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Editorial: Why Is The Us Government So Afraid Of Justice In The Case Of Dr. Rafil Dhafir?
By Katherine Hughes
18 December 2006
Urgent Request For Funds To Buy Trial Transcripts in defense of a blessed man wrongfully convicted by the Bush Justice Department for his crime of compassion:
In direct response to the humanitarian catastrophe created by the brutal and unjustifiable U.S. and U.K. sponsored UN embargo on Iraq, Dr. Rafil Dhafir started the charity Help the Needy (HTN). For 13 years he worked tirelessly to help publicize the plight of the Iraqi people and to raise funds to help them.
According to the US government, he donated $1.25 million of his own money. As an oncologist, he was particularly concerned about the effects of depleted uranium and skyrocketing Iraqi cancer rates. Because of this humanitarian work he has been incarcerated since February 26, 2003.
Bankrupting Dr.Dhafir was just one of the many tools the Bush Justice Department employed to make it impossible for him to defend himself. They also held him without bail for 31 months and denied him access to his counsel and his own records. He is now serving 22 years in jail for a crime he was never charged with in a court of law.
Although convicted as a white-collar criminal, the US government touts Dr. Dhafir's case as a success in its war on terror. In the most recent obstruction of justice in the case, the government is attempting to reverse an appeal court decision to grant Dr. Dhafir his transcripts at the court's expense; they are almost certain to be successful.
Transcripts are the bedrock of an appeal process and will cost about $22,000. It is 14 months since Dr. Dhafir's sentencing and we have been unable to move forward with the appeal because we don't have the transcripts or the funds to get them.
The vigor of the government's denial of due process from the outset of this case is appalling and a deliberate act of vengeance against this man. One can only wonder why despite the fact that the odds for a successful appeal are abysmal - a mere 5 percent - the government still feels it necessary to inhibit Dr. Dhafir's quest for justice.
During the McCarthy era, Judge Irving Kaufman warned once we embark on shortcuts by creating a category of obviously guilty whose rights are denied, we run the risk that the circle of the unprotected will grow. It is incumbent upon each of us to defend civil liberties for all, not least because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
PLEASE HELP US ACHIEVE JUSTICE BY SENDING A DONATION FOR ANY AMOUNT, NO MATTER HOW SMALL OR LARGE, TO: "DHAFIR APPEAL FUND." MAKE CHECKS PAYABLE TO:
PETER GOLDBERGER ESQ., ATTORNEY AT LAW, 50 RITTENHOUSE PLACE, ARDMORE, PA 19003. WRITE "DR. RAFIL DHAFIR APPEAL FUND"IN THE MEMO LINE. PLEASE NOTE THAT DONATIONS ARE NOT TAX DEDUCTIBLE.
Thank you,
Katherine Hughes
For the Dr. Rafil Dhafir Support Committee.
For more information about the case see my recent
Fellowship
(Fellowship of
Reconciliation) article:
http://www.forusa.org/fellowship/nov-dec06/KatherineHughes.html
If you would like to join the Dr. Dhafir Support
Committee contact:
MacGregor Eddy
P.O Box 5789
Salinas CA 93915
Email: mindful@redshift.com
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Editorial: Options after the Deconstruction of Iraq
December 18, 2006
by Rodrigue Tremblay
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002
"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."
George W. Bush, September 12, 2002
"Intelligence leaves no doubt that Iraq continues to possess and conceal lethal weapons."
George W. Bush, March 18, 2003
"For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."
Paul Wolfowitz, May 28, 2003
"But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.."
George W. Bush, May 30, 2003
Wars of aggression are the most barbarous of all human endeavors and are, more often than not, the instruments of insane tyrants who hear voices. Wars are also waged by warlike gambling leaders who bet their citizens' houses to fulfill their megalomaniac dreams of grandeur -And the illegal military invasion of Iraq was a gigantic gamble from the start. What's more, it is a war that was planned and executed on the basis of fabricated lies. It was a war based on false pretenses and on false perceptions of the Muslim Middle East. For example, it is not true that Middle Eastern Muslims hate the West "because they hate our way of life, our freedom, and our democracy." Polls indicate that such ideas are simply based on ignorant prejudices. This wicked war will be judged by history as one of the most blatant abuses of power by any American administration ever.
In the process, the Bush-Cheney team, through a combination of design and blunder, has inflamed the entire Middle East, from Iraq and Afghanistan, to Palestine and Lebanon, and soon, to Iran, and possibly Syria, Saudi Arabia and even Turkey. In Iraq, nearly four years after the March 20, 2003 invasion of the country, the mess and the destruction are complete, leaving behind a genuine humanitarian catastrophe and a political near-debacle.
United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan, for one, has concluded that the "average Iraqi's life" is worse now than it was under Saddam Hussein and that the situation in Iraq is now "much worse" than a civil war. Even some republican senators now say openly that Bush's war in Iraq may be 'criminal'. Only President George W. Bush and his Rasputin-like vice president, it seems, continue to think that their wrecking-crew Middle East policy makes any sense. Even departing Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejects bluntly their stubborn "stay-the-course" and "must-complete-the-mission" policy.
However, departing Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld amazingly listed 20 tactical options for U.S. policy in Iraq, but no strategic option. It seems that among G. W. Bush's sorcerer's apprentices, there are a few tacticians, but no strategist. This may understandable in a government of ideologues. For the Bush-Cheney administration, ideology is a strategy in itself, and it is this neoconservative dogma that cannot ever be questioned or modified without loosing face. Even if all the rosy neocon assumptions about Iraq and the Middle East have turned out to be wrong and wrong-headed, George W. Bush has bet his entire presidency on the foolish enterprise and would need a credible face-saving solution to extirpate himself from the mess he himself created. As an immature person and as the bully-in-chief, as he has recently been labeled by economist Paul Krugman of the New York Times, G. W. Bush cannot face the failure of his adventure in Iraq and will remain in a state of denial as long as he is allowed to do so by Congress.
And now, the 10-member Baker-Hamilton bipartisan commission has made it unanimous and officially concluded that Bush's Iraq policies have failed. But, amazingly, the Commission watered downed its recommendations for fear that Bush would reject them out of hand. As a consequence, its 79-some recommendations deal more with tactical changes than fundamental strategic realignments. For one, the Commission refrained from calling for a timetable for a real withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq or even for a real troops reduction. In this sense, the Baker-Hamilton commission did not produce the face-saving plan of withdrawal from Iraq that the current U. S. President and American politicians from both sides of the isle could have leaned on to extirpate themselves from the blunder they made in the fall of 2002. Secondly, the report did not establish how the Iraq adventure is a costly distraction from the real threat of Islamist al Qaeda-type terrorism, which is in resurgence in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
But all is not completely bleak, even if you are a Neocon who has been "mugged by reality." Indeed, obliterating Iraq from the map, as a country opposed to Israel, and taking control of its oil reserves, were the core objectives behind the pro-Israel neocon policy of invading that country; they were well camouflaged under the terms "liberation" and "democracy". It's not sure, therefore, that the mess that the Bush-Cheney administration has created in Iraq was solely the result of abysmal ignorance and incompetence.
When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003, he did not only topple the Saddam Hussein regime, one of George W. Bush's juvenile fantasies, but he made sure that the entire infrastructure of the country was also destroyed: the army was dismembered, security services were abolished, and, the ruling Sunni-dominated Baath Party was dissolved and its members purged from any administrative positions. An enormous political vacuum resulted, opening the gates to a bloody civil war between the Sunnis in the center, the Chiites in the south and the Kurds in the north.
In this sense, the debacle in Iraq was a planned failure. The final chapter of this drama would be the official break-up of the country into pieces along religious and/or ethnic lines, to the great satisfaction of two countries, i.e. Iran and Israel, the only two countries bound to profit directly from the fragmentation of Iraq.
This is probably what we are going to witness in the coming months. But, just as President Richard Nixon promised to get Americans out of Vietnam in 1968, and only succeeded in doing in 1973, after 20,000 more young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died there, President George W. Bush will try to temporize and save face, as thousands more Americans and Iraqis die. -It is a terrible shame.
Rodrigue Tremblay lives in Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com
Also visit his blog site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
Author's Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com
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Editorial: Tehran's Holocaust Conference: No Matter What Ahmadinejad Does He'll be Portrayed as the New Hitler
By STEPHEN GOWANS
December 16 / 17, 2006
CounterPunch
Was the two-day conference on the Holocaust held earlier this month by the Iranian government intended to cast "doubt on the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War," (1) or was it Iran's rejoinder to the Jyllands-Posten affair, an attempt "to embarrass the West and say, 'Look, we are practicing what you preach. We are allowing freedom of discussion of just about any issue, including the Holocaust'"? (2)
It's pretty clear how Western journalists summed up the event. The point of the conference was to assemble the world's most notorious Holocaust-deniers and Jew haters, among them KKK kook David Duke, to lend support to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claims that the Holocaust is a myth and to cheer on the Iranian president as he prepares to perpetrate a genocide against the Jews and 'wipe out' Israel.
The problem is, matters aren't quite as black and white as all that. Not even close.
Let's start with the claim that Ahmadinejad "has referred to the Holocaust as a 'myth'" (3), a claim made by almost every major media outlet in North America.
Ahmadinejad may have said the Holocaust is a myth, but if he has, it has escaped my attention. Of course, I don't follow him around with a tape-recorder and babel fish in my ear, so maybe I missed it. Still, the file of Ahmadinejad quotes I have before me, which goes back two years, hasn't a single quote that backs up the near media consensus that Ahmadinejad has "repeatedly called the Holocaust a myth," (4) let alone called it one even once. Which is odd. Considering that demonizing the leader of the next oil-rich country on the White House list of targets slated for take-over has become something of a sport in the Western media, you'd think the "no, there never was a Holocaust" quote would be a simple matter to unearth and thrust before the world, like Iraq's WMD. Oh, right.
In the stories that followed the conference, there were dozens of Ahmadinejad quotes, which, if you read them carefully, played opposite type (they didn't say what the headlines said they said) but not one of them had Ahmadinejad saying "Holocaust? Pshaw -- as phony as an all-beef hotdog."
True, Ahmadinejad has played around the edges of the issue, saying things that amount to "maybe it did or maybe it didn't happen, but either way, it doesn't justify what was done to the Palestinians." Always, the emphasis is on the Holocaust as a political construct, not an historical reality. That's not quite in the same league as David Irving, the writer who was jailed in Austria for denying the Holocaust.
Regarding headlines that misrepresent the story they lead, take the "Israel will be 'wiped out'" headline that appeared in the Toronto Star on December 12, a photo of Ahmadinejad nearby just to make clear who was uttering the alleged threat. Outgoing US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, is using quotes like this to bring a suit against Ahmadinejad before the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide. Bolton, who the north Koreans once called "human scum," accuses the Iranian president of "calling for the destruction of Israel." The Guardian ran the Bolton-accused-Ahmadinejad-of-genocide story on December 13, under the headline "Move to bring genocide case against Ahmadinejad as Iran president repeats call to wipe out Israel." Bolton's suit also refers to "numerous threats against the United States" Ahmadinejad is alleged to have made, which says that what Bolton has oodles of in the human scum department, is matched by equal oodles of in the chutzpah department.
Did Ahmadinejad really threaten to wipe out Israel? No more than scientists predicting the melting of the polar ice caps are threatening to melt them themselves. What Ahmadinejad did say was that, "The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was" (5) a prediction, not a threat. And since the Soviet Union wasn't wiped out in a hail of nuclear missiles, a storm of terrorist attacks, or an epidemic sparked by biological weapons, it might be safe to conclude that Ahmadinejad expects Israel to collapse through self-inflicted wounds the way the Soviet Union did and not under a barrage of nuclear missiles launched from Tehran.
In the Iranian president's view, the days of Israel, as Zionist state, are numbered because it was founded on injustice, and therefore stands on rotten foundations. When the UN carved a Jewish homeland out of someone else's homeland, and without consulting a single Palestinian, it created a Chimera whose existence would always depend on sponsorship by imperialist powers, and unremitting, massive infusions of aid. In other words, Israel has been artificially kept alive from the start.
Elections, explained Ahmadinejad, should be held among "Jews, Christians and Muslims" in Palestine (by which he means Israel, Gaza and the West Bank together) "so that the population.can select their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner." (6) That's a far cry from raining down nuclear missiles on Tel Aviv to wipe out Jews, but is much more compelling a story if your aim is to shape public opinion in ways that favor a possible future intervention in Iran.
The whole sordid business of the Holocaust conference, and earlier, the Holocaust International Cartoon Contest, would never have happened had the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, not run flagrantly racist cartoons mocking the prophet Mohamed, and had Western governments not dismissed the resultant flap as an over-reaction by a bunch of hot-headed Mohammedans. It's a free speech issue, the West's politicos said. You Muslims -- simmer down.
What a crock, retorted Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "In this freedom, casting doubt or negating the genocide of the Jews is banned, but insulting the beliefs of 1.5 billion Muslims is allowed." (7) Bull's eye.
With the Jyllands-Posten scandal still resonating, Iran's largest newspaper, Hamshari, counterpunched. It would sponsor a carton contest to mock the Holocaust. If you can mock the prophet Mohamed, and say it's a free speech issue, then surely we can mock the Holocaust, and say the same.
As it turned out, the cartoons didn't do much mocking. They didn't present the genocide of Europe's Jews as a myth, or mock its victims. Instead, they explored the themes of Israeli brutality against the Palestinians, use of the Holocaust to justify anti-Palestinian crimes, and parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany.
Judge for yourself. The drawings showed: A vampire wearing a Star of David drinking the blood of Palestinians; Ariel Sharon in a Nazi uniform; three army helmets together, two with swastikas and one with the Star of David; a rabid dog with a Star of David on its side and the word Holocaust around its collar; a dove prevented from flying because it is chained to a Star of David; US president George Bush seated at a desk swatting doves; an Israeli asleep with three Arab heads mounted to the wall above his bed; an Israeli soldier pouring fuel into a tank from a gasoline can that reads Holocaust on the side; a razor blade in the ground, representing the illegal Israeli-built separation wall, bearing the word Holocaust; two firefighters, each with Stars of David on their chests, using Palestinian blood to extinguish flames issuing from the word Holocaust. (8)
While the director of the exhibit correctly pointed out to a New York Times reporter that the drawings were anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist, not anti-Jewish, the newspaper nevertheless ran the story under the headline "Iran exhibits anti-Jewish art." (9) Conflation of Israel and Zionism with Jew, and therefore anti-Israel and anti-Zionist with anti-Jewish, is a handy howitzer to have around whenever you need to blow away opposition to Israel.
This month's conference was similarly described as anti-Jewish and while the conference certainly featured a cast of unsavory Jew-haters, not all the participants were of the same stripe.
Shiraz Dossa, an admirer of Noam Chomsky and Hannah Arendt, who teaches Third World politics at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, delivered a paper on the abuse of the Holocaust to justify the war on terror. Dossa calls the Holocaust a reality and says that "anyone who denies it is a lunatic." (10) He accepted the invitation to speak at the conference to help Tehran make its point: That the West's commitment to freedom of speech extends only to insulting someone else's sacred cows.
Last point: If the real aim of the conference was to call the Holocaust into question, it would hardly make sense to assemble a gang of hacks, flakes and whack-jobs whose credibility is nil. On the other hand, if the aim was to show that free speech doesn't justify a repellent, silly, and disgusting display, inviting David Duke and his gaggle of misfits, was the right stroke.
Still, no matter how vigorously Ahmadinejad plays to Western public opinion, he can't win. Some will say his moves are bone-headed, and, in the end, they are, not because they alienate Western public opinion, but because he thinks he can win it over. He can't, unless he can cut through the West's mass media and that won't happen. The point about tolerance of freedom of speech will hardly be grasped by Americans or Britons or Canadians. No matter what he does, he will be portrayed as the new Hitler. That's how many leaders of countries on the US hit list are eventually portrayed. That's how they must be portrayed.
Stephen Gowans is a writer and political activist who lives in Ottawa, Canada. He can be reached at: sr.gowans@sympatico.ca
(1) "Israel will be 'wiped out'", AP, December 12, 2006.
(2) "Canadian prof attends Tehran's gathering of Holocaust deniers," Globe and Mail, December 13, 2006.
(3) AP, December 12, 2006.
(4) "Even a scholar's academic freedom has its limits," The Globe and Mail, December 14, 2006.
(5) AP, December 12, 2006.
(6) Ibid
(7) New York Times, February 8, 2006.
(8) New York Times, August 25, 2006.
(9) Ibid
(10) Globe and Mail, December 13, 2006.
Original
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Zionists - The Final Solution - Part 2
Israeli undercover troops kill two Fatah gunmen in West Bank
By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent and News agenciesLast update - 15:55 19/12/2006
Undercover Israeli security forces in the West Bank shot dead two Palestinian militants in separate incidents on Tuesday, one of them a commander of the Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Tul Karm, Palestinian officials said.
They said Mohammed Minas, 23, an Al-Aqsa commander in northern Tul Karm, was shot down by undercover Border Police troops, and a second man was arrested in the raid.
In the afternoon, an undercover border police unit raided the village of Zayde, northeast of Tul Karm, and infiltrated Minas's garage.
Army sources stated that Minas noticed the troops, drew his pistol and was shot dead by the soldiers. In his car, troops found two explosive devices, which IDF sappers then dismantled.
Earlier in the day, a special undercover Israeli police unit opened fire at three Palestinians near a hospital in the West Bank city of Nablus early Tuesday, killing one and wounding two, medical sources said.
The army said its troops identified a vehicle carrying three wanted men, surrounded it and opened fire when the men attempted to escape.
The special unit shot and killed a gunman identified as Alaa Anav, 24, of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs, and injured two other members of the group, while they were sitting in a car near the Ittihad hospital, the sources said.
Israeli media reported that the Israeli force attempted to arrest
the three and opened fire when they tried to escape.
Witnesses reported that shortly after the shooting, a large army force raided the hospital to arrest the two wounded Palestinians and blocked entrances to the Balata refugee camp while it conducted military operations there.
According to IDF sources, the wanted men were involved in the planning of suicide attacks in Israel and received training from Hizbollah in Lebanon.
Comment: Undercover Israel death squads are at work in the occupied territories. This article chronicles one of their hits. But for every hit that makes the news, how many are being conducted and blamed on one or the other faction of Palestinians?
It would be the height of naivité to think that such false flag black ops are not being carried out. Israel wants civil war among the Palestinians so that they kill each other off and do not unite against the occupier. It is the same tactic being used in Iraq.
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Gunbattles rage in Gaza
AP
Published: 19 December 2006
Gun battles raged between Hamas loyalists and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's forces in Gaza City on Tuesday, killing at least three people and reviving fears the strip was sliding into civil war.
Hospital officials said the bodies of two security men loyal to Abbas's Fatah faction had also been dumped in a street after they were abducted earlier in the day.
Concerned events were spinning out of control, Western and Arab nations urged a halt to the fighting.
The internal violence, the worst in living memory, has escalated since Abbas called for early elections on Saturday in an attempt to break a political deadlock with the Hamas government. Hamas has accused Abbas of launching a "coup".
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader, was expected to make a speech in Gaza at 6 p.m. (1600 GMT) to respond to Abbas's election call. Hamas has said it would boycott any polls.
In Gaza City, civilians fled for safety and some shops closed as gunmen fought running battles with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.
"This is madness," said taxi driver Adel Mohammad-Ali, 40. "The streets are divided between Hamas and Fatah gunmen. You never know who is who."
Abbas issued a statement calling on all factions "without exception" to observe a ceasefire agreed late on Sunday but which barely lasted 24 hours.
U.S. Secretary of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the violence had to stop.
"We hope that there will in fact be a ceasefire between the parties. That is very important," Rice said in an interview with Al Arabiya television to be broadcast later on Tuesday.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert traveled to Jordan for unannounced talks with King Abdullah.
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Regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia urged Palestinians to overcome their differences.
The Hamas-run Interior Ministry said Egyptian security officials had brokered a deal for members of rival security services to leave the streets and return to their headquarters.
The deal required various factions to also free hostages they were holding, ministry spokesman Khaled Abu Hilal said.
Abbas said on Monday he was committed to early elections but left the door open for the formation of a Fatah-Hamas coalition with a "technocrat" cabinet that could satisfy the West.
Hamas and Fatah tried for months to form a unity government to end a power struggle, but talks foundered, essentially over Hamas's unwillingness to soften its stance toward Israel. Hamas beat Fatah in January elections.
TRADING BLAME
Both Hamas and Fatah blamed each other for the surge in street fighting in Gaza City.
Two security men from a force loyal to Fatah were among those killed, hospital officials said. Five children were wounded after getting caught in crossfire.
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Witnesses and rival factions said a Hamas policeman was killed in an earlier clash at Gaza's main hospital.
Around a dozen people have been wounded in total.
Fatah sources said the two abducted men had been "executed" by a Hamas-led police unit. A Hamas police spokesman denied the force had abducted or killed anyone.
Hamas, which advocates Israel's destruction, has struggled to govern since taking office in March under the weight of Western sanctions imposed because of its refusal to recognize the Jewish state and renounce violence.
The West has sought to bolster Abbas, who favors a two-state solution to end conflict with Israel.
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Policeman killed in hospital gun battle between Hamas and Fatah
AP
19/12/2006
Fierce gun battles erupted in the streets of Gaza City early today between forces of the rival Hamas and Fatah movements, killing one Hamas militant and leaving a shaky truce in tatters.
The sound of automatic gunfire could be heard throughout Gaza City, and a Fatah installation was attacked with mortar fire - the latest unrest in a week of factional fighting that shows few signs of easing despite Sunday's truce declaration.
At least 11 people were wounded and a Hamas gunman was kidnapped, officials said. [...]
Hamas and Fatah representatives reiterated their commitment to preserving Sunday's truce, but the latest fighting signalled the deal has all but collapsed.
"What is going on is a violation and sabotage and I have called on both parties to shoulder their responsibility and to end what is going on in the streets," said Ibrahim Abu al-Najah, a mediator who sponsored Sunday's truce. "No one is taking advantage of what is going on except for the enemy of the nation."
Hamas and Fatah have been locked in a power struggle since the Islamic group defeated Fatah in legislative elections in January. Abbas' Fatah party controls the presidency, while Hamas controls parliament and the Palestinian Cabinet, putting it in charge of most government functions.
Prime minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas planned to deliver a televised speech later today to discuss the situation.
The latest wave of fighting broke out last week, with tensions heightening after president Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah announced plans to call early elections over the weekend. Hamas has condemned the plan as a coup.
Today's fighting began after a member of the Fatah-controlled intelligence service arrived at the hospital with a broken leg. He was accompanied by two armed colleagues. Hamas militiamen guarding the hospital blocked the entry of the armed men and attempted to arrest them.
When more Fatah forces arrived on the scene, they were fired upon, sparking the gunfight, Fatah officials said.
Hamas accused Fatah of storming the hospital, and said a 23-year-old member of a Hamas police unit was killed. It also said one of its men was kidnapped, describing the incident as "an awful crime committed by elements affiliated with the general terror services".
The battle raged for nearly an hour, sending children scurrying for cover as they made their way to school.
Rival gunmen took up positions of rooftops, some firing rocket-propelled grenades at each other.
The fighting later spread to one of the main offices of the intelligence service, which was attacked by mortars and grenades, security officials said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Supporters of the rival factions each took to the streets in Gaza. Fatah posters condemned the growing chaos. One read: "There is no bread left and no security, what else?" Another showed a woman embracing her child and saying "where are the killers?"
In the northern town of Jebaliya, about 50 pro-Hamas schoolchildren stood on a roadside holding posters that said "No to chaos. Yes to our good government."
The children waved to passing motorists, and Hamas militiamen patrolled major intersections.
Hamas and Fatah representatives reiterated their commitment to preserving Sunday's truce, but the latest fighting signalled the deal has all but collapsed.
"What is going on is a violation and sabotage and I have called on both parties to shoulder their responsibility and to end what is going on in the streets," said Ibrahim Abu al-Najah, a mediator who sponsored Sunday's truce. "No one is taking advantage of what is going on except for the enemy of the nation."
The truce brought a relative lull to Gaza yesterday, but after nightfall the fighting quickly resumed. Gunfire could be heard throughout the night around the area of Abbas' Gaza residence and the pro-Fatah national security compound.
There were no reports of injuries, but Palestinian ambulances said they came under fire in the exchanges. Abbas was at his headquarters in the West Bank.
Another brief gun battle broke out in the morning as masked gunmen opened fire on presidential guards who were manning a roadblock at the entrance to Abbas' home. Abbas was in Ramallah at the time.
Tensions have been high since Abbas' efforts to form a moderate unity government with Hamas collapsed in late November. Abbas had sought a coalition in hopes of ending international sanctions against the Hamas-led government, which has been isolated due to its refusal to recognise Israel.
The tensions turned violent last week after three young sons of a Fatah security officer were gunned down. The fighting worsened after Abbas' announcement on Saturday that he would call new elections to end the impasse.
Prime minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, who has said the party would boycott a new vote, planned to deliver a major speech later today, his office said.
Despite the fighting, Abbas yesterday said he would push ahead with the new elections. With prime minister Tony Blair by his side, Abbas also reached out to Israel in hopes momentum toward peacemaking would provide an electoral edge over Hamas. The United States tentatively endorsed Abbas' call for early elections.
"My understanding of this is that - within the basic law - that this is not prohibited," McCormack said. "It's not specifically accounted for, but it's not prohibited."
An opinion poll indicated Abbas was in a tie with the most popular Hamas politician, prime minister Ismail Haniyeh. Abbas' aides said he hopes his new decisiveness, coupled with progress in negotiations with Israel, will boost his popularity.
Abbas also said he was ready to meet with Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.
After meeting with Blair late yesterday, the Israeli leader said he hoped to have a summit with Abbas "very soon" and said officials from both sides were working on the preparations.
Comment: Indeed it is sabotage - by Israeli undercover operatives.
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Army abducts eight Palestinian men including three brothers from Hebron
IMEMC & Agencies
18 December 2006
The Israeli army on Monday morning abducted eight Palestinian men from several parts of the southern West Bank city of Hebron.
Israeli troops invaded Hebron, the old city, and also surrounding villages Bani Nu'em, Dora, and Beit Kahil near Hebron. During the invasion, the Israeli soldiers searched and ransacked scores of resident's houses and took the seven men to unknown detention camps, local sources reported.
The house of Hisham Al Ja'fari, in the eastern part of Hebron city, was attacked in the morning. Troops searched the houses, damaged some of the family belongings and abducted three of Hisham's sons, Iyad, 24, Mohamed, 22, Ahmad, 20.
Both Mohamed and Ahmad were released after being detained for several hours and questioned by the Israeli army while Iyad was moved to a detention camp, controlled by the army, the family reported. Also, in the city of Hebron, Israeli troops raided resident's houses in the Al Arob refugee camp and took Khadir Al Najmah, 23, prisoner.
Khalil Al Jundi, 33, his brother Tha'er, 21, and Yousif Al Suwiti, 25, were taken away when Israeli forces invaded Dora village near Hebron city and attacked the resident's houses. Palestinian sources stated that both Khalil and Yousif are security officer in the Palestinian security forces in Hebron city. In addition, troops abducted Khalil Zuhur, 30, after surrounding and searching his house in Beit Kahil village just outside Hebron city.
The Israeli forces also abducted on Monday morning Hamza Izrikat, 23, from nearby Tafuha village, north of Hebron, after Israeli soldiers forced the family of 12 members into one small room of the house, then searched and ransacked it.
Elsewhere, south of Hebron city, troops attacked Sourif village assaulted residents and their houses and searched them before taking Ibrahem Abu Farah to an unknown detention camp, his family reported.
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Israeli Army kills one, wounds two, in abductions in Nablus
IMEMC & Agencies
19 December 2006
Israeli undercover special agents killed one Palestinian and abducted two others in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank city of Nablus, Palestinian sources reported on Tuesday morning.
Sources stated that Rami Innab, 25, a leader of the Aqsa brigades, the armed wing of Fatah, was killed and his two companions Imad Abu Mussallam and Talal Abu Lail were wounded and taken prisoner near Al-Ittihad hospital in the city.
Eyewitnesses reported that the three were attacked by an Israeli army unit who were traveling in a white civilian car that resembled an ambulance.
Witnesses added that the troops of the undercover unit opened fire after Innab was killed and the other two were wounded, which prevented medics from providing the needed medical treatment for the wounded although they were technically inside the hospital.
The Innab family said Rami is the fourth family member to be killed by the Israeli and they have vowed revenge.
Moreover in the Al Eein refugee camp in the western side of Nablus, medical sources reported that Amar Zaqzuk, 24, died on Tuesday morning due to wounds he sustained last week after being shot by invading Israeli troops into the refugee camp.
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This is an attempt to overturn our elections
Karma Nabulsi
Tuesday December 19, 2006
The Guardian
Mahmoud Abbas declared yesterday: "Let the people decide for themselves what they want." But there already is a national consensus: there must be Palestinian elections, not for a president of the Palestinian Authority, or for members of its legislative council, but for the Palestinian National Council, the institutional body that forms the sovereign base of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people have already elected a legislative council that represents a proportion of the body politic. They now demand elections for the entire Palestinian population.
When Fatah lost power to Hamas in January, Fatah needed to avail itself of the democratic benefits that accrue to those who lose power in an election: the opportunity to reconnect with their constituents, to learn why it had lost and how to regain their people's trust. Instead, the "international community" told Fatah it was still in power and had to contnue to play this role or take responsibility for abandoning its suffering people to an even crueller fate.
What we are witnessing today is the horrific and inevitable outcome of a process of deliberate coercion, designed to force an occupied people to surrender their elected representatives. That this coercion is being carried out by the military occupier Israel and its neocon backers in the US administration is to be expected - and resisted. What is harder to understand is just how this coercion can be so flagrantly insisted upon by the British and the EU - who should be standing by the Palestinians, if not for the values of decency then as part of their responsibilities as co-signatories to the fourth Geneva convention.
The Palestinian people have indeed already spoken: for elections to the Palestinian National Council; for lifting the economic boycott of a democratically elected authority; for liberty and independence.
- Karma Nabulsi, a former PLO representative, is an Oxford politics fellow commentisfree.co.uk/karma_nabulsi
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A Glimpse at Daily Misery in the Gaza Strip (caused by Israel)
Spiegel
18/12/2006
The 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza strip are trapped in poverty and hopelessness. The violence between the Palestinians stems not only from political disagreements, but from deep, daily despair (and Israeli deception).
Barefoot; dressed in a long gray nightshirt; sleep in his eyes: if his uncle hadn't banged away at the door, Ahmed Kahlout would most likely still be asleep. Instead he dragged himself out of bed at 11:30 a.m., opened the door and invited his visitor in.
Like an old man, he then sank back down onto the two mattresses serving as a sofa in his parents' house -- the only piece of furniture in the living room apart from a fake Persian carpet. He sat there and wearily told his story, one of many such stories in the Gaza Strip: A good education at a school set up by an aid organization, followed by a degree. Since then, the reality of living in Gaza City has ruined all his dreams.
"I did a degree in pedagogy, and wanted to be a teacher," the 23-year-old explained. Instead he is unemployed and spends his days sleeping. "I can't marry, because I have no money to feed a family. So I have a lot of time to kill."
And he does that sitting in semi-darkness. The streets of the Shati refugee camp in the north of Gaza City are so narrow that hardly any light shines into his family's two-room apartment. An old man is perched outside, selling moldy bread as feed for chickens and goats. Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh only lives a few streets away. The Hamas leader didn't move out of the slum following his election to the post of prime minister -- a fact that earns him great respect amongst his followers.
But Ahmed Kahlout is too apathetic to become a radical, despite things going so badly for him. In this respect he is like most of the Gaza Strip's 1.5 million inhabitants: they get on with lives that are marked by poverty and despair. They live an existence in which the bloody conflict between radical Hamas and the seemingly corrupt Fatah is just one more misfortune.
The Gaza strip is just 40 kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide (25 by 6 miles) -- and for years it has been a byword for misery. This year has been even harder for its inhabitants to bear. To understand the sheer scale of the misery, one has to visit John Ging. He is the director of the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency (UNRWA), the body that has been dealing with the Palestinians since they were expelled following the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948.
"Living in one big prison"
The statistics that the Irishman reels off speak for themselves: 89 percent of the population is poverty-stricken, living on less than $2 a day. Over 60 percent are unemployed, and since the election of the Hamas government in January, international aid has dried up. It had been used to pay the salaries of public officials. Now, even those who have jobs have been thrown into poverty, meaning that over 860,000 people in the Gaza Strip are now living on food parcels distributed by the UNRWA. Over half of the population.
But the real drama, says Ging, is that the Palestinians are "effectively living in one big prison." After the withdrawal of Israeli troops last year, there was a feeling of optimism -- that just as quickly turned into hopelessness. "Everyone was counting on an economic upswing once the border with Egypt was open," Ging says.
Instead, trade has come to a virtual standstill as the border has remained mostly closed. Israeli pressure has ensured that the border crossing for people at Rafah is only open 14 percent of the time. And only 14 trucks get through the crossing at Kareni every day -- instead of 400 originally planned. It is the only crossing for those goods not produced in Gaza and thus have to be imported from Israel.
"According to the Dec. 5 treaty on the freedom of movement, the Rafah border can be open if European observers are present," says Ging. However, these observers live in Israel and Israel can use their discretion to prevent them from crossing into the Gaza Strip. "That's how you close a border."
Travellers are not the only ones affected. Farmers who used to export their fruit and vegetables to Israel are now stuck with them. That is the daily lunacy of the Gaza Strip: there are plenty of tomatoes in the markets, but no fish. The chunk of land is on the coast, but the fishermen are only rarely allowed to go out to sea by the Israelis. And frozen fish seldom makes it over the border from Israel.
"No one has any money"
Mahmoud Abu Djayab operates a repair shop for electrical goods in the central market, and he has more work than ever. People can't buy any new appliances, so they need to get even the most worn out cooker fixed. "But that's no use to me," complains the 51-year-old. "All that I have earned is a book full of IOUs. Everyone is living on credit. No one has any money to pay me."
The Palestinians are largely dependent on outside aid. In this February file photo, a man prepares bags full of food from the EU for Gaza City residents.
Ging doesn't blame the Israelis for everything. When he speaks about Hamas, his voice is filled with anger: "Hamas knew that the money would stop flowing if they didn't maintain relations with the international community," he said. "But they didn't do it anyway. That was irresponsible. The party took into account the fact that the people would suffer." He says that international donors have the right to stop their aid payments. "But then they can't act surprised when the psychological strain leads to a greater tendency towards violence." The fact that the Palestinian government was 70 percent dependent on foreign aid wasn't considered either. "The absence of aid deliveries caused chaos."
As bad as the economic situation is for the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, the psychological strain is even worse. "In the past people hoped that the Israelis would leave. Today there is no more light at the end of the tunnel," Ging says. Morale is terribly low. People feel oppressed. Hopelessness leads to despair, which in turn leads to violence. What worries Ging is that a lost generation is growing up. "Just try inspiring a young person to learn, when he knows that after school absolutely nothing awaits him."
Ahmed Kahlout had finally woken up, and he even put on a shirt and trousers for his visitor. But he remained uncommunicative. No, he had no idea what he would be doing in five years time. No, he wasn't political and he hadn't bothered voting. "The civil war will eat everything up anyway," he said. To John Ging "the Palestinians' spirit isn't broken yet, they have the will and the ability to organize their own affairs." But the UN man may be a bit too optimistic.
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Humiliation At Israeli Checkpoints
Palestine Solidarity
18/12/2006
The other day as we were travelling through Zatara checkpoint between Ramallah and Nablus, I witnessed a particularly disgusting display of power by the Israeli army. An extremely public humiliation of a woman, who was taken out of a shared taxi and had her ID and phone removed. She was fighting back the tears, trying to retain her dignity, but was clearly distressed. Everything about the soldiers interaction exuded contempt for her. One in particular was clearly getting something from "punishing" her. We were prevented from speaking to her, which made our ability to intervene somewhat limited. What we were able to do was remain present until she was released. Most of the time I do not feel very effective; the most I can do is be present.
Apparently her ID did not "allow" her to travel to another part of the West Bank. Apart from being extremely punitive, excessively controlling and frankly wrong by any book, it is also arbitary. The rules of the game change. I have been in shared taxis with people who have been turned back.... 'last week' they could make that journey, 'yesterday' they could make that journey, 'next week' they 'may' be able to make it, but today "NO". After a while I feel like I can never hear the word "LO" again (Hebrew for "no"), it is barked and shouted countless times a day, controlling so much of day to day life for Palestinians.
After an hour, on this bitterly cold day, the soldier returned the woman's ID. He simply took it out of his pocket and gave it to her. Clearly she was not a "security threat". Detaining her, frightening her, and publically humiliating her, were blatantly intended to make sure she would not attempt this journey again. I was enraged. The soldiers are boys with guns and egos. They have so much power in a situation that is impossible for them to understand with their conditioning and youth.
At this same checkpoint, in this same period of time, another situation was unfolding. It was hidden away and not for public view. I became suspicious and approached a soldier and border policeman; it was then that I saw a boy of around 15 years, sat hunched behind a concrete bollard, hidden from view, his face wet with tears. He looked petrified. He has good reason to be.
Every single person in Palestine will know someone who has been arrested or detained. Ill treatment is commonplace, and torture is far from being eradicated. I have no idea how long the boy had been held for. He was in tears as the soldiers were speaking to him, but fortunately he was "allowed" to go.
Recently I was travelling through Nablus to a nearby village, the taxi driver pointed out a street where, just half an hour before, the army shot dead a man. Apparently a targetted assasination. Five other people were injured, one seriously. "Normal life" (whatever 'that' is living under
Occupation) continues just a few streets away.
My time here is coming to a close, I am in a quiet, reflective mood. From all the conversations I have had, with countless people, two things are screaming out for attention. One is the overriding sense that things are getting worse. And worse. And worse. I was not here during the bloody years of the Intifada, but I think it is absolutely vital to understand that although the bloodshed and violence is less, the situation is worse. The oppressive control, which works on every level, mental and physical, is steadily going to new levels. One of the women I am working with grew up under Apartheid in South Africa. Along with several other South African activists who are here in the West Bank, she says that Apartheid here is 'even worse' than it was in South Africa. This has not been said lightly. The other thing I am forever requested, "tell people what is happening".
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Knesset okays first reading of bill to extend Citizenship Law
ast update - 16:07 19/12
By Gideon Alon and Shahar Ilan, Haaretz Correspondents
The Knesset on Tuesday approved the first reading of a government proposal to extend the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (the Temporary Order known as the "Citizenship Law"), by two years, until the end of 2008.
The law restricts reunification of families between residents and citizens of Israel and residents of the Palestinian Authority.
The vote was passed by 46 votes in favor, from the rightwing and centrist parties, while 9 MKs from Meretz and the Arab parties voted against.
The government is seeking the extension despite the harsh criticism leveled at it by the High Court of Justice. Meretz has already informed Attorney General Menachem Mazuz of its intention to petition the High Court if the bill is passed.
The government rushed to bring the bill to a vote as the current Temporary Order is only valid until January 16, 2007, and must either be extended or replaced before that date. Last month, the Ministry of Interior's legal adviser, Yehuda Zameret, issued a memorandum of the new draft law.
The bill also calls for the expansion of the law to cover several "threat states," presumably mainly Arab and Muslim countries.
The bill gives Israel the right to reject an applicant who meets all the criteria "if in the applicant's country of residency or if within his vicinity of residence activities liable to endanger the security of the State of Israel or its citizens take place."
This clause ostensibly gives Israel the right to reject any resident of the Palestinian Authority or any Arab country.
On May 2, 2002 the government decided for the first time to freeze all family reunification proceedings between residents and citizens of Israel and residents of the PA, on the grounds of "increasing involvement by Palestinians from the region [i.e. the PA - Shahar Ilan] with Israeli identification cards as a result of family reunification, who exploited their status in Israel to engage in terror activities."
In mid-2003 the cabinet resolution became a Temporary Order, which has since been extended three times. In mid-2005 certain provisions were relaxed to enable family reunification in cases where the husband is at least 35 and the wife at least 25 years old.
On May 14 of this year, an 11-justice panel of the High Court approved the Temporary Order by a vote of six to five. Former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, siding with the minority, argued that "the appropriate goal of increasing security is not justifying severe harm to many thousands of Israeli citizens."
Zameret's memorandum, on the other hand, claimed that the draft bill is in keeping with the High Court ruling according to which accommodation must be available to deal with exceptional humanitarian cases.
Comment: How could anyone of conscience live in Israel? The land was stolen, the original people were subject to ethnic cleansing and terrorism that continues to this day. How could anyone of conscience stay and live in Israel?
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Interior Min. plans to develop area along Syrian border
By Mazal Mualem
Haaretz
19 December 2006
Interior Minister Roni Bar-On (Kadima) plans to accelerate the process for issuing construction permits in the Golan Heights and to shepherd new projects for the areas adjacent to the Syrian city of Quneitra through the planning committees under his ministry. The decisions follow Bar-On's tour of the Golan last week.
After seeing the heightened pace of building in Quneitra last week, Bar-On concluded that the Syrians are treating the areas near their border with Israel as the future permanent border, focusing on civilian rather than military construction as in the past. The minister said that Israel must take the same approach, and expedite construction in the area.
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Bar-On's hosts in the Golan, Golan Regional Council Head head Eli Malka and Katzrin council head Sami Bar Lev, pointed out the new construction in Quneitra and told the minister that Syria is also conducting a media campaign to attract new residents to the Quneitra area, using incentives.
Bar-On has recently expressed firm opposition to the idea of negotiating with Syria, on the grounds that Syrian President Bashar Assad should not be given support, particularly while he is still part of the "axis of evil."
"Talk about the Golan Heights harms the defensive wall built by the international community and by Israel against the axis of evil," Bar-On said. "The Golan Heights should be treated as a region of Israel in every respect."
Bar-On has said that accelerating the development of the Golan is not a provocation of Syria but rather an expression of both sides' acceptance of the future border.
Comment: "Along the Syrian border". I think not. How about, inside of an illegally occupied Syria? Is that closer to the truth?
And don't you love that last line:
"Bar-On has said that accelerating the development of the Golan is not a provocation of Syria but rather an expression of both sides' acceptance of the future border."
Right. It isn't a provocation, no more than seizing Palestinian land and building illegal settlements is a provocation. Or constructing the apartheid wall. In all cases, it is nothing more than "an expression of both sides' acceptance of the future border".
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Iraq "A Terrible Mistake" - For Iraqis
Iraq was terrible mistake, UK thinktank says
December 19, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
The decision to invade Iraq was a "terrible mistake" that would shape Tony Blair's legacy for years to come, a leading thinktank said today.
A Chatham House paper on 10 years of foreign policy under Mr Blair concluded that its root failure was an inability to influence George Bush.
However, the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, defended Mr Blair against the critique, written by the outgoing Chatham House director, Victor Bulmer-Thomas.
Mrs Beckett described the publication as "threadbare, insubstantial and just plain wrong", adding: "Chatham House has established a great reputation over the years, but this paper will do nothing to enhance it."
While the report said there had been qualified successes in Mr Blair's first term, the decision to provide diplomatic cover for Mr Bush's decision to invade Iraq was the defining moment of his foreign policy and premiership.
"It will shape his legacy - for better or for worse - for many years to come," it concluded.
As so often with British prime ministers, Mr Blair thought unwavering public support for the US would bring private influence and lead to changes in US policy favouring British interests, but this had not happened.
Mr Bulmer-Thomas said there had been an "inability to influence the Bush administration in any significant way, despite the sacrifice - military, political and financial - that the United Kingdom has made".
Given the Byzantine complexity of Washington politics, it was always unrealistic to think that outside powers - however loyal - could expect to have much influence on the US decision-making process, he said.
"The bilateral relationship with the United States may be 'special' to Britain, but the US has never described it as more than 'close' ... Tony Blair has learnt the hard way that loyalty in international politics counts for very little," the report said.
It said there was no evidence that British pressure was responsible for Mr Bush's announcement that the US would accept a two-state solution in the Middle East, because this was simply a restatement of policy under the Clinton administration.
The report added that, whoever was the prime minister in future, there would "no longer be unconditional support for US initiatives in foreign policy".
In the absence of UN support for a humanitarian intervention in Iraq, the paper said it had been a "terrible mistake" to emphasise Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction as a justification for war.
"The jury is still out" on the extent to which Mr Blair knew the claims about Iraqi WMD were "overblown or even fabricated", the report said.
The decision to commit British troops in the absence of a UN security council resolution "drove a horse and cart" through the principle Mr Blair himself set out in a speech in Chicago in 1999 setting out a "doctrine of international community".
The report also said it was "unforgivable" that Mr Blair had failed to foresee the consequences of a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, given the impact on heroin use on Britain's streets.
In contrast, it said his most positive legacy in foreign affairs would be his determined advocacy of the need to tackle climate change.
Comment: It does not get much more ridiculous than this. An acclaimed British "think tank" finally states that obvious, and we the people, millions of whom opposed the Iraq invasion from the outset, are supposed to be grateful.
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[US-sanctioned] Violence in Iraq hits record high, Pentagon admits
Timesonline
19/12/2006
Violence in Iraq has reached the highest recorded levels for eighteen months and is taking the country towards civil war, the Pentagon concluded yesterday, in a grim report that coincided with the swearing-in of Robert Gates, the new US Defence Secretary.
In its latest quarterly report to Congress on the progress of the Iraq campaign, the US military found that attacks against American troops, their Iraqi comrades and civilians reached 959 per week in the period from August to November, up 22 per cent on the previous three months.
The increase means that 93 Iraqi civilians are killed or injured every day in Iraq, while 33 Iraqi security staff are killed or hurt. An average of 25 US and coalition soldiers were killed or injured every day in the same period, just short of the 2004 high, during the assault on Fallujah, the bloodiest period of the war for US troops in Iraq.
It is the highest number of attacks recorded by the Pentagon since it was ordered to present three-monthly updates to Congress on Iraq in mid-2005.
The Pentagon said that the level of sectarian violence meant that "conditions that could lead to civil war do exist" in Iraq and identified the Mahdi Army, the Baghdad-based Shia militia, as more dangerous than al-Qaeda in Iraq in the current climate of tit-for-tat ethnic killings. [Ed: No mention of the US-sponsored death squads?]<
"The group that is currently having the greatest negative affect on the security situation in Iraq is Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM)," said the report. The conclusion is a blow to the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who has been criticised for failing to crack down on the militia loyal to Hojatoleslam al-Sadr, the radical Shia cleric, which has taken control of several Iraqi government ministries.
"The violence has escalated at an unbelievably rapid pace," said Lieutenant General John F. Sattler, director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a briefing for journalists. "We have to get ahead of that violent cycle, break that continuous chain of sectarian violence."
Another senior Pentagon official, Peter Rodman, assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs, acknowledged that Iraqi militants with the aim of causing civil war had achieved a "strategic success" by bombing the Shia al-Askariya shrine in Samarra, an event that triggered a massive rise in sectarian warfare.
"The tragedy of Iraq is that in February in Samarra, the insurgents achieved what one could call a partial strategic success -- namely, to trigger what we've been dealing with ever since, which is a cycle of sectarian violence, that indeed is shaking the institutions," he said.
The report was presented to Congress just hours after Robert Gates, a former head of the CIA, was sworn in as America's 22nd Secretary of Defence. At a ceremony at the Pentagon attended by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Mr Gates said the US could not afford to fail in the Middle East.
"Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come."
Mr Gates said he intended to travel to Iraq and discuss the situation with commanders on the ground as soon as possible. His first task will be to enter what is being described in Washington as an "intense debate" between the White House and US military officials about the next step to take in the conflict.
The Washington Post reported today that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leaders of the various branches of the American armed forces that advise the President on military policy, are unanimously opposed to a White House plan to send an extra 15,000 to 30,000 troops to Iraq for the next eight months.
The military officials say a small surge in US troop numbers will only exacerbate levels of violence in the country, the newspaper reported, without giving the coalition or Iraqi soldiers a decisive advantage over the sectarian militias and militant groups that are driving the fighting.
"The Joint Chiefs think the White House, after a month of talks, still does not have a defined mission and is latching on to the surge idea in part because of limited alternatives, despite warnings about the potential disadvantages for the military, said the officials," the newspaper reported.
"The chiefs have taken a firm stand, the sources say, because they believe the strategy review will be the most important decision on Iraq to be made since the March 2003 invasion."
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U.S. working with Iraq over disappearing minister
Reuters
19/12/2006
The United States said on Tuesday it was cooperating with Iraq to find out how a former Iraqi minister with dual U.S. citizenship was sprung from his Baghdad jail cell, reportedly by armed, plain-clothes Americans.
"We are coordinating with the Iraqi government, which is currently investigating the case. There are conflicting reports surrounding his disappearance and we can't comment further," U.S. embassy spokesman Lou Fintor said.
Ayham al-Samarraie, an electricity minister in the former government of Prime Minister Iyad al-Allawi, has not been seen since Sunday, when he walked out of the police station where he was being held, in the company of a group of armed men.
He had been detained at a police station on the outskirts of the Green Zone, the heavily fortified compound that houses the Iraqi government and the U.S. and British embassies, to await trial in up to 12 corruption cases, a judge said on Monday.
The head of the police station and a second officer have been arrested, said Ali al-Shaboot, spokesman for Iraq's independent Public Integrity Commission, which is investigating nine cases of misuse of public money against Samarraie.
"The warrants of arrest were issued by the investigating judge," Shaboot told Reuters.
The commission says Samarraie was taken from the station by plain-clothes Americans and that the minister had previously employed a private American security firm to protect him.
A judge close to a trial in which Samarraie was convicted of corruption in October and sentenced to two years in jail offered a different version of events.
In October, armed Americans took Samarraie from court shortly after his conviction. He had expressed fears for his life and decried the "political" verdict.
He was handed over to Iraqi police to begin serving his sentence after the government objected to the interference.
Samarraie, who spent years in exile in the United States, said he was being victimized because of his opposition to Iranian influence in Iraq and Shi'ite militias, who are accused of killing thousands of members of his minority Sunni Arab sect.
Comment: Hmmm...misuse of public money by a member of the US-apointed Allawi government, Allawi being a CIA asset. We wonder, would this minister, who was spirited away by CIA agents, have had anything to tell the judge about where Iraqi money was going? Or rather, which particular death squads it was funding? We may never know, but we can damn well make a very accurate guess.
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It's Either Occupation or Education
Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily IPS
Dec 18 2006
Iraq's Ministry of Education says attendance rates for the new school year, which started Sep. 20, are at an all-time low.
Statistics released by the ministry in October showed that a mere 30 percent of Iraq's 3.5 million students are currently attending classes. This compares to roughly 75 percent of students who were attending classes the previous year, according to the Britain-based NGO Save the Children.
Just before the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003, school attendance was nearly 100 percent.
Iraqis are forgetting almost what a child needs. Dr. Ahmed Aaraji of the Baghdad Societal Organisation, an Iraqi NGO which monitors the state of Iraqi schools and families in an effort to assist families where possible, is trying to remind everyone what that should be.
"To build a child's character, the home atmosphere should be appropriate, parents should attend to children, the school environment should be proper, and the whole society should function at the best level," he told IPS. "But none of these factors seems to exist in Iraq any more."
Iraq was awarded The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) prize for eradicating illiteracy in 1982. At that time, literacy rates for women were among the highest of all Islamic nations.
Education today presents a quite different picture. An IPS correspondent visited a primary school in the capital city, located in the volatile al-Amiriyah district in western Baghdad not far from the airport, after making his way through piles of garbage. And these piles grow bigger by the day, residents say.
The two-storey building looks neat enough with a fresh coat of yellow paint, but one step inside reveals years of neglect.
"During the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi schools suffered from the poverty of the state due to the U.S.-backed UN sanctions," the headmaster told IPS. "The main problem now is the corruption of contractors and senior administration staff."
Contracts have been handed out for refurbishment, he said. But in effect, "they just paint the walls and fix some cheap accessories to collect their cash, and go."
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) declared as early as October 2004 that the education system in Iraq was "effectively denying children a decent education, and the poor quality of the learning environment delivers a major blow to children."
The study also confirmed that thousands of schools lacked the basic facilities to provide children a decent education.
UNICEF representative Roger Wright said in the October 2004 report: "Iraq used to have one of the finest school systems in the Middle East. Now we have clear evidence of how far the system has deteriorated. Today millions of children in Iraq are attending schools that lack even basic water or sanitation facilities, have crumbling walls, broken windows and leaking roofs. The system is overwhelmed."
Two years later, the situation has grown far worse. Now it is so bad that international agencies are not around to survey it any more.
Still, several parents continue to send their children to school. "We have to because what is the alternative," Um Abdulla told IPS at the front gate of a school in Baghdad as she waited to collect her children.
Literacy is declining with school education. UNESCO estimates that the literacy rate in Iraq as of Dec 11 is below 60 percent, meaning six million illiterate adults. The average literacy rate in Iraq 2000-2003 was 74 percent, according to UNICEF in 2004.
In the rural areas illiteracy is worse. Only 37 percent of rural women are literate, and only 30 percent of Iraqi girls of high school age are even enrolled in school. That compares with about 42 percent of boys, according to the UNESCO report this month.
Security is the prime concern, for parents and teachers.
"Roads are unsafe, with all the explosions and abductions that threaten our children on their way to school," mother of three Um Suthir told IPS.
Mothers usually accompany their children to school and bring them back home. With abductions on the rise, neither are safe.
Many schools in the capital have lowered their hours of classes to less than four a day due to shortage of teachers and facilities, and lack of security.
In war-torn Fallujah, many of the schools destroyed in the November 2004 U.S.-led attack on the city have not been rebuilt. This has led to reduced hours of classes being held in sometimes three shifts in makeshift buildings.
Ali al-Ka'abi from the Ministry of Education said the problem is worse in the capital and in cities in al-Anbar province to the west of Baghdad, where up to 30 percent of school buildings are being used by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers. This province, that includes Fallujah and Ramadi, has seen the fiercest resistance to U.S. occupation.
The collapsing economy is also keeping several children away from school. Many children have had to leave school because of family poverty or after the families were evicted from homes and hometowns for sectarian reasons.
"We are now living in a factory building, and there is no school near our shelter," a Baghdad resident told IPS. "I've had to ask for my oldest boy to help cover expenses by working as a cleaner at a mechanic's shop nearby."
The man said he used to own a small supermarket where he also lived; he now works as a porter. And he has no hope his children can ever go to school any more.
Comment: As we keep saying, the goal of the Iraq invasion was the destruction of Iraqi society. Why? Because that is what it has achieved.
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US general issues warning: politics must not interfere with 100-year "war on terror"
By Bill Van Auken
19 December 2006
One of the Pentagon's senior uniformed strategists warned last week that the "global war on terror" will go on for another 50 to 100 years and voiced concern that "politics" not be allowed to interfere with the protracted struggle.
The remarks were made by Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schissler, an Air Force commander and the Defense Department's deputy director for the "war on terrorism." He made them in an exclusive interview with the Washington Times, the right-wing daily owned by the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
"We're in a generational war," he told the paper. "You can try and fight the enemy where they are and where they're attacking you, or prevent them and defend your own homeland," he said. "But that's not enough to stop it."
The Washington Times went on to report, "Gen. Schissler said he is concerned that Washington politics is weakening the will of the nation."
"I don't care about the politics," he told the newspaper. "I care about people understanding the facts of what our enemy is thinking about, what's our strategy to defeat them, and for [Americans] to understand that it will take a long fight, mostly because our enemy is committed to the long fight." He added, "They're absolutely committed to the 50-, 100-year plan."
"One of my concerns is how to maintain the American will, the public will over that duration," the general said. He described this task as "very difficult."
Difficult indeed. How is the "public will" to wage global warfare for the next century to be maintained, particularly when "politics" gets in the way?
Given the political context of Schissler remarks, his warnings have unmistakable and chilling implications.
Barely six weeks ago, the Bush administration, which initiated the "war on terror" and proclaimed Iraq to be its most important front, suffered a stunning defeat at the polls. The Republican Party's loss of both houses of the US Congress was the result of mass popular opposition to the Iraq war.
This opposition has only deepened in the intervening weeks, as a series of opinion polls have demonstrated. A CBS News poll, for example, found that just 4 percent of Americans believe that terrorism is the most important problem confronting the country. The same poll found that a record 35 percent believe that the war in Iraq is the principal problem, with 71 percent saying the war is going badly and only 9 percent believing that the US is very likely to succeed in Iraq.
A USA Today poll found that two-thirds believe that the costs of the US succeeding in Iraq outweigh the benefits. A clear majority wants all US troops withdrawn from the country within the next year, while 74 percent say all combat troops should be withdrawn by March 2008.
Not only is the American public unwilling to support a century of wars of aggression, it has reached the conclusion that the three-and-a-half-year-old war in Iraq should never have been launched and should be brought to a speedy end. This is the threat to the "American will" about which Gen. Schissler is so concerned.
This supposed "will" to wage war-what could better be described as a temporary and forced acquiescence-was achieved through political deception and intimidation, by terrorizing the population with the supposed threat of attack in the wake of the September 11, 2001 tragedy.
As all of the pretexts used to promote the war-weapons of mass destruction, Baghdad-Al Qaeda ties, etc.-were exposed as lies, and as the war itself turned into an ever-more bloody debacle, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and either killing or wounding 25,000 US troops, the demand for withdrawal of US forces from Iraq was embraced by millions of Americans, including many in uniform.
The issue posed is not really sustaining the "will" to wage a 100-year war, but suppressing the mass opposition to war that has already found powerful political expression.
Among masses of American working people, there never was a will to wage wars of aggression. That outlook reflected the aims and schemes developed within the corporate and financial elite that rules America. This ruling layer has utilized the "global war on terror," in which Gen. Schissler is a senior strategist, as the pretext for carrying out a military campaign aimed at imposing US domination over the oil-rich regions of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia as part of American capitalism's pursuit of global hegemony.
In the aftermath of the 2006 midterm elections, it has become increasingly apparent that this ruling elite has no intention of bowing to the actual will of the people, as reflected at the polls, by bringing an end to the war and withdrawing US troops from Iraq. It is driven by its own economic necessity to offset a declining position on the world market by means of military force. And it fears that a withdrawal from Iraq will expose the underlying weakness of American imperialism, raising the danger of revolutionary crises both at home and abroad.
In his interview with the Washington Times, Schissler said that the century-long struggle he foresees will be waged against extremists determined to establish a global "caliphate" stretching from Spain to Indonesia. While there are, no doubt, a small number of radical Islamists who believe in such a crackpot scheme, this supposed threat has nothing to do with the military interventions now being carried out by Washington in the regions possessing the largest reserves of petroleum in the world.
The attempt to cast the wars being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq in religious terms has become an increasingly common refrain within the most right-wing sections of the political establishment in Washington, as well as within the military command. There is no doubt that this depiction of events is aimed at solidifying a base of support for war among a layer of Christian fundamentalists.
The most notorious example of this attempt to drum up a religious-based "will" to wage war came to light in 2003 with press reports of speeches delivered by Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, to audiences assembled by the Christian right.
Boykin repeatedly told audiences that the war was being waged by a "Christian army" and a "Christian nation" against Islamic forces aligned with Satan. He proclaimed that his own confidence in victory over a Muslim foe was based on the knowledge that "my God was bigger than his . . . my God was a real god and his was an idol." He likewise declared that George W. Bush was "appointed by God," despite having failed to win the majority of the votes in 2000, and indicated that he saw himself as answerable only to God's commands.
While the general's anti-Islamic bigotry and profoundly anti-democratic remarks provoked outrage, the Republican right and the Bush administration leapt to his defense. The general himself asked that a Pentagon inspector general investigate the controversy. The result was a report that avoided the content of Boykin's remarks, delivering only the mildest rebuke for his failure to assert that they were his personal opinion and to clear them first with superiors.
General Boykin remains to this day the senior uniformed officer in military intelligence and a top policy-maker in the "war on terror," overseeing assassination squads, illegal abductions and torture.
Schissler is not known to have delivered any similar religious-political diatribes. His service record posted on the Defense Department's web site does, however, include the notation that in 1998, while climbing the promotional ladder to the Pentagon's inner circle, the Air Force officer found time to complete a master's degree in "pastoral studies."
The politically protected ravings of Boykin as well as the expressions of concern by Schissler that "politics"-that is, the real will of the people-not be allowed to interfere with the official will to wage war are indicative of the right-wing and authoritarian tendencies that are being nurtured by American militarism and colonial-style occupation.
In the end, imposing upon the American people the "will" to sustain a 100-year war could be achieved only by dictatorial means similar to those utilized by the Nazis in their attempt to generate the "will" of the German people to sustain a 1,000-year Reich.
The danger posed by such right-wing tendencies is not that they have any substantial base of popular support, but that they emerge under conditions of deepening social and political polarization in which the opposition of American working people to war and repression can find no genuine expression within the political establishment and its two-party system.
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Pentagon's new chief pledges to find solutions in Iraq
www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-19 06:15:18
WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Robert Gates, the new U.S. defense secretary, on Monday pledged to go to Iraq soon in search of a solution to the violence and warned that failure in Iraq will be unbearable for the United States.
"I intend to travel quite soon to Iraq and meet with our military leaders and other personnel there," Gates said at his sworn-in ceremony at the Pentagon.
"I look forward to hearing their honest assessments of the situation on the ground and to having the benefit of their advice, unvarnished and straight from the shoulder, on how to proceed in the weeks and months ahead," he said.
Gates stressed that the United States could not afford a failure in Iraq.
"All of us want to find a way to bring America's sons and daughters home again, but, as the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East," he said, noting that "failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come."
Although putting Iraq at the top of his list of major concerns, the new defense secretary said he did not forget Afghanistan, where U.S. forces overthrew the Taliban regime shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"The progress made by the Afghan people over the past five years is at risk...," he said. "Afghanistan cannot be allowed to become a sanctuary for extremists again."
"The right man to meet challenges"
At the ceremony, U.S. President George W. Bush praised Gates as "the right man to meet the military challenges confronting the United States."
"We are a nation at war," the president said, "and I rely on our secretary of defense to provide me with the best possible advice and to help direct our nation's armed forces as they engage the enemies of freedom around the world."
Bush said he was counting on Gates to bring a "fresh perspective" to the Pentagon as the United States charts "a new way forward in Iraq" to build a country that can govern, sustain and defend itself and be an ally in the war against "extremists and radicals."
The change of guard at Pentagon was taking place at a crucial juncture in the Iraq war, a conflict that cost Donald Rumsfeld the job of defense secretary and will likely define Gates' Pentagon tenure.
When U.S. President George W. Bush announced last month that he will change Pentagon chiefs, he said he wanted "fresh perspective" on Iraq, acknowledging that the current approach was "not working well enough."
Rumsfeld was a chief architect of the war strategy and still defends the decision to invade in March 2003.
Comment: Who believes this stuff? The new, improved Secretary will continue on with the same goal as Rumsfeld: implementation of the neo-con agenda to destabilize and partition Iraq. Bush isn't going to change. The goal is chaos, and chaos is what Bush and his team are delivering and will continue to deliver.
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Bush administration elaborates plans for bloodbath in Iraq
By Bill Van Auken
18 December 2006
Reports on the Bush administration's discussions on a change of course in Iraq indicate that Washington is preparing a major new bloodbath as part of a desperate attempt to salvage its nearly four-year-old bid to conquer the oil-rich country.
The New York Times Sunday carried an article entitled "The Capital Awaits a Masterstroke on Iraq," which indicated that the options under discussion include what amounts to support for a genocidal war against Iraq's Sunni population as well as the deliberate unleashing of a region-wide sectarian conflict between the predominantly Sunni Arab countries and the Shia majorities in Iran and Iraq.
This proposal-known widely in Washington as the "80 percent solution," the percentage of the Iraqi population comprising Shia and Kurds-the Times writes, "basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they're likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni."
The plan reportedly has been promoted by Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of the Iraq war from the beginning.
A key consideration, the article adds, is control of Iraq's oil fields. "The longer America tries to woo the Sunnis, the more it risks alienating the Shiites and Kurds, and they're the ones with the oil," the Times states. "A handful of administration officials have argued that Iraq is not going to hold to together and will splinter along sectarian lines. If so, they say, American interests dictate backing the groups who control the oil-rich areas."
An off-shoot of the plan, which the Times cynically describes as something "some hawks have tossed out in meetings," is a suggestion that the US could reap the benefits of a region-wide sectarian conflagration. "America could actually hurt Iran by backing Iraq's Shiites; that could deepen the Shiite-Sunni split and eventually lead to a regional Shiite-Sunni war," the Times writes. "And in that, the Shiites-and Iran-lose because, while there are more Shiites than Sunnis in Iraq and Iran, there are more Sunnis than Shiites almost everywhere else."
At the same time, there are growing indications that a proposed "surge" of tens of thousands more American combat troops into Iraq will have as its first objective taking on the militia loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, meaning a brutal assault on the impoverished Shia masses of Baghdad.
The formulation of such mutually contradictory policies appears to be less the product of diplomatic and military calculation than political insanity. Underlying what seems like madness is the desperation and disorientation at all levels of the American state over the deep crisis that its policy has produced.
What predominates is the conception that provided it carries out a sufficient level of killing-whether in a genocidal slaughter of Sunnis, a bloodletting against the Shia, or a combination of the two-US imperialism can somehow extricate itself from a humiliating defeat in Iraq.
The leaks concerning the strategies now under consideration only underscore the abject criminality of the war as well as the desperate crisis that is gripping the American political establishment, which remains deeply divided over how to confront the political and military debacle confronting the US occupation.
Less than two weeks after the release of the report by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, the Bush administration has repudiated the panel's prescriptions for reducing the US military role in Iraq and pursuing diplomatic initiatives aimed at winning cooperation from the neighboring countries of Iran and Syria.
The White House, backed by the Republican right and the most ruthless sections of the American ruling elite, is instead preparing what amounts to a re-invasion of the ravaged country and the pursuit of a broader regional war, ultimately aimed at toppling both the Iranian and the Syrian regimes.
It was reported late last week that the Pentagon has already ordered the 3,500 troops of the Second Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, currently based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to prepare for deployment to Kuwait next month. This would be the first contingent for what is anticipated to be a "surge" of between 30,000 and 50,000 additional troops.
Not only is the political establishment deeply divided over the way forward in Iraq, but the US military command as well. Some, such as Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq, and Gen. John Abizaid, the senior commander of US forces in the Middle East, have questioned the value of a "surge" of American troops into Iraq, noting that such an increased deployment could not be sustained and warning that it could serve to further delay Iraqi forces taking over security operations.
On the other hand, a number of recently retired senior commanders have advocated the escalation, and the scheme is reportedly supported by Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who assumed command of combat troops in Iraq last week. Odierno commanded the Army's 4th Infantry Division in Anbar Province in 2003 and 2004, gaining a reputation for heavy-handed counterinsurgency operations and repression that is credited by many with generating much of the popular support for the Iraqi resistance.
"We are going to go after any-any-individual who attacks the government, who attacks the security forces and who attacks coalition forces no matter who they are and no matter who they are associated with," he said at a ceremony in Baghdad last Thursday.
The remark appeared to be a warning that the immediate target of the new offensive now being prepared will be the Mahdi Army, the Shia militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr. According to press reports, the Pentagon's uniformed command has been unanimous on its insistence that any increased deployment in Baghdad be accompanied by unrestricted rules of engagement for US forces going after Sadr's followers.
Such an offensive would signal not only a US-engineered coup against the current Iraqi government, in which Sadr's movement holds substantial power, but also a massive loss of civilian life, as an all-out war would be waged in the crowded Shia slums of Baghdad's Sadr City.
Barely six weeks after growing popular opposition to the war in Iraq produced a stunning defeat for the Bush administration at the polls, there is every indication that the White House intends not only to continue the war, but to escalate it substantially.
The Democratic leadership, meanwhile, exhibits no such conviction or determination as it prepares to assume the leadership next month of both houses of the US Congress.
On Sunday, incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared in a television interview that he is prepared to support the proposed "surge" in Iraqi troop deployment if it served as part of a broader strategy to achieve the Baker-Hamilton commission's proposal for reducing the number of troops in Iraq by early 2008.
"If the commanders on the ground said this is just for a short period of time, we'll go along with that," Reid said, adding that an escalation for two to three months would be acceptable, but not one that dragged on for 18 months or 24 months.
The Democratic Senate leader's qualms were dismissed by one of the prominent advocates of the "surge," former Army vice chief of staff Gen. Jack Keane, who pointed out, "It will take a couple of months just to get forces in." Keane said that it would take at least one and half years for an expanded force to suppress Iraqi resistance.
Meanwhile, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, considered the most liberal Democrat in the US Senate, appearing on the Fox News channel, voiced opposition to the increased troop deployment, but rejected any move to cut off funding for the war-the only means, short of impeachment, that the Democrats have to rein in the escalating militarism of the Bush administration.
"One thing about the Democrats is we will support the troops," Kennedy declared, adding, "We are not going to pull the line, in terms of the troops."
Pressed by interviewer Chris Wallace as to why he was unprepared to support a vote to defund the war in Iraq, when Democrats had pursued just such a course during the Vietnam War, Kennedy stressed that "This is a different situation than Vietnam" and "we are not at this point at this time."
What is different is that in Iraq, decisive sections of America's ruling elite remain determined to pursue the goal of establishing US domination over one of the largest reserves of petroleum in the world by means of military force and colonial-style domination.
While there are intense divisions over how this goal is to be pursued, the defense of the geo-strategic interests of American capitalism is upheld by every faction of the political establishment. It is for this reason that the Democrats have served as the Bush administration's accomplice in this war since voting to authorize an unprovoked invasion more than four years ago.
The growing threats to escalate the assault against the Iraqi people and potentially unleash a conflagration that could spread throughout the Middle East and worldwide demonstrate that the popular opposition to the war cannot find expression through the present two-party political set up in America.
Even before the new Congress convenes, it has become starkly apparent that the struggle to end the war in Iraq and to hold those who are responsible for launching this war politically and criminally responsible can be advanced only through the emergence of a new independent political movement of working people in opposition to the American financial oligarchy and both of its parties.
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Washington Refuses to End the War: Powell, Baker, Hamilton ... Thanks for Nothing!
By NORMAN SOLOMON
December 18, 2006
When Colin Powell endorsed the Iraq Study Group report during his Dec. 17 appearance on "Face the Nation," it was another curtain call for a tragic farce.
Four years ago, "moderates" like Powell were making the invasion of Iraq possible. Now, in the guise of speaking truth to power, Powell and ISG co-chairs James Baker and Lee Hamilton are refueling the U.S. war effort by depicting it as a problem of strategy and management.
But the U.S. war effort is a problem of lies and slaughter.
The Baker-Hamilton report stakes out a position for managerial changes that dodge the fundamental immorality of the war effort. And President Bush shows every sign of rejecting the report's call for scaling down that effort.
Meanwhile, most people in the United States favor military disengagement. According to a new Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll, "Seven in 10 say they want the new Congress to pressure the White House to begin bringing troops home within six months."
The nationwide survey came after the Baker-Hamilton report arrived with great -- and delusional -- expectations. In big bold red letters, the cover of Time predicted that the report would take the White House by storm: "The Iraq Study Group says it's time for an exit strategy. Why Bush will listen."
While often depicted as a rebuff to the president's Iraq policies, the report was hardly a prescription for abandoning the U.S. military project in Iraq -- as Baker was at pains to repeatedly point out during a whirlwind round of network interviews.
Hours after the report's release on Dec. 6, Baker told PBS "NewsHour" host Jim Lehrer that the blue-ribbon commission was calling for a long-term U.S. military presence: "So our commitment -- when we say not open-ended, that doesn't mean it's not going to be substantial. And our report makes clear that we're going to have substantial, very robust, residual troop levels in Iraq for a long, long time."
Baker used very similar phrasing the next morning in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America" -- saying that the report "makes clear we're going to have a really robust American troop presence in Iraq and in the region for a long, long time."
That was 24 hours into the report's release, when media spin by Baker and Hamilton and their allies was boosting a document that asserted a continual American prerogative to devote massive resources to war in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. And, in a little-noted precept of the report, it said: "The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise."
In short, the Baker-Hamilton report was a fallback position for U.S. military intervention -- and for using Pentagon firepower on behalf of U.S.-based oil companies. But the report's call for tactical adjustments provoked fury among the most militaristic politicians and pundits. Their sustained media counterattack took hold in short order.
President Bush wriggled away from the panel's key recommendations -- gradual withdrawal of many U.S. troops from Iraq and willingness to hold diplomatic talks with Syria and Iran. War enthusiasts like Sen. John McCain denounced the report as a recipe for retreat and defeat. The New York Post dubbed Baker and Hamilton "surrender monkeys." Rush Limbaugh called their report "stupid."
By the time its one-week anniversary came around, the Baker-Hamilton report looked about ready for an ashcan of history. Bush had already postponed his announcement of a "new strategy for Iraq" until after the start of the new year -- a delay aimed at cushioning the president from pressure to adopt the report's central recommendations. Even the limited punch of the report has been largely stymied by the most rabidly pro-war forces of American media and politics.
But those forces don't really need to worry about the likes of Colin Powell, James Baker and Lee Hamilton -- as long as the argument is over how the U.S. government should try to get its way in Iraq.
"We are losing -- we haven't lost -- and this is the time, now, to start to put in place the kinds of strategies that will turn this situation around," Powell told CBS viewers on Sunday. That sort of talk stimulates endless rationales for continuing U.S. warfare and facilitates the ongoing escalation of the murderous U.S. air war in Iraq.
Powell's mendacious performance at the U.N. Security Council, several weeks before the invasion of Iraq, is notorious. But an obscure media appearance by Powell, when he was interviewed by the French network TV2 in mid-September 2003, sheds more light on underlying attitudes that unite the venture-capitalist worldviews of "moderates" like Colin Powell and "hardliners" like Dick Cheney.
Trying to justify Washington's refusal to end the occupation, Powell explained: "Since the United States and its coalition partners have invested a great deal of political capital, as well as financial resources, as well as the lives of our young men and women -- and we have a large force there now -- we can't be expected to suddenly just step aside."
Norman Solomon is the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
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Money Makes The World Go...Boom!
US sees UN sanctions against Iran voted within days
Mon Dec 18 2006
AFP
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The UN Security Council will adopt sanctions against Iran within days in response to Tehran's refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment program, a senior US official said.
After months of intense negotiations, the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany were nearing agreement on the text of a resolution, said Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns.
"There will be sanctions passed against Iran in the next several days at the United Nations," Burns said on CNN after
President George W. Bush signed a controversial civilian nuclear deal with India, which is already a nuclear weapons power.
The United States has been leading efforts to impose sanctions against Iran over its refusal to comply with an earlier UN resolution demanding that it stop reprocessing and enriching uranium -- activity that could provide material to produce nuclear weapons.
But drawn-out negotiations with the four other veto-wielding Security Council members -- Britain, China, France and Russia -- along with Germany have so far failed to yield agreement on the exact terms of a sanctions resolution.
Russia, which has close energy and economic ties with Iran, objected to an initial draft resolution as too harsh.
But over the weekend Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said a consensus was forming around a revised draft presented by France and Britain earlier this month.
"I hope that it is entirely realistic to come to a consensus in the days remaining before the New Year if our partners take a realistic approach and do not insist on certain positions which we are convinced have nothing to do with the task before us," Lavrov was quoted by Russian media as saying.
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Dollar dropped in Iran asset move
BBC News
18/12/2006
Iran is to shift its foreign currency reserves from dollars to euros and use the euro for oil deals in response to US-led pressure on its economy.
In a widely expected move, Tehran said it would use the euro for all future commercial transactions overseas.
The US, which accuses Tehran of supporting terrorism and trying to obtain nuclear weapons, has sought to limit the flow of dollars into Iran.
It wants the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran.
Dollar squeeze
Analysts said Tehran had been steadily shifting its foreign-held assets out of dollars since 2003 and that Monday's announcement was unlikely to affect the value of the dollar, which has weakened significantly in recent months.
An Iranian spokesman said all its foreign exchange transactions would be conducted in euros and its national budget would also be calculated in euros as well as its own currency.
"There will be no reliance on dollars," said Gholam-Hussein Elham.
"This change is already being made in the currency reserves abroad."
The currency move will apply to oil sales although it is expected that Iran, the world's fourth largest oil producer, will still accept oil payments in dollars.
Nuclear trigger
Washington has sought to exert financial pressure on Iran, which it accuses of flouting international law by trying to acquire nuclear weapons.
Tehran denies this, saying its nuclear research is for purely geared towards civilian uses.
Most international banks have stopped dollar transactions with Iran and some firms have ceased trading with Iran altogether in anticipation of possible future sanctions.
The dollar slipped slightly against the euro in New York trading although analysts said they did not expect the reaction to be too severe.
"It is something they have been saying they are going to do for quite a long time now, so I wouldn't expect any market reaction," said Ian Stannard, an economist with BNP Paribas.
The BBC's Tehran correspondent Frances Harrison said Iranian businessmen were complaining about delays in securing letters of credit and saw current conditions as a prelude to the imposition of sanctions.
Tehran has urged Iranian businesses to open letters of credit in euros in the future.
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Flashback: China's Dollar Reserves set to surpass 1 trillion
China Daily
2006-10-30
China's foreign exchange reserves look set to hit the US$1 trillion mark at the end of this month or beginning of November. But as the figure rises, so does the debate over how to best manage it.
The reserves, already the world's biggest, surged to US$987.9 billion at the end of September, largely driven by a burgeoning foreign trade surplus and massive inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI).
In the first nine months of the year FDI stood at US$42.59 billion, although this was a 1.52 per cent drop year-on-year.
Reserves grew on average US$18.8 billion each month from January to September, statistics from the central bank show.
"How to manage such a huge reserve is a big challenge," said Yi Xianrong, a research fellow at the Institute of Finance Research under the Chinese Academy of Social Science.
"The crux of the problem is that you have to keep the value stable or increasing," Yi said.
The ballooning foreign reserves, many economist say, is a major reason behind the loose money supply. This is because the central bank has to issue additional money to mop up the excess US dollars in the market, resulting in excessive liquidity in the banking system.
And the fluctuating foreign exchange rate also poses a huge risk, economists say.
In a bid to minimize such risks, the central bank should diversify its existing US dollar-dominated foreign reserves structure, and increase its holdings of euros or other major international currencies, said Li Yongsen, a finance professor at Renmin University of China.
The central bank, he said, could also buy more state bonds issued by other major economies and decrease holdings of US Treasury bills.
"It's better to spread the risks, and not put all your eggs in one basket," Li said.
The professor also suggested that the country might consider using the huge foreign reserves to purchase some strategic resource reserves such as oil.
But such a plan should proceed with caution, both Li and Yi warned, citing the huge risks involved due to changing resource prices.
In the short term, increasing imports is an effective way to decelerate foreign reserves, economists said. This would also reduce trade frictions with some countries that have a high trade deficit with China.
Economists also said the country should further relax controls on capital outflow, in order to create a better balance of international payments.
In a bid to ease foreign reserves and broaden investment channels, China has introduced a QDII (Qualified Domestic Institutional Investors) scheme, allowing them to invest overseas.
By October 10, the foreign exchange regulator had granted quotas worth US$11.6 billion to QDIIs.
"This is the right approach for creating a two-way capital corridor," said Yi. "We used to put too much emphasis on attracting foreign investment and feared capital outflow."
China is also shifting from a long-held policy of stockpiling foreign reserves in State coffers, and instead encouraging households and businesses to hold more foreign currency.
Individuals, for example, are now allowed to buy up to US$20,000 in foreign exchange a year, up from the previous US$8,000.
Previously, China invested some foreign exchange reserves in banks.
Central Huijin Investment Company, an investment arm of the central bank, injected a total of US$45 billion in foreign exchange reserves into China Construction Bank and Bank of China in 2003.
It poured another US$15 billion into the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in 2005.
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Iranian Oil minister: Drilling industry to become indigenous
Ahvaz, Khuzestan prov, Dec 19, IRNA
Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh said on Tuesday that given proper grounds are prepared for production of drilling rigs in the country, it may be claimed that Iran's drilling industry is becoming indigenous.
The minister made the remark while speaking to reporters while touring the fourth drilling exhibition (December 19-22) in Ahvaz on the anniversary of establishment of National Iranian Drilling Company.
Hamaneh said that ever since the establishment of National Iranian Drilling Company, attempts have been made to encourage domestic production and maintenance of drilling rigs and other equipment.
Turning to the fourth drilling exhibition, he lauded the efforts and creativity of domestic producers, given that all participants are showcasing their own products.
The minister said that given the facilities available to National Iranian Drilling Company, proper grounds are prepared for drilling oil wells, adding that the Oil Ministry is willing to support the company's activities.
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Wall Street awards itself billions in Christmas bonuses
By David Walsh
19 December 2006
Wall Street is awarding itself tens of billions in bonuses this winter. The fantastic amounts of money being handed out to investment bankers, securities traders and the like is symptomatic of the vast social divide that blights every aspect of American life.
Investment bank Goldman Sachs is leading the pack. The firm reported an increase in quarterly earnings of 93 percent and will distribute some $16.5 billion in bonuses to dozens of its bankers and traders. The top "rainmakers," as they are called, will each take home as much as $20 to $25 million just in bonuses, "while traders who booked big profits will take home a chunk of those profits, up to $50 million apiece," according to a December 13 article in the New York Times. The report cited the comment of one New York-based investment firm, "Anyone at the bonus line at Goldman Sachs died and went to bonus heaven. It doesn't get any better than this."
Another piece on the December 3 financial page of the Times suggested that bonuses are "expected to be a cash pile of more than $100 billion across the Street this year." That estimate presumably includes companies of all sizes. Last year major investment banks and trading firms handed out $21.5 billion in year-end bonuses. Options Group, a New York executive search firm, predicted 2006 bonuses would rise 15 to 20 percent.
The staggering figure of $100 billion in total bonuses is more than twice the annual budget of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and nearly twice the US Department of Education budget. Washington spends $20 billion annually on foreign aid to the entire world. The yearly budget of the City of New York, which employs 250,000 people, amounts to $50 billion.
The $16.5 billion in bonuses at Goldman Sachs alone is more than New York City pays to educate 1.1 million children in its schools, the largest local school budget in the US. Goldman Sachs is giving out more in year-end financial rewards than the federal government spends on the nation's largest low-income housing program, the Housing Choice Voucher Program ($15.9 billion), which covers some 2 million households.
Goldman Sachs' top employees are not alone. Investment bank Morgan Stanley awarded its chief executive, John Mack, $40 million in stock and options for 2006, according to a regulatory filing on December 14. When Mack rejoined Morgan Stanley in June 2005 (he was ousted as president of the bank in 2001), he received a new-hire award of 500,000 restricted stock units, valued at $26.2 million. In February 2006, Morgan Stanley announced that it had awarded Mack $13 million in cash, stock and other compensation for his first five months on the job. Aside from his salary, therefore, Mack has received compensation worth nearly $80 million in 18 months at Morgan Stanley.
Mack's $40 million bonus, however, is expected to be eclipsed by the amount eventually handed out to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. His 2006 bonus will probably top $50 million, according to analysts. Other executives in the $40-$50 million category include James Cayne of Bear Stearns, Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch and Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, notes the Wall Street Journal.
Much of the bonus money is paid out for those involved in massive mergers and acquisitions. The New York Times revealed a dirty little secret of corporate mergers: There is "a torrent of multibillion [dollar] takeovers and mergers at the end of every year" to influence bonuses "for all involved in the deal, especially the bankers." The newspaper added, "Corporate America's biggest cheerleaders and boosters need to get paid."
Bankers at Goldman Sachs and the other firms receive bonus money for a deal announced this year, and receive another reward when the deal closes next year. Even if the merger eventually fails to come about, the bankers keep their bonus money.
The nature of Goldman Sachs' activities underscores the parasitic character of modern-day American capitalism. According to the Times, the investment bank has "transformed its business to capitalize on sea changes in the capital markets, particularly new opportunities in far-flung markets and a shift from issuing and trading plain-vanilla stocks and bonds to building and trading complex derivative products."
Two episodes demonstrate how Goldman Sachs makes some of its billions. In the second quarter of 2006, it spent $2.6 billion for a 5 percent stake in the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, the largest state-owned bank in that country. When the latter went public in October, Goldman Sachs reaped a windfall. For the fourth quarter, it made nearly $1 billion on the investment.
Goldman Sachs earned a further half a billion dollars on the sale of Accordia Golf, a portfolio of Japanese golf courses it began to acquire in 2001. This is a far cry from the manufacturing operations of a Henry Ford or an Andrew Carnegie.
Goldman Sachs is a particularly well-connected financial institution. The present US treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, is a former chairman and CEO. His three immediate predecessors were Jon Corzine, former US senator (and present governor of New Jersey), Stephen Friedman, who became chairman of the National Economic Council (and later chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, in which capacity he still works) and Robert Rubin, who served as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration.
The billions in bonuses will have a material impact, in the first place, on New York City, further widening the social gap. Financial industry employees collect more than 50 percent of the wages paid in Manhattan, although their 280,000 jobs represent less than a sixth of the total (1.8 million), and that first figure itself is skewed, considering the relatively small percentage of employees at Wall Street firms who make fabulous amounts. Meanwhile, incomes for restaurant, hotel, retail and health care workers stagnate, in many cases at near-poverty levels.
Real estate brokers, luxury automobile and jewelry dealers salivated at news of the Wall Street bonuses. According to the Times, "There are few things that can gladden the hearts of New York real estate brokers as much as the thought of billions of dollars in bonuses paid on Wall Street, moving from hedge funds and buyout fees to brick and stone, or in some cases, glass and steel, as this uncertain year of wavering condominium and co-op price draws to a close."
The newspaper continued: "Not all buyers, of course, wait for bonus season. Among recent transactions was the $19 million sale of a co-op at 66 East 79th Street to J. Christopher Flowers, a former Goldman Sachs partner who formed his own investment fund, and who is listed by Forbes on its list of 400 richest Americans with a net worth of $1.2 billion. Then, Kenneth D. Brody, another former Goldman Sachs partner, who went on the head the United States Export-Import Bank during the Clinton administration, bought a fifth-floor apartment at 25 Sutton Place for $6.25 million."
The vast amount paid out for real estate in Manhattan and affluent corners of the other boroughs is helping drive up housing costs. For working New Yorkers, affordable rents are disappearing. And social conditions for millions in the city continue to deteriorate.
In 2004, in the "richest city in the world," an estimated 1.2 million people, including 400,000 children, lived in hunger or in households where having sufficient food was always in question.
In 2005, the top fifth of Manhattan's earners reported making $330,244-about 41 times more than the $8,019 reported by the bottom fifth. The Bronx remains the poorest urban county in the country, with more than half of its households headed by a woman and including young children who live below the poverty level.
As is the case with every other social phenomenon, there are two holiday seasons in the US, one for the wealthy elite and another for the overwhelming majority of the population. The gap is registered by every significant social barometer.
In late November, Tiffany & Co. reported a 23 percent jump in earnings on increased sale of $20,000 rings and necklaces. The luxury retailer hiked its profit forecast for the year as a result of the holiday demand.
The Bloomberg wire service noted, "The US luxury market has grown as the number of Americans with financial assets of at least $1 million increased 6.5 percent last year, according to the World Wealth Report published by Capgemini Group and Merrill Lynch & Co. Tiffany and other US luxury retailers are poised to have a strong holiday season, analysts said."
The Chicago Tribune commented, "So far, it's a tale of two Christmases for retailers. Those stores catering to luxury shoppers are faring better than discount stores." The International Council of Shopping Centers noted that sales at chain stores rose only 2.1 percent in November, reflecting, in particular, the poor showing of Wal-Mart, where millions of lower-income people shop, which experienced its worst performance in a decade.
A report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out that the disparities in consumer expenditure among households at different income levels were greater in 2005 than in any year on record. The top fifth of households made 39 percent of all consumer expenditures in 2005, the highest share on record. The bottom 20 percent of the population made only eight percent of the expenditures, tied with 2004 for the lowest share ever.
The media and political establishment attempt to ignore this vast social chasm-or treat it as something of a joke. At one point in American history, and not so terribly long ago, the Goldman Sachs bonuses would have caused a furor. The amounts handed out, while tens of millions lived in poverty, would have been called a national disgrace. Congressmen would have demanded public hearings. Now, there is a shrug of the shoulder in the media, or an amused reference, or hints of envy and jealousy. The politicians, many of them multi-millionaires like Corzine, prefer to say nothing.
If anything, the vast pay-outs are seen as a positive sign. As a New York Times reporter, speaking for many, asserted, "Investment banking earnings are often proxies for the health of the American and global economy."
On the contrary, the misappropriation of wealth to a handful of speculators and glorified bottom-feeders is a sign of a diseased social organism. The funneling of tens of billions into the hands of the elite, who will spend it on themselves, on their homes, yachts and private airplanes, means that useful and productive projects go by the wayside and grave social needs go unmet.
The Goldman Sachs figures made a few people in the media nervous. John Gibson, one of Fox News's right-wing anchormen, wrote, "Yes, I'm for capitalism, but please. You've got guys like [Democratic Party politician] John Edwards saying there's two Americas-the rich and the poor-playing the class game . . . My point is: Why do the fat cats have to work so hard at proving him right when by and large we know he's wrong?"
The Washington Post business page opined, "Still, news of Wall Street's Very, Very Good Year is likely to stir some resentment on Main Street-not because the economy is so bad as much as it is yet another reminder of the ever-widening gap between the super-rich and everyone else."
Comment: These bonuses are symptomatic of something else: the imminent demise of the dollar.
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2008 to be 'tax-free'; France moves to pay-as-you-go
PARIS, Dec 18, 2006 (AFP)
French tax-payers received an unusual piece of good news Monday to enliven the Christmas season: under plans being finalised at the finance ministry, 2008 is to be tax-free!
For those reluctant to believe it, the rare act of government largesse was spelled out by the finance minister Thierry Breton who told Les Echos newspaper: "I am suggesting that 2008 be fiscally blank."
The anomaly will come about if - as proposed - France switches to a "pay-as-you-go" income tax system in 2009, in line with most of its European neighbours.
Currently earners pay their tax on income earned in the previous year, but from 2009 the government wants people to pay as they earn, with the levy deducted from their monthly salary.
The result would be that in 2008 earners would pay tax on 2007 income, and then in 2009 they would pay tax in 2009 income. 2008 will simply disappear from the account books.
The change to pay-as-you-go - which the government says will increase revenues because it is more efficient - could be given the green light before April's presidential election, Breton said.
"It is a win-win situation. The tax-payer will not pay tax for the year 2008, and the state will receive more in 2009 than it would have," he said.
Of course workers will not notice any immediate benefit, because they will continue to pay tax each year. The advantage will come when they stop work, and are not taxed in their first year of retirement.
The mooted change was announced amid news that France's most famous singer, Johnny Hallyday, has decided to become a Swiss tax exile to escape his native country's crushing tax burden, which soars to 60 percent in the case of the most wealthy.
Hallyday, a 63-year-old national icon who has modelled himself as something of an Elvis Presley figure, said last week "I've had enough of the taxes we are forced to pay" and that he was to relocate to the Swiss ski resort of Gstaad.
Comment: Johhny supports Sarko. Would that most of Sarko's supporters moved to Switzerland....
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Segolene changes tack, praises 35-hour week
PARIS , Dec 17, 2006 (AFP)
Leading presidential hopeful Ségolčne Royal described France's controversial 35-hour work week - one of the shortest in Europe - as a major step forward Sunday, adding that any revisions to the law must be negotiated with unions.
"The 35 hours amounts to wonderful social progress, nobody can dispute that," the Socialist party lawmaker said on France 5 television, suggesting she would not fundamentally reform the legislation if elected.
Royal, whose remarks have not always been in synch with her party's platform, cast doubt on the Socialist-inspired, 35-hour week earlier this year, saying it had produced mixed results.
On Sunday, she elaborated, saying one problem lay with "the authorization of supplementary (work) hours."
Any new version of the 35-hour week must be negotiated with unions, she added, scorning current labor dialogues as "backward."
Popularity polls put the 53-year-old politician nearly dead even against conservative Interior Minister and presidential contender Nicolas Sarkozy.
If elected in next spring's vote, Royal would become France's first female president.
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Setting The Stage
US to warn Iran with naval buildup in Gulf- CBS
19 Dec 2006
Reuters
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is planning a major buildup of U.S. naval forces in and around the Gulf as a warning to Iran, CBS News reported on Monday.
A senior Defense Department official told Reuters the report was "premature" and appeared to be drawing "conclusions from assumptions." The official did not know of plans for a major change in naval deployment.
Another Defense Department official called the report "speculative" and a Pentagon spokeswomen declined to comment.
Citing unidentified military officers, CBS said the plan called for the deployment of a second U.S. aircraft carrier to join the one already in the region.
The network said the buildup, which would begin in January, wad not aimed at an attack on Iran but to discourage what U.S. officials view as increasingly provocative acts by Tehran.
The report said Iranian naval exercises in the Gulf, its support for Shi'ite militias in Iraq and Iran's nuclear program were causes for concern among U.S. officials.
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New Al Qaeda Message Expected As Terror Anxieties Already High in Europe
ABC News
18/12/2006
With European law enforcement officials warning of an imminent holiday terror attack, Web sites associated with al Qaeda announced today that the group's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is about to issue a new statement entitled "the truths about the clash between Islam and atheism."
According to the Associated Press, John Reid, Britain's top law enforcement official, said Sunday that it was "highly likely" that terrorists would attempt to mount an attack over the holiday period, when the number of travelers swells. He gave no other details.
The head of Britain's domestic spy agency MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, has said her agents are tracking almost 30 terrorist plots involving 1,600 suspects, and that at least five major terror plots had been thwarted since the July 2005 transit bomb attacks in London.
Zawahiri's statement is being advertised by al Sahab, the production wing for al Qaeda. Typically, the statements are released a few days after being advertised by al Sahab, which would put this message out right before the Christmas holiday weekend begins.
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U.S. military spy teams operating in friendly countries
LA Times
December 18, 2006
Special Forces units work in allied countries and clash with the CIA.
WASHINGTON - U.S. Special Forces teams sent overseas on secret spying missions have clashed with the CIA and carried out operations in countries that are staunch U.S. allies, prompting a new effort by the agency and the Pentagon to tighten the rules for military units engaged in espionage, according to senior U.S. intelligence and military officials.
The spy missions are part of a highly classified program that officials say has better positioned the United States to track terrorist networks and capture or kill enemy operatives in regions such as the Horn of Africa, where weak governments are unable to respond to emerging threats.
But the initiative has also led to several embarrassing incidents for the United States, including a shootout in Paraguay and the exposure of a sensitive intelligence operation in East Africa, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter. And to date, the effort has not led to the capture of a significant terrorism suspect.
Some intelligence officials have complained that Special Forces teams have sometimes launched missions without informing the CIA, duplicating or even jeopardizing existing operations. And they questioned deploying military teams in friendly nations - including in Europe - at a time when combat units are in short supply in war zones.
The program was approved by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and is expected to get close scrutiny by his successor, Robert M. Gates, who takes over today and has been critical of the expansion of the military's intelligence operations.
Senior officials at the CIA and the Pentagon defended the program and said they would urge Gates to support it. But they acknowledged risks for the United States in its growing reliance on Special Forces troops and other military units for espionage.
"We are at war out there and frankly we need all the help that we can get," said Marine Maj. Gen. Michael E. Ennis, who since February has served as a senior CIA official in charge of coordinating human intelligence operations with the military. "But at the same time we have to be very careful that we don't disrupt established relationships with other governments, with their liaison services, or [do] anything that would embarrass the United States."
Ennis acknowledged "really egregious mistakes" in the program, but said collaboration had improved between the CIA and the military.
"What we are seeing now, primarily, are coordination problems," Ennis said in an interview with The Times. "And really, they are fewer and fewer."
The issue underscores the sensitivity of using elite combat forces for espionage missions that have traditionally been the domain of the CIA.
After Sept. 11, the Bush administration gave expanded authority to the Special Operations Command, which oversees the Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and other elite units, in the fight against terrorism. At the same time, Rumsfeld, who lacked confidence in the CIA, directed a major expansion of the military's involvement in intelligence gathering to make the Pentagon less dependent on the agency.
Officials said this led to the secret deployment of small teams of Special Forces troops, known as military liaison elements, or MLEs, to American embassies to serve as intelligence operatives. Members of the teams undergo special training in espionage at Ft. Bragg and other facilities, according to officials familiar with the program.
The troops typically work in civilian clothes and function much like CIA case officers, cultivating sources in other governments or Islamic organizations. One objective, officials said, is to generate information that could be used to plan clandestine operations such as capturing or killing terrorism suspects.
Ennis said MLE missions were "low level" compared with those of the CIA. "The MLEs may come and go," he said, "but the CIA presence is there for the long term."
In a written response to questions from The Times, a spokesman for the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., described MLEs as "individuals or small teams that deploy in support of (regional military commanders) in select countries, and always with the U.S. ambassador and country team's concurrence and support."
But critics point to a series of incidents in recent years that have caused diplomatic problems for the United States.
In 2004, members of an MLE team operating in Paraguay shot and killed an armed assailant who tried to rob them outside a bar, said former intelligence officials familiar with the incident. U.S. officials removed the members of the team from the country, the officials said.
In another incident, members of a team in East Africa were arrested by the local government after their espionage activity was discovered.
"It was a compromised surveillance activity," said a former senior CIA official familiar with the incident. The official said members of the unit "got rolled up by locals and we got them out." The former official declined to name the country or provide other details.
He said it was an isolated example of an operation that was exposed, but that coordination problems were frequent.
"They're pretty freewheeling," the former CIA official said of the military teams. He said that it was not uncommon for CIA station chiefs to learn of military intelligence operations only after they were underway, and that many conflicted with existing operations being carried out by the CIA or the foreign country's intelligence service.
Such problems "really are quite costly," said John Brennan, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. "It can cost peoples' lives, can cost sensitive programs and can set back foreign policy interests."
Brennan declined to comment on specific incidents.
There have also been questions about where teams have been sent. Although conceived to bolster the U.S. presence in global trouble spots, the units have carried out operations in friendly nations in Europe and Southeast Asia where it is more difficult to justify, officials said.
On at least one occasion, a team tracked an Islamic militant in Europe. "They were trying to acquire certain information about a certain individual," said a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The official declined to name the country, but said it was a NATO ally and that the host government was unaware of the mission.
Critics said such operations risked angering U.S. allies with a dubious prospect for payoff. In some countries where MLE teams are located, "There's not a chance ... we're going to send somebody in there to snatch somebody unilaterally," said a government official who is familiar with the program.
At a time when the military is stretched thin, the official questioned the priority of using Special Forces for espionage, noting that the MLE program has not produced a significant success in terms of disrupting a plot or capturing a terrorist suspect.
"These are a highly trained, short-supply resource of the U.S. government," the official said. "What ... are they doing there instead of Pakistan or Afghanistan?"
Gates, the former director of the CIA who is to run the Pentagon, has voiced concern over the military's encroachment on CIA missions. In an opinion piece published this year, Gates said that "more than a few CIA veterans, including me, are unhappy about the dominance of the Defense Dept. in the intelligence arena and the decline in the CIA's central role."
In response to such conflicts, the Bush administration previously designated the CIA director as the head of all U.S. human spying operations overseas, with CIA station chiefs serving as coordinators in specific countries.
Ennis, whose position at the CIA was created last year, said the agency and the Pentagon were developing a more rigorous system for screening proposed military intelligence operations.
"Like a pilot with a checklist," CIA station chiefs will be required to sign off on all aspects of a proposed military intelligence operation before it is allowed to proceed, Ennis said. The CIA station chief, he added, "would look at the risk in terms of embarrassment to the government. Do they have the right level of training to do what they claim that they want to do, and is this already being done somewhere else?"
Col. Samuel Taylor, director of public affairs for the Special Operations Command, dismissed the suggestion of coordination problems with other agencies, saying, "We have an excellent, effective and productive working relationship with the CIA."
Comment: Question is: what are they doing. Could it have anything to do with the alleged upcoming "al-Qaeda" attacks? Maybe something with an Iranian flavor?
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Netancuckoo: Mossad chief's comments on Iran are warning, not all-clear signal
By Aluf Benn and Mazal Mualem, Haaretz Correspondents
Last update - 16:39 19/12/2006
Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that an estimate by the head of Mossad, that Iran would have nuclear weapons within four years, was a warning and not an all-clear signal.
The director of the espionage agency, Meir Dagan, told the Knesset Foreign Affairs Defense Committee on Monday that Iran would be in a position to build a nuclear bomb by 2009 at the earliest.
Netanyahu was speaking at a meeting Tuesday with members of the foreign diplomatic corps, to announce an initiative to try the Iranian regime at the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
The former prime minister said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would like to establish a 1,000-year Islamic Reich. In an address to a conference of American Jewish organizations last month, Netanyahu compared the present Iranian regime to 1938 Germany and said that Ahmadinejad was planning "another Holocaust."
Former Netanyahu counsel and ambassador to the United Nations, Dore Gold, and MK Dan Naveh are also taking part in the Likud leader's initiative, and traveled to the United States last week in order to kickstart the proposal.
The initiative represents Netanyahu's first advocacy mission before the international community.
According to Netanyahu, who has termed the Iranian nuclear program a "genocidal threat" to Israel, the government of Israel is not giving a firm enough diplomatic response to Iran.
Both the prime minister's bureau and the foreign minister's bureau declined Monday to comment on the initiative.
Comment: According to Netancuckoo, Ahmadinejad wants to establish a thousand year Reich! Are you kidding!?!? Who's going to believe that?
Oh, yeah. Right. Anyone who reads the Zionist controlled press...
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Spokesman: Iran to celebrate nuclear victory in February
www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-18 21:15:16
TEHRAN, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Iranian government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said on Monday that his country will celebrate a nuclear victory in February, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Iran will "announce the achievement and establishment of peaceful nuclear technology and the due power of the country" during the Ten Day Dawn ceremonies (Feb. 1-11) in 2007, Elham said.
The Ten Day Dawn ceremonies mark the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and are held in Iran every year.
Iran's access to the peaceful nuclear technology has been based on international regulations and is under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Elham said.
The path to attain this scientific achievement has been legal and transparent, he added.
Elham called on "international bodies and certain countries" to refrain from hostile attitudes toward the Islamic republic, saying" Tehran will never withdraw from its path."
He also reiterated Iran's warning that it might revise its relationship with the IAEA if the UN Security Council imposes sanctions against it.
"If they violate Iran's rights, Tehran will make use of its existing potentials to restore its rights," Elham said.
Iran has said that it needs to use nuclear power as a peaceful, alternative energy source and has the right to do so under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
However, the West has accused Iran of trying to produce nuclear weapons under a civilian cover, a charge denied by Tehran.
Due to Iran's resistance to suspend uranium enrichment, the European countries and the United States have been seeking a UN Security Council resolution to impose sanctions on Tehran.
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For The Chosen People - But Chosen For What?
Middle East Events Resembling Ancient Prophecies (surprise!)
Ynet
18/12/2006
Current world events are beginning to increasingly resemble the 2,500 year old bible prophecy made by Ezekiel in chapters 38-39. Ezekiel foresaw the rise of Russia (or Turkey, depending on the interpretation) in a coalition with Iran and other Middle Eastern countries (Sudan, Ethiopia and Libya).
The coalition is foretold to attack Israel from the north in a bid to destroy it during the earth's "last days," commonly known as the "war of Gog and Magog."
Throughout history it was thought that the prophecy had been put on hold, until perhaps today when it seems frighteningly more feasible.
In Joel C. Rosenberg's book "The Ezekiel Option," the author points to Ezekiel's prophecies in chapters 36-37, which have largely come true.
Rosenberg then asks the obvious question: If prophecies such as "the rebirth of the State of Israel, the return of the Jews to the Holy Land after centuries in exile, the re-blossoming of desolate desert land to produce abundant food, fruit and foliage, and the creation of an exceedingly great army" materialized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then why shouldn't the next prophecies come true in our lifetime?
Let's try and place the biblical names and locations into today's reality, and see the parallel unfolding of events:
Gog is commonly believed to represent a person's name rather than a place, a tyrannical leader who may hatch an evil plan - in today's reality this "honor" could be most suited to the President of Iran, Ahmadinejad, or perhaps Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon .
Magog, according to some scholars, refers to Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union, or perhaps Turkey. Others will argue that the exact location has not been fully ascertained and that the word Magog may simply be a generalization for an enemy of Israel, leaving the location open.
According to the prophecy in question, "many peoples with you" who will attack along "the mountains of Israel" implies that other countries will be involved in the Russian (or Turkish), Iranian, Sudanese, Ethiopian and Libyan coalition, and who border on the mountains of Israel. This includes Lebanon, Syria and possibly Jordan as well.
Is it so farfetched to imagine the axis between Hizbullah, Iran and Syria, especially after the second war in Lebanon when these three forces overtly united and continue to support each other's goal to destroy Israel?
In his book, Rosenberg notes a conspicuous absence of Egypt and Iraq in the original prophecy, which also makes a lot of sense at this point in time. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 and Iraq is embroiled in its own war of survival and both are unlikely to join a coalition against Israel.
According to the prophecy Magog "will build a military coalition and prepare a strike against Israel." Gog "will use overwhelming force against Israel" - could this be referring to nuclear force? And his coalition will "come like a storm...like a cloud covering the land."
But let's not become hysterical. According to the prophecy, there is no need for Israel to become alarmed, "as the Lord God will bring judgment upon the enemies of Israel beginning with Gog (the tyrant)."
Ezekial prophesies a great earthquake and the turning of Gog's forces against each other. The next step, which prophesies God subjecting the enemy to "pestilence, blood, torrential rains, hailstones and fire from heaven," is unclear and sounds like someone pressed the nuclear button, and if so, then who, and who in the region would survive it?
But as in all happy endings, Israel, it is prophesied, will regain its economic prosperity.
So the question remains: Should we wait for future developments and hope for the best, or look more closely at Ezekiel's prophecy and consider preemptive action to stop what may be seen as an imminent threat rising from the "anti-Israel coalition?"
With this said, Ezekiel's prophecy says nothing about an Israeli pre-emptive strike to avert a possible attack - and indeed, it appears such strike is unlikely considering the current state of our dubious, weak leadership.
Comment: First up; "Ezekiel" and most of the other people and events of the old testament were made up by a bunch of psycho Levites with a megalomania complex. Second; the "prophecies" such as "the rebirth of the State of Israel", "the return of the Jews to the Holy Land after centuries in exile", the "re-blossoming" of "desolate desert land to produce abundant food, fruit and foliage", and the "creation of an exceedingly great army", need some clarification:
the rebirth of the state of Israel could not have happened because before the present artificially created one, there never was a "state of Israel". The "return of the Jews to the holy land" was more of a forced return against their wishes and with the help of Hitler, his Zionist/Communist friends and their "final solution". The "re-blossoming of the desert" would be laughable if it were not in fact evidence of racism. The "desert" was enjoying a much more peaceable and harmonious blooming under the indigenous Arabs of Palestine before the Zionist came invading and destroyed or stole everything in sight. As for the "creation of an exceedingly great army"; Israel's army is not that great, as evidenced by its defeat at the hands of Hizb'allah this year, and the army it does have is purely the product of extortion, blackmail and bribery of American politicians by Zionist leaders.
So we see that "biblical" prophecy is a self-fulfilling one, and much more earthly and man made than Zionist pundits would have us believe. The solution then is to remove the warmongering Yahwehites and Zionists and peace may have a chance of reigning on earth.
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The Chosen People: Are We More Than Just A Category?
Bethamie Horowitz | Fri. Dec 15, 2006
Forward
In 1964, preeminent sociologist Marshall Sklare published an article in Commentary magazine titled "Intermarriage and the Jewish Future," sounding an alarm at a time when only 7.2% of married Jews had non-Jewish spouses. Even though Sklare and most Jews of his time viewed intermarriage as a one-way ticket out of Judaism, the conventional wisdom of the time held "that the threat of the problem has been surprisingly well contained in America." But Sklare saw this complacency as deeply misleading.
More than 40 years later, our whole orientation to the subject of intermarriage is different, and not only, as Sklare foresaw, because has there been a dramatic rise in intermarriage. American Jewry no longer sees itself as particularly immune from or resistant to intermarriage. But it is also the case that intermarriage itself is no longer equivalent to leaving the Jewish community, as it once appears to have been.
The latest occasion for this current stocktaking is the remarkable finding from the recently released 2005 Boston Community Study that fully 60% of the children in the region's interfaith families are being raised Jewish, nearly double the national rate reported in 2001. There will be much debate about how to explain the Boston results - indeed, on this page last week three well-known researchers argued that the study's findings are not particularly exceptional among local studies - but the upshot is that we are "not in Kansas anymore" regarding the causes and consequences of intermarriage.
Intermarriage was once thought to be the slippery slope of decline into total assimilation and Jewish disappearance. But the Boston case suggests that there are other possible outcomes. The Boston community deserves credit for its visionary approach of welcoming the intermarried while also emphasizing serious Jewish education. But let us not overlook the significant ways that today's America differs from the societal milieu that Sklare encountered.
At one time, say in the 1940s, intermarriage was hard to do, for it meant leaving the Jews and joining the gentiles at a time when Jews were one of the disadvantaged minorities in America. It involved traversing a "bright boundary," according to sociologist Richard Alba: Jews and gentiles just didn't mix. To do so required an act of will, either on the part of the individual or by the individual's forebears, to deliberately step away from Jewishness into the broader society.
At that time, to marry out was to risk, in a sense, a brush with death, as in one's parents threatening to sit shiva. In this context the rate of intermarriage remained very low through the 1960s, after which it increased sharply, so that by 1985 and continuing into our time, about half of Jews who were marrying wed partners who were not Jewish. What factors led to this sudden increase? Foremost was a shift in the contours of the American mainstream - the bright boundaries between various white ethnic groups became blurry in Alba's terms, and intermarriage itself became more commonplace. That is, mixing has become a default condition, based on the increasingly integrated settings where people work, play and typically find mates.
So for a tiny minority like American Jews, marrying a non-Jew has become widespread enough that one might say that a Jew who ends up marrying another Jew shows some choice, arising from greater Jewish immersion and commitment, more than one who intermarries. And we'd have to add that the intermarried couple that raises its children as Jewish also shows evidence of deliberate choice and commitment.
The second major change that makes intermarriage today very different is that the credit rating of Jews as a group in American society has radically improved in comparison to its valuation half a century ago. Many people with previously hidden or partial Jewish backgrounds are now open to, and even seek out, their Jewishness. They have become truly interested in Judaism, indicating that there is no longer a unidirectional pull away from Jewish life.
In this context, intermarriage does not in and of itself rule out a serious Jewish life; that depends on social climate as well as the individual's and family's commitments. It's time to realize that intermarriage isn't the major threat. Rather, it is indifference - viewing one's heritage as simply a fact of one's background, without a sense of its power or potential as a guiding force - that is the more fundamental problem. The irony of our hyper-focus on intermarriage is that it has kept us focused on the boundaries, and distracted us from the more important issues of meaning.
Are we a tribe that cares only about race and blood, or are we also about commitment, values, belief, and practice - is there something beyond mere category membership? Likewise, what matters most to the Jewish community - going through the motions, striving to retain our numbers and protecting our flank, or addressing the content and force of our community's commitments?
Can we be about something more than just ourselves? If we are only for ourselves, what are we?
Bethamie Horowitz, a social psychologist, is research director for the Mandel Foundation.
Comment: Any group that focuses on their special character, while ignoring the question of conscience, has chosen the path of entropy. The only important fact of humanity is the fact of conscience. If you ignore that, you have aligned with the animal kingdom.
The author speaks of "commitment, values, belief, and practice". We ask, to what? What good is "belief"? Isn't "belief" one of those things that creates hatred between groups? How about jettisoning belief altogether, whether it is religious or scientific materialism?
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Zionism: A Hip-Hop Mogul Is the Diamond's New Best Friend
December 18, 2006
By MARIA ASPAN
The dialogue surrounding the Warner Brothers film "Blood Diamond" and its implicit criticism of the diamond industry took a new turn this month, as the hip-hop producer and entertainment mogul Russell Simmons returned from an industry-paid trip to Africa and began vocally defending the diamond trade.
The trip to Botswana and South Africa was largely paid for and organized by the Diamond Information Center, which handles public relations in the United States for the Diamond Trading Company, the marketing division of De Beers. Benjamin Chavis, a former executive director of the N.A.A.C.P. and a close associate of Mr. Simmons, who traveled to Africa with him, said the trip had been a long-planned project unrelated to the movie. (Mr. Simmons was out of the country on vacation and unavailable to comment.)
Mr. Simmons entered the diamond trade himself in 2003 with the opening of his Simmons Jewelry Company, which is supplied by De Beers. He has been meaning to visit Africa for some time, and received an invitation from the Diamond Information Center more than a year ago, Mr. Chavis said.
"We wanted to see the community where the diamond mine is located, where the diamonds are coming from," he said. "The mission of the trip was not in reaction to the movie."
Mr. Chavis said he and Mr. Simmons did not see a problem with participating in the diamond industry, which has historically exploited Africans. "Russell has always been an entrepreneur who pushes the envelope," Mr. Chavis said. "It shouldn't be controversial to not only want to go into business, but also to make sure that our businesses are doing good deeds."
Representatives from the Diamond Information Center declined to say how much the trip cost, although Mr. Chavis said about 14 people were in the group each day, including local security and support staff as well as the 9 people who had traveled from the United States. Mr. Chavis and Mr. Simmons also organized about a third of the itinerary for the nine-day trip independently of the diamond group, which did not pay for those parts of the trip.
"Blood Diamond," directed by Edward Zwick, depicts some of the violence surrounding the diamond trade in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. It opened on Dec. 8 but has been on the diamond industry's radar for several months. In September, the World Diamond Council, the industry's trade group, began a public relations campaign to counteract any negative publicity.
Mr. Simmons jumped into the fray upon his return on Dec. 5, giving glowing reviews about the diamond trade and its impact on southern Africa.
Mr. Zwick, in a Dec. 11 interview with The Daily News, accused Mr. Simmons of being a public relations puppet for the diamond industry; Mr. Simmons and Mr. Chavis retaliated with an open letter in The New York Post on Thursday, saying they were concerned about "the current wave of misinformation" about diamonds and that they had observed concrete examples of how the diamond industry "contributes to the overall self-empowerment of African people and communities."
Sally Morrison, the director of the Diamond Information Center, said Mr. Simmons's trip was by happenstance unfortunately close to the film's release. Ms. Morrison, who has organized similar tours of Africa for celebrities like Ashley Judd, said she regretted that scheduling conflicts had forced the trip to be postponed from this summer.
"This was planned as a private trip," she said. "We spent a whole bunch of time having to answer to criticisms about the trip when it wasn't anyone's intention for this trip to even engage in the dialogue about the film." MARIA ASPAN
Comment by Jeff Blankfort: Two of the more obscene aspects of political life in today's world are (1) the almost total absence of any discussion on who has profited from the trade in Africa's "blood diamonds" (hint: the world's diamond centers are in Tel Aviv, New York and Antwerp and they are run by Hasidic Jews ) and (2) the plantation-like control over the black political class by the American Jewish political establishment. Both come together in this article from today's NY Times. Simmons, who made a fortune with his DefJam record label, joined with Rabbi Marc Schneier in 2002 to become chair of the "The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding to combat anti-Semitism and Racism, with an emphasis on the former and "was honored by the Israeli Consulate at the Jewish Community Relations Council/Jewish National Fund Annual Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., held at the home of Israeli Consul General Alon Pinkas" according to the foundation's web site.
The story of Ben Chavis is a much sadder one. Chavis, a one-time civil rights leader, tried to remake the NAACP into a viable organization more than a decade ago with an outreach to black youth, but ran afoul of the NAACP's Jewish funders who would not forgive him for having earlier expressed support for the PLO. Through the Forward newspaper and Commentary magazine, they launched a concerted attack against him, and with the loss of those Jewish funders, he was finally forced to resign, whereupon the funding miraculously returned and the organization once again became irrelevant in the black community. Now, like Jesse Jackson who is still doing penance for having referred to Jews as "Hymie," in 1984, as in the expression, "All Hymie wants to talk about is Israel" (which he said to NPR's Juan Williams, another Uncle Tom, who proceeded to snitch on him), Chavis is apparently trying to get into the good graces of the plantation's overseers. Besides Jackson, genuflecting to Jewish power seems to have worked for Al Sharpton and Rep. John Conyers whose criticism of Jimmy Carter for using the word, "apartheid" to describe Israel's treatment of the Palestinians under its occupation, was cited in an ad attacking Carter placed in the NY Times by the ADL last Wednesday.-JB
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Academic to be Tried for Attending Holocaust Conference
By Ali Ihsan Aydin
zaman.com
December 15, 2006
Robert Faurisson, a French academic who attended an Iranian conference questioning the Jewish Holocaust, could face legal punishment.
Robert Faurisson might be brought to court as a result of the comments he made at the "unacceptable" Tehran gathering, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said.
The foreign minister said the French academic was previously taken to court and banned from teaching at universities for his attitude toward the holocaust.
The French academic, who attended the conference titled "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision" held by Iranian Foreign Ministry Foreign Policy Center, was previously convicted for denying the holocaust five times in his country.
The conference was attended by 67 scholars from 30 countries and found "unacceptable" by the European Union and the United States. Tehran was condemned for allowing it to take place.
Professor Faurisson had sparked reactions for his open letter "The Rumor of Auschwitz," published in Le Monde.
The French academic was given a three month prison term and fined 7,500 for an interview with Iranian TV channel Sahar 1 in October.
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No One Loves America
UNESCO to fight English-language influx
PARIS, Dec 18, 2006 (AFP)
A UNESCO convention aimed at protecting countries from English-language cultural standardization was poised on Monday to come into force as 14 countries were to ratify the text, the French foreign ministry said.
UNESCO's convention on cultural diversity was adopted last year despite strong protests from the United States, which fears that the convention will be used to erect barriers against its huge entertainment industry exports.
Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden as well as the European Union were to formally notify UNESCO Monday of their ratification, a ministry spokesman said.
"This will take us beyond the threshold of 30 ratifications needed for the convention to come into effect," he said, adding that the text would formally take effect three months later on March 18 next year.
Championed by France and Canada, the convention affirms the sovereign right of nations to "protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions."
It was approved last year by 148 of 154 members of the United Nations educational, scientific and cultural organisation. Only the US and Israel voted against, while four countries abstained.
Supporters say the convention will help countries protect themselves in particular from English-speaking cultural standardisation. But Washington argued that it is a pretext for putting up trade barriers and blocking the free flow of information.
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Ukrainians Do Not Want NATO
Kiev, Dec 18 (Prensa Latina)
Seven out of ten Ukrainians do not favor entry of the country into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization a study confirmed, leading an expert to favor a national referendum on the topic.
The idea of a referendum merits attention, since 70 percent of the Ukrainian population is negative about the NATO alliance, Ukrainian Barometric Sociology Service director Victor Hebozhenko declared.
Almost 99 percent of the voters on the Crimean peninsula were negative on the proposal defended by President Victor Yushenko, to the detriment of traditional links with Russia.
Serguei Tolstoy, director of the International Research and Analysis Institute of the Ukrainian Sciences Academy, pointed out the referendum only took place in Crimea because a national initiative was not permitted by authorities, despite 4.6 million signatures petitioning it, as it is not considered advantageous for the Regions party.
Suprema Rada (Parliament) deputy Efim Fiks added his voice to the debate on Channel NTN, stating that actions similar to the petitioning will take place in other regions of the country, making Ukraine an anti-NATO bastion, he asserted.
Legislator and president of the Social Council for Defense of Constitutional Rights, Leonid Grach stressed that the only way to stop the run toward the alliance is a national plebiscite and a national mobilization.
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Blair 'fails to influence White House'
PA
Published: 19 December 2006
Tony Blair has failed to influence the policies of George Bush's White House in any significant way, despite his unwavering support for the US president, a leading foreign affairs think tank said today.
Delivering its verdict on ten years of foreign policy under Mr Blair, a Chatham House briefing paper said his legacy would be defined by the "terrible mistake" of the war with Iraq.
It said Mr Blair was now paying the price for setting too much store by his relationship with Mr Bush and warned that his successor would have to strike a new foreign policy balance between Europe and the US.
"The post-9/11 decision to invade Iraq was a terrible mistake and the current debacle will have policy repercussions for many years to come," the paper said.
"The root failure of Tony Blair's foreign policy has been its inability to influence the Bush administration in any significant way despite the sacrifice - military, political and financial - that the United Kingdom has made.
"Tony Blair has learnt the hard way that loyalty in international politics counts for very little."
The paper, written by outgoing Chatham House director Victor Bulmer-Thomas, said Mr Blair's first term as Prime Minister had been a "qualified success" - demonstrating Britain's European credentials while forging a close working relationship with US president Bill Clinton.
However his response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and decision to back Mr Bush over the invasion of Iraq marked a "watershed" in British foreign policy.
"This was without a shadow of doubt the defining moment of Blair's foreign policy - indeed, the defining moment of his whole premiership. It will shape his legacy - for better or for worse - for many years to come," the paper said.
In the absence of support in the United Nations for a humanitarian intervention in Iraq, the paper said it had been a "terrible mistake" to rely on Saddam Hussain's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as a justification for war.
It said "the jury is still out" on the extent to which Mr Blair knew that the claims about Iraqi WMD were "overblown or even fabricated".
However, by the time of the invasion, it was clear Britain was not sure of its case, the diplomatic options had not been exhausted, and the UK national interest was truly engaged.
"Under these circumstances, the only thing that could have rescued Tony Blair was a swift and successful establishment of a democratic government in Iraq, and that did not happen," the paper said.
It dismissed Mr Blair's claims that unwavering support for the US in public would bring influence in private, accusing the Prime Minister of over-estimating his political capital in Washington.
"The bilateral relationship with the United States may be 'special' to Britain, but the US has never described it as more than 'close'," it said.
"The best that could be hoped for is that Britain would ally itself with one of the Washington factions that ultimately prevailed in the internecine struggle for presidential support."
The paper said Mr Blair's successor would not be able to make the same mistake, and would instead have to develop a closer relationship with Europe.
"For the foreseeable future, whoever is Prime Minister, there will no longer be unconditional support for US initiatives in foreign policy," it said.
Elsewhere it said it was "unforgivable" that Mr Blair had failed to foresee the consequences of a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, given the impact on heroin use on Britain's streets.
In contrast, it said his most positive legacy in foreign affairs would be his determined advocacy of the need to tackle climate change.
"While it is easy to criticise the gap between his rhetoric and Government actions at home in mitigating climate change, there is no doubt that Blair's powers of persuasion have been very effective in pushing this issue up the international agenda," it said.
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Two men tried to smuggle birds in coat, fanny pack, U.S. border agents say
Published: Monday, December 18, 2006 | 6:12 PM ET
Canadian Press
BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) - If a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, what will four birds in a pocket and three in a fanny pack bring?
If border agents notice, a US$1,000 fine and maybe worse.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents said Monday they seized seven birds from two men as they re-entered the United States from Canada via Buffalo's Peace Bridge.
John Beale, 59, and Frank Salvini, 65, caught the attention of officers when they said they had gone to Canada Friday not for the usual gambling or theatre excursion, but to buy 11 kilograms of millet bird seed.
The suspicious agents searched the men and found seven undeclared live finches, each worth $50 to $200 in the U.S. market. Four of the birds were in the liner of a coat pocket and the other three were in toilet paper rolls inside a fanny pack, agents said.
The Buffalo-area men each were fined $1,000, CBP spokesman Kevin Corsaro said, and the case was referred to federal wildlife and agricultural officials, who were looking into possible criminal charges.
"The smuggling of such birds increases the chances that a communicable bird disease, such as Exotic Newcastle or avian influenza, could enter the United States," Corsaro said.
Comment: Yeah, when the birds are migrating and don't stop at customs to show they have gotten their shots, the customs agents get nervous....
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(Yet Another) Executive Branch Assault on the Constitution
Posted 12/17/2006 @ 11:01am
John Nichols
The Nation
The Bush Administration's Department of Defense is examining whether it has the power to break a strike at tire plants that supply the military.
The Constitution affords the executive branch no such authority. But, as should be obvious by now, the current Administration has little regard for the founding document.
"The US Army is considering measures to force striking workers back to their jobs at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber plant in Kansas in the face of a looming shortage of tires for Humvee trucks and other military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan," reported the Financial Times on December 15. "A strike involving 17,000 members of the United Steelworkers union has crippled 16 Goodyear plants in the US and Canada since October 5."
This is no small matter, as a similar dispute in the early 1950s provoked one of the most significant constitutional crises of modern times.
In April 1952, when a dispute between the nation's steel companies and the United Steel Workers of America union threatened to disrupt production at more than eighty steel mills, President Harry Truman issued an executive order that the plants be seized.
The President argued that he had the power to do so because the country was engaged in the Korean War, claiming that he acted "by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, and as President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States."
Truman had an expansive view of executive powers during wartime, as was evidenced during his April 17, 1952, press conference, where a reporter asked: "Mr. President, if you can seize the steel mills under your inherent powers, can you, in your opinion, also seize the newspapers and, or, the radio stations?"
"Under similar circumstances," claimed Truman, "the President of the United States has to act for whatever is for the best of the country. That's the answer to your question."
In fact, Truman was wrong on both political and constitutional grounds. As with the current Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, the Korean fight had been entered into without a declaration of war by Congress--the bloody conflict was described vaguely as a "police action." Even if a declaration of war had been made, there was little reason to believe that Truman had the authority that he said was his. Without such a declaration, there was no question that he was claiming powers that were not his to exercise.
Republican members of Congress, led by Ohioan George Bender, moved to impeach Truman. Bender declared, "I do not believe that our people can tolerate the formation of a presidential precedent which would permit any occupant of the White House to exercise his untrammeled discretion to take over the industry, communications system or other forms of private enterprise in the name of 'emergency.'"
The articles of impeachment against Truman that were submitted by Bender drew national attention, and support from publications such as the Chicago Tribune. As the drive picked up steam--with Illinois Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen telling a national radio audience that Congress had a responsibility to act--the Supreme Court quickly announced that it would take up the matter.
A court consisting of Justices appointed by Truman and his Democratic predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, forced Truman to back down. The ruling in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952) explicitly restricted the authority of the President to seize private property in the absence of either specifically enumerated powers under Article Two of the Constitution or statutory authority approved by the Congress.
"The Founders of this Nation entrusted the lawmaking power to the Congress alone in both good and bad times," Justice Hugo Black wrote, on behalf of the court's majority. "It would do no good to recall the historical events, the fears of power and the hopes for freedom that lay behind their choice. Such a review would but confirm our holding that this seizure order cannot stand."
In his brilliant concurrence, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, "A constitutional democracy like ours is perhaps the most difficult of man's social arrangements to manage successfully. Our scheme of society is more dependent than any other form of government on knowledge and wisdom and self-discipline for the achievement of its aims. For our democracy implies the reign of reason on the most extensive scale. The Founders of this Nation were not imbued with the modern cynicism that the only thing that history teaches is that it teaches nothing. They acted on the conviction that the experience of man sheds a good deal of light on his nature. It sheds a good deal of light not merely on the need for effective power, if a society is to be at once cohesive and civilized, but also on the need for limitations on the power of governors over the governed. To that end they rested the structure of our central government on the system of checks and balances. For them the doctrine of separation of powers was not mere theory; it was a felt necessity."
Noting the recent struggle against German fascism, Frankfurter argued that the wisdom of the Founders had been confirmed. "Not so long ago it was fashionable to find our system of checks and balances obstructive to effective government. It was easy to ridicule that system as outmoded--too easy," the Justice explained. "The experience through which the world has passed in our own day has made vivid the realization that the Framers of our Constitution were not inexperienced doctrinaires. These long-headed statesmen had no illusion that our people enjoyed biological or psychological or sociological immunities from the hazards of concentrated power.... The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority."
Frankfurter's words ring true across history to address the current circumstance, as do those of George Bender and the members of the House whose move to impeach Truman highlighted the need for judicial intervention: "our people [cannot] tolerate the formation of a presidential precedent which would permit any occupant of the White House to exercise his untrammeled discretion to take over the industry, communications system or other forms of private enterprise in the name of 'emergency.'"
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Latin America On The March
New Paraguay Left to Win Next Vote
Asuncion, Dec 19 (Prensa Latina)
Agrarian reform, energy sovereignty and rejection of foreign troops are the main points of a new political movement, Tekojoja, that has arisen as an alternative to traditional Paraguayan parties and is predicted to win the next elections.
Tekojoja, which means equality in Guarani, and was founded in this South American nation to boost the candidacy of Monseignor Fernando Lugo for the presidential elections of 2008.
In addition to a representation in Asuncion, the group has a broad social base made of landless campesinos, indigenous people and left wing sectors.
Ultima Hora reported that its declaration of principles identify it within a socialist line.
Lugo has announced his resignation from religious life to allow to devote himself full time to politics, and has a list of 100 thousand backers.
The Paraguay Constitution prohibits a religious minister from occupying the presidency.
He also admitted that he would like to have a woman accompany him on the ticket as vice president.
According to ABC Color, the Paraguayan scene is moving towards a change because of the crisis of the traditional parties.
That entity s national survey gave the 55-year-old bishop a majority against President Nicanor Duarte if elections were held now.
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The Repeatedly Re-Elected Venezuelan Autocrat
Saturday, Dec 16, 2006
By: Steve Rendall - FAIR's Extra!
Note: This is just one of a series of article examining news coverage of Venezuela in the U.S. Press that appeared in the November/December 2006 issue of Extra! For the full table of contents and purchasing information, please go to: Extra! (November/December 2006)
Hugo Chávez never had a chance with the U.S. press. Shortly after his first electoral victory in 1998, New York Times Latin America reporter Larry Rohter (12/20/98) summed up his victory thusly:
All across Latin America, presidents and party leaders are looking over their shoulders. With his landslide victory in Venezuela's presidential election on December 6, Hugo Chávez has revived an all-too-familiar specter that the region's ruling elite thought they had safely interred: that of the populist demagogue, the authoritarian man on horseback known as the caudillo.
Notwithstanding that interring caudillos has not been a consuming passion of Latin America's ruling elite (or U.S. policy makers), it is fitting that the Times reporter sided with that elite. A few years later, in April 2002, following Chávez's re-election by an even greater margin, Times editors cheered a coup against Chávez by Venezuelan elites (Extra! Update, 6/02), declaring in Orwellian fashion that thanks to the overthrow of the elected president, "Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator."
For Pedro Carmona-the man who took power in Chávez's brief absence, declaring an actual dictatorship by dismissing the Venezuelan legislature, Supreme Court and other democratic institutions-Times editors had much nicer language, calling the former head of Venezuela's chamber of commerce "a respected business leader."
Following Chávez's return to office a few days later, Times editors issued a grudging reappraisal of their coup endorsement (Extra! Update!, 6/02). Still insisting that Chávez was "a divisive and demagogic leader," the editors averred that the forcible removal of a democratically elected leader "is never something to cheer."
As if this pro-opposition bias were not enough, in January 2003 the Times was forced to dismiss one of its Venezuela reporters, a Venezuelan national named Francisco Toro, when it was revealed that Toro was an anti-Chávez activist (FAIR Action Alert, 6/6/03).
The Times anti-Chávez campaign was manifest in a recent book review (9/17/06) of Nikolas Kozloff's Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge to the United States, in which Times business columnist Roger Lowenstein rebuked the author for praising the Chávez government, explaining that Chávez "has militarized the government, emasculated the country's courts, intimidated the media, eroded confidence in the economy and hollowed out Venezuela's once-democratic institutions." But Lowenstein failed to provide much evidence for his charges-a frequent characteristic of Chávez bashing-or to note that similar charges can be made against other governments, including one much closer to home.
Calling names
The New York Times is not alone. A Newsweek column (11/7/05) asserted that Venezuela has turned to "destructive populism" under Chávez, while a news report in the magazine (10/31/05) cited the "increasingly authoritarian tilt of the Chávez regime, which has packed the Venezuelan judiciary with pliable magistrates and enacted legislation curtailing press freedoms." In his May 2006 Atlantic profile, New Republic editor Franklin Foer complained that under Chávez's presidency Venezuela had taken an "anti-democratic turn."
The Washington Post's news pages have relentlessly criticized Chávez in news stories, calling him "autocratic" (8/12/04) and "authoritarian" (8/7/06). However, a much more ferocious campaign is waged against Chávez on the Post's editorial and op-ed pages. In one column after another, the Post's opinion pages have charged him with assaulting democracy and stifling dissent. In one column (10/16/06), deputy editorial editor Jackson Diehl called Chávez an "autocratic demagogue" and accused him of "dismantl[ing] Venezuela's democracy." Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt (12/26/05) explained that Chávez had "consolidated one-party rule and moved to export his brand of populist autocracy to neighboring nations."
Even putative liberal commentators have joined the media chorus. On the O'Reilly Factor (12/5/05), Fox News contributor and NPR reporter Juan Williams said of Venezuela, "What you're seeing there is really communism." In September, when Democratic operatives Paul Begala and James Carville appeared on New York City public radio station WNYC (9/25/06), Begala told host Brian Lehrer that Chávez was "an autocrat, not a democrat," and said he had "a terrible human rights record." Carville told Lehrer, "I've worked in Venezuela and I would be very reluctant to call Chávez a democrat." What Carville didn't say was that he worked in Venezuela as an advisor to Venezuelan opposition groups leading an economically devastating strike by managers of the national oil company in an effort to destabilize the government (Washington Post, 1/20/03).
Is Venezuela undemocratic? And is Hugo Chávez an autocrat who has consolidated one-party rule? An examination of Venezuelan elections, governing institutions and public opinion indicates otherwise.
Certified elections
Venezuela has held half-a-dozen major elections for national offices and issues since 1998, the year of Chávez's first presidential victory. That election saw Chávez beating his nearest rival by 16 percentage points, 56 percent to 40 percent, in a vote that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter called "a remarkable demonstration of democracy in its purest form." (Chicago Tribune, 12/8/98.) In 2000, in a re-election required by the new Venezuelan constitution, Chávez increased his winning margin, 60 percent to 38 percent. In each case the elections were monitored and certified by a variety of observers including the Organization of American States, the European Union and the Carter Center.
A 1999 referendum backed by Chávez, which called for the convening of a constituent assembly to draft a new Venezuelan constitution, passed with 72 percent of the vote, in an election likewise certified by international observers. The resulting constitution, which strengthened the office of the president, also set up clear checks and balances between five branches of government, including a provision for a recall vote to remove the president after the mid-point in a presidential term was reached. (See box: "Unseparate and Unequal?")
This provision was invoked in 2004 when the opposition amassed the required signatures over challenges by the Chávez government and a recall was held in August. Despite the U.S. bankrolling some of the opposition groups organizing the recall through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the secretive Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), Chávez retained his office with 58 percent of the vote (Christian Science Monitor, 2/6/06).*
Though the OAS and Carter Center certified the recall referendum as fair, some opposition groups, like the anti-Chávez, NED-funded Sumate, charged (and continue to charge) a fraudulent vote tally. Such charges have been largely dismissed by an otherwise anti-Chávez U.S. press, but Sumate has managed to convince Washington Post editor Jackson Diehl of the righteousness of its cause. More than a year after the failed referendum (4/10/06), Diehl wrote favorably of "the election-monitoring group Sumate, which has meticulously documented Chávez's manipulation of the electoral system."
Sumate is not an "election-monitoring group," but a prominent political opposition group that spearheaded the recall. The group's co-founder, María Corina Machado, was a coup supporter who signed the 2002 Carmona Decree that suspended Venezuela's democracy. No actual election monitoring group challenged the referendum's official results (Miami Herald, 7/8/05).
A legislative election in December 2005 ended with a twist when four opposition parties decided to withdraw their candidates, allowing Chávez allies to win virtually all the seats. Not that they would have done well had they stayed in the race. As Venezuela political observer and Chávez critic Alberto Garrido told the New York Times (12/5/05), "Chávez would have annihilated them anyway." The predictable dominance of a Chávez-aligned coalition in the legislature was followed by a column by Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt (12/26/05) that charged Chávez had "consolidated one-party rule."
Participatory democracy
Free elections are a necessary condition for democracy, but aren't sufficient evidence to ensure that a functioning democracy is in place. Actual democracy depends on how elected institutions function and on day-to-day citizen involvement in between elections.
During his tenure, Chávez has tried to implement an agenda he has alternately called "21st century socialism" and "capitalism with a human face," which he says takes into account socialism's past failures. But rumors of communism in Venezuela are greatly exaggerated. The private sector has actually grown during his presidency. According to the Associated Press (7/7/06), Venezuelan central bank statistics show "the private sector accounted for more of the economy last year, 62.5 percent of gross domestic product, than when [Chávez] was elected in 1998, when it stood at 59.3 percent."
This doesn't mean Chávez isn't a strong believer in the public sector and a government supported cooperative sector, particularly when it comes to programs for the poor. He has created a series of programs dubbed "missions" to fight poverty, malnutrition, disease, illiteracy and other pressing social problems. In many cases, the administration, budgeting and other decision-making for these programs have been delegated to neighborhood councils located in Venezuela's poor neighborhoods. Even New Republic editor Franklin Foer (Atlantic, 5/06) conceded the impact of the missions:
Chavista investments in the slums are obvious. For the first time, blighted neighborhoods have government-subsidized grocery stores, access to the Internet, and doctors tending to their children. These improvements have translated into palpable optimism. Some polls show that Venezuelans are more sanguine about their economic future than Canadians or Americans.
Charges that Chávez has "militarized" the Venezuelan government (New York Times, 9/17/06) have their origins in an early Chávez government program. In 1999, when a recession left Venezuela short of money to fund poverty programs, Chávez implemented "Plan Bolívar 2000," under which the underutilized military was ordered to construct housing, build roads and carry out mass vaccination drives-hardly what one imagines upon hearing warnings of government militarization.
Venezuela's aggressive anti-poverty programs and "participatory democracy" have energized the poor and given them a stake in the country's fortunes. By the democratic measure of citizen involvement, Venezuela is doing rather better than many democracies. And Venezuelans seem to agree; a 2005 Latinobarometro poll surveying opinion in 18 Latin American countries found Venezuelans near the top in their preference for democracy over other forms of government, and in satisfaction with how their democracy is functioning. The poll found Venezuelans considered their country "totally democratic" at a higher percentage than in any other nation in Latin America.
* The NED has given $2.9 million in "pro-democracy" grants to Venezuelan groups since 2002; the more secretive OTI, a branch of USAID whose website says it works to "support U.S. foreign policy objectives," has spent over $26 million in Venezuela to "strengthen democratic institutions" since 2002 (AP, 8/27/06).
Research assistance: Matt Briere
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Chavez Moves Forward
By: Michael A. Lebowitz - MRZine
Caracas, 16 December 2006
But, last night Chavez offered some surprises. The MVR is history, he said. The new party (provisionally called the United Socialist Party of Venezuela) will be there for all the parties to join or, alternatively, to separate themselves from the government. But this, he stressed, will not be a party that combines the existing parties. Rather, it will be a party that can only be built from the base. In your communities, in your patrols, battalions, squadrons, identify your neighbours who are supporters of the Revolution -- you know who they are, he proposed. Do a census, build the party from below. Make it a party that is not built for electoral purposes (although able to engage in electoral battles); make it a party that can fight the Battle of Ideas, one that can fight for the socialist project, one that allows us to read and discuss the way forward. Make this party the most democratic in the history of Venezuela.
Was it my imagination or were there lots of sad faces at last night's meeting at the Teresa Carrena theatre -- the site of so many Bolivarian rallies and celebrations? Certainly, here was another occasion for celebration. It was a meeting to recognize the electoral triumph of Hugo Chavez on 3 December and, in particular, to acknowledge the contribution of campaign workers organized in the Comando Miranda.
And, acknowledge they did: certificates were given to the state organizations which produced the greatest votes for Chavez's re-election: Amacuro Delta (77.98%), Amazon (77.81%), Portuguesa (77.05%), Sucre (73.70%), and Cojedes (73.33%) -- as well as to exemplary municipal battalions such as Rio Negro (96.4%). Definitely a time to celebrate.
So, why those glum faces? Well, it had to do with Chavez himself. Now, I've seen many Chavez speeches on the Channel 8, the state TV station. And, they've run the gamut -- those electric occasions in which high velocity currents flow between the red-shirted Chavez and red-shirted supporters (especially women) lifting them higher and higher, the meetings where Ministers and prominent leaders smile and chuckle on cue and wish for just-a-little-mention, and the similar gatherings where businessmen-who-want-to-do-business-with-the-state listen to the blue-suited Chavez for hints about their future. But this was like none of those occasions.
Last night, there were cheers in the back half of the theatre and in "the gods" -- but few in the high-priced seats. And, it had to do with Chavez's message. Not the part about going toward socialism (although there would have been some who still shudder at the word but who have retained hopes at working on the modifying adjective). And, not the part about asking all his Ministers for their resignation (because that can be just a formality but also does open up the possibility of new appointments). And, not the attacks on corruption (which have been heard before). No, it was all about the new party, the "unique party."
Many of those present have been looking forward to this idea -- ever since Chavez announced earlier this year that 2007 would be a year to create this unified party. After all, the battles among the various Chavista parties have been growing more intense recently. (And, so have the struggles among the various factions of the MVR, the Movement for the 5th Republic, the electoral party that Chavez formed initially.) Accordingly, the idea of bringing unity to an often-dysfunctional team did have its appeal (and not the least to Chavez, who was well aware of problems in the MVR and the other parties).
Of course, the terms of unification were unclear, and the MVR domination of the Comando Miranda didn't inspire confidence in the smaller Chavist parties. So, it wasn't surprising, after electoral results in which the prominently-placed MVR slot overwhelmingly captured the Chavez vote, that there were mutterings from that camp that the MVR is the party (and that all others should dissolve) or that the MVR initiated moves for the delisting of all parties which failed to receive 1% of the vote (which would remove all but 4 of the Chavista parties).
But, last night Chavez offered some surprises. The MVR is history, he said. The new party (provisionally called the United Socialist Party of Venezuela) will be there for all the parties to join or, alternatively, to separate themselves from the government. But this, he stressed, will not be a party that combines the existing parties. Rather, it will be a party that can only be built from the base. In your communities, in your patrols, battalions, squadrons, identify your neighbours who are supporters of the Revolution -- you know who they are, he proposed. Do a census, build the party from below. Make it a party that is not built for electoral purposes (although able to engage in electoral battles); make it a party that can fight the Battle of Ideas, one that can fight for the socialist project, one that allows us to read and discuss the way forward. Make this party the most democratic in the history of Venezuela.
And, choose your true leaders, which only the base can do. There's been too much anointing of people from above with a pointing finger (especially mine). Choose the people you have faith in, whom you know -- not the thieves, the corrupt, the irresponsible, the drunkards. The bad boys must be kept outside. We need to stress socialist morals, socialist ethics.
All this was bad news enough for the politicians accustomed to the practices of the 4th Republic and those who had adopted them to succeed. But, the real dagger came with a message which summed it all up succinctly: "The new party cannot be the sum of old faces. That would be a deceit."
And Chavez said to those representatives of the old parties: we don't have the time for endless debates about this. We have to build this new party from below now. So, you decide what you are going to do because there's no time to lose.
Small wonder that there were glum faces at this celebration. The battle for a new party of the revolution and to build socialism is underway.
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Marta Harnecker: Venezuela's experiment in popular power
Coral Wynter & Jim McIlroy, Caracas
30 November 2006
Marta Harnecker is the Chilean-born author of Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 2005) and other books dealing with revolution and Latin America. She has been an active participant in Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution and an adviser to that country's socialist president, Hugo Chavez.
Harnecker has been involved in the formation and development of Venezuela's Communal Councils - bodies intended to be vehicles for popular power and public participation in the process of creating "socialism of the 21st century". Harnecker was interviewed by Green Left Weekly in late October.
How were the Communal Councils created and how is the process going?
What I have done in the past year is to look for interesting experiences, to find people who can exchange experiences. In Cumana, [in north-eastern Venezuela], I discovered that an organisation had existed for many years before the Communal Councils came into being. It was organised within a very small space, smaller than a barrio (neighbourhood), 200-400 families. And in some rural zones, you need even less, say 100 families, in an area where everybody knows each other, and you don't even need transport to get to meetings. It's easy to meet. It is a space that allows everyone to participate.
Evidently, the people who thought about this, discovered that such a small space allows the people who do not normally have a great ability to express themselves ... to express their opinions and to make decisions. As Freddy Bernal [mayor of Libertador municipality in central Caracas] said, [the Communal Council] is a basic cell of the future society.
If we are successful in constructing communities that orientate toward solidarity, the people will be concerned with the poor people who live in their area. Within [a framework of] solidarity, they look for a solution for this sector ...
Chavez was looking at different formulas for popular organisations. The Bolivarian Circles are more within a broad political framework. They are organisations aimed at political power. The Communal Councils include both those who are with Chavez and those who are not. They are the community: the Communal Councils must reflect all the colours of a rainbow; must cover everyone who wants to work for the community, without political affiliations, without government associations ...
Through this project, when one begins to work for the community, one begins to put solidarity in the forefront, one begins to be transformed. I think this will replace "Chavismo". At times, people think that to be involved politically one has to go out with placards, banners, red [caps and T-shirts]. The people in this period in which the world is living think that politics is [limited to a formal political] practice.
If you organise in the barrio, the organisation is on a much smaller scale. You need a person who is flexible, not sectarian, with the capacity to work with everyone - carrying out projects, trying to solve the problems of the people ...
In an article I wrote about the 4 million votes that were cast in the 2004 referendum to remove Chavez, I said that 3 million of those did not really vote against the Chavez project. They only voted against the Chavez project as it was presented by the opposition. Only about 1 million who voted against Chavez were completely convinced and knew what they were doing. The other 3 million were influenced by the opposition media, which say the Chavez project is a project of "communism", authoritarianism, dictatorship ...
When people become involved in practical work, they can begin to see that Chavez is an open, direct person, and that the president's project isn't what they thought it was. In regard to the election, the problem is that many people are not fully informed. There are many people who are anti-Chavista who have been misinformed by the opposition media in this country. The media do not respect the basic right of people to be properly informed.
Middle-class people are more susceptible to the media's work. The media manipulates the situation by beginning with small truths, and small failures, which they then exaggerate ...
What role does the workers' movement play in relation to community organising?
Logically, we accept that in general the experience of popular power means that, as it is based on territorial spaces, the workers do not appear [directly] as active members. I remember a very interesting discussion in Cuba, when they were planning popular power through electoral registrations. Inevitably, the neighbour who proposed a candidate in their area would choose the person who could solve the most practical problems within the community. This meant it was difficult, up to now, for the workers to be directly involved.
Because of this, in Cuba, it was suggested that there be two forms of choosing candidates, one territorial and the other at the workplace - two ways of deciding ... In Venezuela, up to now, we don't have unity of the workers within the [revolution]. The union movement is not strong enough at this stage.
I have said to the trade unions, "Why don't you strengthen the communal councils, by integrating with them? You, as workers, should be involved in the community." Up to now, they have not done this.
We should think of the communal councils as a central community of workers, [as well as of neighbours]. To me, it is very important to consider the micro-economy and the necessity to bring in economic organisations so that they can be democratised, in the direction of solidarity and not of corporatism. There should be a close link between the organisation of work and the community.
Could you describe how the Communal Councils work?
There are now 16,000 CCs, established in six months [since the start of the program this year]. It is a very serious initiative, in my opinion. The CC process requires many months to allow people to mature, and to elect true leaders. We began with a process involving motivators. The committee of motivators have to go house-to-house to make a census. This is one of the most basic jobs - a socioeconomic census. It requires the committee to visit all the households in the area.
It seems that it needs serious and diligent leaders who are capable of going house-to-house. Because of this, we think it would not be possible to elect spokespeople for the CC without going through this process. There should be an assembly first, and then an election.
There has to be a team, a promotions commission, who should do this social and geographic history - the story of the community. [To achieve this], it would take at least eight months. When they have the meeting of the assembly, they will elect the future spokespeople. Then the process is approved [legally]. Some of the CCs are working okay, others are not.
Another very important thing is that the CC has the opportunity to elect a new leadership ... The leadership must be elected by a general assembly where anyone can be proposed. The spokespeople are not the assembly - they are not the organisation. The assembly must ratify the proposals - whether from a committee for housing, or a committee for health. If someone who becomes the spokesperson does not have the confidence of the assembly, the CC will not work.
It is a democratic way to renovate the leadership, and permits the assembly to choose a new leadership. I think the law respects this will of the assembly. I was part of the group that oversaw the formation of the CCs. In the law it is very clear: Where is the power? The power is not with the spokespeople - it is with the general assembly. Why are they called "voceros"? Because they are the voice of the community. If they lose the position of spokesperson, they stop having any power ...
I think this is an experimental way of organising popular power. But, for me, it is the future direction we should be taking. This is the basic idea: not from above.
It also depends on the type of problem. There are problems that require the involvement of various CCs, because they are problems of the whole barrio - for example, the water pipes that pass through the whole barrio. This must be resolved at the level of the Barrio Council. The stairs, the lighting, the rubbish - you can resolve these within the CC. These CCs are the base - very democratic; a scheme for participation ...
They are looking for ways to prioritise the things the community can resolve: but not to create a kind of "begging" neighbourhood that sees a problem, and just calls on the state to resolve it ...
These are methods that allow the community to resolve issues ... We make an assessment and prioritise problems: what the community can resolve, and what it can't. The "voices" of the different communities must discuss these problems at a higher level.
This is how solidarity begins, because you start to see that your problem is wider than your small reality, and you must help others. Thus, the Communal Councils are more of a school for political formation. I think popular power, when it is really democratic, is the best school, because it produces this process. This is because you have been fighting for your house, your land. And you begin to realise that your house is in a barrio, and the barrio is in a city ...
What are some of the differences between the Cuban experience, and Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution, with its missions and so on?
I think this revolution has been carried out through the peaceful route, but the president has not been disarmed. In the Chilean case [Salvador Allende's left-wing government in the early 1970s], it was the peaceful way, but not armed. It did not have military support. Venezuela is very powerful, because it is armed, with the backing of the National Armed Forces. Nevertheless, it has been a process in which the correlation of forces means that the president could not impose a project on the country. The Venezuelan process obliges the government to achieve harmony.
The project has gained consensus with most of the sectors of society. Consequently, this obliges the transformation to be much slower. The state apparatus means that you have 80% or more of people employed in the government through clientalism, who are not interested in working. It is a public service, but it does not function. The majority of public servants are not public servants; they work against the public ...
[Venezuela] is a "rentier" country that does not have a high level of industrial development. The great majority of workers are in the informal sector. In Cuba, the revolution undertook [socialist] projects almost immediately. Instead, here, the series of battles are primarily ideological.
Thus, the direction of popular power is important, because they need time for the project to mature. With the peaceful route, it is much slower than a sharp transformation of the state.
Could you comment on Chavez's project for "socialism of the 21st century"?
The truth is we have many critics. Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer, said that when socialism failed in the Soviet Union, the West said that socialism died and so did Marxism. Galeano said that the socialism that is dead is not our socialism, because the socialist project that we are defending is fundamentally humanist, democratic and based on solidarity. The socialism that died was a bureaucratic socialism that the people did not defend, because there was no real participation.
I think Chavez knows this. Chavez knows that you can only create a socialist society of the future if the people, the most humble, the poorest, the most exploited, participate in this process. The great merit of Chavez is that he is a leader who promotes popular organisation - who is convinced that the force of this process is in the organisation. Chavez is always calling for more organisations and inventing new organisations. At times, too many. It is a creativity that gives the possibility that everybody can be organised.
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US New Chief Spy for Cuba and Venezuela
Washington, Dec 7 (Prensa Latina)
Norman Bailey, the new "chief spy" whom Bush has appointed against Cuba and Venezuela is a genuine relic from the Reagan regime, in which he was a privileged advisor.
He infiltrated the Noriega government in Panama whilst the US invasion was being prepared; he advised Duhalde in Argentina when the country was heading towards economic disaster; he confesses to being a buddy of Lyndon LaRouche, the controversial ultra right-wing U.S. politician.
Everything would indicate there was no other recourse left available to Bush than rummaging round in his father's closet when the time came to recruit high-ranking officials for his declining government.
Norman Bailey, whom John Negroponte - another leftover from the Reagan connection and currently national director of US intelligence - has recently named as head of the US intelligence mission for the two sister nations, has a longstanding curriculum with the CIA, that is certainly not lacking in inconsistencies and foolish mistakes.
His official biography indicates that Bailey is an "economic consultant" and "professor" of Washington's Potomac Foundation, a conservative think-tank embedded within the network of low-ranking Republican officials.
Former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan for international economic affairs and a member of the National Security Council (NSC), he urged the NSA - the electronic espionage agency that monitors the post - to spy on the movement of money on a worldwide scale.
He has his own lobbying office - Norman A. Bailey Incorporated - that has even advised the Mobil Oil firm.
But aside from all his titles and covers, this rotund sexagenarian, who was trained in military intelligence and graduated from Colombia University, has acted for many decades as a beachhead for the CIA, most notably with respect to Latin American governments which, after having placed their trust in him, have seen their own downfall.
In 1989, when the US. invasion of Panama was being prepared, it was he who handled the plans of George Bush Sr. in the State Department and the CIA.
It is said that it was thanks to his indiscretions, perhaps inspired by Otto Reich, that journalist Seymour Hersch published a veritable flurry of alleged crimes committed by Manuel Noriega in The New York Times, which gave rise to a widespread international campaign of discredit and a series of undercover operations.
He then advised Noriega and "accompanied" him to the disastrous denouement of the crisis that took the Panamanian president straight to a US jail cell, in the midst of a veritable massacre of poor Panamanians from the most marginal neighborhoods in the capital.
With the same shamelessness, he developed a close relationship with Argentine president Eduardo Duhalde, in the guise of a great U.S. financial expert - his favorite role - following the abrupt end of the De la Rúa government in December 2001, when the Argentine economy was in tatters.
On March 8, 2002, the Clarín daily, with admirable innocence, announced that "the president is now receiving advice from his American consultants" and that the previous day at the presidential palace he had met with Norman Bailey, "who advised (George W. Bush) in his campaign" with the aim of "improving his contacts in the USA."
He recommended that the vulnerable president fiercely repress social unrest or, if a strong hand did not work in the short term, to call elections as a means of diversion. He also recommended that Duhalde issue trusteeship bonds for state land.
Shortly after receiving such great advice from an "independent" advisor who belonged to both the CIA and the most intimate circles of the current occupant of the White House, Duhalde ended up in the inexorable archives of history.
He continued his links with Latin America. It is said that he made an appearance during the dollarization process in Ecuador and also participated in the conception of Plan Colombia.
But the thing that stands out most on his résumé is his confessed friendship with Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., former presidential candidate and prominent member of the far right in the US, who runs an intelligence network, the breadth and efficiency of which he has publicly praised.
In December 1999, in a cable from Washington which condemned the appearance of "new threats to the security of the United States in Latin America", the US AP agency quoted Bailey rudely attacking Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who had been democratically elected the previous year.
In his lecture, Bailey declared that the government of Ecuador was "totally bankrupt", suggesting that "military intervention" should not be ruled out. Speaking of Panama, he said then that it was a country that was vulnerable to guerilla incursions and that possibilities for sabotaging the Canal are "enormous" allowing him, of course, to dream of another adventure in that nation.
In March 2001, in The Washington Times, the current Chief Spy against Cuba and Venezuela openly expressed his desire for a drop in oil prices which, he commented, would have "disastrous consequences" for Venezuela.
Bailey then blurted out an example of his unsubtle vision of Latin America: "Thinking that Bush needs Kirchner to contain Chávez is idiotic."
Reports of US troops being sent in alleged "humanitarian" missions to Peru, Panama, Paraguay and other Latin American countries may be a new scheme, Bailey-Bush style, to subvert the newly-elected governments and their neighbors in the region.
ef
(*) Based on a report by Jean-Guy Allard of Granma International, posted on this date.
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Brain Power
Bard boosts brain, researchers say
Last Updated: Monday, December 18, 2006 | 6:00 PM ET
CBC News
British researchers using modern medical technology have demonstrated what generations of teachers have told generations of students: Shakespeare is good for you.
Reading parts of Shakespeare's plays causes the brain to become positively excited, researchers from the University of Liverpool said in a release Monday.
In particular, Shakespeare's use of a linguistic technique known as a functional shift, where a part of speech is employed in an unusual way - a noun might act as a verb, for example - forces a peak in brain activity.
"By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things," said Prof. Philip Davis, from the university's School of English.
He cited the example of the phrase "he godded me" from the tragedy Coriolanus. Because it's an unusual usage, "the brain becomes excited."
The reader understands that a familiar word is being used in an unfamiliar way, said Prof. Neil Roberts, from the university's Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre.
"The brain signature is relatively uneventful when we understand the meaning of a word, but when the word changes the grammar of the whole sentence, brain readings suddenly peak. The brain is then forced to retrace its thinking process in order to understand what it is supposed to make of this unusual word," he said.
The two researchers, with Guillaune Thierry from the University of Wales, watched 20 participants who had electrodes linking their scalp to an electroencephalogram (EEG) while they read selected lines from Shakespeare's works.
When the readers hit a functional shift, the EEG didn't show the negative wave modulation produced by a sentence that doesn't make sense, but instead, recorded a positive re-evaluation of the word.
The researchers are now trying to find which areas of the brain are most affected.
Experts have suggested that heightened brain activity may explain why Shakespeare's plays have such a strong effect on readers.
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Robot controlled by power of brain waves
UK Telegraph
18/12/2006
Computer scientists have used the power of thought to control a humanoid robot.
Wearing a special cap dotted with 32 scalp electrodes, an individual can "order" the robot to move about and pick up objects merely by generating brain waves that reflect the instructions.
Rajesh Rao, of the University of Washington, demonstrated the robot at the Current Trends in BrainComputer Interfacing meeting in Whistler, British Columbia.
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"It suggests that one day we might be able to use semi-autonomous robots for helping disabled people," he said.
For the demonstration, the robot was in a different room from its human master. The electrodes pick up signals using a technique called electroencephalography.
The thought commands are limited to basic instructions. The robot can be told to move forward, choose one of two objects and bring it to one of two locations.
The Washington team plans to extend the research to use more complex objects and equip the robot with skills such as avoiding obstacles.
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French researchers identify gene linked to autism
PARIS, Dec 17, 2006 (AFP)
French researchers have discovered a new gene linked to autism, a mental disability which prevents sufferers from communicating and forming relationships normally and whose causes are unknown.
The study, published Sunday online by Nature Genetics journal, found that all of five autistic children studied had anomalies in the SHANK3 gene, responsible for making the connections in the brain necessary for language development.
The most distinctive symptoms of autism are problems with communication, forming relationships and developing strong obsessional traits.
The Institut Pasteur study showed "the key role of the gene in the organisation of neurone connections" in the brain, lead researcher Thomas Bourgeron told AFP.
"This gene, named SHANK3, does not explain all forms of autism" warned Bourgeron, but it might help explain the communication difficulties which provide major social obstacles to many sufferers.
The study sample included five people from three families, each suffering either from autism or Asperger's Syndrome.
Asperger's Syndrome is an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) which shares most of the symptoms of autism with less severe communication problems.
"It (ASD) affects about one child in 200 and four times' more boys," Bourgeron said of the lifelong disorders.
In 2003, Bourgeron's team identified anomalies on SHANK3, which produces the proteins necessary to construct synapses, the junctions between the brain's neural pathways.
They discovered significant "deletions" to various degrees in the gene. One participant, who was autistic but had learned to talk, was found to have a "duplicate" of the gene.
The research was conducted with Paris' psychiatric services institute Inserm, and the University of Gothenberg in Sweden.
Autism usually does not appear in infants before the age of three, though it can be diagnosed as early as 18 months.
Children who suffer from it display impaired social skills and communications abilities throughout their lives, and their families bear a substantial financial and emotional burden in caring for them.
Global statistics on autism are limited, with figures appearing to show the disease on the rise.
According to the Autism Society of America, 10 percent to 17 percent more people are diagnosed with autism each year, but this may be partly due to increasing awareness and identification of the disease.
The US Center for Disease Control estimates that between one child in 500 and one in 166 may be diagnosed with a disease on the autism spectrum.
The causes of autism remain mysterious. Years of research have gone into identifying a genetic cause.
US autism researcher Bernard Rimland, who died in November, courted controversy by claiming that an increase in autism diagnoses might be caused by childhood vaccinations.
Research is increasingly addressing the idea that autism may be caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
Copyright AFP
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Handwriting Analyst: Jack The Ripper Not Jewish
Beth Schwartzapfel | Fri. Dec 15, 2006
Using the conclusions from her personality analysis, Dresbold dismantles some of the long-standing theories about the identity of Jack the Ripper. One, which was put forth at the time of the murders by the then-Assistant Commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, was that the Ripper "and his people were low-class Jews." Dresbold, however, contends that the letter's spelling errors were actually phonetic spellings of Cockney- or Irish-accented English. Further, she says, in 1880s London most "low-class Jews" would have spoken primarily Yiddish and very little English - not enough, in any case, to produce a letter from Hell.
Somehow, in the process of murdering, disemboweling and surgically removing the organs of five London prostitutes in the fall of 1888, the notorious Jack the Ripper found the time to write a letter, wrap it around a preserved kidney and mail it to the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. "Sir," it read, in smudged, vertically elongated script, "I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise." The return address read "Hell."
The missive forms the basis of "The Letter from Hell," Chapter 19 of the new book "Sex, Lies, and Handwriting: A Top Expert Reveals the Secrets Hidden in Your Handwriting."
To come up with a personality profile for the letter writer, author Michelle Dresbold, who trained with the Secret Service and writes the syndicated column "The Handwriting Doctor," applies several tricks of the handwriting-analysis trade. We learn, for instance, that since the script is unruly, the content disorganized, and the grammar and spelling full of mistakes, the writer was not "[someone] whose actions were well thought out and planned." Logical enough. Other findings, however, strike the uninitiated as a little far-fetched: On the basis of a single letter "I," for instance, Dresbold concludes that "the writer's mother did not play a significant role in his life," and that "while he had a relationship with his father, it was strained."
Using the conclusions from her personality analysis, Dresbold dismantles some of the long-standing theories about the identity of Jack the Ripper. One, which was put forth at the time of the murders by the then-Assistant Commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, was that the Ripper "and his people were low-class Jews." Dresbold, however, contends that the letter's spelling errors were actually phonetic spellings of Cockney- or Irish-accented English. Further, she says, in 1880s London most "low-class Jews" would have spoken primarily Yiddish and very little English - not enough, in any case, to produce a letter from Hell.
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Google, NASA agree to put NASA data on Internet
www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-19 08:37:58
BEIJING, Dec. 19 (Xinhuanet) -- Internet search engine Google Inc., and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) signed a collaboration agreement Monday that calls for Google to help make NASA information readily accessible on the Internet.
Under the arrangement, NASA will feed Google with its weather forecasting information, three-dimensional maps of the moon and Mars, and real-time tracking of the International Space Station and space shuttle flights so the pictures and data wil be available to anyone with an Internet connection.
"This agreement between NASA and Google will soon allow every person to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement.
The two organizations will also tackle what they consider to be challenging technical problems in areas like large-scale data management, massively distributed computing and user interfaces.
"Partnering with NASA made perfect sense for Google, as it has a wealth of technical expertise and data that will be of great use to Google as we look to tackle many computing issues on behalf of our users," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said.
NASA and Google said they are also finalizing details for additional collaborations in areas such as research, products, facilities and education.
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As Above - So Below
More solar flares blast toward earth
ABC News
18/12/2006
A large electromagnetic "storm" has broken out on the face of the sun, sending masses of charged subatomic particles through the space that surrounds planet Earth.
Images from the SOHO space probe -- short for Solar and Heliospheric Observatory -- showed a bright flare near the sun's equator on Wednesday, and another was reported by ground-based observatories today.
Several of SOHO's sensors were temporarily overwhelmed by the amount of radiation, engineers said.
Such flares, known as coronal mass ejections, are actually fairly common, scientists say. Earth is well protected by both its atmosphere and its magnetic field.
Astronauts Alerted
The 10 least protected human beings are those currently in orbit -- the crews of the Space Shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station.
The flare had one surprising effect: It temporarily knocked out the gyroscopes that keep the space station oriented in orbit.
Apparently, NASA said, the energy from the flare caused the outer layers of Earth's atmosphere to thicken slightly.
Even at the station's altitude of 220 miles, there's a tiny bit of air -- and there was more on Thursday.
The gyroscopes had been turned off this week, while astronauts Robert Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang did two spacewalks to update the station's wiring.
When the gyros were turned back on, onboard computers sensed that they were working harder than they ought to -- and shut the gyros off again.
NASA said the astronauts were in no danger. The shuttle's steering jets will keep the docked ships stable until the gyro problem is solved.
Overnight the astronauts were instructed to sleep in sections of their ships that were the best shielded from radiation. NASA said the shuttle mission schedule would not be changed because of the solar storm.
Earth on the Lookout
Here on Earth, the most visible effect of the flare was the aurora borealis -- the so-called Northern Lights, often seen over Alaska and Canada at night.
Late Thursday and early today, aurora displays were reported as far south as Michigan and Minnesota.
Many technology companies were also on alert.
In an increasingly electronic age, solar storms sometimes have surprising effects.
In 1998, a communications satellite broke down because of the radiation striking it, cutting off pager signals, long-distance calls, and some radio transmissions.
In 1989, there was a blackout in Quebec, and scientists decided afterward that it was the result of a power surge directly related to a solar flare.
Long-haul airliners on routes over the Arctic are sometimes diverted south, because Earth's magnetism offers less protection near the poles.
"It is a rare occurrence to have a strong event like this so late in the solar cycle," said Larry Combs, a forecaster at NOAA's Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colo.
The frequency of solar flares fluctuates in an 11-year pattern, and the last peak was in 2002.
But NOAA said the magnetic pulse was so far not of a type that was likely to cause major problems.
On a scale used by scientists, this storm was a "G2," meaning it had moderate strength.
"So far, yes, there's been a magnetic disturbance," said Joe Kunches, chief of the Forecast and Analysis Branch at the Space Environment Center. "And yes, it's coming from the sun, but the reality is that it's been less than severe -- so far."
Kunches' staff reported that more radiation was likely to pass Earth over the weekend.
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Climate change melting Kilimanjaro's snows
Dec. 16 2006
Associated Press
NARO MORU, Kenya -- Rivers of ice at the Equator -- foretold in the 2nd century, found in the 19th -- are now melting away in this new century, returning to the realm of lore and fading photographs.
From mile-high Naro Moru, villagers have watched year by year as the great glaciers of Mount Kenya, glinting in the equatorial sun high above them, have retreated into shrunken white stains on the rocky shoulders of the 16,897-foot peak.
Climbing up, "you can hear the water running down beneath Diamond and Darwin," mountain guide Paul Nditiru said, speaking of two of 10 surviving glaciers.
Some 200 miles due south, the storied snows of Mount Kilimanjaro, the tropical glaciers first seen by disbelieving Europeans in 1848, are vanishing. And to the west, in the heart of equatorial Africa, the ice caps are shrinking fast atop Uganda's Rwenzoris -- the "Mountains of the Moon" imagined by ancient Greeks as the source of the Nile River.
The total loss of ice masses ringing Africa's three highest peaks, projected by scientists to happen sometime in the next two to five decades, fits a global pattern playing out in South America's Andes Mountains, in Europe's Alps, in the Himalayas and beyond.
Almost every one of more than 300 large glaciers studied worldwide is in retreat, international glaciologists reported in October in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. This is "essentially a response to post-1970 global warming," they said.
Even such strong evidence may not sway every climate skeptic. Some say it's lower humidity, not higher temperatures, that is depleting Kilimanjaro's snows, for example.
Stefan Hastenrath of the University of Wisconsin, who has climbed, poked, photographed and measured east Africa's glaciers for four decades, says what's happening is complex and needs more study. But on a continent where climatologists say temperatures have risen an average 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, global warming plays a role, he says.
"The onset of glacier recession in east Africa has causes different from other equatorial regions. It's a complicated sort of affair," he said by telephone from Madison. But "that is not something to be taken as an argument against the global warming notions."
In Kampala, Uganda's capital, veteran meteorologist Abushen Majugu agreed. "There's generally been a constant rise in temperatures. To some degree the reduction of the glaciers must be connected to warming," he said.
It was 10 years ago, on the 100th anniversary of the Italian first expedition to the Rwenzoris, that Majugu and colleagues were struck by an Italian gift to Uganda: photographs from 1896 showing extensive glaciers atop the spectacular, remote, 3-mile-high mountains.
In a scientific paper this May, Majugu and British and Ugandan co-authors reported that this ice, which covered 2.5 square miles a century ago, has diminished to less than a half-square-mile today.
The glaciers are "expected to disappear within the next two decades," they concluded. And because the 2nd century Greeks were right, that means a secondary source of Nile River waters will also disappear.
At Mount Kenya, too, "it's a dying glacier," Hastenrath said, referring to its big Lewis Glacier, once a mile-long tongue of ice draped over a saddle between peaks. "At the rate at which it goes, the end could come soon," he said.
In a meticulous new summary, the Wisconsin scientist, who first investigated Mount Kenya in 1971, shows that its ice fields have shrunk from an estimated 400 acres to less than one-fifth that area in the past century. After decades of work, he concludes a complex of phenomena was responsible.
In the early years, sparser clouds and precipitation in east Africa allowed solar radiation to evaporate exposed areas of ice, which then wasn't adequately replenished, Hastenrath says. But more recently the reduction in ice thickness has been uniform, pointing to general warmth, not limited sun exposure, as the cause. Eight of 18 glaciers are already gone.
"Northey's gone. Gregory's about finished," said John Maina, as if mourning old friends. The 56-year-old guide knows Mount Kenya's glaciers and peaks well, having led climbers up its face since he was a teenager. As he readied for yet another trek from Naro Moru, he recalled how it was.
"We used to be able to ski on Lewis, but now it's all crevasses. We would climb all the way up Lewis on ice to Lenana peak, but now it's climbing on rocks. And the ice is weak. We're seeing blue ice, weak ice."
Up at 10,000 feet, where he mans a weather station in the clouds, another longtime guide, Joseph Mwangi, 45, makes his own projections. "In five years, Lewis Glacier will be gone," he said.
He worries that the water loss may unravel a unique ecosystem that surrounds him -- of high-altitude trees and bamboo groves, blue monkeys and giant forest hogs. "The lobelia trees might die," he said.
Animals are already dying in the foothills and plains below.
Glaciologists say "terminal" glaciers often discharge -- and waste -- large amounts of water in the early years, followed by declining runoff from shrunken ice fields. Villagers here seem to confirm that: The Naro Moru River and other streams off Mount Kenya ran very high some years back, they say, but are now growing thin. A years-long drought magnifies the problem.
"The more the snow goes down, the lower the rivers," said Roy Mwangi, area water officer here.
The trouble has already begun, he said. Miles downstream on the Naro Moru, where the river now vanishes in the dry season, livestock are dying of thirst. Desperate nomadic herdsmen have raided points upriver, blocking intakes for farm irrigation systems, he said.
"There's a lot of suffering on the lower side. These are armed men. I'm afraid there will be conflict," Mwangi said.
Hardships may spread even to Nairobi, Kenya's metropolis. Most of this country's shaky electric grid relies on hydropower, and much of that is drawn from waters streaming off Mount Kenya. In a U.N. study issued in early November, scientists predicted that the glacial rivers of Mount Kenya and the rest of east Africa may dry up in 15 years.
"The repercussions on people living down the slopes will be terrible," said Kenyan environmentalist Grace Akumu.
Scientists say such repercussions would multiply across a world where human settlements have come to depend on steady runoffs from healthy glaciers -- in Peru and Bolivia, India and China. And it would extend beyond that, they say, to coastal settlements everywhere, as oceans rise from heat expansion and the melting of land ice.
The October journal report, by European and North American glaciologists, estimates that glacier melt contributed up to one-third of the 1-to-2-inch rise in global sea levels in the past decade. And that contribution is accelerating. Since 2001, they report, dying glaciers apparently have doubled their runoff into the world's rising seas.
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Shiveluch volcano on Kamchatka spews ash to 10 km height
PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKY, December 19 (Itar-Tass)
A series of ash spews has been registered from the crater of the Shiveluch volcano on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.
One of the spews reached an altitude of 10 kilometres above the summit, the Kamchatka branch of the Geophysical Service of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) told Itar-Tass on Tuesday.
A plume of ash 61 by 35 kilometres in size moved 24 kilometres northeast of the volcano. Increased seismic activity is observed on the volcano. The giant mount presents no danger for nearby settlements, believe scientists that have been without interruption monitoring the eruption.
However, ash clouds spewed by Shiveluch may be dangerous for local aviation. It is also not safe to approach the volcano during eruption, specialists say.
Shiveluch became active on December 5 after a relatively calm period since autumn 2005. This volcano is regarded as one of the most active on Kamchatka. Its height is 3,283 metres above sea level. The volcano eruptions are explosive, which makes it difficult to forecast them.
The Volcano eruptions in 1864 and 1964 were classified by scientists as catastrophic. The nearest settlement Klyuchi is located at a distance of some 50 kilometres from Shiveluch.
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Hundreds of seagulls killed mysteriously
www.chinanews.cn
2006-12-19
Chinanews, Jinan, Dec. 19 - Hundreds of seagulls were found dead on the beach of Zhouge Village, eastern China's Shandong Province.
The remains of these seagulls were found on December 16, which still kept white feathers and red claws without any wounds.
Relevant authorities reveal that all the seagull remains have been cleared away and samples have been made. A careful investigation shows that their death was not related to bird flu. Experts suspected that they were infected by a kind of mysterious disease. Further results have to be revealed in a few more days.
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Mystery smell under investigation
Published: Tuesday, December 19, 2006 - 6:00 am
By Paul Alongi
STAFF WRITER
Firefighters expect to return to an Anderson Road store today to investigate a mysterious smell that sent at least nine people to the hospital Monday night after they complained of burning eyes and throats, officials said.
The people were taken from Big Lots to Greenville Memorial Hospital, where they were being evaluated.
Their symptoms included burning noses and throats, dizziness and chest pain, said Sandy Dees, a hospital spokeswoman.
"It doesn't look like any of the nine are going to be admitted," she said.
Parker Fire District Chief Richard Jones didn't know late Monday what caused the smell.
The patients began feeling better after leaving the store, Jones said.
Firefighters with their masks down and monitors in their hands went through the aisles but came up with no results for anything harmful, Jones said.
No smoke was visible from the parking lot. The predominant smell was diesel exhaust from the fire trucks.
Firefighters were called to the store near the intersection of Anderson and White Horse roads at 7:59 p.m., Jones said.
By 9:15 p.m., the police tape around the store came down, and firefighters were hauling industrial-size fans from the doorways to their trucks. Four employees deflated an inflatable Santa globe and took it inside.
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