose body was never found.

He insisted he was innocent and over decades new theories have emerged of a curious saga of illegal rackets in American Cadillacs and a possible police set-up by a French officer who later joined the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation. The case inspired numerous books, while Seznec's family fought to force the courts to acknowledge a miscarriage of justice.
But yesterday, amid intense interest from the media, lawyers and historians, the court of revision refused to posthumously clear Seznec's name. Last year the state prosecutor concluded that fresh evidence cast doubt on the guilty verdict. But judges insisted there were no new facts leading them to doubt Seznec's conviction.

"It is shameful what you are doing!" shouted Seznec's grandson, Denis, 59, from the gallery, accusing the courts of wasting a chance to prove the justice system was able to admit its mistakes.

The case comes as the legal system is reeling from the failures of a case in Outreau in northern France where several innocent people were jailed for years for paedophile offences, with some having their children taken into care. Some of those finally acquitted in that case were present in court with the Seznec family yesterday.

In May 1923 Seznec left Brittany for a trip to Paris with a friend, Pierre Quemeneur, a woodcutter and local official. They were to negotiate with Boudjema Gherdi the sale of 100 Cadillac cars, left by US troops after the first world war. But their car broke down several times and Quemeneur decided to take the train alone. He never arrived in Paris and his body was never found. The following month his suitcase was found at Le Havre with a note in which Quemeneur promised to sell his land to Seznec. Seznec's family argue the document was faked.

At Seznec's trial lawyers claimed that Gherdi did not exist, and that Seznec had planned Quemeneur's murder to take over his land. But Gherdi was later proved to exist. He was a car trader and an informer for a police officer on the case, inspector Pierre Bonny.

The Seznec family questioned whether the police had framed Seznec to cover up a racket in American cars. In 1993 an 85-year-old former shopkeeper retracted statements implicating Seznec, saying she had been coerced by the police.

Bonny joined the French Gestapo during the occupation and was shot by firing squad in January 1945. On the eve of his execution, his son Jacques said he confessed to having sent an innocent man to a penal colony.



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People in the News!!!


Ban sworn in as U.N. secretary

by Maggie Farley
Los Angeles Times
Dec 15 06

UNITED NATIONS - South Korea's former foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, took the oath of office Thursday morning to become the United Nations' eighth secretary-general.

Ban, 62, pledged that after he officially takes up his post Jan. 1, he would try to restore trust in the institution tainted by scandal and management lapses and to bridge divisions between rich and poor nations.

"I look forward with a mixture of awe and enthusiasm to taking up my duties as secretary-general of the United Nations," he said after being sworn in.
Before Ban took his oath in the vaulted General Assembly hall, representatives from 192 countries gave a thundering ovation to outgoing Secretary-General Kofi Annan, 68, who will step down after 10 years in office.

Although Annan brought international spotlight to the issues of human rights and development, saying they deserve as much attention as matters of war and peace, his tenure also was blemished by findings of corruption and mismanagement in the $64-billion Iraq oil-for-food scandal.

Annan's grand vision of reforming the institution was scuttled by developing countries, which viewed the changes as a power grab by U.N. bureaucrats and by the United States, which proposed a more stringent plan.

While praising Annan's "high ideals, noble aspirations and bold initiatives," Ban hinted at a shift from his predecessor's approach.

"The time has come for a new day in relations between the secretariat and member states," he said. "The dark night of distrust and disrespect has lasted far too long."

He also said he would strive to "lead by example" to set high ethical standards at the world body, a statement also seen by diplomats as a subtle swipe at Annan and the scandals that have been exposed at U.N. agencies under his watch.

Ban, whose career as a South Korean diplomat kept him largely out of the spotlight, has said that his modest and unassuming demeanor should not be mistaken for weakness or indecision.

He told the press that he would not evade questions, as he was reputed to do as foreign minister.

"Your colleagues in Korea may have dubbed me the 'slippery eel' because I was too charming for them to be able to catch me," he said. "But I promise today that I can be a pretty straight shooter when I need to."

Addressing concerns that he would be more of an administrator than a leader, Ban said that he was willing to personally engage to find solutions to the standoffs involving Darfur, Iran and North Korea.

"The suffering of the people of Darfur is simply unacceptable," he told reporters. He said he would push leaders in Sudan to allow U.N. peacekeepers to protect the people of Darfur if the government could not halt the violence.

He also said he would meet with Iranian leaders "wherever and when" to discuss their denial of the Holocaust, an attitude he called "not acceptable." He told a news conference that among the many crises in the world, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians was at the core of tensions in the Middle East and "the most serious issue with which we must deal." He said he planned to revitalize the "road map" peace initiative and to speak soon with leaders in the region.

But Ban left most of his concrete plans and policies vague, saying he would like to resolve issues in the Middle East, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq in each case "in a peaceful way through dialogue."

The new secretary-general also made it clear that despite all his calls for dialogue, he won't be doing it in French.

French is the second official working language of the United Nations, and Ban's resume says that he speaks it - an unstated requirement for his new post. French President Jacques Chirac interviewed Ban to make sure he could pass muster as a Francophone.

But when a Canadian reporter asked Ban in French why it should be one of the U.N.'s working languages, he didn't understand.

"If you speak 'lentement en francais' [slowly in French] I will do my best," he said.

In the end, he relied on an interpreter and answered the question in English, earning him a new nickname from the press corps: "Franco-phony."



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An Atheist Bullies the Faithful- And he's mostly right

By Lakshmi Chaudhry
In These Times
December 15, 2006

Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins reveals his fundamentalist approach to atheisim in his new documentary, The Root of All Evil.
Religion f**king blows!" declares comedian Roseanne Barr in her latest HBO special. Her pronouncement, both in its declarative certainty and self-congratulatory defiance, could easily serve as the succinct moral of Richard Dawkins' documentary, The Root of All Evil.

The big-screen version of a two-part British television series follows the noted biologist as he embarks on a global road-trip to the veritable bastions of theological conviction -- the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a Christian conservative stronghold in Colorado Springs, a Hassidic community in the heart of London -- bullying, berating and heckling the devoutly faithful he encounters along his way.

Confronting cancer patients who have traveled to Lourdes in hopes of a cure, Dawkins tells the viewer in the first scene, "It may seem tough to question the beliefs of these poor, desperate people's faith." By the end of the documentary, Dawkins' bravado is not in doubt. When talking to Ted Haggard, a New Life Church pastor (more recently infamous for his predilection for crystal meth and gay prostitutes), after witnessing one of his sermons, Dawkins tells him, "I was almost reminded of the Nuremberg rallies ... Dr. Goebbels would have been proud." To a hapless guide at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, he taunts, "Do you really believe that Jesus' body lay here?" And then there's his remark -- "I'm really worried for the well-being of your children" -- to a Hassidic school teacher, Rabbi Herschel Gluck, whom Dawkins accuses of brainwashing innocent kids.

As he storms his way around the world in the state of high dudgeon, Dawkins' attitude can be best described as apocalyptic outrage. The effect is in turns bewildering, embarrassing, grating and even unintentionally comic, as we watch the distinguished Oxford University Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science channel his inner Borat. When the astonished rabbi exclaims, "You are a fundamentalist believer," even a sympathetic, true-blue San Francisco audience cannot help but chuckle in assent.

As his rabbinical nemesis rightly suspects, Dawkins' fondness for sweeping generalizations reflects his own deep-seated fundamentalism, a virulent form of atheism that mirrors the polarized worldview of the religious extremists it claims to oppose. "They condemn not just belief in God, but respect for belief in God. Religion is not just wrong; it's evil," writes Gary Wolf in his Wired Magazine cover story, "The New Atheism," whose leading exponents include -- in addition to Dawkins -- Daniel Dennett, a philosophy professor at Yale, punk rocker Greg Graffin and Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. These are the self-styled "Brights," the moniker of choice for Dawkins to describe "a person whose worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements."

The "bright" worldview is also remarkably free of complexity. Dawkins' view of faith can be summed up thus: Religion is dangerous because it requires that we suspend our powers of reason to place our faith in the shared delusion that is God. This, he asserts, is the first step on that "slippery slope" to hatred and violence.

When we cede our "critical faculties" to believe in the idea of a higher power, Dawkins claims, we are immediately invested in a panoply of increasingly ludicrous propositions: that the Virgin Mary ascended directly to heaven, Moses parted the seas, God created the world in seven days, or beautiful virgins await good Muslims in heaven. Why not, he asks, believe in fairies or hobgoblins?

Faith, in his universe, is interchangeable with superstition, eccentricity, madness, and, at its most benign, infantilism. Religious conviction is a marker of human backwardness, both in a historical and psychological sense. According to Dawkins, human beings invented religion as a "crutch" for ignorance. Without science to help us understand the world around us, we turned to gods/faith/superstition to cope with our sense of helplessness. Today, religion remains a source of succor to those unable to outgrow their childish desire to see the world in terms of "black and white, as a battle between good and evil" -- unlike atheists who are "responsible adults and accept that life is complex."

"We're brought from cradle to believe that there is something good about faith," says Dawkins, as he compares this belief to "a virus that infects the young, for generation after generation." Fortunate are the "responsible adults" who grow up to shake off these beliefs, unlike the rest of humanity who remain trapped in their infantile desire to be taken care of by an all-powerful deity.

Unlike fairytales, however, our religious beliefs are not harmless, says Dawkins, they instead lay the foundation for the murder and mayhem inevitably wreaked by true believers. His evidence: the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Crusades, the 9/11 attacks, and less spectacular crimes against humanity like suicide bombers, anti-abortion killers, and so on.

This broad-stroked caricature of faith is delivered with a breathtaking disregard for historical context, in which social, political or economic conditions are simply ignored or discounted. "[Dawkins] has a simple-as-that, plain-as-day approach to the grandest questions, unencumbered by doubt, consistency, or countervailing information," writes Marilynne Robinson in the November Harpers', while reviewing his bestselling book, The God Delusion. And on screen he is no different. Of course, there are sound political causes for the Palestinian conflict, Dawkins hurriedly acknowledges -- only to assert in the same breath that the real culprit is religion, which teaches its adherents to think, "I'm right and you're wrong."

Not unlike the religious simpletons he claims to disdain, Dawkins sees the world in terms of a battle of Good vs. Evil, cloaked here as Science vs. Religion. Where Religion is corrupt, tyrannical and false, Science offers intellectual integrity, freedom and truth. As Robinson notes, Dawkins fails to acknowledge Science's less admirable achievements, be they eugenics, Hiroshima, or the more mundane travesties committed by unethical doctors or fat-cat researchers in service of corporate funding.

"Dawkins implicitly defines science as a clear-eyed quest for truth, chaste as an algorithm, while religion is atavistic, mad, and mired in crime," Robinson writes.

In this version of atheist theology, Science attains the same status as Dawkins' loathed "alpha male in sky," whose laws rule all things known and unknown. If we do not quite understand how the universe was created or the human brain works -- or the competing, contradictory claims about the virtues of, say, table salt -- all we need to do is wait and keep faith in the scientific method, which will reveal all in good time. The ways of Science are no less sacred or mysterious than that of God.

Like his fellow fundamentalists, Dawkins has no use for moderation or its practitioners. The people of faith featured in his documentary are strict, true believers, who adhere to the most rigid interpretations of their respective faiths. There are no Muslim doctors, church-going geneticists or Catholics who support abortion rights. Anyone who believes in evolution and God is just as deluded or in denial, and, as he tells Wired, "really on the side of the fundamentalists."

Nothing less than a complete renunciation of all things spiritual will suffice. "As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers," he writes in The God Delusion, in an eerie echo of President Bush's post-9/11 point of view: "You're either with us or against us."

It would be silly to argue that the new atheists' crusade is as dangerous as the so-called war on terror, but that crusade does give aid and comfort to fundamentalists everywhere by affirming their view of faith: one, science and religion are mutually opposed and exclusive worldviews; two, religion is immutable and outside history; and therefore, three, the Bible (or the Quran, for that matter) must be taken literally, and is not open to interpretation. For both camps, ignoring one law or moderating a single injunction is the first step toward rejecting the faith in its entirety.

This great war of ontologies, seductive though it may be in our beleaguered times, becomes immediately absurd if we remind ourselves of one simple fact: Science and Religion are historical in the richest sense of the word. They both inform and reflect our changing ideas about ourselves and the world around us. From the practice of throwing a woman on her husband's funeral pyre in India to determining intelligence by the shape of person's skull in Europe -- both of which seem hateful today -- religious and scientific beliefs ebb, rise and transmute themselves over time. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the vast bulk of what we call History, which the Brights seem just as willing to rewrite as their theological adversaries.

As innately human endeavors, religion and science are therefore as unreasonable, noble, immoral, kind, tyrannical, odious, compassionate -- in other words, irredeemably human -- as the people who literally embody them. Yes, the laws of nature and those of God might still exist without human beings, but there would be no one to name or know them as such, or act on that knowledge. Taken together, they express our need to both submit and to control, to know and to believe, to be in the visible world and to transcend it.

That the vast majority of us would find it difficult to choose between the two should be hardly surprising. The antidote to fanaticism is not a new puritanism of reason, but the contradictory, ambiguous, compromised reality of ordinary human experience.

Comment: While we do not agree with Dawkins that man is the product of accidental mechanicalness of the universe, he certainly has a point about religion as a whole and at large. Just a cursory review of history will show that the three Monotheistic religions are, indeed, the Root of All Evil. Of course, at the root of these religions is a particular mindset: that of the psychopath vs normal human beings with conscience. Unfortunately, when normal human beings with conscience get taken in by psychopathic religion, the results are often disastrous for millions.

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Jon Tester: A New Kind of Populist

By Joshua Frank
AlterNet
December 15, 2006

Newly elected Montana Senator Jon Tester is an NRA-approved Democrat who wants to redeploy troops from Iraq and repeal the PATRIOT Act. Is Washington ready for him?
He's not exactly the type of Democrat you'd be likely to see backslapping New York City fat cats on their way into an elaborate fund raiser for Hillary Clinton. In fact, Jon Tester, the senator-elect from Montana, isn't your typical Democrat. He's almost not a Democrat at all, or at least not the kind we're used to seeing run around Washington these days. In fact Tester ran his campaign against Senator Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) on just that platform. He was tired of the scandals and dishonesty that engulf our national politics and professed that the polluted Beltway could use a little Montana house cleanin'. Voters agreed, and Burns, who had ties to the now incarcerated power broker Jack Abramoff, was defeated in one of the tightest races in state history.

A State Senator and organic farmer by trade, Jon operates his family's homestead just outside Big Sandy in northern Montana where the winter chills can chatter your teeth as early as mid-September. When I say he's not really even a Democrat, that may be a bit of an understatement. Tester is essentially an NRA approved neo-populist with libertarian tendencies who wants to immediately redeploy troops from Iraq as well as repeal the PATRIOT Act. And although nobody would consider Tester an anti-globalization activist, his position on international trade is more in line with the protesters who shut down Seattle in 1999 than with the Democratic Leadership Council.

On a recent Meet the Press broadcast Tester even addressed the most evaded issue in national politics: Poverty. "There's no more middle class," he confessed to Tim Russert, "the working poor aren't even being addressed. Those are the people who brought us here [to Congress] and they need to be empowered. It's time to show them attention ... We have to use policy to help that situation."

In a debate last September, Sen. Conrad Burns attempted to paint Tester as weak on terror. "We cannot afford another 9/11," Burns chided. "I can tell you that right now, he [Tester] wants to weaken the PATRIOT Act." To which Tester countered, "Let me be clear. I don't want to weaken the PATRIOT Act. I want to get rid of it."

Tester built his campaign from the ground up, shunning support from nationally known Democrats like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, as he knew they'd rub Montanans the wrong way. Instead, the nearly 300 pound farmer who lost three fingers in a meat grinding accident as a child, drove around the state so he could chat face-to-face with his potential constituents.

Fortunately for Tester, he's used to bucking the system. His first foray with the Washington Consensus came in 1998 when he ran for the Montana legislature because he was outraged over the huge energy hikes that had resulted from the state's deregulation of the power industry. And he's been speaking out against policies that pit working folks against the corporate class ever since. That's why he supports renewable energies and a livable minimum wage.

Still, Tester isn't the perfect politician. While he may remain strong on many issues, he is a bit wishy-washy on a few social justice concerns, such as the death penalty and gay rights. Nevertheless, Tester's campaign and personal appeal may serve as a winning blueprint for left-leaning populists out here in the Interior West. Indeed Brian Schweitzer used the exact formula to become Governor of Montana two years ago.

We should keep an eye on the senator-to-be when he takes office next month. If Jon Tester shuns the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, and truly speaks for the people of Montana, he could have a profound effect on our national discourse. Not to mention the way business is done in Washington.



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Inquest hears astrophysicist may have been poisoned at the South Pole

ABC
14 Dec 06

New Zealand police believe an Australian astrophysicist who died mysteriously while working at the South Pole five years ago might have been deliberately poisoned.

A coroner's inquest has heard the investigations have been frustrated by a lack of cooperation from the US agency that operated the base.

Rodney David Marks died in May 2000 from methanol poisoning while working on a Smithsonian astrophysical project at the US base at the South Pole.

New Zealand police commenced an investigation into the case four years ago, but have been unable to get cooperation from the necessary US authorities.

Detective Senior Sergeant Grant Wormald told the coroner there was still no definitive evidence as to how the killer dose of methanol came to be in Dr Marks's body.

He thought it was most unlikely the 32-year-old had ingested it himself, opening up the possibility that someone had deliberately put it into his food or drink.

The coronial inquest has been adjourned.




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Thoughts on Gary McKinnon - The Computer Hacker and His Likely Fate

Nick Redfern
14 Dec 06

The news that British-based computer-hacker Gary McKinnon may be facing up to 70 years in a U.S. prison (or, worse still, in Guantanamo Bay) for hacking 97 American military and NASA computers between 2001 and 2002 as he searched for secret information on UFOs, is unfortunate.

Earlier this year, Gary lost his first appeal against extradition to the States in a High Court Hearing. And what may be his last appeal to ensure he stays a free man (or at least that he doesn't serve a sentence in a U.S. jail) will be heard in February. And if that fails, his only hope is an appeal to the British Government's House of Lords.
Now, Gary surely realized that he wouldn't get away with hacking into the classified files of the U.S. Government. But, to me at least, the punishment doesn't fit the crime - at all. Okay, he did hack the U.S. military on a large scale, and in doing so he set himself on the path to inevitable arrest. And an arrest, in a case like this, is likely to result in some form of punishment.

But 70 years in Guantanamo for searching for UFO data? Come on! He's no terrorist. The unfortunate fact is that Gary - if convicted and sentenced - is likely to become a convenient scapegoat and pawn in a far bigger picture. Here will be the chance for official authorities to use Gary as an example, to throw him in jail for the rest of his natural life, and then send out the message to others: "Do something similar and this will be your fate, too. For the remainder of your entire life."

The main reason why I suspect that authorities are so keen to throw the book at Gary and make an example of him, is because a decade ago a similar tactic was used against a Welsh man named Matthew Bevan, who I interviewed extensively for a chapter in my recently published "On the Trail of the Saucer Spies" book. And the earlier tactic failed - which is why I suspect steps are being taken to ensure that Gary's case doesn't similarly collapse.

Matt's case eerily parallels that of Gary. He, too, hacked into U.S. military computer systems in search of data on crashed UFOs, and claimed to have found evidence of anti-gravity style research undertaken at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Like Gary, Matt was arrested. Similarly, Gary has been accused of damaging U.S. computer systems; and it was claimed that Matt had altered data contained on the systems he penetrated.

The big difference, however, is that Matt's case collapsed when U.S. Intelligence refused to provide to the British judge at Bow Street Magistrates Court (where the case was held) firm evidence of the damage that Matt had caused. With no evidence provided, the judge suggested that the prosecution should think long and hard about whether or not they wanted to proceed.

The prosecution did think long and hard and decided to drop the case; Matt was a free man.

It seems, however, that steps have been taken - by pushing to have him extradited and tried in the U.S. - to ensure that Gary doesn't walk away equally as free as Matt Bevan.

At the very least, Gary should be allowed to serve his time in a British prison. Indeed, it's certain that even if he walks free, Gary will not attempt something like this again - ever.

But, it's that convenient scapegoat/pawn angle that will, I suspect, be Gary's downfall.



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Major Manipulations


Israeli 9/11 Hijacker Believed Planes Were Being Landed By Remote Control

The Truth Seeker
14/12/2006

Several Israelis have confirmed that the hijacker's voice is Israeli. The official claim that it is the Egyptian Atta is false. Egyptians who learn English in high school like Atta would have a specific accent and a lively flow (with added vowels like Italian). Also, Atta cannot have a German/Yiddish "r" sound. The hijacker does.

The Hijacker of Flight 11 was an Israeli who believed that he was being landed safely. He was watching the frightened passengers and telling them to "please" calm down.
The Flight 11 hijacker was not Atta. Listen to this distinct Israeli voice:

"We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be okay. We are returning to the airport."

Seconds later: "Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet."

Ten minutes after that: "Nobody move please. We are going back to the airport. Dont try to make any stupid moves."

The hijacker speaks as if he is facing the passengers and threatening them with a weapon, telling them not to make stupid moves. Who is flying the plane?

This man thinks that several airplanes are being "landed." This is exactly what neocon Zakheim's remote control gadget (or here and here too) is supposed to do with hijacked airplanes: land them safely against the hijackers' will.

The Israeli hijacker may be counter-terror agent/passenger Daniel Lewin or another Israeli who snuck on board with a forged/stolen Arab ID.

He probably did not know that Israeli "art students" (signal & demolition experts) on the ground were steering the planes into buildings.

Several Israelis have confirmed that the hijacker's voice is Israeli. The official claim that it is the Egyptian Atta is false. Egyptians who learn English in high school like Atta would have a specific accent and a lively flow (with added vowels like Italian). Also, Atta cannot have a German/Yiddish "r" sound. The hijacker does.

The Hijacker of Flight 11 was an Israeli who believed that he was being landed safely. He was watching the frightened passengers and telling them to "please" calm down.

For the glory of Israel. If not Lewin, another Israeli, or an Israeli art student's voice from the ground.

After the landing, he would escape prosecution as usual. The Israeli security company ICTS would swear that he was not a hijacker.

The hijacker is an Israeli, I heard it so many times. I have no doubt about it. Not an Arab, an Israeli. Positive.
www.govsux.com/Israeli_9-11_Hijacker%20.htm



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The Holocaust Was Part of a Larger Genocide

Henry Makow
The Truth Seeker
December 14, 2006

The Tehran Conference expects us to believe the Nazis spared Jews at the same time as they exterminated millions of Slavs to create a "Lebensraum" ("living space") reaching to the Ural Mountains.

The Jewish Holocaust took place in the context of "Generalplan Ost" ("General Plan, East") the planned genocide of over 40 million Slavs, 75 % of the population of Nazi-occupied Poland, Ukraine and Russia. The Nazis intended to "Germanize" a few, and reduce the rest to agricultural serfs who would not even learn to read.
The Nazis killed 6 million Poles and 20 million Russians including 7 million civilians by a variety of means. Three million Russian POW died from bullets, deliberate typhus infection and starvation.

Another three million members of the Polish intelligentsia (professionals, clergy, teachers, union and political leaders) were also murdered. The term "genocide" was first coined to refer to Poles. 200,000 Polish children with Aryan characteristics were sent to Germany for "Germanization." By 1944, 4.5 million Poles and Russians worked as forced laborers in Germany.

Why would the Nazis exempt the 5-6 million Jews in this region? The Jews were even lower than Slavs on the "untermensch," (subhuman) scale. Holocaust minimizers are in denial about the true character of World War Two.

In my view, their real objection is to the political exploitation, i.e. the immunity from criticism and prestige the Jewish Holocaust gives Zionists. They would be wiser to address this issue directly rather than pretend the Jewish Holocaust didn't take place. They could neutralize its propaganda value another way: by drawing attention to the pattern of Nazi-elite Jewish collaboration (Judenrat, Jewish police, Zionist).

Holocaust minimizers discredit themselves and advance the NWO agenda, which is to provoke a gratuitous confrontation between Islam and the Zionist West.

*The Historical Context*

The treatment of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe depended on the changing Nazi relationship to host nations and allies. For example, the 5,000 Danish Jews were mostly unscathed because the Nazis wanted good relations with the Nordic Danes, and access to their farm produce. Unlike the Poles, the Danes were very protective of their Jews.

Nazi persecution was held in check as long as Hitler desired peace with England, or good relations with Russia. However the invasion of Russia June 22, 1941 signaled the beginning of a genocidal death struggle. In this war zone, Slavs and Jews who were unfit for slave labor, (i.e. 70-90% of the total) were marked for extermination.

In the Nazi mind, all Jews represented the Bolshevik peril. "German National Socialism and Jewish Bolshevism could not coexist," German soldiers were told. "This is a war of extinction." There is simply no way Jews could escape the fate of Russians in general. By July 1942 the first extermination camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were opened.

During the winter of 1940-41, there were food shortages and public grumbling in Germany. The Nazis realized the food was the key to public support. According to historians Deborah Dwork and Jan van Pelt, the Nazis calculated that "tens of millions of Russians would have to die in order to safeguard German meat rations. German food would not go east to the invading army; rather [2.5 million] German soldiers would be fed at the expense of the local population." ("/Holocaust: A History" /p 265.)

The Nazis "looked to the east to become the breadbasket of New Europe...a true granary [characterized by] low density of settlement...prosperous farms and attractive small towns." They envisaged "the deportation of 41 to 51 million people which included 80-85% of all Poles...It was tacitly understood that they would be killed." (266)

Goring remarked to Italian Foreign Minister Ciano in Dec. 1941: "This year between 20 and 30 million persons will die in Russia of hunger. Perhaps it is well that it should be so, for certain nations must be decimated." (190)

At the same time, the Allies subjected the German civilian population to a murderous bombing campaign. In July 1943 in a Hamburg fire storm, 50,000 people died in "Operation Gomorrah." 800,000 fled the city in the aftermath.

World War Two was a time of unparalleled savagery and ethnic cleansing. I will not attempt a complete inventory here. The Romanians used the cover of war to kill 250,000 Jews at their own initiative. The Croats murdered 350,000 Serbs. The German army lost 4 million men killed and 4 million wounded. The Soviet army lost over 9 million dead and 18 million wounded. Civilian losses were 1.8 million in Germany and 11.5 million in Russia. China lost 20 million civilians.

My point is that the real Holocaust was the war itself. The Jewish Holocaust was a part of it. The injustice is focusing on the Jewish experience, which is racism in the name of anti-racism. It implies that only Jewish lives matter. The challenge is to mourn the world war as a collective tragedy for humanity and to understand why it took place, before we have another.

The True Lesson of World War Two

The lesson of World War Two is that our politicians are pied pipers who can lead their gullible flock to annihilation. The media plays the entrancing tune. They all serve the cabal that owns the world's central banks and is working steadily to establish its world government dictatorship.

Jewish moneylenders based in Amsterdam funded the English Revolution (Cromwell 1640-1649) and later the ascendancy of William of Orange (1687). Thus they were able to establish the Bank of England in 1694, intermarry with the British aristocracy and begin their relentless drive to take over the world. They used British-American imperialism, Illuminism (Kabalism, Freemasonry), Socialism, Communism, Neo Conservatism, Feminism and Zionism as their vehicles. War is considered revolutionary because it advances their New World Order. That's why there is always war.(See my "Bankers Seek Totalitarian Control")

Hitler referred to this clique in 1939: "Once again I will be a prophet: should international Jewry of finance succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be Bolshevism of the earth, and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." (260)

In 1942 he reiterated: "This war will not turn out the way the Jews imagine it, that is with the extermination of the European Aryan peoples, but that the result of this war will be the destruction of Jewry." (284)

The Nazis saw the war in terms of saving the German race and western civilization from the Bolshevik New World Order, which we now face. This is why Holocaust minmizers imagine the Nazis were heroes and want to absolve them of guilt.

However the pagan and genocidal Nazis were hardly fit standard-bearers for civilization. In addition, the London-based Kabalist (Masonic) banking clique that Hitler condemned actually financed his war machine. It wanted to destroy Germany and the concepts of race and nationalism, provide a rationale for the establishment of Israel, brutalize and demoralize mankind and turn a profit, all at once.

As you can see, whether we are German, American or Russian; Zionists, Masons or whatever, ordinary people cannot afford to blithely join causes without considering their hidden agendas or consequences.

Apparently World War Three will begin as a confrontation between Israel and Iran. It may spread to a nuclear trade-off between the US, Russia and China. Obviously we need to stop arguing about how many Jews died 60 years ago and focus on preventing World War Three and the NWO.




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Fall in love only with Jews

Haaretz Editorial
15 Dec 06

In recent years the state has been trying to make the entry into Israel and naturalization of non-Jews more difficult. Six months ago, the justices of the Supreme Court criticized the amendment to the citizenship law barring any family unification involving Arab Israelis and Palestinians. The petition against the law was denied, but the justices argued that the right of citizens to be in Israel with the partner they choose should not be harmed, and that it is necessary to legislate a new and more flexible citizenship law. The Justice Ministry promised to do precisely that.
It turns out that the hope for a more humane law was exaggerated. Now, the Knesset is seeking to extend the temporary citizenship law by another two years, and it will also vote in a second and third reading on the law on illegal aliens, which will prevent the unification of families for those who resided in Israel illegally for as little as a month. In theory, this law is meant to counter illegal immigration; in practice it is another measure for blocking citizenship to those who are not Jews, even if they have family ties with an Israeli.

Arab citizens have to marry among themselves, or emigrate from Israel. Any possibility of marrying an Arab from a different state or the territories will be blocked by the citizenship law or the law on illegal aliens. However, the law on illegal aliens will also hurt families of Jewish new immigrants who want to bring with them non-Jewish family members. These include non-Jewish children from previous marriages, non-Jewish elderly parents of new immigrants and also foreign workers who fell in love with Israelis and would like to live with them in Israel. The strict immigration policy that Israel is adopting with these laws completely ignores the breadth of possibilities stemming from ties of love and human relationships. Henceforth, the government recommends, through legislation, it is advisable to fall in love only with Jews, or to give up living in Israel.

The citizenship law was originally created to open the door to non-Jews to also live in Israel. While the Law of Return is the law that instituted the Jewish state and provides for automatic naturalization for any Jew, the citizenship law is meant to solve different human problems. But since the demographic panic began, and the rumor was spread that the Palestinians are trying to manifest the right of return through marriage with Arab Israelis, and hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish new immigrants from Russia arrived, and the number of foreign worker rose, a coalition of those fearful for the future demography of Israel emerged, which led to superfluous legislative initiatives.

No doubt, Israel, too, like all Western states, must formulate a reasonable immigration policy. The difference between such a policy and the hunting down of parents, children and partners of Israelis, most of them living in Israel illegally because of the circumstances, is enormous. A country of immigrants like Israel cannot ignore the slew of human problems that emerge, and family members should not be asked to separate because some of them do not meet the entry requirements. Preventing the unification of families of Arab Israelis with their partners is discrimination of the worst kind. It has nothing to do with immigration, but with the right of every citizen to live in his/her country with his/her partner and children.



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TWA Flight 800 - 'Zoom climb' scenario falling apart

Jack Cashill
14 Dec 06

Slowly but surely, retired United Airline Capt. Ray Lahr and attorney John Clarke are prying open the can of worms known as the TWA Flight 800 investigation, and sooner or later the major media will have to take notice.

WABC in New York already has. Two weeks ago, the station's Jim Hoffer did a short feature headlined "Major court ruling in TWA Flight 800 case." What proved to be most newsworthy about the feature, however, was not the ruling in question but a surprising admission by former NTSB managing director Peter Goelz.

As Hoffer noted, and has been reported here previously, a U.S. district court judge in Los Angeles has granted Lahr access to most of the documents he has requested to get at the truth behind the alleged 3,200-foot "zoom climb" of the damaged aircraft.

In the WABC feature, Hoffer interviewed not only Lahr but also Goelz, who oversaw the investigation. Wittingly or not, Goelz made the stunning comment that "whether [TWA Flight 800] climbed 3,200 feet or not is really irrelevant."
Irrelevant? Really? The FBI and the CIA did not think so. In 1996-1997, the two agencies climbed over the notorious "wall" to collaborate on an animation showing how a crippled 747 could climb rocket-like for 3,200 feet after its nose had been blown off. This animation was critical. The FBI needed such a scenario to silence the media and close the case.

The CIA video could not have been more definitive. "The Eyewitnesses Did Not See a Missile," reads an underlined script on the video screen. No, "What the witnesses saw was a Boeing 747 in various stages of crippled flight." The FBI showed the CIA video at its final press conference in November 1997, thereby ending any serious investigation.

Despite doubts, the NTSB stuck to the story. At the final NTSB hearing in August 2000, Dr. David Mayer, acting chief of the NTSB's Orwellian-titled "Human Performance Division," reaffirmed the zoom climb. "As the airplane maneuvered in crippled flight," said Mayer in an attempt to explain what the eyewitnesses saw, "it appeared to fly nearly straight up." Tellingly, at no NTSB hearing were the eyewitnesses, several of them pilots or military personnel, ever allowed to testify.

Goelz himself knows just how relevant the zoom climb is. His claim that "there is absolutely no evidence that a missile was fired at this aircraft" hinges on the zoom climb. Without it, there is no way to explain the testimony of the 270 FBI eyewitnesses who had seen lights streaking up toward the plane in the seconds before it exploded. Without it, that eyewitness testimony becomes once again all but irrefutable evidence of a missile strike.

Much of that testimony was vivid and specific. One travel industry professional, for instance, told the FBI that she was standing on the beach when she noticed a 747 "level off." With her eye still on TWA Flight 800, she watched in awe as a "red streak" with a "light gray smoke trail" moved up towards the airliner at a 45-degree angle. Then, the "red streak went past the right side and above the aircraft before arcking [sic] back down toward the aircrafts [sic] right wing."

She saw "the front of the aircraft separate from the back" and watched as the burning pieces of the debris fell from the aircraft. She provided a drawing that showed the scenario in some detail, including the "upside down Nike swoosh," which ended at the plane's right wing. By the way, she correctly identified the departure of the plane's nose long before that detail became publicly known. For the record, hers is one of perhaps 100 comparably strong testimonies.

A veteran safety investigator and a serious student of aerodynamics, Ray Lahr thought the zoom climb scenario a canard the moment he saw it. There is scarcely a pilot anywhere who disagrees with Lahr. Buttressed by wide support in the aviation community, he began his nine-year quest to see the evidence used to calculate the zoom climb.

Lahr is making progress. The Los Angeles judge clearly sided with him. He ruled that the case Lahr and Clarke presented was sufficiently strong "to permit plaintiff to proceed based on his claim that the government acted improperly in its investigation of Flight 800 or at least performed in a grossly negligent fashion."

Ten years out, the evidence for a missile strike grows stronger by the week. A Pulitzer awaits the first major media organization to tackle this case in a serious way. Shamefully, none ever has.



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Murder Inc


Gaza City: 'Free the women and you free the whole country'

By Johann Hari in Gaza
15 December 2006

There are many things you expect to find in the cratered, cramped heart of Gaza City, but a group of proto-Germaine Greers and Betty Friedans would be low on the list. Yet, I am sitting under a lush green tree with a group of tough old ladies at the heart of the feminist hub they have built here - and where hundreds of Gazan women are flocking to find freedom.

In 1989, the women's rights campaigner Um Ahmad returned to her native Gaza after decades working for women's groups across the world. "I was determined to do something about the fact that women were in a much worse position here than even in other Arab countries," she says.
She found that Palestinian women were trapped between the savage Israeli occupation and a suffocatingly patriarchal Palestinian society. She knew there was only one way to free them - by getting them jobs and hard earning power.

Her proposal to establish an organisation providing jobs for women was refused by the Israeli occupying authorities, but Ms Ahmad refused to let this stop her. Risking interrogation and imprisonment, she went ahead and set up a network for women to make jams and foods in their homes and to sell them on. In Gaza, the Women's Institute was revolutionary, and jam-making an act of subversion.

After four years, Ms Ahmad's organisation was finally legalised. Today - thanks to the Welfare Association, one of the three charities being supported in this year's Independent Christmas Appeal - it has a permanent base.

She is sitting with me in the courtyard, watching women sip coffee and read print-outs from the internet terminals here. If you shut out the endless car-horns - the tinnitus of the most congested land-mass in the world - and the simulated explosions of the Israeli sonic booms, this is as close to tranquil as Gaza City gets.

"Women are suffering most from the occupation and economic collapse," she explains. "When the husband is out of work and at home all the time, he starts picking on his wife. For a lot of men, being unemployed and humiliated by the Israelis makes them show they are still in control somewhere - over their wives and children. Often violence breaks out."

Ms Ahmad's priority was to give women a chance to earn money and achieve independence. That is why she set up a women-only, non-profit clothing factory, and today as she walks along its floor with me, the 30 women are engaging in the usual factory-floor banter. They all have a story of how this centre changed their lives. Leila is a 40-year-old sewing machinist, and as she steps away from her machine she explains: "I used to live on food and money subsidies from a local charity. I was stuck at home, staring at the walls and thinking 'What am I doing with my life?'

"Then a charity worker told me I was intelligent and I could be a producer, not just a passive recipient - and he put me in touch with this charity. Now I support my husband and my seven children." She laughs with a mixture of surprise and glee. "I am convinced that sitting at home waiting for donations is bad. Going out, fulfilling yourself, being independent - that is good. I want all women to be able to do this."

Fatima is a bubbly 18-year-old who works on the knitting machines. She has always wanted to be a teacher of deaf children, but her parents could not afford to send her to university - so she is paying her own way as a student while working. "It's an amazing feeling, to be able to stand on your own feet: to be an independent woman," she says.

The Welfare Association helps to pay for these women to make school uniforms for the poverty-wracked children, and to maintain a bakery. Ms Ahmad says: "The most noticeable thing is that when women first join our society, they don't speak a lot. They are silent, because that's how they have been taught to be. But after a while they start to express their views, and soon they are drawn out of their silence. They want to browse the internet, see the world out there. It's like a person who has been locked in a room; then you offer them a window and they want to see more and more."

Ms Ahmad wants to open more windows - but she needs your money to do it. "When you help a Palestinian woman, you help all her children," she says. "When you free a Palestinian woman, you help to free Palestine."



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Clashes at border as Hamas tries to bring in cash - Israel Steals Cash

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian

Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian prime minister, was blocked from bringing millions of dollars of desperately needed donations home last night after Israeli forces closed Gaza's border with Egypt.

Mr Haniyeh was only allowed passage through the Rafah crossing after hours of negotiation and after leaving a reported $35m (£17.8m) in cash behind with aides.
The border closure sparked chaotic scenes. More than 1,000 Hamas members stormed the checkpoint, firing into the air as travellers ducked for cover and sparking a gun battle with Palestinian security guards. Two bombs were detonated nearby to blow a hole through the concrete wall on the border. One of Mr Haniyeh's bodyguards was reported to have been killed, and more than two dozen other people, including Mr Haniyeh's son, were wounded.

The incident came after another day of clashes between rival Palestinian factions in the tense atmosphere of Gaza. A gun battle broke out when officers from the General Intelligence unit, a force allied to the Fatah faction of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, arrested a member of another faction, the Popular Resistance Committees, in Gaza City. The arrested man, Hisham Mukhaimar, was wanted in connection with the killing of the three young sons of a Fatah intelligence officer in Gaza on Monday.

After the arrest the Popular Resistance Committees kidnapped a General Intelligence security officer in retaliation.

On Wednesday a Hamas judge was killed in southern Gaza in another retaliatory attack. In Ramallah in the West Bank, Hamas cancelled a rally due to be held yesterday to mark the 19th anniversary of its founding.

Fatah activists had blocked off the streets and security officers loyal to Fatah were deployed in the area.

Hamas officials said another rally was planned for today and Mr Haniyeh, who had cut short his trip abroad to handle the crisis, would address a large crowd in Gaza. That comes a day before Mr Abbas is to make a speech in which he is expected to threaten early elections in an effort to break the deadlock between the rival factions.

Since Hamas won elections and formed a government in March, the Palestinian Authority has faced an international financial boycott.

Israel is also withholding $60m a month in tax revenues, which normally pays the salaries of 160,000 government employees. The international community and Israel say Hamas must recognise Israel, halt violence and sign up to past peace agreements before the boycott is lifted.

Hamas has refused, and for the past month Mr Haniyeh has been touring the Muslim world to rally support.

Iran, Qatar and Sudan have together promised up to $350m, but transferring the money has proved difficult due to banking sanctions. In recent weeks, Hamas ministers have brought in up to $80m in cash stuffed in suitcases when they cross the Rafah border.

But Israel, in particular, appears to want to prevent any Iranian funds reaching Hamas leaders in Gaza.



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Hamas accuses rival of PM attack

BBC News
Dec 15 06


The Palestinian Hamas group has accused a key figure in the rival Fatah faction of trying to assassinate Prime Minister Ismail Haniya as he returned to Gaza.

Hamas accused Mohammad Dahlan of orchestrating the attack as Mr Haniya crossed Gaza's border with Egypt.

Clashes have now broken out between Hamas and Fatah supporters in Gaza City and the West Bank town of Ramallah.

A bodyguard died and Mr Haniya's son was among five hurt in the gun battle late on Thursday at the Rafah border.

Mr Dahlan has rejected Hamas's accusations of involvement, saying that Hamas, the governing party, was trying to "mask its failures".
Correspondents say the attack on Mr Haniya - and Hamas's open accusation of such a prominent opponent - have dramatically raised the stakes in the tense political struggle in the Palestinian territories.

Shooting erupted in Gaza City on Friday between masked Hamas gunmen and Palestinian police allied to Fatah. An exchange of gunfire between the factions was also reported in Ramallah.

Hamas had deployed armed militants to key points in a show of force following the fire fight.

Hamas spokesman Ismail Radwan had earlier said the attack at Rafah was "an assassination attempt carried out by traitors led by Mohammad Dahlan".

Mr Dahlan is a former minister of internal security and a fierce critic of Hamas.

In the 1990s he led a crackdown on militants who refused to acknowledge the new Palestinian Authority (PA).

Fatah spokesman Tawfiq Abu Khoussa rejected Hamas's claims.

"Fatah has condemned the incident and is demanding the formation of an official investigation committee," he said.

"These accusations are posing a grave threat to Palestinian unity."

PA President Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, said he regretted the attack, but Hamas said he had to share some responsibility.

Mr Haniya, after his return to Gaza City, said: "We know who opened fire."

Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Ephraim Sneh said his first response was to regret that the gunmen had missed Mr Haniya.

He told Israeli radio: "Emotionally, it was indeed my feeling. But upon coldly reconsidering it, I do not believe that that would have solved the problem."

Chaotic scenes

Inter-faction tensions have increased since the killing of three sons of a pro-Fatah security chief on Monday.

Mr Haniya had tried to cut short his first trip abroad as prime minister to deal with the crisis.

But Israel on Thursday closed the Gaza border, saying the reported $30m (£15.3m) Mr Haniya was carrying in donations as he returned from his foreign trip would fund "terrorist operations".

Mr Haniya crossed late in the evening following hours of intense negotiations, leaving the money on the Egyptian side. But at the border, guards allied to Fatah exchanged fire with Mr Haniya's security forces.

The BBC's Alan Johnston in Gaza said that during chaotic scenes gunfire rattled around the entrance hall to the customs hall as Mr Haniya's bodyguards shielded him.

Television pictures showed Mr Haniya's jeep manoeuvring to avoid bullets.

Hamas won elections in January, but has struggled in government amid a Western aid boycott against the militant Islamic group, which refuses to renounce violence and recognise Israel.

The Palestinian Authority has been unable to pay full salaries to its 165,000 workers.



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Don't Abandon Bethlehem, Mayor Urges Christians Worldwide

By Julie Stahl
CNSNews.com Jerusalem Bureau Chief
December 14, 2006

Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - The mayor of Bethlehem, a Palestinian Christian, is calling on Christians from around the world not to abandon the birthplace of Jesus -- the reason for the season.

Bethlehem, whose main source of income comes from Christian tourism, has suffered severe economic hardship since the beginning of the violent Palestinian uprising in September 2000. It also is losing more of its Christian population -- and its Christian identity.
With fewer than two weeks until Christmas, Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh said very few pilgrims have arrived so far. Bethlehem is a safe and peaceful city, said Batarseh. He appealed to Christians from around the world to come to visit.

"The message to our Christian brothers is not to forget, forsake Bethlehem city. We need our brothers to stand in solidarity with us [and]... visit," Batarseh told Cybercast News Service by telephone.

Fifty years ago, Christians made up some 90 percent of the population in Bethlehem. Now they represent less than half, and the numbers continue to decline.

Economic concerns as well as persecution have driven many Christians to seek better lives in the West.

Batarseh said he did not know of any families that had left Bethlehem in the last few months. The more Christians that leave Bethlehem, the more it is a disaster not only for Bethlehem but also for the world, which would lose what he called a "model of co-existence."

Bridges

The enclave of Bethlehem, just six miles from Jerusalem, is now surrounded on three sides by Israel's security barrier, which Israel credits for a dramatic drop in terror attacks from the West Bank. Passage to and from the city is through a high-tech border crossing and passport control checkpoint that works like airport security.

"We need to break these walls of separation, not physically but psychologically. We need to build bridges, not walls," Batarseh said in reference to the barrier.

"[It will be a] very sad Christmas for the citizens of Bethlehem," Batarseh said. The security barrier, the summer war in Lebanon between Israel and Hizballah and the trouble in the Gaza Strip as well as a "bad political situation" in the Middle East have all affected tourism and pilgrimage, Batarseh said.

But Judeh Morkus, the Palestinian Authority minister of tourism, offered a more optimistic assessment of the tourism situation. While tourism is less than half of what it was in pre-intifadah days, it has been on the rise since last year, he said.

"It's a very bad political and economic situation," said Morkus, "[But we] hope that will change in the coming weeks."

Before the intifadah, nearly a million people a year visited the city, Morkus said in a telephone interview.

When Christians around the world were marking the second millennium since the birth of Jesus in 2000, the Holy Land expected record tourism. But the Palestinian uprising, which started in September of that year, scared away visitors and sent tourism plummeting.

Last year some 300,000 pilgrims and tourists visited Bethlehem, said Morkus, a Catholic who was born and raised in the city. (That is three times the number who visited in 2004.) And by the end of 2006, Bethlehem is expecting to see some 450,000 visitors for the year, he said.

For the first time since the intifadah erupted, the 2,000 hotel rooms in Bethlehem are fully booked over the Christmas holiday, said Morkus. Thousands of visitors are expected over the two-day Christmas holiday.

According to Morkus, the P.A. has granted the Bethlehem Municipality $50,000 to help pay for decorations and activities during the holiday season.

Israeli Christian Arabs from Nazareth and Haifa are being encouraged to join the celebrations in Bethlehem. And a traditional December 24th reception for residents of the city that was held in the prior to 1997 may be re-instituted, said Morkus.

An Israeli Tourism Ministry official said Israel would do all it could to facilitate tourism and pilgrimage to Bethlehem during the Christmas holidays. As usual Israel will provide a free shuttle service for pilgrims traveling from Jerusalem to Bethlehem from noon on Christmas Eve until noon on Christmas day.

The Tourism Ministry also is providing all those who travel to Bethlehem "a Christmas greeting" and a "surprise trinket" said the official. Everything is being done to make passage to Bethlehem as easy as possible, he said.



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Target Iran


Iranians vote in test for Ahmadinejad

By Alireza Ronaghi
Mirror.co.uk
15 December 2006

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranians voted on Friday for local councils and a powerful clerical body in the first electoral test for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his allies since he swept to office in 2005.

The vote for city and rural councils and the Assembly of Experts, in theory the most powerful institution in the Islamic Republic, will show if the president's rivals are regaining popularity even if the results have no direct impact on policy.
Forecasting results is hampered by a lack of reliable opinion polls but some early voters for Tehran City Council, the most high profile of Friday's races, stood behind the president.

"Ahmadinejad is a gentleman. He has done a lot of good works for the people. I will vote for his supporters," said Javad Zerangi, 65, a bus ticket seller queuing to vote in south Tehran, a poorer area where the president is generally popular.

Ahmadinejad, the son of a blacksmith who says the government must be more in touch with people, waited in line for about half an hour to vote at a mosque in east Tehran, witnesses said.

Ahmadinejad's anti-Western and anti-Israel statements have alarmed the West. Any indication his popularity is waning is likely to be taken as a welcome sign among Western countries worried Iran is building nuclear arms. Iran denies this.

But Ahmadinejad's vow to share out Iran's oil wealth more fairly still wins him the backing of many of the Islamic Republic's poor, even if many also grumble about rising prices, which economists blame on the president's spending policies.

SEEKING A COMEBACK

In the Tehran race, the conservative camp is split between Ahmadinejad's backers, called "The Pleasant Scent of Servitude", and supporters of Tehran mayor, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf.

Iran's reform movement, defeated in 2003 council polls and subsequent parliamentary and presidential races, is seeking a comeback but it does not expect to make sweeping gains.

Much may depend on the turnout of Iran's 46.5 million eligible voters, who will choose between around 233,000 candidates for more than 113,000 city and rural council posts.

In the 2003 council race, turnout was a modest 49 percent, and just 12 percent in Tehran. Many voters were disenchanted with ruling reformists who failed to deliver a freer society.

Iranians will also choose the 86-member Assembly of Experts, which appointed, supervises and can unseat Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 67, the country's highest authority.

Khamenei urged Iranians to do their "revolutionary and national duty" and vote after he cast his own ballot.

Although it holds powers even parliament or the president cannot boast, the assembly is dominated by traditional conservative clerics who have kept a low profile and are never known to have challenged Khamenei's actions.

That race is dominated by two rivals, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a mid-ranking cleric who has been at the heart of decision-making in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, and a top-ranking theologian, Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, widely seen as Ahmadinejad's mentor.

Polling stations are due to close at 7.00 p.m. (1530 GMT), although in past elections voting has often been extended. Results may not be released until late on Sunday.



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Iran vote seen as referendum on Ahmadinejad - President criticized for failed promises

By Anne Barnard
Globe Staff
December 15, 2006

TEHRAN -- Nineteen months after an upset election victory catapulted him to a controversial role on the world stage, firebrand Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is facing criticism from both the left and right, much of it from Iranians who believe he hasn't delivered on his populist economic promises.
In national elections today, many Iranians view the vote as a referendum on Ahmadinejad's performance. City council races nationwide focus on who can do more to improve people's daily lives, with some candidates vowing to accomplish what they say the president has failed to do. And candidates for a key national assembly of Muslim clergy are clashing over how much power Iran's supreme leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, should wield.

But at both the local and national levels, the races pit supporters of Ahmadinejad against members of the reformist movement, which pushes for democratization within Iran's Islamic government. And in some cases, traditional conservatives have banded together with reformists to oppose Ahmadinejad allies.

Reformist candidates are taking a page from Ahmadinejad's play book, emphasizing bread-and-butter issues like the need for better public transportation and more accountable city officials instead of the human rights and freedom of speech themes they've sounded in the past.

"We need to show the world that we are more practical," said Piruz Hanochi, an architect running on the reformist ticket for Tehran's city council. "After the election, people's lives have to become better."

To the outside world, Ahmadinejad (pronounced ah-MAHDI-ne-JAD) is best known for spurring confrontation with the West -- restarting the uranium enrichment program that the United States believes is aimed at making a nuclear bomb; denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map"; and declaring that Iranian influence should replace American sway in the Middle East.

But to Iranians, the president is controversial for a different reason: In May 2005, Ahmadinejad, a newcomer to the national political scene, shocked the country's reformists by trouncing their veteran candidate, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Reformists had led the country through more than a decade of gradual social and political liberalization, relaxing religious dress codes and allowing more press freedoms under former president Mohammad Khatami. But their focus on ideology eventually soured as Iranians increasingly struggled with double-digit inflation and rising youth unemployment in a country where 70 percent of the population is under age 30.

Some of that disappointment is now being directed at Ahmadinejad, even among some of his core supporters.

Amirhussein Jaharuti is a natural Ahmadinejad voter, a strong believer in the 1979 Iranian revolution whose older brother died in the 1980-88 war with Iraq and who says the president's tough stances against the West have defended his country's honor. He voted for Ahmadinejad, but now plans to split his vote in the local races between reformists and pro-Ahmadinejad candidates because the president hasn't delivered enough.

"I'm sure he wants a better life for Iranians, but his policies haven't provided it," said Jaharuti, co-owner of an Internet provider in Tehran. "He is like a pilot who can't fly very well -- he doesn't mean to kill anyone."
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Traditional religious conservatives with a pro-business bent -- the heart of Iran's bazaar culture and a base of support for the revolution -- are also skeptical of Ahmadinejad's policies, which briefly raised the minimum wage, spent more oil money on imports, and handed out patronage.

"We are against fat governments," said Asadullah Badamchian, a leader of the Islamic Coalition, Iran's oldest Islamic party, which is backing Ahmadinejad's city council candidates, but with reservations. "We think that, as in America, big companies should have influence in economic policies."

Inflation this year hit 15 percent, according to official figures, but independent analysts have put the figure at closer to 25 percent. Growth over the past two years has slowed from 7.5 percent a year to 5 percent.

Even more dissatisfied with Ahmadinejad are young, urban, middle-class Iranians. They are the backbone of reformist support, and many sat out presidential elections last year to register their disillusion with the system. That decision helped bring Ahmadinejad to power.

Now, the reformists are trying to make a comeback, focusing on getting out the vote and reminding voters of the liberalization they enjoyed under Khatami, who was president from 1997 to 2005.

"We are the companions of Khatami," reads a yellow campaign poster for reformist candidates in Isfahan, about 240 miles southwest of Tehran.

The city of 1.5 million is part of Iran's conservative heartland, but many young people here said Ahmadinejad's tenure had emboldened vigilante groups who patrol the streets to enforce strict Islamic order, making it harder for young men and women to socialize, without delivering the economic improvements he promised.

"It was a mistake not to vote last time," said Mohammad Paknegad, 24, a Khatami supporter who is studying English and who works nights as a cashier in a tea shop under the Si-o-Seh Bridge, where the Zayandeh river rushes between tables of young men smoking waterpipes beneath the narrow arches. "Things got worse."

But many voters in Tehran and Isfahan say they don't believe their vote makes a difference -- especially after many reformist candidates were rejected as unqualified or unsuitable by the Guardian Council, a powerful body of clerics appointed by the supreme leader.

"This is far from democracy," said Sayyid Ali Mirhadi, a reformist cleric from the National Trust party, which backs a coalition of reformist and conservative candidates -- led by Rafsanjani -- for the Assembly of Experts. The 86-member body chooses the supreme leader, the cleric who is the ultimate authority in Iran, and at least theoretically supervises him.

Mirhadi's slate of candidates wants the council to exercise more of its supervisory power, while their opponents -- led by Ahmadinejad's spiritual mentor, Mohammed Taghi Mesbah Yazdi -- want the supreme leader to have virtually unlimited power.

"The leader of the Islamic Republic is the leader of the Muslim world, so we cannot put any limits on him," said Mohammad Ali Ramin, an adviser to Ahmadinejad and a backer of the Yazdi group.

Those views so trouble traditional conservatives like the Islamic Coalition that they are backing Rafsanjani's slate of candidates despite their cultural disputes with reformists.

Ramin, a top campaign adviser to Ahmadinejad's allies, buses supporters to large rallies where their opponents are painted as wealthy, secular Iranians against a humble, religious man.

"God helped us to elect Ahmadinejad," said one student speaker at a Tehran rally last week. "Now the enemies of Islam are disapproving of him."



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Arabs want action on Israel nukes

From correspondents in Cairo
December 14, 2006

IRAN and Arab states today seized on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's statement implying that Israel has nuclear weapons, calling it proof of a regional threat and demanding UN action.

Yesterday Mr Olmert appeared to admit - in breach of the Jewish state's decades-long policy of ambiguity - that Israel possessed such weapons.

Iran called his comments a confession and demanded action from the United Nations.
"This confession shows the real threat to security and stability in the Middle East, and it shows this regime's evil plans to carry out threats, a terror strategy and continued occupation," foreign ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini said.

"It is extremely necessary to adopt fast and efficient solutions on the UN Security Council and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and other regional organisations to combat these clear threats," he said.

Israel, which Iran does not recognise, is Tehran's arch-foe. It has repeatedly called for UN action over Iran's nuclear program and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's anti-Israel comments.

The Arab League urged the international community and the Security Council to exert pressure on Israel "to open its nuclear facilities in a transparent manner".

"It is essential that Israel comply with international resolutions," Mohammed Sobeih, the assistant secretary general in charge of Palestinian affairs, told reporters in Cairo.

The 22-member body called on "all states which offered assistance to Israel, particularly on the issues of uranium and heavy water, to speak out without delay", he said.

"Everyone knows that Israel possesses weapons of mass destruction which could reach as far as 2000km, and all Arab capitals are within this range," Mr Sobeih said.

Today the Gulf Cooperation Council - grouping Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - demanded that sanctions be imposed on Israel.

GCC Secretary General Abderrahman al-Attiya called on the United States not to apply a policy of "double standards" and to "work for the application (against Israel) of the resolutions of international legitimacy and of Chapter VII".

Chapter VII of the UN charter deals with action the Security Council might take regarding threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression.

As a first step, it says the council may call for member states to impose sanctions, including complete or partial interruption of economic relations and the severance of diplomatic relations.

If such measures fail, military action can be called for.

In an interview yesterday with German television, Mr Olmert listed Israel as a country with nuclear weapons.

"We never threatened any nation with annihilation," he said.

"Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as France, America, Russia and Israel?" he asked.

Mr Olmert's spokeswoman Miri Eisin was quick to deny that the prime minister admitted Israel had nuclear weapons, saying "Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the region".



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Iran seizes on Israeli PM's atomic 'confession' - Tehran demands U.N. action as tensions increase between two countries

Reuters
13 Dec 06

TEHRAN - Iran on Wednesday called for U.N. Security Council action against Israel, seizing on remarks by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert widely interpreted as an admission that the country has nuclear weapons.

"This confession reveals a real threat to security and stability in the Middle East and shows the evil aims and plots of this regime," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini.

Quoted by the official IRNA news agency, Hosseini called for "effective and rapid measures in the Security Council and the Organization of Islamic Conference and other regional organizations to combat these explicit threats."
In a German television interview broadcast on Monday, Olmert said: "Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"

Olmert aides said the remarks did not constitute an admission that Israel had atomic weapons.

Leading opposition lawmakers in Israel have accused Olmert of undermining Israel's campaign to curb the atomic ambitions of Iran with his remarks.

Independent analysts believe Israel has built up to 200 nuclear warheads since the late 1960s. Israel refuses to discuss the matter, under an "ambiguity" policy aimed both at deterring regional foes and avoiding an arms race.

Increasing rhetoric
The reticence is a major grievance for Iran, which sees a double standard in Western calls for Tehran to accept checks on a nuclear program that it says is for civilian use.

"Iran recommends that the Security Council place emphasis on combating the open and real threats of the nuclear weapons capabilities, instead of putting unreal issues on its agenda," Hosseini said.

Iran and Israel have traded increasingly confrontational rhetoric and accusations in recent months.

In an interview with Germany's Spiegel magazine last week Olmert called for dramatic measures against Iran and declined to rule out a military attack against the Islamic Republic.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday on Israel would soon be consigned to history, as happened to the Soviet Union.

Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited.



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India: The Future?


India's shame

Arundhati Roy
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian

Five years ago this week, on December 13 2001, the Indian parliament was in its winter session. The government was under attack for yet another corruption scandal. At 11.30 in the morning, five armed men in a white Ambassador car fitted out with an improvised explosive device drove through the gates of Parliament House. When they were challenged, they jumped out of the car and opened fire. In the gun battle that followed, all the attackers were killed. Eight security personnel and a gardener were killed too. The dead terrorists, the police said, had enough explosives to blow up the parliament building, and enough ammunition to take on a whole battalion of soldiers. Unlike most terrorists, these five left behind a thick trail of evidence - weapons, mobile phones, phone numbers, ID cards, photographs, packets of dried fruit and even a love letter.
Not surprisingly, prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee seized the opportunity to compare the assault to the September 11 attacks in the US only three months previously.

On December 14 2001, the day after the attack on parliament, the Special Cell (anti-terrorist squad) of the Delhi police claimed it had tracked down several people suspected of being involved in the conspiracy. The next day, it announced that it had "cracked the case": the attack, the police said, was a joint operation carried out by two Pakistan-based terrorist groups, Lashkar- e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. Three Kashmiri men, Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani, Shaukat Hussain Guru and Mohammad Afzal, and Shaukat's wife, Afsan Guru, were arrested.

In the tense days that followed, parliament was adjourned. The Indian government declared that Pakistan - America's closest ally in the "war on terror" - was a terrorist state. On December 21, India recalled its high commissioner from Pakistan, suspended air, rail and bus communications and banned air traffic with Pakistan. It put into motion a massive mobilisation of its war machinery, and moved more than half a million troops to the Pakistan border. Foreign embassies evacuated their staff and citizens, and tourists travelling to India were issued cautionary travel advisories. The world watched with bated breath as the subcontinent was taken to the brink of nuclear war. All this cost India an estimated pounds 1.1bn of public money. About 800 soldiers died in the panicky process of mobilisation alone.

The police charge sheet was filed in a special fast-track trial court designated for cases under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Some three years later, the trial court sentenced Geelani, Shaukat and Afzal to death. Afsan Guru was sentenced to five years of "rigorous imprisonment". On appeal, the high court subsequently acquitted Geelani and Afsan, but upheld Shaukat's and Afzal's death sentence. Eventually, the supreme court upheld the acquittals and reduced Shaukat's punishment to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment. However, it not just confirmed, but enhanced Mohammad Afzal's sentence. He was given three life sentences and a double death sentence.

In its judgment on August 5 2005, the supreme court admitted that the evidence against Afzal was only circumstantial, and that there was no evidence that he belonged to any terrorist group or organisation. But it went on to endorse what can only be described as lynch law. "The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the entire nation," it said, "and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender."

Spelling out the reasons for giving Afzal the death penalty, the judgment went on: "The appellant, who is a surrendered militant and who was bent upon repeating the acts of treason against the nation, is a menace to the society and his life should become extinct." This implies a dangerous ignorance of what it means to be a "surrendered militant" in Kashmir today.

So, should Afzal's life be extinguished? His story is fascinating because it is inextricably entwined with the story of the Kashmir Valley. It is a story that stretches far beyond the confines of courtrooms and the limited imagination of people who live in the secure heart of a self-declared "superpower". Afzal's story has its origins in a war zone whose laws are beyond the pale of the fine arguments and delicate sensibilities of normal jurisprudence.

For all these reasons it is critical that we consider carefully the strange, sad and utterly sinister story of the December 13 attack. It tells us a great deal about the way the world's largest "democracy" really works. It connects the biggest things to the smallest. It traces the pathways that connect what happens in the shadowy grottoes of our police stations to what goes on in the snowy streets of Paradise Valley, and from there to the malign furies that bring nations to the brink of nuclear war. It raises specific questions that deserve specific, and not ideological or rhetorical, answers. What hangs in the balance is far more than the fate of one man.

For the most part, the December 13 attack was an astonishingly incompetent "terrorist" strike. But consummate competence appeared to be the hallmark of everything that followed: the gathering of evidence, the speed of the investigation by the Special Cell, the arrest and charging of the accused and the three-and-a-half-year-long judicial process that began with the fast-track trial court.

The operative phrase in all of this is "appeared to be". If you follow the story carefully, you will encounter two sets of masks. First, the mask of consummate competence (accused arrested, "case cracked" in two days flat), and then, when things began to come undone, the benign mask of shambling incompetence (shoddy evidence, procedural flaws, material contradictions). But underneath all of this - as several lawyers, academics and journalists who have studied the case in detail have shown - is something more sinister, more worrying. Over the past few years the worries have grown into a mountain of misgivings, impossible to ignore.

The doubts set in as early as the day after the parliament attack, when the police arrested Geelani, a young lecturer at Delhi University. His outraged colleagues and friends, certain that he had been framed, contacted the well-known lawyer Nandita Haksar and asked her to take on his case. This marked the beginning of a campaign for the fair trial of Geelani. It flew in the face of mass hysteria and corrosive propaganda that was enthusiastically disseminated by the mass media. But despite this, the campaign was successful, and Geelani was eventually acquitted, along with Afsan Guru.

Geelani's acquittal blew a gaping hole in the prosecution's version of the parliament attack. The linchpin of its conspiracy theory suddenly tuned out to be innocent. But in some odd way, in the public mind, the acquittal of two of the accused only confirmed the guilt of the other two. There was bloodlust that had to be satiated. When the government announced that Afzal, Accused No 1 in the case, would be hanged on October 20 2006, it seemed that most people welcomed the news not just with approval, but with morbid excitement. But then, once again, the questions resurfaced.

To see through the prosecution's case against Geelani was relatively easy. He was plucked out of thin air and transplanted into the centre of the "conspiracy" as its kingpin. Afzal was different. He had been extruded through the sewage system of the hell that Kashmir has become. He surfaced through a manhole, covered in shit (and when he emerged, policemen in the Special Cell pissed on him. Literally.) The first thing they made him do was a "media confession" in which he implicated himself completely in the attack. The speed with which this happened made many of us believe that he was indeed guilty as charged. It was only much later that the circumstances under which this "confession" was made were revealed, and even the supreme court was to set it aside, saying that the police had violated legal safeguards.

From the very beginning there was nothing pristine or simple about Afzal's case. His story gives us a glimpse into what life is really like in the Kashmir Valley. It is only in the Noddy Book version we read about in our newspapers that security forces battle militants and innocent Kashmiris are caught in the crossfire. In the adult version, Kashmir is a valley awash with militants, renegades, security forces, double-crossers, informers, spooks, blackmailers, blackmailees, extortionists, spies, both Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies, human rights activists, NGOs and unimaginable amounts of unaccounted-for money and weapons. There are not always clear lines that demarcate the boundaries between all these things and people; it is not easy to tell who is working for whom.

Truth, in Kashmir, is probably more dangerous than anything else. The deeper you dig, the worse it gets. At the bottom of the pit are the Special Operations Group and Special Task Force (STF), the most ruthless, indisciplined and dreaded elements of the Indian security apparatus in Kashmir, which play a central role in the Afzal story. Unlike the more formal forces, they operate in a twilight zone where policemen, surrendered militants, renegades and common criminals do business. They prey upon the local population, particularly in rural Kashmir. Their primary victims are the thousands of young Kashmiri men who rose up in revolt in the anarchic uprising of the early 1990s and have since surrendered and are trying to live normal lives.

In 1989, when Afzal crossed the border to be trained as a militant, he was only 20. He returned with no training, disillusioned with his experience. He put down his gun and enrolled himself in Delhi University. In 1993, without ever having been a practising militant, he voluntarily surrendered to the Border Security Force. Illogically enough, it was at this point that his nightmares began. His surrender was treated as a crime and his life became hell. Afzal's story has enraged Kashmiris because what has happened to him could have happened, is happening and has happened to thousands of young Kashmiri men and their families. The only difference is that their stories are played out in the dingy bowels of interrogation centres, army camps and police stations where they have been burned, beaten, electrocuted, blackmailed and killed, their bodies thrown out of the backs of trucks for passers-by to find. Whereas Afzal's story is being performed like a piece of medieval theatre on the national stage, in the clear light of day, with the legal sanction of a "fair trial", the hollow benefits of a "free press" and the all pomp and ceremony of a so-called democracy.

In documents submitted to the court, Afzal describes how, in the months before the attack on parliament, he was tortured in the camps of the STF - with electrodes on his genitals and chillies and petrol in his anus. He talks of how he was a constant victim of extortion. He mentions the name of Deputy Superintendent of Police Devinder Singh, who said he needed him to do a "small job" for him in Delhi. (Singh has subsequently admitted on record to having tortured Afzal in exactly the ways Afzal has described.) Afzal has also said that from the time he was arrested up to the time he was charged (a few months), his younger brother Hilal was held in illegal confinement in a police camp in Kashmir. As ransom.

Even today, Afzal does not claim complete innocence. It is the nature of his involvement that is being contested. For instance, was he coerced, tortured and blackmailed into playing even the peripheral part he played? In a gross violation of his constitutional rights, from the time he was arrested and right through the crucial phase of the trial when the real work of building up a case is done, Afzal did not have a lawyer. He had nobody to put out his version of the story, or help him or anyone else sift through the tangle of lies and fabrications and propaganda put out by the police. Various individuals worked it out for themselves. Today, five years later, a group of lawyers, academics, journalists and writers has published a reader (December 13th: The Strange Case of the Parliament Attack, published by Penguin India). It is this body of work that has fractured what, only recently, appeared to be a national consensus interwoven with mass hysteria.

Through the fissures, those who have come under scrutiny - shadowy individuals, counter-intelligence and security agencies, political parties - are beginning to surface. They wave flags, hurl abuse, issue hot denials and cover their tracks with more and more untruths. Thus they reveal themselves.

The essays in the Penguin book raise questions about how Afzal, who never had proper legal representation, can be sentenced to death without having had an opportunity to be heard, without a fair trial. They raise questions about fabricated arrest memos, falsified seizure and recovery memos, procedural flaws, vital evidence that has been tampered with, false telephone records, false testimonies, legal lacunae, material contradictions in the testimonies of police and prosecution witnesses, and the outright lies that were presented in court and published in newspapers. They show how there is hardly a single piece of evidence that stands up to scrutiny.

And then there are even more disturbing questions that have been raised, which range beyond the fate of Afzal. Some of these are critical for a country that is claiming to be a responsible nuclear power. Here are 13 questions for December 13:

Question 1: For months before the attack on parliament, both the government and the police had been saying that parliament could be attacked. On December 12 2001, the then prime minister, AB Vajpayee, warned of an imminent attack. On December 13 it happened. Given that there was an "improved security drill", how did a car bomb packed with explosives enter the parliament complex?

Question 2: Within days of the attack, the Special Cell of the Delhi police said it was a meticulously planned joint operation of Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba. They said the attack was led by a man called "Mohammad" who was also involved in the hijacking of flight IC-814 in 1998. (This was later refuted by the Central Bureau of Investigation.) None of this was ever proved in court. What evidence did the Special Cell have for its claim?

Question 3: The entire attack was recorded live on CCTV. Two Congress party MPs, Kapil Sibal and Najma Heptullah, demanded in parliament that the CCTV recording be shown to the members. They said that there was confusion about the details of the event. The chief whip of the Congress party, Priyaranjan Dasmunshi, said, "I counted six men getting out of the car. But only five were killed. The closed circuit TV camera recording clearly showed the six men." If Dasmunshi was right, why did the police say that there were only five people in the car? Who was the sixth person? Where is he now? Why was the CCTV recording not produced by the prosecution as evidence in the trial? Why was it not released for public viewing?

Question 4: Why was parliament adjourned after some of these questions were raised?

Question 5: A few days after December 13, the government declared that it had "incontrovertible evidence" of Pakistan's involvement in the attack, and announced a massive mobilisation of almost half a million soldiers to the Indo-Pakistan border. The subcontinent was pushed to the brink of nuclear war. Apart from Afzal's "confession", extracted under torture (and later set aside by the supreme court), what was the "incontrovertible evidence"?

Question 6: Is it true that the military mobilisation to the Pakistan border had begun long before the December 13 attack?

Question 7: How much did this military standoff, which lasted for nearly a year, cost? How many soldiers died in the process? How many soldiers and civilians died because of mishandled landmines, and how many peasants lost their homes and land because trucks and tanks were rolling through their villages and landmines were being planted in their fields?

Question 8: In a criminal investigation, it is vital for the police to show how the evidence gathered at the scene of the attack led them to the accused. The police have not managed to show how they connected Geelani to the attack. And how did the police reach Afzal? The Special Cell says Geelani led them to Afzal. But the message to look out for Afzal was actually flashed to the Srinagar police before Geelani was arrested. So how did the Special Cell connect Afzal to the December 13 attack?

Question 9: The courts acknowledge that Afzal was a surrendered militant who was in regular contact with the security forces, particularly the STF of Jammu and Kashmir police. How do the security forces explain the fact that a person under their surveillance was able to conspire in a major militant operation?

Question 10: Is it plausible that organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammad would rely on a person who had been in and out of STF torture chambers, and was under constant police surveillance, as the principal link for a major operation?

Question 11: In his statement before the court, Afzal says that he was introduced to "Mohammed" and instructed to take him to Delhi by a man called Tariq, who was working with the STF. Tariq was named in the police charge sheet. Who is Tariq and where is he now?

Question 12: On December 19 2001, six days after the parliament attack, police commissioner SM Shangari identified one of the attackers who was killed as Mohammad Yasin Fateh Mohammed (alias Abu Hamza) of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, who had been arrested in Mumbai in November 2000 and immediately handed over to the Jammu and Kashmir police. He gave detailed descriptions to support his statement. If police commissioner Shangari was right, how did Yasin, a man in the custody of the Jammu and Kashmir police, end up participating in the parliament attack? If he was wrong, where is Yasin now?

Question 13: Why is it that we still do not know who the five "terrorists" killed in the parliament attack are?

These questions, examined cumulatively, point to something far more serious than incompetence. The words that come to mind are complicity, collusion, involvement. There is no need for us to feign shock or shrink from thinking these thoughts and saying them out loud. Governments and their intelligence agencies have a hoary tradition of using strategies such as this to further their own ends. (Look up the burning of the Reichstag and the rise of Nazi power in Germany in 1933; or Operation Gladio, in which European intelligence agencies created acts of terrorism, especially in Italy, in order to discredit militant groups such as the Red Brigades.)

The official response to all of these questions has been dead silence. As things stand, Afzal's execution has been postponed while the president considers his clemency petition. Meanwhile, the Bhartiya Janata party (now in the opposition) announced that it would turn "Hang Afzal" into a national campaign. But it does not seem to have taken off. Now other avenues are being explored. The main strategy seems to be to create confusion and polarise the debate on communal lines. In the business of spreading confusion, the media, particularly television journalists, can be counted on to be perfect collaborators. On discussions, chat shows and "special reports", we have television anchors playing around with crucial facts, like young children in a sandpit. Torturers, estranged brothers, senior police officers and politicians are emerging from the woodwork and talking. The more they talk, the more interesting it all becomes.

One character who is rapidly emerging from the shadowy periphery and wading on to centre-stage is deputy superintendent Devinder Singh. He was showcased on the national news (CNN-IBN), in what was presented as a "sting" operation with a hidden camera. It all seemed a bit unnecessary, however, because Singh has been talking a lot these days. He has done recorded interviews, on the phone as well as face to face, saying exactly the same shocking things. Weeks before the sting operation, in a recorded interview with Parvaiz Bukhari, a freelance journalist, he said, "I did interrogate and torture him [Afzal] at my camp for several days. And we never recorded his arrest in the books anywhere. His description of torture at my camp is true. That was the procedure those days and we did pour petrol in his ass and gave him electric shocks. But I could not break him. He did not reveal anything to me despite our hardest possible interrogation ... He looked like a 'bhondu' [fool] those days, what you call a 'chootya' [idiot] type. And I had a reputation for torture, interrogation and breaking suspects. If anybody came out of my interrogation clean, nobody would ever touch him again. He would be considered clean for good by the whole department."

This is not an empty boast. Singh has a formidable reputation for torture in the Kashmir Valley. On TV, his boasting spiralled into policy-making. "Torture is the only deterrent for terrorism," he said. "I do it for the nation." He did not bother to explain why or how the "bhondu" that he tortured and subsequently released allegedly went on to become the diabolical mastermind of the parliament attack. Singh then said that Afzal was a Jaish militant. If this is true, why was the evidence not placed before the courts? And why on earth was Afzal released? Why was he not watched? There is a definite attempt to try to dismiss this as incompetence. But given everything we know now, it would take all of Singh's delicate professional skills to make some of us believe that.

The official version of the story of the parliament attack is very quickly coming apart at the seams. Even the supreme court judgment, with all its flaws of logic and leaps of faith, does not accuse Afzal of being the mastermind of the attack. So who was the mastermind? If Afzal is hanged, we may never know. But LK Advani, the leader of the opposition, wants him hanged at once. Even a day's delay, he says, is against the national interest. Why? What is the hurry? The man is locked up in a high-security cell on death row. He is not allowed out of his cell for even five minutes a day. What harm can he do? Talk? Write, perhaps? Surely, even in Advani's own narrow interpretation of the term, it is in the national interest not to hang Afzal? At least not until there is an inquiry that reveals what the real story is and who actually attacked parliament?

A genuine inquiry would have to mean far more than just a political witch-hunt. It would have to look into the part played by intelligence, counter-insurgency and security agencies as well. Offences such as the fabrication of evidence and the blatant violation of procedural norms have already become established in the courts, but they look very much like just the tip of the iceberg. We now have a police officer admitting - boasting - on record that he was involved in the illegal detention and torture of a fellow citizen. Is all of this acceptable to the people, the government and the courts of India?

Given the track record of Indian governments (past and present, right, left and centre) it is naive - perhaps utopian is a better word - to hope that today's politicians will ever have the courage to institute an inquiry that will, once and for all, uncover the real story. A maintenance dose of pusillanimity is probably encrypted in all governments. But hope has little to do with reason.

(C) Arundhati Roy 2006



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Indian minister defends U.S. nuke deal

The Associated Press
Tuesday, December 12, 2006

NEW DELHI, India -- India's foreign minister on Tuesday defended a landmark civil nuclear agreement with the United States in the face of strong opposition from supporters of the country's ruling coalition and the main opposition party.

The deal, approved by Congress on Saturday, would allow shipments of civilian nuclear fuel to India, overturning a nearly three-decade-old U.S. anti-proliferation policy. The approval paves the way for President Bush to sign the legislation into law.


The U.S. legislation was "consistent with our national security and energy requirements," Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee told Parliament.

Mukherjee did not comment on criticism of the deal but said the pact would free the United States to engage with India in the civil nuclear area.

"We recognize the initiative that President Bush has taken to make the exception for India," he said.

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has called the agreement "unequal" and said it would impose tough conditions that would cripple India's nuclear program, without assurance of uninterrupted fuel supplies for the country's civilian nuclear reactors.

The BJP has urged the government to reject the deal's "humiliating" conditions.

The criticism has disrupted work in India's parliament this week, but it is unlikely to have any impact on the status of the agreement, which will end the isolation imposed on the country's nuclear and high-technology agencies.

India pushed hard for the deal, which it said it urgently needs to help meet its rapidly growing energy needs.

But the version approved by Congress raised concerns in India over provisions that could limit India's right to reprocess spent atomic fuel and employ other sensitive nuclear technologies. Concerns also center on provisions that would require Bush and his successors to determine if New Delhi is cooperating with Washington's efforts to confront Iran about its nuclear ambitions.

The law also drew criticism from India's two main communist parties, supporters of India's ruling coalition.

The communists asked the government on Monday to seek clarification from Washington on clauses that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) said would "seriously undermine" India's foreign policy.

"This is an attempt to bind India to U.S. strategic interests. We fear it will adversely affect our independent foreign policy and our strategic autonomy," CPI-M chief Prakash Karat said.

The agreement creates an exemption in U.S. nonproliferation law to allow American civilian nuclear trade with India in exchange for Indian safeguards and inspections at its 14 civilian nuclear plants. Eight military nuclear plants would be off-limits in the deal.

India is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.



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Fencing the Porous Bangladesh Border

by Syed Sajjad Ali
World Press
Dec 14 06

In 1985 the government of India mooted the idea of constructing a fence along their common international frontier in the eastern part of the country. Subsequently, after deliberations at the highest policy-making levels, the decision was made to erect barbed wire fencing along entire common boundary with Bangladesh. The move to put up a barrier along the border was made to check illegal infiltration, contain smuggling and to frustrate militants who were using the border route to cross over into India to commit subversive acts.

In consideration of vital issues such as national security and the economy, India planned to build an eight-foot-high, double fence of rolled barbed wire stretched between concrete pillars. The multi billion-dollar project has already been implemented in many areas along the border, while work is progressing in others.
Northeast India has been struggling with with border-related problems that forced the central government to fence the boundary, according to P.J. Sebastian, a senior officer in the Border Security Force (BSF). The BSF is responsible for guarding the 2,545-mile (4,095-km) border with Bangladesh on the eastern frontier. The northeast's four states - Tripura, Mizoram, Assam and Meghalaya - share common boundaries with Bangladesh, but Tripura's geographical position is different from the rest as it shares an international border on three sides. Small corridors connect it with Assam and Mizoram.

Mainly due to its geographical disadvantages, the pattern of insurgent activity in Tripura is also different. Records disclosed by authorities show that tribal separatist outfits have established many hideouts within the state, and have set up transit, training and base camps in Bangladesh.

"Dhaka [the capital of Bangladesh] seems to have taken some measures against fundamentalists, but not with regard to Indian militants," said Sabestian. "Militants from Tripura and other states in the region continue to get support and abetment across the border."

It is officially acknowledged that the militants have participated in the kidnapping and killing of civilians as well as carrying out attacks on security forces after crossing the border from their camps. They then retreat across same border to evade security dragnets. Indian officials attribute this elusiveness as the main reason for not achieving the expected success in security operations against the militants. Even criminals try to flee to the other side of the border after committing a crime in Tripura.

Another dismal result of the porous border has been the illegal migration that began after India's independence in 1947, due to religious reasons. There was a massive exodus of Bengali Hindus from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to the neighboring Tripura, Assam and West Bengal states. The continued infiltration is a very sensitive issue in Tripura, and a source of ethnic unrest. Smuggling remains another problem that weighs heavily on the state's economy.

Relations between India and Bangladesh have been stained for the past few years and border troops from both sides have engaged in bloody skirmishes. In April 2001 as many as 16 Indian border guards and three Bangladeshi troops died in the deadliest border clash between the countries. The gun battle along Bangladesh's eastern Akhaura border, alongside Tripura state capital Agartala, erupted as talks between Bangladeshi and Indian officials in Dhaka on ending the conflict over the border fence and other security issues, ended without resolution.

The Indian government argues it is building the fence to prevent rebels, illegal migrants and smugglers from sneaking across the frontier. Bangladesh does not object to the fence, but it has asked India not to build it within 490 feet (150 meters) of the so-called 'zero line,' saying it violates a 1972 agreement between the two countries.

In a recent article, northeast India's prominent intellectual and writer T. Siamchinthang said: "The porous India-Bangladesh border in the North East has for long been a corridor for various armed militants in the region. Hence, the apprehensions of the Bangladesh watchers are that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), and fundamentalist parties like Jamal E Islam may create trouble for the North Eastern States. The fear was that Bangladesh might provide more support to ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] training camps along the border."

The fence project is intended to cover the entire stretch of India's eastern frontier. The federal government has sanctioned adequate funds to complete the work by end of 2007. However, the fencing has created a humane crisis as thousands of people have been evicted due to its construction. Those evicted have been subject to harassment, and are sometimes prevented from working in the region. The federal interior ministry has given assurances of proper rehabilitation for such evacuees, but very little evidence indicates that much assistance has been provided.

Comment: What is it with walls and fences which seem to be popping up all over the globe? Israel's Wall has come to symbolise the psychopath's sense that he must protect himself - this now seems to be stimulating others to do the same.

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Japanese business must regain lost ground in India: PM

Madhur Singh
Hindustan Times
Tokyo, December 15, 2006

Japan must regain the ground it has lost to South Korea and China with regard to trade and investment in India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said at a gathering of Indian and Japanese business leaders in Tokyo on Friday.

He was speaking hours before a bilateral meeting with his Japanese counterpart, where the two leaders are going to announce the start of negotiations for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement as well as a Special Economic Partnership Initiative.

"I urge you to weigh the initial problems of entry against the long-term profitability and stability of doing business in India," Singh said. He assured that India is committed to improving infrastructure, simplifying taxation regime, reducing tariffs and eliminating red tape.

Thanking Japan for having helped India during the 1991 economic crisis and for its generous ODA, the PM cited India's vast market, sustained rate of growth at 8 per cent and status as an open democracy and an open economy as reasons why Japanese business must focus on India. He said Japan must partner India's efforts to create world class infrastructure, saying India needs $500 bn of investment over the next five years, $320bn of this for infrastructure alone. "We happily welcome foreign investment and seek to promote public-private partnership," he said, adding that special mechanisms like "viability gap funding" and an Infrastructure Development Finance Company have been established to facilitate investment in infrastructure.

Singh urged Japan to make the most of the investment opportunities in India's labour-intensive as well as knowledge-based industries, including biotechnology, nano-technology and IT, automobiles and aerospace, textiles and leather and marine products.

In particular, he remarked on India and Japan's IT complementarities - India's expertise in IT software and Japan's in hardware - to urge Japan to exploit India's IT advantage the way the US and EU have.

The PM also laid emphasis on the fact that India wants to make its growth inclusive in terms of equity and environmental sustainability. "Growth has already helped millions emerge from abject poverty," he said, adding that millions had emerged from poverty and joined the consumer market.

"In this journey of unleashing the creativity and enterprise of the Indian people, and seeking growth with equity, we want Japan to be our partner," he said. While referring to the CEPA, he added: "Prime Minister Abe and I are sincerely and deeply committed to breathing new life into our traditional friendship."




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The Science Desk


Comets hold life chemistry clues

By Jonathan Amos
BBC News
Dec 15 06

The idea that comets delivered the chemical "seeds" for life to the early Earth has been given a big boost.

Scientists studying the tiny grains of material recovered from Comet Wild-2 by Nasa's Stardust mission have found large, complex carbon-rich molecules.

They are of the type that could have been important precursor components of the initial reactions that gave rise to the planet's biochemistry.

The first full analysis of the Wild-2 grains is reported in Science magazine.
"Whatever it took to get life started, the more variety of molecules you had in the mix and the more they looked like the kinds of molecules that life uses now then the easier it should have been," Dr Scott Sandford from Nasa's Ames Research Center told BBC News.

The Stardust spacecraft flew past the 5km-wide icy "mud-ball" known as Comet 81P/Wild-2 in January 2004.

The probe swept up particles fizzing off the object's surface as it passed some 240km (149 miles) from the comet's core, or nucleus. These tiny grains, just a few thousandths or a millimetre in size, were then returned to Earth in a sealed capsule.

Lab clues

Distributed among the world's leading astro-labs, the specimens are giving researchers a remarkable insight into the conditions that must have existed in the earliest phases of the Solar System when planets and comets were forming.

Dr Sandford led the organics investigation; some 55 researchers in more than 30 institutions. His team sees many delicate, volatile compounds that are quite unlike those familiar in meteorites that have fallen to Earth.

These Wild-2 compounds lack the aromaticity, or carbon ring structures, frequently found in meteorite organics. They are very rich in oxygen and nitrogen, and they probably pre-date the existence of our Solar System.

"It's quite possible that what we're seeing is an organic population of molecules that were made when ices in the dense cloud from which our Solar System formed were irradiated by ultraviolet photons and cosmic rays," Dr Sandford explained.

"That's of interest because we know that in laboratory simulations where we irradiate ice analogues of types we know are out there, these same experiments produce a lot of organic compounds, including amino acids and a class of compounds called amphiphiles which if you put them in water will spontaneously form a membrane so that they make little cellular-like structures."

No-one knows how life originated on the cooling early Earth, but it has become a popular theory that a bombardment of comets may have deposited important chemical units for the initiating reactions.

The Stardust results, also reported here at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, will give support to this idea.

Hot and cold

They will also allow researchers to "re-tune" the models they use to describe how materials were moved and mixed up in the early Solar System.

The Stardust mineral grains generally show a huge diversity, and, very surprisingly, there are materials incorporated into the samples that must have formed close in to the proto-Sun.

These include calcium-aluminium and magnesium-olivine fragments.

"They form in the hottest possible place in the Solar System, so it's quite stunning to find something like them in a body that came together in the coldest place in the Solar System," said Dr Don Brownlee from the University of Washington and who is the principal investigator, or lead scientist, on Stardust.

"There must have been some way of getting them from the new Sun to the outer fringes of the proto-planetary disc," commented Professor Monica Grady from the UK's Open University.

"There must have been major turbulence and currents and disc-wide mixing, which hadn't really been predicted."

The international team of scientists has used a wide variety of sophisticated laboratory analytical techniques to study the samples. But there is a realisation that technologies improve and some comet samples will be kept back for future study.

Just as with the Moon rocks returned by the Apollo programme, researchers are likely to be working on the Stardust samples for decades.

"The information from Stardust has been a revelation and will continue to be as we couple it with other comet data we get from Nasa's Deep Impact mission and Europe's Rosetta mission, which is coming up in seven years' time," said Professor Grady.

In the UK, scientists from the Open University, Imperial College London, the Natural History Museum and the Universities of Kent, Manchester and Glasgow have been involved in the analysis.



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Battling a Black Epidemic

By Claudia Kalb and Andrew Murr
Newsweek
May 15, 2006 issue

At home: AIDS now threatens tens of thousands of African-Americans, many of them women, in big cities and small towns alike. A community in peril tries to save itself.
It's a warm spring morning, and two dozen African-American women are gathered around a conference table at the Women's Collective in Washington, D.C. Easter is just a few days away, but nobody is thinking about painted eggs and bunny rabbits. The collective, less than two miles north of the White House, is a haven for HIV-positive women, and on this day the focus is on sex, condoms and prevention. "Our responsibility," says one woman in a rousing voice, "is to tell the truth!" Together, the women are on a mission to educate, empower themselves and stop the spread of the virus. Patricia Nalls, the collective's founder and executive director, asks the group to read a fact sheet about HIV and AIDS, a staggering array of statistics documenting the impact of the disease in the United States. "So now we know what's happening to us," says Nalls.

What's happening is an epidemic among black women, their husbands, boyfriends, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. Twenty-five years after the virus was first documented in gay white men, HIV has increasingly become a disease of color, with blacks bearing the heaviest burden by far. African-Americans make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for an astounding 51 percent of new HIV diagnoses. Black men are diagnosed at more than seven times the rate of white men, black females at 20 times the rate of white women.

Decades into the epidemic, scientists have made enormous strides in unlocking the disease at the molecular level. Understanding why HIV has taken hold of black America and how to prevent its spread has proved to be no less daunting a challenge. The root of the problem is poverty and the neglect that comes with it-inadequate health care and a dearth of information about safe sex. IV drug use, sexually transmitted diseases and high-risk sex (marked by multiple partners and no protection) have fueled transmission; homophobia and religious leaders steeped in moralistic doctrine have suppressed honest conversations about how to stop it. All the while, much of black leadership has been slow in responding, only recently mobilizing to protect its community. HIV, says Cathy Cohen, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and author of a book about blacks and AIDS, "is one of the greatest crises threatening the black community. It's the life and death of black people."

The crisis plays out in inner cities and rural towns alike, where money, education and access to good medical care are limited. Protecting against HIV isn't necessarily priority No. 1 among the poor. "If you're focused on day-to-day survival, you're not thinking about where to get condoms," says Marjorie Hill, of the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City. Alijah Burwell, 39, lives in a rundown 110-year-old clapboard house with seven family members in Oxford, N.C. Burwell, who was diagnosed with HIV eight years ago and has long had sex with both men and women, doesn't know which of his partners made him sick. "I had one too many" is all he'll say. But for several years after he was diagnosed, Burwell says, he continued to have sex, often unprotected. And he didn't tell the women that he was sleeping with men too. He also smoked crack and drank a lot. And though he sought treatment for HIV, he wasn't vigilant about taking his medication, spiking his viral load, which made him a greater threat to his partners.



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Dramatic Drop in Breast Cancer Could Link to Hormones

By Dan Childs
ABC News
Dec 14 06

A sharp drop in breast cancer cases in 2003 has many researchers pointing to the fact that millions of women quit hormone replacement therapy in 2002.

But others have doubts that quitting HRT could alone produce such a steep drop.

The 7 percent drop in breast cancer cases between 2002 and 2003 means about 14,000 fewer women in the United States were diagnosed with the disease. Most of these women were between 50 and 69 years old.

"It's very, very compelling that this is not random variability, that there is something very clear and dramatic that happened," said Dr. Donald Berry, professor and chairman of biostatistics at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, during an interview with ABC News correspondent John McKenzie.

McKenzie also talked to Dr. Eric Winer of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, who said, "Any downward trend would be important. But this drop, and a drop this size in a couple of years, is really very major news."

The drop is significant in that it could be the single largest year-on-year reduction in new breast cancer cases ever recorded.

"It is biologically plausible, and there is no other glaring change in public health to explain the change," said Dr. Clifford Hudis, chief of the Breast Cancer Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. "This is more evidence that HRT is risky in terms of breast cancer."
Some experts, however, said the findings overlook the possible role that other factors might have played in the decrease.

"At this point, it's still an intriguing and promising observation, but very early," said Michael Thun, vice president of epidemiology and surveillance research of the American Cancer Society. He said a leveling off of the number of women getting mammograms could be responsible, since fewer women getting screened means fewer cancers getting detected.

This, he said, "creates the false impression that incidence rates are falling, whereas what is actually happening is that many early tumors are not being detected."

In short, he said, the decrease is just a detection gap; the same number of women may have breast cancer, but their tumors just aren't being detected.

"This is the most likely factor in the more gradual decrease in the last five years," Thun said.

Others said the rapid drop in incidence needs to be studied further before the cessation of HRT is confirmed as the primary cause.

"The suggested relationship with reduction in breast cancer incidence is too premature to trust with any confidence," said Dr. Gary Lyman, professor of medicine and oncology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. "There are many possible explanations for this apparent drop in incidence, including chance."

Strong Signal to Postmenopausal Women

If it is true that stopping HRT alone leads to such a dramatic drop, "it sends a message to women who are postmenopausal to think long and hard before opting to take HRT for control of menopausal symptoms," said Lillie Shockney, administrative director of the Johns Hopkins Avon Foundation Breast Center.

"Because this is an indirect study, they can't establish the reason," said Dr. Lisa Carey, medical director of the UNC Breast Center at the University of North Carolina-Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

But, she said, the fact that the decrease primarily occurred in the tumors that would be most likely to develop in the presence of the hormones used in HRT supports the idea that stopping HRT may be responsible for at least part of the drop.

"In order to make that link definitively, they would need to know who did and didn't take HRT during these times.

But, again, other factors could be at play.

"What we may be observing is a downturn in breast cancer diagnoses, in part due to decreases in mammography among hormone users," said Diana Buist, chairwoman of the National Cancer Institute sponsored Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium. "We also may well be seeing a slowdown in tumor growth among women who stop using hormones.

"That said, we cannot refute the strong evidence from the Women's Health Initiative demonstrating use of estrogen and progestin in postmenopausal women leads to increases in rates of breast cancer."

"There are other factors that can affect incidence of breast cancer on a broad scale, including availability and use of mammogram screening, use of preventive agents like Tamoxifen or Raloxifene, or avoidance of carcinogens," said Dr. Anne McTiernan, co-author of the book "Breast Fitness" and director of the Prevention Center of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

"It's unlikely that any of these changed so dramatically to influence incidence, which makes it more likely that the sudden change in use of HRT was largely responsible."



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Physicist: Stars can be strange

Washington University, St. Louis
physorg.com
Dec 15 06

According to the "Strange Matter Hypothesis," which gained popularity in the paranormal 1980's, nuclear matter, too, can be strange. The hypothesis suggests that small conglomerations of quarks, the infinitesimally tiny particles that attract by a strong nuclear force to form neutrons and protons in atoms, are the true ground state of matter. The theory has captivated particle physicists worldwide, including one of Washington University's own.

Mark Alford, Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, and collaborators from MIT and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, have used mathematical modeling to discover some properties of theoretical "strange stars," composed entirely of quark matter. Alford and his colleagues have found that under the right conditions the surface of a strange star could fragment into blobs of quark material called "strangelets," forming a rigid halo that contradicts traditional strange star models. This means that collapsed stars' nuclear leftovers, like the famously resplendent Crab Nebula, could be stranger than physicists think.

Alford and his colleagues recently published their findings in Physical Review D 73, 114016 (2006). The standard account of the dramatic death of a heavy star is that, after exploding in a supernova that rivals a whole galaxy in brightness, what is left is a "neutron star," a profoundly dense remnant, made mostly of neutrons, with a mass one and a half times that of our sun, crammed into an area with the radius of Saint Louis.

A strange star is an alternate ending of this story. If the Strange Matter Hypothesis is correct, then what is left behind is not a neutron star but an even denser strange star, made of quark matter rather than neutrons. And until recently, physicists thought that the two presented very different faces to the world.

A neutron star has a complicated multilayered surface. According to a description by M. Coleman Miller, Ph.D., of the University of Maryland, the deeper portions of the crust have voids that can be likened to Swiss cheese, overlaid by regions with sheets like lasagna, rods like spaghetti, and finally blobs like sprinklings of meatballs on the outside.

A strange star, on the other hand, was generally assumed to have a much simpler surface, consisting of a sharp interface between strange matter and the vacuum of surrounding space.

"A sharp interface between quark matter and the vacuum would have very different properties from the surface of a neutron star," noted Alford. But couldn't strange stars also have complicated surfaces? And if they did, could we even tell neutron stars and strange stars apart?

Kaleidoscopic aura of matter

Earlier this year, Alford's colleagues concocted a radical proposal. If blobs of quark matter (strangelets) have the right properties, maybe the strange star crust is something more like a kaleidoscopic aura of matter than a melon rind. "The idea was that the surface of a quark star might be as complicated as that of a neutron star, with a sort of crystalline halo or crust of strangelets," Alford explained. "If strangelets exist in reality, they will have a preferred size. If small strangelets are preferable, then big ones will split up into smaller ones. Conversely, if big strangelets are more stable, then small ones could fuse with other small ones--if they happened to bump in to each other--to make big ones."

If strangelets prefer to be big, then the strange star's surface will be the conventional simple sharp interface, with particles fused into the main body of the star. But if strangelets prefer to be small, then the surface will evaporate small strangelets to form a crystalline aura of strangelets floating in a sea of electrons.

His colleagues found that if surface tension along the interface and electrical forces within the charge distribution were neglected, then strangelets prefer to be small, and the strange star's surface indeed fragments into strangelets.

To follow, Alford joined the researchers in a more definitive investigation, addressing key parameters like surface tension and electrical forces that were neglected in the original study. Their results show that as long as the surface tension is below a low critical value, the large strangelets are indeed unstable to fragmentation and strange stars naturally come with complex strangelet crusts, analogous to those of neutron stars.

Their results will fuel the ongoing debate among astrophysicists about the nature and existence of strange stars. "A strange star believer would say: See, they showed that if the quark matter surface tension was low, then a strange star would have this strangelet crust, so perhaps some of the objects we think are neutron stars could actually be strange stars," Alford explained. "A strange star skeptic would say: Oh well, but the surface tension would have to be absurdly low for that to happen. These results basically show that for any reasonable value of the surface tension there is no crust, and strange stars are completely different."

Both conclusions are valid.

The strange star theory has its staunch defenders, but most physicists think it's merely an interesting, though improbable idea. But Alford and his colleagues are keeping its possibility afloat.

"There is still enough doubt about our understanding of these things," he said, "to leave room for speculation that there may be strange stars out there."






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One gene 90 percent responsible for making common parasite dangerous

Washington University School of Medicine
physorg.com
Dec 15 06

More than a decade of searching for factors that make the common parasite Toxoplasma gondii dangerous to humans has pinned 90 percent of the blame on just one of the parasite's approximately 6,000 genes.

The finding, reported in this week's issue of Science by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and elsewhere, should make it easier to identify the parasite's most virulent strains and treat them. The results suggest that when a more harmful strain of T. gondii appears, approximately 90 percent of the time it will have a different form of the virulence gene than that found in the more benign strains of the parasite.
Infection with T. gondii, or toxoplasmosis, is perhaps most familiar to the general public from the widespread recommendation that pregnant women avoid changing cat litter. Cats are commonly infected with the parasite, as are some livestock and wildlife. T. gondii's most infamous relatives are the parasites that cause malaria.

Epidemiologists estimate that as many as one in every four humans is infected with T. gondii. Infections are typically asymptomatic, only causing serious disease in patients with weakened immune systems. In some rare cases, though, infection in patients with healthy immune systems leads to serious eye or central nervous system disease, or congenital defects or death in the fetuses of pregnant women. Historically, scientists have found strains of T. gondii difficult to tell apart, heightening the mystery of occasional serious infections in healthy people.

"Clinically it may be helpful to be able to test the form of the parasite causing the infection to determine if a case requires aggressive management and treatment or is unlikely to be a cause of serious disease," says senior author L. David Sibley, Ph.D. professor of molecular microbiology. "This finding will advance us toward that goal."

ROP18, the T. gondii virulence gene identified by researchers, makes a protein that belongs to a class of signaling factors known as kinases that are ubiquitous in human biology.

"Kinases are active in cancers and autoimmune disorders, so pharmaceutical companies already have libraries of inhibitors they've developed to block the activity of these proteins," Sibley says. "Some patients can't tolerate the antibiotics we currently use to treat T. gondii infection, so in future studies we will want to screen these inhibitor libraries to see if one can selectively block ROP18 and serve as a more effective treatment."

The Institute for Genomic Research, in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, completed sequencing of the T. gondii genome in 2004. Three separate postdoctoral fellows (the co-first authors of the paper) then used three different post-genomic techniques to search the genome for potential virulence factors.

"All the approaches we used eventually pointed emphatically to a single gene, ROP18," Sibley notes. "The readings were just off the scale."

A survey of isolates from T. gondii strains from around the world found ROP18 and its effects on virulence to be widespread.

"The protein made by the ROP18 gene has an interesting and predictable function," says Sibley. "The parasite uses it to get a host cell 'drunk,' secreting the protein into the host after infection."

Inside the host cell, ROP18 presumably disrupts some important signaling process, altering the intracellular environment in a way that favors the parasite's growth and reproduction. Sibley notes that ROP18's primary role in T. gondii virulence suggests that similar genes in malaria parasites may be worthy of further study.

Sibley and his colleagues are currently working to identify ROP18's targets in the host cell. They are also looking for other genes that act together with ROP18 to contribute to T. gondii virulence.


Comment: For more on this go to the Signs of the Times Forum to view the current research on psychopathology and discussions on Toxopltoxoplasmosis and other topics.

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Self-assembling Nano-ice Discovered - Structure Resembles DNA

University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Science Daily
Dec 13 06

Working at the frontier between chemistry and physics, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Xiao Cheng Zeng usually finds his reward in discovering the unexpected through computer modeling.

Zeng and his colleagues regularly find new and often unanticipated behaviors of matter in extreme environments, and those discoveries have been published several times in major international scientific journals. Their findings, though, have been so far ahead of existing technology that their immediate practical impact was essentially nil -- until now.


Zeng and two members of his UNL team recently found double helixes of ice molecules that resemble the structure of DNA and self-assemble under high pressure inside carbon nanotubes. This discovery could have major implications for scientists in other fields who study the protein structures that cause diseases such as Alzheimer's and bovine spongiform ecephalitis (mad cow disease). It could also help guide those searching for ways to target or direct self-assembly in nanomaterials and predict the kind of ice future astronauts will find on Mars and moons in the solar system.

Zeng, post-doctoral student Jaeil Bai and doctoral candidate Jun Wang reported their findings in the Dec. 11-15 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Zeng and his colleagues use powerful computers to model how materials behave at the nanoscale (where measurements are made in billionths of meters) under extremes of temperature, pressure and confinement. The team found the self-assembling double helix of nano-ice following a months-long experiment on UNL's PrairieFire supercomputer.

The experiment was a follow-up on a 2001 discovery through computer modeling by Zeng and another team of four new kinds of one-dimensional ice inside carbon nanotubes. Scientists elsewhere later confirmed through laboratory experiment the existence of three of the new nano-ices. One result in particular intrigued Zeng, Bai and Wang. Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago confirmed the existence of a chain of octagon-shaped ice crystals inside a 1.4-nanometer carbon tube, just as Zeng and company expected. But the Argonne group also found an additional, unexpected chain of water molecules inside the octagon.

Zeng said that report inspired his team to take another look at one-dimensional ice, but this time with a PrairieFire that was 20 times more powerful that it had been five years earlier. The 2001 results were achieved at atmospheric pressures, but PrairieFire's added processing power enabled Zeng, Bai and Wang to design simulations that greatly increased the pressure on the water molecules.

"We were shocked to see these molecules arrange themselves in this way," said Zeng, university professor of chemistry. "We thought it would be like two tubes, one inside the other, but it didn't do that. It was helical, like DNA. I'm just speculating, but maybe the helix is a way for molecules to arrange themselves in a very compact, efficient way under high pressure.

"This ice formation can be viewed as a self-assembling process, and self-assembly is a way for molecules to bond together through weak hydrogen bonds. One example of a self-assembling material is protein. Proteins can self-assemble into structures like amyloid fibrils that can build up in the brain to cause Alzheimer's disease or prions that cause mad cow disease."

Another implication, Zeng said, is that these self-assembling helical ice structures may give scientists and engineers a different way to think about weak molecular bonds and the self-assembly process as they try to develop ways to direct self-assembly in making new materials. He said that while scientists have a good understanding of covalent bonds (the strong type of bonding where atoms share electrons), knowledge is not as complete about the weak bond, such as hydrogen bonds, that are essential to the self-assembly process. In weak bonding, atoms don't share electrons.

"We're happy to see potential applications that can maybe advance some fundamental science," Zeng said. "We're not engineers in direct contact with technology, but if our research can make some contribution, we're happy."

Zeng and his colleagues achieved their results by running four series of molecular dynamics simulations on PrairieFire and Department of Chemistry computers, using simulated carbon nanotubes ranging in diameter from 1.35 to 1.9 nanometers. They used Earth-like temperatures ranging from 117 degrees Fahrenheit to 9 degrees below zero F., but with pressures ranging from 10 to 40,000 atmospheres, with each series lasting no more than a few 10s of nanoseconds.

Most of the experiments produced the expected tubular structures, but in a simulation in a 1.35-nanometer tube at minus-9 degrees F. and 40,000 atmospheres, the ice transformed into a braid of double helix that resembles DNA in structure and in the weak bonds between the helixes. Additionally, in a simulation in a 1.9-nanometer tube at the same temperature, pressure on the confined liquid water was instantly raised from 10 atmospheres to 8,000. The confined liquid froze spontaneously into a high-density, triple-walled helical structure.

This research was funded by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Nebraska Research Initiative and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.



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Breast cancer may be sexually transmitted

by Judy Skatssoon
ABC Science Online
Dec 12 06

Breast cancer could be sexually transmitted, says a researcher who has found the same virus that causes cervical cancer in breast cancer tumours from Australian women.

Emeritus Professor James Lawson of the University of New South Wales and colleagues have found the same form of the human papillomavirus (HPV) associated with cervical cancer in almost half the breast tumour samples they tested.

It's the first study of its kind in Australia, although international studies have also found cervical cancer-related HPV in breast cancer cells.
He says while the evidence is far from conclusive, "it's possible and totally worthy of investigation" to suspect that HPV could also cause breast cancer.

Lawson says it's possible that HPV is spread by sexual activity or during showers or baths, when the virus could be transferred from the genital area to the breasts via the nipple ducts.

"We know that the virus explodes out of the cell and is spread by touch, so it's fairly obvious that it could be spread by sexual activity to the breast, you could also argue that it would be spread by washing and bathing," he says.

Lawson says more research is needed to establish whether HPV is actually causing the breast cancer or if women with breast cancer are more prone to infection with the virus.

Younger women

Lawson and colleagues last year published the results of a DNA analysis which found 24 out of 50 breast cancer samples also tested positive to HPV 18, the same form of the virus implicated in breast cancer.

A subsequent review, published in the journal Future Microbiology in June this year, found various forms of high-risk HPV had been identified in 10 separate breast cancer studies since 1999.

In a letter published online in the British Journal of Cancer last month Lawson reports that a review of the 2005 study found women with HPV positive breast cancers were on average about eight years younger than those whose tumours did not test positive to the virus.

He says this lends weight to the sexual transmission theory, because HPV is more common in younger women who are more likely than older women to have had multiple sexual partners, something he describes as a "post-pill phenomenon".

Lawson says it isn't the first time a virus has been associated with breast cancer.

The mouse mammary tumour virus, which causes breast cancer in mice, has been known about since the 1930s, and in a 2004 study Lawson reported finding a genetically similar version of the virus in Australian women.

Lawson says if it's true that HPV can cause breast cancer as well cervical cancer, the introduction of the cervical cancer vaccine, developed by Australian of the Year Professor Ian Frazer, should also cut rates of breast cancer.

He says he is currently pushing for a study into this.

"The real proof of all this will be the vaccine, but you'll have to wait [a long time] for [the results]," he says.

"It makes sense to follow that group of girls, and when some of them get breast cancer, to see if any of them are HPV positive breast cancers.

"Theoretically the answer should be no."

Doubts

But chief executive officer of Cancer Council Australia, Professor Ian Olver, says while it's possible that a virus could cause breast cancer the existing studies are small and inconclusive.

"What we've got is small studies that have found an association between HPV and breast cancer ... but they haven't shown anything that could say it's causal," he says.

"I think you need much bigger studies and a mechanism by which HPV was implicated in the development."

A recent article published online ahead of appearing in the journal The Breast failed to find evidence of HPV in a study of 81 Swiss women.

"Our analysis could not support a role of HPV in breast carcinoma," the study concludes.





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USGS scientists worry about being muzzled

By John Heilprin
Associated Press
Dec 13 06

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is clamping down on scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, the latest agency subjected to controls on research that might go against official policy.

New rules require screening of all facts and interpretations by agency scientists who study everything from caribou mating to global warming. The rules apply to all scientific papers and other public documents, even minor reports or prepared talks, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Top officials at the Interior Department's scientific arm say the rules only standardize what scientists must do to ensure the quality of their work and give a heads-up to the agency's public relations staff.
"This is not about stifling or suppressing our science, or politicizing our science in any way," Barbara Wainman, the agency's director of communications, said Wednesday. "I don't have approval authority. What it was designed to do is to improve our product flow."

Will objectivity be compromised?

Some agency scientists, who until now have felt free from any political interference, worry that the objectivity of their work could be compromised.

"I feel as though we've got someone looking over our shoulder at every damn thing we do. And to me that's a very scary thing. I worry that it borders on censorship," said Jim Estes, an internationally recognized marine biologist in the USGS field station at Santa Cruz, Calif.

"The explanation was that this was intended to ensure the highest possible quality research," said Estes, a researcher at the agency for more than 30 years. "But to me it feels like they're doing this to keep us under their thumbs. It seems like they're afraid of science. Our findings could be embarrassing to the administration."

The new requirements state that the USGS's communications office must be "alerted about information products containing high-visibility topics or topics of a policy-sensitive nature."

The agency's director, Mark Myers, and its communications office also must be told - prior to any submission for publication - "of findings or data that may be especially newsworthy, have an impact on government policy, or contradict previous public understanding to ensure that proper officials are notified and that communication strategies are developed."

No 'scientific gotcha'

Patrick Leahy, USGS's head of geology and its acting director until September, said Wednesday that the new procedures would improve scientists' accountability and "harmonize" the review process. He said they are intended to maintain scientists' neutrality.

"Our scientific staff is second to none," he said. "This notion of scientific gotcha is something we do not want to participate in. That does not mean to avoid contentious issues."

The changes amount to an overhaul of commonly accepted procedures for all scientists, not just those in government, based on anonymous peer reviews. In that process, scientists critique each other's findings to determine whether they deserve to be published.

From now on, USGS supervisors will demand to see the comments of outside peer reviewers' as well any exchanges between the scientists who are seeking to publish their findings and the reviewers.

Criticism over scientific integrity

The Bush administration, like the Clinton administration before it, has been criticized over scientific integrity issues. In 2002, the USGS was forced to reverse course after warning that oil and gas drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would harm the Porcupine caribou herd. One week later a new report followed, this time saying the caribou would not be affected.

Earlier this year, a USGS scientist poked holes in research that the Interior Department was using in an effort to remove from the endangered species list a tiny jumping mouse that inhabits grasslands coveted by developers in Colorado and Wyoming.

Federal criminal investigators are looking into allegations that USGS employees falsified documents between 1998 and 2000 on the the movement of water through the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada. The USGS had validated the Energy Department's conclusions that water seepage was relatively slow, so radiation would be less likely to escape.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, scientists and advocacy groups alike are worried about closing libraries that contain tens of thousands of agency documents and research studies. "It now appears that EPA officials are dismantling what it likely one of our country's comprehensive and accessible collections of environmental materials," four Democrats who are in line to head House committees wrote EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson two weeks ago.

Democrats about to take control of Congress have investigations into reports by The New York Times and other news organizations that the Bush administration tried to censor government scientists researching global warming at NASA and the Commerce Department.



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US scientists reject interference by Bush Administration

By Jonathan Amos
BBC News, San Francisco
14 Dec 06

Some 10,000 US researchers have signed a statement protesting about political interference in the scientific process.

The statement, which includes the backing of 52 Nobel Laureates, demands a restoration of scientific integrity in government policy.

According to the American Union of Concerned Scientists, data is being misrepresented for political reasons.

It claims scientists working for federal agencies have been asked to change data to fit policy initiatives.
The Union has released an "A to Z" guide that it says documents dozens of recent allegations involving censorship and political interference in federal science, covering issues ranging from global warming to sex education.

Campaigners say that in recent years the White House has been able to censor the work of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration because a Republican congress has been loath to stand up for scientific integrity.

"It's very difficult to make good public policy without good science, and it's even harder to make good public policy with bad science," said Dr Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security.

"In the last several years, we've seen an increase in both the misuse of science and I would say an increase of bad science in a number of very important issues; for example, in global climate change, international peace and security, and water resources."

The statement was released at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting. It is an annual gathering of Earth scientists.

Last year, it triggered a major row when a discussion here resulted in the renowned US space agency climate scientist Dr James Hansen later claiming he had come under pressure not to talk to the media on global warming issues.

Michael Halpern from the UCS said the statement of objection to political interference had been supported by researchers regardless of their political views.

"This science statement that has now been signed by the 10,000 scientists is signed by science advisers to both Republican and Democratic administrations dating back to President Eisenhower, stating that this is not business as usual and calling for this practice to stop," he told BBC News.

The Union said is was hopeful that the new Congress taking office in January would show a greater commitment to protecting the integrity of the scientific process.



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Grab Bag


Snapshot of the US: Annual survey published since 1878 shows dramatic changes in American lives

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian

If you are reading this as you surf the internet while the TV is on, the radio is playing and you are listening to music on your personal stereo you are already tapping into the American way of media multi-tasking.

Data released by the US census bureau today forecasts that Americans will spend a total of 65 days watching TV next year and 41 days listening to the radio. A week each will be given to reading newspapers and surfing the internet.
All that reading, surfing and listening will occupy 3,518 hours of the average American adult's year - the equivalent of almost five months. But such indolence doesn't come cheap. The average American, says the survey, will spend $936 (£475) on media in the coming year.

The information comes in the 126th statistical abstract, which collates data from census bureau studies as well as international organisations, non-profit-making groups and the private sector. The abstract, which has been published most years since 1878, makes comparisons with previous years as well as providing forecasts.

Internet boom


Thus the survey shows that 97 million adult internet users looked for news online in 2005, 92 million bought a product online and 91 million made an online travel reservation. About 16 million Americans used a social or professional networking site such as MySpace, and 13 million created a blog in 2005, with 39 million reading someone else's blog.

The information on internet usage is based on telephone surveys of 2,500 US adults carried out in September 2005 by the Pew Research Centre. The survey also showed that 25 million Americans downloaded videos to their computers, and 24 million remixed material found online to make their own creation.

Despite much speculation about the death of old media and the rise of the new, reading a newspaper and surfing the internet will each consume the same amount of the average American adult's time next year, the census bureau says.

Nevertheless, a week spent reading the news on the internet represents a significant change in habits. Ten years ago, according to a Pew report in the summer, one in 50 Americans regularly got their news from the internet. Today the figure is one in three. But the figures show that the rate of increase in online news readership has slowed since 2000, suggesting, says the report, that "online news has evolved as a supplemental source that is used along with traditional news media outlets. It is valued most for headlines and convenience."

"This new census bureau material highlights just how dramatically we have moved into the information age," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew internet and American life project. "Pick any metric you like and you'll see that the volume of information and media in people's lives has grown, the velocity of that information as it circulates in their lives has increased, and the variety of information has exploded."

Elsewhere the census bureau statistics showed that people in US households drank an average of 88 litres of bottled water in 2004, compared with 10 litres each in 1980. But while some were enjoying mountain-fresh water, others were struggling to get enough food. Out of 112m households, 11.9m were deemed "food insecure" in a 2004 survey by the US department of agriculture. Food insecure is defined as having "limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways". The figures do not include homeless people.

The lives of those with homes were often made uncomfortable by nasty smells. In 2005 residents of 3.7m housing units said that they were bothered by odours in the neighbourhood.

At the other extreme, the US has more millionaires than ever before, 3.5 million of them, according to internal revenue service figures published at the end of last year. More than half a million live in California.

And as the ranks of the rich have increased, so the beliefs and aspirations of the young have evolved. In 1970, 85% of university entrants thought abortion should be legalised, 59% thought capital punishment should be abolished and 57% aimed to keep up with political affairs. By 2005, those figures had fallen to 55% in favour of legalised abortion, 33% against capital punishment, and 36% who aimed to follow politics.

And while in 1970, 79% of university entrants said they had a personal objective of "developing a meaningful philosophy of life", by last year 75% defined their objective as "being very well off financially".

- The first survey of 1878: Aliens, postmasters and budding industry

The US census bureau issued its first statistical aggregate in 1878. "Sir," wrote the treasury secretary, John Sherman, in a letter to the speaker of the House of Representatives, Samuel Randall, "I have the honour to transmit ... a statistical abstract ... this abstract embraces tables in regard to finance, coinage, commerce, immigration, tonnage and navigation, the postal service, public lands, railroads, agriculture and mining."

The 160-page document goes on to catalogue a very different world from this week's study.

The lists of Alien Passengers Arrived in the United States from Foreign Countries between 1861 and 1870 shows that the largest group, 1.1 million, came from the British Isles. A further million came from the rest of Europe, mostly from Germany, although three Corsicans and eight Maltese also made it across the Atlantic. Unlike today, Asia and Latin America made modest contributions, with 363,000 arriving from the "Americas" and 68,000 from Asia.

Of the 38.5 million population recorded in the 1870 census, the bulk lived in the eastern states, with New York having the largest population, 4.4 million. Pennsylvania, with 3.8 million, was close behind.

The population figures show the country before the huge expansion to the west. Outside California - misspelled as Caliofrnia in the official table - which had a population of 500,000, the most populous of the western states was New Mexico, with 96,000.

That population relied on the postal service to communicate. In 1790, the data shows, the postal service had 75 post offices in the entire nation, offering 1,875 miles of post routes and taking almost $38,000 in revenue. By 1878 there were more than 39,000 post offices serving 300,000 miles of post routes and taking in $29m.

Some of that mail and much of the population would travel by railway, with the number of miles of railway in the country rising from 22 in 1830 to 79,000 by 1879.

The year also saw the births of a number of figures who would help to define America's transition into the modern age: the poet Carl Sandburg, the African-American boxer Jack Johnson (left), the film actor Lionel Barrymore, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the writer and social activist Upton Sinclair were all born in 1878.



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Diverting Red Sea to Save Dead Sea Could Create Environmental Crisis

Mati Milstein
National Geographic News
December 14, 2006

A multibillion-dollar canal project that would divert water from the Red Sea to save the shrinking Dead Sea may inadvertently cause critical environmental side effects.

Israel, Syria, and Jordan all siphon water from upstream sources that drain into the Dead Sea.

Because of this, the sea's water level has dropped some 82 feet (25 meters) over the past century, losing between 31.5 and 39 inches (80 and 100 centimeters) every year.
At a meeting this past Sunday representatives from Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority agreed to examine the feasibility of building a canal to channel seawater north from the Red Sea into the Dead Sea.

The 112-mile-long (180-kilometer-long) Two Seas Canal project would cost the equivalent of two to four billion U.S. dollars. The canal would send between 317 and 396 gallons (1.2 and 1.5 billion cubic meters) of water into the Dead Sea annually.

"This project will help ease the shortage of water for all of us," Israeli National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said at the Sunday summit, according to the Reuters news service.

"A peace agreement is a piece of paper that can be cemented only though economic projects."

But Eilon Adar, director of the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, warned that major natural engineering projects inevitably create negative impacts.

Leaky Canal?

The principle problem with the Two Seas Canal, Adar said, is its location in the Arava Valley, part of the earthquake-prone Syrian-African rift.

A canal rushing with seawater in a seismologically volatile valley could spell disaster for the area's underground freshwater aquifers.



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Thieves make off with Bizet's bust in series of cemetery raids

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian

First Oscar Wilde's tomb was defaced with hundreds of lipstick kisses. Then Jim Morrison's grave had to be protected by a full-time security guard from fans who had painted arrows on other tombs pointing the way "to Jim".

Now the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where famous residents such as Molière, Marcel Proust, Edith Piaf and Maria Callas attract 2 million visitors a year, has been the victim of theft.

Six bronze busts were stolen last month from its 19th century tombs, including that of Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen.
The busts dated from the second half of the 19th century and were made by well-known artists of the time. Each is worth between €5,000 and €10,000.

The Paris city hall, which oversees the oldest cemetery in the French capital, has lodged an official complaint with police, Le Parisien reported yesterday.

"It's the work of an expert," a source familiar with the case told the newspaper. The source added that the robberies were probably carried out to order for a collector.

Hugues de Bazelaire, who works on the restoration of funeral monuments, said there was a thriving black market in pieces from French graveyards.

Jean-Claude Hitz, a trade union representative for Paris cemetery workers said that although efforts had been made to provide security for the Père-Lachaise, "20 or so wardens were not enough ... at a site whose five gates are open to the public, where the landscape is hilly and where someone can hide behind a cross or a tombstone, out of sight".



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Embassies and public duped by Belgian TV hoax

Nicholas Watt in Brussels
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian

For a brief moment on Wednesday night it appeared that Belgium had disappeared. The main French language television station hoodwinked the country into thinking that it had split in two when it reported that Flanders had issued a unilateral declaration of independence.

The hoax, modelled on Orson Welles' famous War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938, kicked off at 8.21pm, when RTBF broke into its main current affairs programme with a newsflash. The Flemish parliament, in the northern half of the country, had just voted to secede from the Kingdom of Belgium.
Flag-waving Flemish nationalists outside the parliament illustrated the story which was then driven home to alarmed viewers with the news that King Albert II had fled the country, possibly to the former Belgian colony of Congo. Grainy pictures from a military airfield showed the royals, who hail from the Francophone tradition, boarding a plane.

Within seconds of the broadcast thousands of concerned viewers bombarded the television station with phone calls and its website crashed. Nervous embassies called the Belgian government to find out whether their job had been split in two.

"Ambassadors who were worried asked what they had to tell their capitals," the senate chair, Anne-Marie Lizin, told AP. "This fiction was seen as a reality and it created a catastrophic image of the country."

The panic persuaded RTBF to reassure viewers. At 8.50pm it flashed the message: "This is fiction."

This failed to calm political leaders in both halves of Belgium, who condemned RTBF.

Yves Thiran, the head of news at RTBF, said he wanted to provoke a debate before next year's general election.



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Google to "consider" removing "offensive material" from Google Earth

by lambert
14 Dec 06

Sure, it was a giant humongous image of Mr. P-Niss-those crazy, lovable Brits-but what next? The Moonie wire service:

STOCKTON-ON-TEES, England, Dec. 13 (UPI) - Pranksters drew a willy on the roof of a top British prep school that was so big it could be seen from space - and, in fact, was found on Google Earth.


Excellent! Clearly these British lads have no soy in their diet!
A couple of former students from the Yarm School in Stockton-on-Tees - an elite school whose tuition is $5,700 a term - "hopped over the school fence on a weekend and went unnoticed by guards," a former student told London's Sun newspaper.

"They managed to get on the roof of the Friary building and somehow mark on the willy," the student continued. "They also burnt a manhood into the grass."

The shape on the roof has been scrubbed off, but it could still be seen on Google Wednesday.

"If users spot something offensive, we would consider having it removed," Google said.


First, they airbrush Cheney's bunker, now, they'll do the same for "willies" and "manhoods"-what next?

Seriously:

Suppose somebody stamps a huge defaced cross into a snow field, somewhere up in the frozen north, and the Christianist "War on Christmas" loons go nuts. Will Google "consider" censoring this image?

What about Chinese characters that the Chinese government might not like?

What about "Fuck Bush"?

Where does Google's "consideration" stop?



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Alarm sounded on future space warfare - Terrorists may target satellite systems, Bush administration says

By Barry Schweid
MSNBC
Dec. 13, 2006

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration warned Wednesday against threats by terrorist groups and other nations against U.S. commercial and military satellites, and discounted the need for a treaty aimed at preventing an arms race in space.

Undersecretary of State Robert G. Joseph also reasserted U.S. policy that it has a right to use force against hostile nations or terror groups that might try to attack American satellites or ground installations that support space programs. President Bush adopted a new U.S. space policy earlier this year.

"We reserve the right to defend ourselves against hostile attacks and interference with our space assets," Joseph said in prepared remarks to the George C. Marshall Institute.
Joseph, the senior arms control official at the State Department, said nations cannot all be counted on to use space purely for peaceful purposes.

"A number of countries are exploring and acquiring capabilities to counter, attack, and defeat U.S. space systems," Joseph said

9/11 invoked
He also said terrorists "understand our vulnerabilities and have targeted our economy in the past, as they did on 9/11." He said terrorists and enemy states might view the U.S. space program as "a highly lucrative target," while sophisticated technologies could improve their ability to interfere with U.S. space systems and services.

Joseph did not identify terror groups or nations that might have such motives. An aide to Joseph, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter, said that information was classified.

"For our part, we must take all of these threats seriously because space capabilities are essential" to the U.S. economy and government, Joseph said. He said the U.S. is more reliant on space than any other country.

"No nation, no state-actor, should be under the illusion that the United States will tolerate a denial of our right to the use of space for peaceful purposes," he said.

Claims challenged
Wade Boese, a spokesman for the private Arms Control Association, challenged the adminstration's policy. He said rejecting additional international arms controls for space runs counter to U.S. security interests "because the United States has the most to lose from an unregulated space arena."

Boese said he believes the administration wants to avoid negotiations in order to preserve the possibility of deploying space-based missile defense systems, such as interceptors.



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Cosmic Weather


Feeling strange? Severe Space Storm Headed to Earth

By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
13 December 2006

Space weather forecasters revised their predictions for storminess after a major flare erupted on the Sun overnight threatening damage to communication systems and power grids while offering up the wonder of Northern Lights.

"We're looking for very strong, severe geomagnetic storming" to begin probably around mid-day Thursday, Joe Kunches, Lead Forecaster at the NOAA Space Environment Center, told SPACE.com this afternoon.

The storm is expected to generate aurora or Northern Lights, as far south as the northern United States Thursday night. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are not expected to be put at additional risk, Kunches said.
Radio communications, satellites and power grids could face potential interruptions or damage, however.

Solar flares send radiation to Earth within minutes. Some are also accompanied by coronal mass ejections (CME), clouds of charged particles that arrive in a day or two. This flare unleashed a strong CME that's aimed squarely at Earth.

"It's got all the right stuff," Kunches said.

However, one crucial component to the storm is unknown: its magnetic orientation. If it lines up a certain way with Earth's magnetic field, then the storm essentially pours into our upper atmosphere. If the alignment is otherwise, the storm can pass by the planet with fewer consequences.

Kunches and his team are advising satellite operators and power grid managers to keep an eye on their systems. In the past, CMEs have knocked out satellites and tripped terrestrial power grids. Engineers have learned to limit switching at electricity transfer stations, and satellite operators sometimes reduce operations or make back-up plans in case a craft is damaged.

Another aspect of a CME involves protons that get pushed along by the shock wave. Sometimes these protons break through Earth's protective magnetic field and flood the outer reaches of the atmosphere-where the space station orbits-with radiation. The science of it all is a gray area, Kunches said. But the best guess now is that there will only be a slight increase in proton activity. That's good news for the astronauts.

"When the shock goes by, we don't expect significant radiation issues," he said.

The astronauts were ordered to a protective area of the space station as a precaution last night.

Now that sunspot number 930 has flared so significantly-after several days of being quiet-the forecast calls for a "reasonble chance" of more major flares in coming days, Kunches said.



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Freak solar explosion disrupts satellites

by Anna Salleh
ABC Science Online

Communication systems are being disrupted by the effects of an unusually large solar explosion that started lashing the Earth this week.

The explosion could also cause spectacular auroras in the night skies as far north as Sydney, weather permitting.

Dr David Cole, director of the Australian Government's space weather service, says the massive solar explosion as the Sun is supposed to be in a fairly quiet phase.

"We didn't expect anything in particular and suddenly this turns up and it's really fierce," says Cole, of IPS Radio and Space Services in Sydney.
When magnetic fields in the Sun coalesce in dark regions called sunspots they can explode sending a blast of radiation. Such solar flares reach Earth within minutes.

This is followed by a cloud of plasma or coronal mass ejection (CME) that takes a day or so to reach Earth.

The flare and CME alter the ionosphere, the outermost part of Earth's atmosphere, and cause problems with communication systems.

Unpredictable

Although solar explosions are random, they are more likely to happen when the Sun is most active, during what is called a solar maximum that happens every 11 years. But there is currently a solar minimum.

Cole says solar flares are hard to predict because there are no models of how they work.

While Coles' agency suspected something might happen when they saw a sunspot pointing directly at the Earth and a build up in magnetic fields, they couldn't tell exactly if or when an explosion would occur.

"It's like someone snapping their fingers, you don't know when they're going to do it," he says.

GPS and short-wave communications blocked

Cole says the solar flare that reached the Earth mid-week, had possibly the strongest emission at 1.4 gigahertz ever seen, matching almost exactly the wavelength GPS satellites use.

He says communication with GPS navigation satellites in the lower ionosphere was blacked out for up to two hours.

Short-wave radio communications, used by defence forces, aviation and emergency services, were also affected, says Cole. Such communications pass through or bounce off the ionosphere.

But Cole stresses air traffic control does not rely on short-wave communication.

Fire fighters affected?

Another CME reached Earth today and Cole predicts its effects on short-wave communications will last throughout the weekend.

It might also affect short-wave communication of some personnel currently fighting Australia's severe bushfires.

He says his agency will let such emergency services know which frequencies will be unaffected by the CME so they can use these instead.

Cole says electricity grids close to the poles could also be disrupted today by the CME.

Cole says the same sunspot produced caused less serious explosions earlier this month and may cause another in around two weeks time.

Spacewalkers take cover

While humans on Earth are protected from the effects of solar explosions, those in space are vulnerable, says Cole.

For instance this week astronauts on the shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station have been sleeping in protected areas and may need to cut planned spacewalks short if radiation levels get too high.



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Public preparedness for a big shake is down

By Brian DeNeal
The Daily Register
Thursday, December 14, 2006

SALINE COUNTY - We are within an earthquake hot zone being between the New Madrid and Wabash Valley fault zones. A powerful earthquake can happen literally any time, but we don't think about it and we most likely are not ready for it.

Saline County Emergency Services and Disaster Agency Coordinator Allan C. Ninness is trying to get the public to prepare and reiterated the need to prepare during a seminar Wednesday at Southeastern Illinois College.

Ninness began talking about Ivan Browning who thought he could predict an earthquake. The date was Dec. 3, 1990. The day came and went, uneventfully, but people paid enough attention many prepared for it.
"Do you think the preparedness level kept going up? No. The preparedness level at home, work and school went down, down and down," Ninness said.

Most of us only think about earthquakes when we feel a tremor. Near Eldorado in January there was a quake measuring 3.4 on the Richter scale that caught people's attention.

"Those little ones should be reminders to us the big one is out there," Ninness said.

One of the first things people need to realize when preparing for "the big one" is that they will probably be stuck on their property for several days and their house may not be safe enough to stay in. Roads may be too damaged to drive on, bridges may be out, there may be no water or electricity and police and firefighters will likely have too much to do to help out.

People will likely be living in tents in their yards. How do people decide on the emergency items to keep in a preparedness kit?

"Move into your front yard for a week and everything you want with you, that's what you need in the kit," Ninness said.

A few necessary items include a flashlight, battery powered radio and plenty of batteries. Ninness said people should keep at least five days supply of food and water, but more is better.

"The area of devastation could be rather large. There could be a 300 mile circle of devastation," Ninness said.

People should not plan on getting any kind of help very soon.

He said everyone needs a family communications plan. They need to know how they will communicate and reunite.

"You might plan to meet back at the house, but may not be able to get to the house so you want a secondary meeting spot," Ninness said.

Families should have an out of state contact so if they are seperated, all family members know to call that person to exchange information. The earthquake could knock out local telephone service, but long distance service may not be interrupted.

People should plan on there being debris, including broken glass, everywhere, so it is a good idea, especially for women who wear heels, to keep an extra pair of sneakers in the trunk of the car.

Ninness said everyone needs to know how to turn off water, gas mains and electrical utilities in the case of a leak. But he said not to shut off the gas unless there is a leak because it may be needed.

Water heaters should be secured to walls. The water heaters could come in quite handy even if the power is off. They contain about 40 gallons of water you may need for drinking.

Bolt woodburning stoves down and keep heavy objects on the lower shelves.

Ninness said people need to pay attention to the objects that are around them in the places they spend most of their time. For many, those places are a desk at an office and in bed.

"I have two bookshelves that are going to fall on me in the basement of the courthouse," Ninness said.

Around beds there are often mirrors and picture frames that could fall on people during the night if they are not firmly secured to walls.

When the quake happens, people should try to seek cover under a desk, bed or in a doorway immediately. Once the shaking stops they should try to get outside which may be easier said than done.

"Debris is going to be everywhere. I imagine walking through this room would be like walking throug a plate full of spaghetti. There is going to be stuff everywhere," Ninness said.

Under the bed is a good place to keep a duffel back of clothing and emergency supplies.

There may be aftershocks. When the shaking is done, people need to check for fire hazards and structural damage after each aftershock. In checking damage it is not a good idea to use candles in the house because of the fire potential, especially in houses using natural gas.

If driving, people will likely only feel a very large earthquake. If so, he said drivers should pull over, get out of traffic and try not to stop under an overpass or under power lines. Stay with the vehicle and listen to the radio for emergency broadcasts.

Ninness said any open containers could contain shards of glass. People can strain liquids through a handkerchief to make sure they don't ingest glass. Food in the refrigerator should be eaten first, freezer second and cupboard third because of the risk of spoiling.

Don't use the telephone except genuine emergency calls, Ninness said. He recalls one local quake that resulted in 911 calls in the thousands.

"It was people calling to ask if it was an earthquake. Don't do that, please. Turn on the radio. Don't pick up the phone and call somebody and say, 'Did you feel that?' It ties up the lines," Ninness said.

Ninness said other don't include rumor spreading and sightseeing following the quake.

Ninness also said emergency crews will be needing and asking for help. People should be prepared to help in whatever way they are needed at that moment.

SIC President Dr. Ray Cummiskey asked for advice on what should be done at the college. It is a large campus and there are many people there at any given time.

Ninness said personnel should be trained on the college's earthquake emergency plan.

"You have to be self-sufficient. Mutual aid has been taken away from us," Ninness said.

"There is a very huge possibility you will have to stay here a while."

Ninness said the college should consider earthquake drills and exercises.

"They are hard to do, it takes time away from class time, but it can also save you," Ninness said.



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Do we still need to wake up to the future?

David Adam, Environment correspondent
Guardian Unlimited
Dec. 15th, 2006

Climate change:
Droughts? Storms? Heatwaves? Alarming predictions of the creeping effects on global warming, regularly described by politicians and top scientists as the greatest threat faced by the human race, are ignored by almost a third of Britons, the ICM poll on behalf of the Guardian suggests. Some 31% of people dismissed the threat of climate change, insisting that it would have little or no impact in their lifetimes. Not unreasonably perhaps, 42% of the over 65s thought they would not live long enough to witness the effects first-hand, but a surprising 39% of those aged 18-24 - supposedly the most environmentally conscious generation - were very relaxed about the perceived threat.
About two-thirds of people polled thought they would experience moderate or severe effects, with 21% plumping for the worst case scenario. In contrast to the earlier finding, the most concerned age group questioned were the 18-24s (with 28% classing the likely impact as severe). Overall, a pessimistic 13% thought that rising sea levels meant that the home they currently live in would be underwater within 40 years - with 21% of Londoners believing they face catastrophic submergence by 2046.

How do those results sit with the science? Sea levels first, and the Londoners can breathe (relatively) easily. Sea levels will not get anywhere near high enough to inundate the city unless the mighty Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt, which even the most pessimistic forecasts rule out for several centuries at least. Most sea level rise over the coming century will be driven by thermal expansion: the water gets bigger as it warms.

By the 2050s seas around most of England could be 30cm higher, with the rise in the north-west and Scotland not as severe - the entire UK is slowly tilting (southeast down) as the bedrock it sits on recovers from the most recent ice age.

How will this affect us? Scientists are reluctant to simply morph sea level changes on to contour maps, because it is unrealistic to expect no action to be taken to defend valuable land. In other places, the sea could be allowed to advance in a managed retreat.

With sea level higher, the risk of flooding will increase. Vulnerable areas will be underwater more often, and places with no history of floods could be threatened.

By the 2080s, sea levels could be 70cm higher at the southern end of the UK and some 50cm up along the north-western coast. An estimated 2 million extra people will be at risk of flooding and there will be a 17-fold increase in the flood risk along the east coast. London could face a £25bn clean-up bill after a freak storm surge that would overwhelm the Thames barrier. Higher sea levels mean deeper coastal water and more powerful waves battering the shore, which will break down defences and erode soil.

As far as the wider impacts of climate change, then it is hard to escape the evidence that some are already upon us. This year's July and September were the hottest ever and air temperatures across the globe are on the rise. In the Arctic, the mass of sea ice that surrounds the north pole has reached a series of record lows since 2002 and the sea off the Antarctic peninsula is warming so quickly that experts have sounded the alarm over whether its fragile marine species can adapt in time.

Closer to home, warmer winters and a longer growing season have baffled wildlife and disrupted the delicate natural rhythms that drive food availability. Contrary to some over-excited headlines, individual weather events like this summer's heatwave cannot be pinned on global warming, but they are exactly in line with what climate scientists predict.

In 2004 Peter Stott, a Met Office expert, and scientists at Oxford University showed that human emissions of greenhouse gases had more than doubled the risk of record-breaking heatwaves such as the one that is reckoned to have killed 27,000 people across Europe in 2003.

Perhaps the 31% of the poll respondents, who do not foresee any impact, care little for ice and wildlife at the ends of the world, and view changing weather patterns as par for the course. Maybe they are waiting for an impact on their own lives. David Miliband, environment secretary, may have provided it earlier this year. Speaking on possible solutions to climate change, Mr Miliband floated the idea of carbon rationing - which could force consumers to carry a swipe card that records their personal carbon allocation.

Under the scheme, all UK citizens would be allocated an identical annual carbon allowance, stored as points on an electronic card similar to Air Miles or supermarket loyalty cards. Points would be deducted at point of sale for every purchase of non-renewable energy, such as petrol or flight tickets. People who did not use their full allocation, such as families who do not own a car, would be able to sell their surplus carbon points into a central bank. A pilot scheme is on the drawing board. The potential impact on all our lives is beyond dispute.



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The Solution to Global Warming Is Us

By Julia Whitty
Mother Jones
December 15, 2006.


What if 12 asteroids were on collision courses with earth? What if we could alter their trajectories and save our planet by the cumulative effect of our individual efforts? What if science and history proved that we were fully capable of such heroism? What would it take to get us started?
John Schellnhuber, distinguished science advisor at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom, has identified 12 global warming tipping points, such as the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest or the melting of the west Antarctic ice sheet. Any of these, if triggered, will likely initiate sudden changes across the planet, as cataclysmic as any asteroid strike. So what will it take to trigger what we might call the 13th tipping point, the shift from personal denial to personal responsibility? What will tip us toward addressing global warming with the urgency it deserves, as the mother of all threats to homeland security?

A 2005 study on Americans' perceptions of global warming found that most are moderately concerned, but 68 percent believe the greatest threats are to people far away or to nonhuman nature -- a dangerous and delusional misperception. Only 13 percent perceive risk to themselves, their families or their communities.

Many secretly perceive global warming to be an insoluble problem and respond by circling the family wagons and turning inward. Yet science shows that human beings are born with powerful tools for solving this quandary. We have the genetic smarts and the cultural smarts. We have the technological know-how. We even have the inclination.

The truth is we can change ourselves with breathtaking speed, sculpting even "immutable" human nature. Forty years ago many believed human nature mandated that blacks and whites live in segregation; 30 years ago human nature divided men and women into separate economies; 20 years ago human nature prevented us from defusing a global nuclear standoff, but in 1987 the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the INF agreement. Nowadays we blame human nature for the insolvable hazards of global warming.

Research out of the Max Planck Institute in Germany suggests how we might help ourselves evolve. We behave as better environmental citizens when educated about the science of global warming, and when our individual actions are visible to those around us -- a phenomenon known as "social facilitation." Perhaps if we're vigorously informed of how global warming endangers our neighborhoods, we'll individually forego the McMansions and the Hummers and make other sustainable choices. Anything less compromises our children's future.

Until then, our denial facilitates "social loafing": the tendency of individuals to slack when work is shared and individual performance is not assessed. There's no better example than the U.S. Congress, where members cloak their lethargy regarding global warming behind the stultifying inactivity of their fellows. And why not? After all, who's watching?

Not the media, which habitually squelch new science stories on global warming by rationalizing that we've heard that before , though they would never ignore another round of Middle East bloodletting. The growing body of scientific knowledge on climate change gains heft and power as it accumulates, but the public rarely hears about it, reinforcing our loafing.

Scientists don't help when they react to the terrifying dimensions of public ignorance by sheltering inside hallowed halls. At a recent meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology, 70 percent of members argued in favor of advocating real solutions to environmental problems directly to lethargic policymakers and the press. Yet most researchers remain sequestered at a time when we need their knowledge and expertise like never before.

The nature of tipping points is that they happen dizzyingly fast. The good news is that history proves we're capable of keeping up. Social scientists once believed it would take decades of government pressure and education for Americans to choose smaller families, since the desire to procreate is an absolute part of the human animal, or so they thought. Yet population growth radically declined over only three years in the 1970s -- one woman at a time -- without an ounce of government involvement.

Political leaders can help. But even without them we can help ourselves. Whether or not Marie Antoinette actually said, "Let them eat cake," she inspired change that reverberated far beyond Europe. Likewise, when George W. Bush says we can't act on global warming until we "fully understand the nature of the problem," we can use his callous disregard as a rallying cry.

The truth is, humans can change, and change fast. Our hallmark is adaptability. Long ago, we looked out from the trees and saw the savannas. Beyond the savannas we glimpsed further frontiers. History proves that when we behold a better world, we move toward it -- one person at a time -- leaving behind what no longer works. We know what to do. We know how to do it. We know the timeline. We are our own tipping point.

This piece is adapted from a longer article in the current issue of Mother Jones.

Julia Whitty is a contributing writer for Mother Jones and the author of the forthcoming book The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific.




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Rising oceans could threaten low-lying coasts

By Alister Doyle
Reuters
Dec 14 06

OSLO - The world's oceans may rise up to 140 cms (4 feet, 7 inches) by 2100 due to global warming, a faster-than-expected increase that could threaten low-lying coasts from Florida to Bangladesh, a researcher said on Thursday.

"The possibility of a faster sea level rise needs to be considered when planning adaptation measures such as coastal defences," Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research wrote in the journal Science.
His study, based on air temperatures and past sea level changes rather than computer models, suggested seas could rise by 50-140 cms (19.69-55.12 inches) by 2100, well above the 9-88 cms (3.54-34.65 inches) projected by the scientific panel that advises the United Nations.

A rise of one meter, or over 3 feet, might swamp low-lying Pacific islands such as Tuvalu, flood large areas of Bangladesh or Florida and threaten cities from New York to Buenos Aires.

"The computer models underestimate the sea level rise that has already occurred," Rahmstorf told Reuters of a rise of about 20 cms (7.87 inches) since 1900. "There are aspects of the physics we don't understand very well."

Sea level changes hinge on poorly understood factors such as the pace of the melt of glaciers and of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Water also expands as it gets warmer but the rate of penetration of heat to the depths is uncertain.

"My main conclusion is not that my forecast is better but that the uncertainty is much larger because of the different results you get with reasonable methods," he said.

Almost all climate scientists reckon the world is warming because of emissions of greenhouse gases from human use of fossil fuels in factories, power plants and cars. Rising temperatures could bring more droughts, floods and heatwaves.

Rahmstorf likened his approach to predicting the height of tides along a coast, largely based on past observations.

He said seas were 120 meters (just under 400 feet) and below present levels during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago. Seas are 25-35 metres (82-114.83 feet) higher than the present in the Pliocene epoch 3 million years ago.

In the Ice Age temperatures were 4-7 Celsius (7.2-12.6 Fahrenheit) cooler than today and 2-3 C (3.6-5.4F) warmer in the Pliocene. That suggested sea levels change 10-30 metres per rise or fall per degree Celsius (1.8F), over thousands of years.

The U.N. climate panel has projected temperatures will rise by 1.4-5.8C (2.5-10.4F) by 2100, mainly because of human influences.

"Sea level is a very slow component of the climate system so what we see by the year 2100 is just a small percentage of the total we are causing," Rahmstorf said.

There was still time for the world to cut greenhouse gas emissions but he said the slow pace of U.N. talks on extending the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 "gives you the impression that governments are not very well aware of how urgent the whole problem has become". Coastal cities in the North Atlantic - from New York to London - could be especially vulnerable because a possible slowdown of ocean currents could also raise sea levels in the North Atlantic and lower them in the southern hemisphere.

"Any time you change ocean currents you change the sea surface...if you slow down the North Atlantic current you get a rise in the North Atlantic," Rahmstorf said.

Comment: The higher levels of global governments are perfectly aware of the danger of Climate change and are feathering their bunkers accordingly. They may however have underestimated just how quickly change may arrive. See our research in Earth and Climate Changes supplment for more details.

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Down the Tubes


Data restrictions cost economy £500m

Michael Cross
The Guardian
Thursday December 14, 2006


Fair trade watchdog blasts government agencies for manipulating the market in public sector information

The Office of Fair Trading has put a price on the cost to the economy of not making more government data freely available: £500m. In a long-awaited report on public sector information - data created as a byproduct of government activities - the watchdog says that government policy allows public bodies to rig markets for data they generate in their own favour. It also found evidence that public bodies are secretive about the data they hold, restrictive in the way they license it, and may be abusing their position as monopolies.ting the market in public sector information.
Although stopping short of endorsing Technology Guardian's Free Our Data proposal, the report says the Treasury should investigate the benefits of making those public sector databases freely available for commercial re-use. Confusion in government policy is stifling the re-use of data - and that policy "could be better informed by a proper assessment of whether [information] be provided for free".

The 180-page report (avilable as a 707KB PDF at oft.gov.uk) also fires a shot across the bows of Ordnance Survey, the largest and most successful player in the public sector data market. It warns of "further action" unless the mapping agency changes the way it works with businesses that use its data (see below). This could include a referral to the Competition Commission, which has the power to order OS to change its business model.

Full potential

Covering many of the conflicts highlighted by the Guardian's campaign, the report - in preparation since June 2005 - says the huge resources of data created at taxpayers' expense are not being exploited to their full potential. Today, the market in maps, weather forecasts and other products created from public sector information is worth about £590m a year to the UK economy; creating a level playing field would double that sum to around £1.1bn, the OFT says.

The OFT draws a distinction between "raw" data, collected in the course of government work, and "refined" data which has been processed for sale or other use. It praises some organisations, such as British Geological Survey, for making the raw data from its notebooks available for free. Problems arise with organisations that both collect and refine data - but offer no easy way for the private sector to access the raw data. Guardian Technology's Free Our Data campaign argues that the raw data collected by government agencies should be made available for no more than the cost of simple distribution (which online is free). Furthermore, there is obvious economic benefit in making refined data generated by government bodies with a statutory duty to be comprehensive - such as Ordnance Survey and the UK Hydrographic Office - free for re-use on the same conditions.

Abuse of position


The report's concerns include:

- Organisations with monopolies in raw data may be abusing their position by providing the data to their own commercial operations on better terms.

- Organisations are reluctant to provide "unrefined" data.

- High prices and poor customer service. More than one third of businesses relying on public sector information reported problems with their supplier.

- "Significant evidence" of unreasonable licensing conditions, such as requiring a company to share its business plan with a potential competitor.

- Failure to provide separate accounts for activities involving raw and refined data.

- "Extremely limited and insufficient" resources at the sector regulator, the Office of Public Sector Information.

Despite its concerns, the report finds evidence of good practice. As well as British Geological Survey, it also commends the Met Office for transparent accounts. To create a level playing field, the OFT says government bodies should make their unrefined information available for re-use, priced at no more than the cost of producing it.

It also recommends that holders of public sector information split their accounts to show how much they earn from refined and unrefined data and set simpler and less intrusive licensing conditions. The Treasury should give the Office of Public Sector Information more resources and new powers to check compliance to the rules, to conduct unannounced "information audits", for example.

Government, led by the Department of Trade and Industry, has 90 days to say whether it accepts the OFT's recommendations. Many of the concerns raised about the market in public sector information could be resolved if government bodies pulled out of the market in value-added products and made their unrefined data available for free, the OFT says. The drawback is that barring public bodies from the market might mean some products would not be developed. Ordnance Survey, for example, says large parts of the country would no longer be mapped. The OFT says such questions are outside its remit.

Nonetheless the OFT's conclusion - that society as a whole gains from encouraging the wider re-use of public sector data - is more ammunition for this growing campaign to free our digital crown jewels.

Ordanance Survey targeted in explosive report


Of the 120 government bodies earning income by supplying information, the Office of Fair Trading selects one for special attention. Ordnance Survey (OS) not only has the largest revenues (£100m a year), it is also unique in the "nature and seriousness" of problems reported by businesses using its data. The OFT found: - OS's licensing terms allow it to refuse to allow its data to be used in products intended to compete with any product Ordnance Survey markets - or intends to market.

- Companies wishing to license OS information must share their business plans with the organisation. OS says this is essential to set fair prices; the OFT says it is unreasonable.

- One company that wanted to bid for a government contract in competition with OS could not licence information from OS on terms that would comply with the bid.

The OFT notes that "one of the more noticeable factors is the way in which previous attempts by regulators and other bodies to influence the behaviour of OS have met with resistance", and criticises OS's lawyers for relying on "the most recent statement of the outer limits" of competition law to defend its terms and conditions.

The OFT says it has discussed its concerns both with OS and its parent ministry, the Department for Communities and Local Government. It warns that if its concerns are not resolved "we would need to consider whether further action by the OFT would be warranted". OS responded that it would give the OFT's recommendations "very careful and serious consideration".

Still, OS had one piece of good news this week: the Office of Public Sector Information failed to uphold a complaint lodged in October on behalf of organisations wanting to re-use census data. However the changes called for by the OFT, especially in making raw data available without strings to competitors, will be harder to shrug off.

- Join the debate at the Free Our Data blog: freeourdata.org.uk



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US banks predict sterling set to crash

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Telegraph.co.uk
12/12/2006


America's elite banks are expecting sterling to plummet next year after its meteoric rise to near $2 this autumn, believing Britain's growth surge to be well past its sell-by-date. Goldman Sach has advised sophisticated investors take out a "short" position against pound on the derviatves markets as its top trade for 2007, a bet that the currency will fall.


US banks predict sterling fall, pound coins
America's top banks expect the pound to plummet

"The UK remains the largest current account deficit country in Western Europe, with a substantially overvalued currency - about 13pc on a trade-weighted basis," said the bank in a client note.

Jens Nordvig, a Goldman Sachs currency strategist, said the credit cycle was turning as the Bank of England finished raising rates, ending the yield premium over European investments that has made UK bonds so attractive.

"There are quite a few risks in Britain, especially in the housing market, but this is more a case of Europe doing better rather than the UK falling off a cliff," he said.

Lehman Brothers is even more bearish on Britain, warning in its global outlook for 2007 that the glory days of UK dynamism are drawing to a close. It predicted that Britain's FTSE 100 would lag the other major stock markets in 2007, calling for a cut in the UK weighting of global equities from 10pc to 7pc.

The US investment bank also warned that the odds of an outright recession in the US had shortened to 4/1, though it is still betting that the housing slide will bottom out soon enough to ensure a softish "bumpy" landing.

Alan Castle, Lehman's UK economist, said the pound would fall to $1.82 in 2007 and to $1.68 by the end of 2008 as UK Inc gradually goes out of favour.

"I'm not saying that things will be terrrible, but they will feel much worse," he said. The property boom may continue for a few more months as buyers exploit interest-only mortgages and lax credit offers, but would sputter out in the second half of 2007. He expects interest rates to peak at 5.25pc early next year.

"The surprise is that the pound has been so strong. Current account deficits matter over time and we're worried that Britain's deficit could widen to 4pc of GDP in 2008," he said.

Sterling has a been favourite choice for global central banks switching reserves out of dollars over the last two years but Lehman Brothers said the effect was "starting to fade". Fresh data from the Office for National Statistics show private investors are now the main foreign buyers of UK gilts.

The Bank of Italy switched 20pc of its reserves into sterling last year, while Russia and Switzerland have both raised their share to 10pc. But the data is often out of date when published, reflecting a trend that may already have reversed.

Traders suspect that central banks and Middle East institutions are now targeting the yen, which is at a record low against the euro. The Bank of International Settlements said in its quarterly report yesterday that Saudi investors had been switching out of dollars into Japanese bonds.

Lehman Brothers expects the yen to rocket 12pc against the euro in 2007 as Japan finally claws its way out of deflation.



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The Economy: Not Looking Like Christmas

by Peter Coy
Business Week
30 Nov 06

Don't jingle any bells for the U.S. economy as the holiday season heats up. From major headline numbers like the gross domestic product (GDP) report to out-of-the-way stats like truck tonnage, the economy seems to be stuck in below-trend growth. Let's hope Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is right that things will get better in 2007.
Start with the biggest number of the week: the Commerce Dept.'s Nov. 29 revision of third-quarter GDP. It looked positive at first glance: a 2.2%, instead of a 1.6%, annual rate of growth in GDP in the third quarter. Stocks even rallied, with strong gains from AT&T (T) and Dell (DELL) to ExxonMobil (XOM) and ConocoPhillips (COP).

Look At The Fine Print

But take a closer look. The 2.2% growth rate is still a deceleration from the first quarter (5.6%) and second quarter (2.6%), and is below the economy's sustainable path for long-term growth, which is a little below 3% per year.

What's more, the reasons for the upward revision were none too cheering. One big factor was inventory accumulation. Instead of consuming inventories, as originally thought, business actually added to inventories in the third quarter. That means there's more unsold stuff on the shelves. Also, the government lowered its estimate of import growth, which means that consumer demand for imports wasn't as robust as previously believed. Not exactly a bell-ringer of a report.

Looking ahead to 2007, it takes a sunny disposition to share the Fed chairman's view, expressed in a Nov. 28 speech, that the economy will get back on or close to its regular growth path. The buildup of inventories will tend to dampen growth because companies don't need to produce as much if there's a backlog of unsold products. Housing will continue to be a drag as well. Residential construction fell at an 18% rate in the third quarter, even worse than originally estimated. That alone took almost 1.2 percentage points off the rate of GDP growth. And the inventory of unsold homes remains exceptionally high.

"Borderline Recessionary"

There's no consolation in the less scrutinized indicators, either, like the tonnage of freight carried by trucks. On Nov. 27, the American Trucking Assn. said its seasonally adjusted truck-tonnage index dropped 1.8% in October and was down 4% from a year earlier. ATA Chief Economist Bob Costello said "the latest number fits with anecdotal reports that the traditional fall freight season was essentially nonexistent this year." That's bad news because trucking is a barometer of the U.S. economy. David Rosenberg, chief North American economist of Merrill Lynch (MER), wrote that the truck-tonnage report "looked borderline recessionary, for lack of a more polite term." He said "this was the worst October for trucking activity since 1982, when the economy was in recession."

The U.S. economy is remarkably resilient, and it may resume solid growth in the next few months. But right now, things are looking a bit precarious.



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China, U.S. agree to tackle global imbalances

By Glenn Somerville
Reuters
15 Dec 06

BEIJING - U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said on Friday that China's reluctance to let its currency appreciate remained a core bilateral issue but claimed some progress in talks on reducing trade imbalances.

At a news conference after two days of talks and meetings with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and President
Hu Jintao, Paulson said he had told Chinese officials "in the clearest possible terms" it needed to move toward currency flexibility.

He said an inaugural session on Thursday and Friday of a "joint economic dialogue" between the two countries found agreement on "fundamental principles," including the need for balanced growth without large trade imbalances.
The United States's soaring trade deficits have their counterpart in Chinese surpluses racked up by exporting to U.S. consumer markets. That raises the ire of U.S. lawmakers who say an undervalued Chinese yuan allows Chinese products to be priced so low that American companies cannot compete.

"China's currency policy is a core issue in our economic relationship," Paulson said. "We have indicated to the Chinese in the clearest possible terms that more flexibility in their exchange rate will help China achieve more balanced economic growth" and have more control over its own monetary policy."

Paulson was joined on a podium by six other cabinet officers who were part of the high-powered U.S. delegation, though
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke who also was a member left Beijing early.

TIMING AN ISSUE

The U.S. Treasury chief said there were differences about whether Beijing could speed up the pace of reform.

"We have a point of view that there's more risk in going too slowly than there is in going too fast, and the Chinese see that differently," Paulson said, noting growing protectionist sentiment that he said added urgency to the reform process.

The tangible results of the talks, which will resume in May in Washington, were modest.

China agreed to let the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq open offices in Beijing, while Washington gave the green light for China to join the Inter-American Development Bank.

Paulson earlier claimed agreement on the direction of the steps each side needed to take.

"We will each take measures to address global imbalances, notably through greater national savings in the United States and through increased domestic consumption and exchange rate flexibility in China, and maintaining open investment in both countries," he said.

The leader of the Chinese delegation, Vice Premier Wu Yi, said the discussions had been very successful and would help to boost trade and economic relations. She said the two sides had not seen eye to eye on every issue, but that was understandable given the economic differences between the two countries.

Paulson wants to lay a foundation to tackle complex sets of issues over the long haul. He is under pressure to deliver progress in the form of a faster rise in the yuan -- a litmus test for many of China's commitment to market reforms.

The yuan is also called the renminbi or RMB.

Bernanke said a stronger yuan would enhance China's future growth and stability by giving the central bank more control over monetary policy.

In prepared remarks, Bernanke said an undervalued yuan represented an "effective subsidy" to Chinese exporting firms but he dropped the reference to subsidies when he spoke to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a leading think-tank.

A Fed spokesperson said later that Bernanke decided on his own to alter his text to make clear he was referring to the fact that an undervalued currency affects corporate decisions about production.

LAWMAKERS CHIME IN


The talks occurred against a background of new U.S. calls for speedier Chinese action to let the yuan appreciate.

"We cannot continue to wait for this longer-term goal and suffer the consequences of insignificant short-term action," Sen. Christopher Dodd (news, bio, voting record), the Connecticut Democrat who will chair the Senate Banking Committee next year, and Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby (news, bio, voting record), the outgoing Republican chairman, said in a statement.

They said experts estimated the yuan was undervalued by as much as 15 to 40 percent, costing American job losses by making Chinese-made goods unfairly cheap in America's consumer markets.

China freed the yuan from a dollar peg in July 2005, and on Friday the central bank set the currency's mid-point at a new post-reform high, 7.8185 per dollar, for the second day in a row.

Before leaving Washington, Paulson had played down expectations of dramatic results from the first round of talks with Chinese officials. That seemed to keep markets calm and the dollar made modest gains against Asian currencies on Friday.

China pushed back against U.S. claims that it was laggard in the pace of its economic reforms.

Wu on Friday again questioned Americans' "limited knowledge" of China's efforts to give market forces greater sway over the economy, while the People's Daily, the official paper of the ruling Communist Party, said the United States had China to thank for a long period of low inflation.



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Cats and Snakes


Fact or fiction? The incredible world of Kitty Kelley

By David Usborne
15 December 2006

Her unauthorised biographies have become renowned for their unsubstantiated claims about the world's biggest celebrities - and now she has Oprah Winfrey in her sights
It was a glorious Washington morning in April when the argument started. Kitty Kelley, America's most notorious poison-pen biographer, was nestled beneath a fluffy duvet - it had a 64 tog rating - in the honeymoon suite of the Tabard Inn with her favourite toyboy, Julian. Why, he demanded, had she not asked for a divorce from her husband as she had promised? The squabble quickly became violent.

Ms Kelley, who is not 64 as she claims but, according to the sister of a hairdresser who once set her blonde locks in a Little Rock beauty salon in 1956, turned 70 last year, didn't even see the sidetable lamp coming before it cracked into the wrinkles of her forehead.

"The blood was incredible. It gushed all over the bedclothes," said a doorman hiding inside the closet. Only when the ambulance drew up at Sibley Hospital did it dawn on the dazed Ms Kelley that her health insurance had lapsed. Every cent of the fortune accumulated from her three decades of debunking celebrities had been exhausted by her gambling habit. ('Kelley and Blackjack', see source notes on page 1,229.) She knew what she had to do. Write yet another book. First she would need a victim ...

Sorry, Kitty, maybe that's not funny. But have a sense of humour. You know what people say about you - that the five unauthorised biographies you have written so far, beginning with the best-selling Jackie Oh! in 1978, have been as laden with dubiously sourced, unflattering details as they have been with anything that was reliably true. You deny making up things always, of course, as any writer would. Except this one, who has never interviewed a doorman at the Tabard Inn nor any hairdresser in Arkansas.

We have met before. We were guests on a talk show when you released that unkind book about the British Royal Family eight years ago. I was there to expose how you had no decent sources to suggest that the Queen had been conceived by artificial insemination or that the late Princess of Wales, Diana, had tried once to push her step-mother down the stairs. You made mincemeat of me, of course.

With each new book she publishes, new uproar erupts, mostly from indignant practitioners of mainstream journalism. The sourcing is denounced at best as flimsy and her motives decried as unnecessarily destructive and vicious. But two things remain true. She has never lost a libel case arising from her works. Nor, indeed, has she been legally obliged to publish a single retraction.

That she has settled on a new victim is, in fact, no lie.

This week, came the news that Kelley has signed a deal with Crown Books, an imprint of Random House, to turn out yet one more unauthorised biography. And the lucky winner is Oprah Winfrey, who for two decades has reigned as the queen of daytime talk television in the United States, and indeed, through syndication, in markets worldwide. It was to Ms Winfrey, that Madonna turned to give her side of her recent adoption of an African boy.

"Oprah Winfrey has fascinated me for many years," Kelley said in a statement. "As a woman, she has wielded an unprecedented amount of influence over the American culture and psyche. There has been no other person in the 20th century whose convictions and values have impacted the American public in such a significant way."

Exactly what has spurred her to zero in on Ms Winfrey at this time we can only guess at. Possibly, it was the Madonna episode. Or maybe she became fascinated with Oprah's book of the month club, which influences the reading choices of millions of book lovers around the globe.

Lest we forget Kelley's fascination with the salacious, another possible motivation comes to mind. Winfrey's sexuality has been the subject of much conjecture of late. We know that she has a best buddy, Gayle King, with whom she appears at public events. They recently denied theirs is anything more than a very close, but platonic relationship. But it hasn't stopped the gossip or the jokes, like the one delivered last week by the actor Jamie Foxx during a tribute to Will Smith. "Will, I was talking about you the other day," he began. "I was laying in bed with Oprah, and I turn over to Gayle and I said, 'You know what?'."

After working as a press aide to the late Senator Eugene McCarthy, Ms Kelley got her first job in journalism as a junior editorial assistant at the Washington Post in 1969. A book soon followed. Called The Glamour Spas it was an exposé of the fat-farm industry and its celebrity clients that was then in its infancy in the US. Then came the first book that established her reputation as an aggressive biographer-cum-muckraker that every famous person would quickly learn to fear. Jackie Oh! shocked readers by detailing the infidelities of her first husband, JFK, as well as the struggles she had with mental illness and depression. Included in its pages was the claim that the former First Lady had undergone electric shock therapy.

Like every one of her subsequent works, Jackie Oh! shot instantly to the top of the best-sellers lists. In hindsight, Kelley had thus invented a genre of autobiography writing. The charges of her critics that some of what she puts in her books simply doesn't stand up to close scrutiny have never gone away.

She has occasionally tripped up, for instance claiming to have interviewed one source - the actor Peter Lawford - when, in fact, he had died 12 days earlier. With each new book she seems to go to even greater lengths to demonstrate the authenticity of her reporting. After publishing a 1986 reputation-shredding oeuvre on Frank Sinatra - His Way: The Unauthorised Biography of Frank Sinatra - she claimed it was the product of no fewer than 857 interviews with people either close or not so close to the legendary crooner. Those she spoke to before writing The Royals allegedly totalled 988.

Sinatra tried to block the publication of the book in the courts, slapping Kelley with a $2 million lawsuit saying it portrayed him in an unflattering and unfair light. He knew what was coming.

The book detailed his tumultuous marriages and branded him a misogynist and a friend of mobsters. He later withdrew his lawsuit and the book did its damage. A reviewer with the Washington Post surmised that the biography, "reduces the legend of Ol' Blue Eyes to rubble". While the reviewer was quite kind, the Sinatra's daughter, Nancy, was less so. "I hope she gets hit by a truck," she was reported to have said.

Defenders of Kelley argue that she is unfairly targeted for criticism in part because she is a woman writing these highly toxic books with a slightly silly-sounding first name that lends itself instantly to tabloid headlines. "Kitty Litter" is a favourite moniker for her books. Sally Denton wrote of her in the Progressive Review: "If her name is Kitty, she can't be taken seriously. If she also happens to be blonde, all the more reason. A 'liberal' to boot and her destiny is sealed."

If we can persuade ourselves that the main outlines of Kelley's various portraits are broadly true even if some of the more exotic details within them may be of questionable veracity, then perhaps we can admire her for what she does. Few reporters, after all, have been so successful - or fearless - in puncturing the protective shells of myth and mystique that are otherwise so tightly spun around our celebrities. Until Kelley, no one had dared even to suggest that the man the behind the legend that used to be Sinatra was less than perfect. Most of us have the intelligence not to accept everything she writes as unimpeachable fact. What she writes, meanwhile, has proved irresistible reading for millions.

"It's clear that Kelley is no meticulous historian who nails down her facts with airtight precision," Michael Crowley said on the Slate website. "To the contrary, she is the consummate gossip-monger, a vehicle for all the rumour and innuendo surrounding her illustrious subjects. She surely knows it as well as her readers do. "People read Kelley for the same reason they read the National Enquirer: the taboo."

After her mauling of Sinatra, Kelley turned her chilly eye on the Reagans. This time it was Nancy Reagan who saw her public image turned upside down as, page after page, Kelley painted her as a conniving shrew, who relied on astrologers and was so mean she used to recycle gifts that came to the White House.

While the libel-free record is impressive, it is worth noting that in the US the burden on the plaintiff to prove unfair treatment is extremely heavy. The bar has traditionally been lower in Britain and it is telling that the scandal-packed book about the Royal Family was never published in the UK.

Kelley's last outing was in 2004 when her target was the Bush clan. The book, called The Family, triggered a predictable firestorm with assorted shockers including a claim that the current occupant of the White House once snorted cocaine at Camp David when his father was President and that the First Lady, Laura Bush, was a small-time drug dealer while at college. Much of it may have been poppy-cock, but the book went instantly to the top of the New York Times best-seller list and sold 750,000 copies in hardback in the US.

If Ms Winfrey is as fearful as she is flattered to have become the next prey of Kitty Kelley, no one could blame her. At least in her case, she will have some means of counter-attack.

If the book, whenever it comes out, displeases her, she will be sure not feature it in her book of the month club.

Famous victims

Jackie Kennedy 1978

Jackie Kennedy, wife of JFK, was the first to suffer the Kelley treatment when 'Jackie Oh!' hit American newstands in 1978. Its spicy allegations about JFK's womanising hit the former president's wife hard.

Sinatra 1986

Kelley's next victim was Frank Sinatra, who presented Kelley with a $2m lawsuit when 'His Way' was published in 1986. Ol' Blue Eyes finally withdrew the suit and watched the book, fuelled by publicity, shoot to the top of the 'New York Times' bestseller list.

Nancy Reagan 1991


'Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorised Biography' became the fastest selling biography in publishing history. It was suggested by Kelley that the First Lady had invited Frank Sinatra into her White House boudoir.

Royal Family 1997

'The Royals' was a gritty look at the numerous scandals surrounding the monarchy, including attempts to conceal their German ancestry. Libel laws eventually prevented its publication here, but again it topped 'New York Times' best-seller list.

Bush family 2004

Then came 'The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty', published in the run-up to the 2004 presidential elections. Its insistence that Laura Bush was an ex-drug dealer provoked a barrage of abuse from the Bush family.



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Python living down the toilet

metro.co.uk
Dec 14 06

A plumber called to fix a toilet in Australia got a bit of a surprise when he turned up, and found the blockage was a seven-foot-long python.

The python was eventually extracted from the septic tank by Peter Phillips of the Parks and Wildlife Service in the Northern Territory. He would have pulled it straight out of the toilet, he said, but it was so big it wouldn't fit.

Phillips said in a statement: 'The ... resident originally called a plumber because her toilet was blocked. I arrived to see a large python head peering out of the toilet bowl.'

Owners of pythons that are a bit down in the dumps might want to pay attention to Phillips' next statement.

'The tank was obviously a great home,' he noted, 'because the snake was so fat and healthy it was difficult to retrieve it.'

The tank was apparently a good place to hide during the day and hunt for frogs at night, he said. Which makes you wonder about the state of the woman's toilet.

Reassuringly for local residents, the snake will be released back into the wild soon, so that it can go find more septic tanks to live in.




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Head of US polygamist sect to stand trial on rape charges

AFP
15 Dec 06

The leader of a US polygamist sect will stand trial on charges of acting as an accomplice to rape for forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry and have sex with a cousin, a judge ruled.

Warren Jeffs, 51, pleaded not guilty to the charge after judge James Shumate ruled, following a hearing in St George, Utah, that there was enough evidence for the case to proceed to trial next April.

If convicted Jeffs, the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), could face life in prison.
The rape case against the religious leader was based on the teenage witness known only as "Jane Doe IV." In earlier testimony the girl sobbed as she described finding out she was to marry her 19 year-old first cousin.

"I was horrified," said Doe on the witness stand.

At Thursday's hearing, police officer Shauna Jones said Jeffs had told the girl to give herself to her husband "mind, body, and soul" after she had expressed her unhappiness to the religious leader.

"She told me that she told Warren that her husband did things with her and touched her in places that (she) didn't feel comfortable with. He said that she was to go back to her husband and give herself to him mind, body and soul."

Despite strong objections by the girl, prosecutors say Jeffs performed the wedding ceremony at a motel in Nevada in 2001 and instructed the teenager to "multiply and replenish the earth and raise children in the priesthood."

Prosecutor Brock Belnap told reporters after Thursday's hearing it was not easy for the accuser to "confront the man she was raised to believe was the mouthpiece of God."

Defense attorneys have said Jeffs did nothing but offer routine advice as religious leaders often do.

"The evidence shows that Mr. Jeffs officiated at the marriage and urged the young lady to stay in the marriage and make it work. He counseled the wife to be loving, respectful and obedient to her husband," said attorney Walter Bugden.

The accuser was not in the courtroom for Thursday's ruling. She left the polygamous lifestyle years ago and has since remarried.

Members of Jeffs church are known to live in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, South Dakota and Canada's British Columbia.

Security has been extremely tight for all of Jeffs' court appearances.

He was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List until his capture outside of Las Vegas in August.



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New bill for blind Texas hunters

Tuesday, 12 December 2006, 17:51 GMT

Blind hunters would be able to use laser-sighted rifles to hunt animals in Texas, if a bill introduced in the state's legislature is successful.
Republican Edmund Kuempel proposed an amendment to existing law that would permit "legally blind" people to use a laser-sighting device when hunting.

Current Texas law prohibits the use of laser sights, spotlights and headlights for hunting purposes.

A sighted person would be legally required to accompany the blind hunter.

"This opens up the fun of hunting to additional people, and I think that's great," said Mr Kuempel.

Sighted guide

Blind hunters are not a new phenomenon in Texas.

Under current procedures, a sighted guide can assist a visually-impaired hunter by peering over the hunter's shoulders and advising where to aim the gun and when to pull the trigger.

However, hunters say that without a laser pointer it is difficult to time the shot.

Laser sights, spotlights and headlights are banned in hunting in Texas, because they can make the animals freeze in their tracks.

If the bill is passed in when the state legislature reconvenes in January, it will probably not become law until 2008.

Mr Kuempel's bill would give the state until 1 January 2008, to come up with a definition of legally blind so the law could be enforced.

Comment: We are speechless.

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Suffolk Strangler


Suffolk Strangler Update: British prostitutes get help as police hunt killer

By Alessia Pierdomenico
Reuters
15 Dec 06

IPSWICH - Prostitutes in eastern England are being offered financial help to stay off the streets as police step up their hunt for a serial killer feared to have murdered five prostitutes, officials said on Friday.

Some prostitutes have ignored police warnings and carried on working, many to feed drug habits, despite the discovery of five bodies in less than two weeks near the port of Ipswich.

Local government workers are handing out food vouchers, mobile phone credit and the heroin replacement drug methadone to encourage them to stay at home. They will also be given advice on claiming state benefits and housing allowances.
"It's not physical cash," said a local government spokeswoman. "It's about making sure that we're doing everything we can so they don't have to go on the streets."

Police identified the fifth victim on Friday and said all five murders were linked. No one has yet been arrested or questioned as a suspect, but police were seeking a number of people to help with their enquiries,

"We know they were all working girls, they knew one another. I think there is likely to be some crossover as far as clients are concerned," said Detective Chief Superintendent Stewart Gull. "There are a number of people of interest to us."

But as police drafted in hundreds of extra officers to help hunt for the killer, prostitutes in Ipswich told how their drug addiction drove them to ignore the risks.

"I'll be dead in 10 years' time anyway," 25-year-old Suzanne told the Daily Mail. "Whether it is through drugs, or at the hands of some sicko, well, it doesn't make much difference. If it happens, it happens."

SUFFOLK STRANGLER

Experts were carrying out toxicology tests on the bodies of two of the victims, Gemma Adams, 25, and Tania Nicol, 19, to see if they were drugged before they were killed, police said, but the test results will not be known for weeks.

"We know these were all drug users, poly drug users, so we need to keep an open mind," Gull told a news conference.

The women may have been drugged, media said, because their bodies showed no obvious signs of injury or struggle.

"There is no significant trauma on any of the five girls, none of them appear to have been subject to serious sexual assault," Gull said. "We know these are working girls; they get into cars voluntarily, that is the nature of their work."

All five were found dumped naked in countryside around Ipswich, in the county of Suffolk, three of them wearing jewelry.

The murderer has been dubbed the Suffolk Strangler, although the precise way all the women died is yet to be established.

Anneli Alderton, 24, was strangled and Paula Clennell, also 24, was killed by "compression to the neck," detectives said.

The fifth victim was identified as Annette Nicholls, 29, last seen on December 5, but a post-mortem was inconclusive.



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Police warn Suffolk killer could strike again

AFP
15 Dec 06

Police probing the murders of prostitutes here have stressed the need for vigilance to prevent the killer striking again, as they were expected to identify a fifth victim.

Sex workers have been told to stay off the streets as the manhunt for the so-called "Suffolk Strangler" continues in the quiet English town of Ipswich, gripped by fear since five bodies were found over about 10 days.

"I am very pleased that so far we haven't found any more bodies," said assistant chief constable Jacqui Cheer, one of the officers leading the investigation beefed up by hundreds of officers from the rest of the country.
"These are five young women who have... all got families, some of them have children. That's why were putting... all the preventative measures in to make sure that we don't have another disappearance," she told Sky News Friday.

Police confirmed Thursday that a body found in a woodland near the eastern English town was Paula Clennell, 24, and they removed a second woman's body from the area to conduct post-mortem examinations.

They are expected to identify her as Annette Nicholls, 29. She would be the fifth sex worker to have been killed in less than two weeks.

The three other victims have already been identified as 25-year-old Gemma Adams, 19-year-old Tania Nicol and 24-year-old Anneli Alderton.

The case has evoked one of Britain's most notorious serial killers, east London's elusive Jack the Ripper, who murdered five prostitutes in 1888, as well as the "Yorkshire Ripper" Peter Sutcliffe, who murdered 13 from 1975 to 1980.

Investigators in the normally tranquil town, about 80 miles (130 kilometres) northeast of London, are ploughing through some 5,500 calls from the public and trying to trace the victims' last movements.

More than 300 officers from nine different police forces around Britain have been drafted in to help in the massive manhunt.

In new leads, police confirmed to British newspapers that they were investigating whether the victims had been drugged before being killed, reporting that none of the bodies showed signs of a struggle.

The Guardian daily meanwhile reported that police and local drug workers were paying prostitutes in Ipswich to stay off the streets. The money was being provided by an unidentified charity, it said.

"It's not safe to engage a client or punter at this time," Detective Chief Superintendent Stewart Gull was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

Police also reported progress in searching for a man driving a blue BMW, after a local sex worker was quoted by several news outlets as saying she saw Alderton climb into the car last week.

Detectives had interviewed a man fitting that description, but were now searching for the prostitutes who had given the information "so that this man can be eliminated from our inquiries", The Daily Telegraph reported.

Another possible lead came after it also emerged that Clennell had stolen 1,000 pounds (1,490 euros, 1,960 dollars) from a client of hers after they had a falling out, according to the Daily Mirror tabloid.

Clennell's boyfriend, Paul Turner, suggested that the man, whose name he did not know, might be the killer.

"I think I know who killed her," he said, adding: "Maybe this guy had enough of being ripped off and lashed out.... It could be that he got the killing bug or that he wanted to get revenge on every one of them who'd stolen from him."

While the red light district was largely deserted Thursday evening, an AFP reporter said residents had returned to the city centre for Christmas shopping or drinking in local pubs despite the grim backdrop to the festive season.



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