|
Our newsroom gets
dozens of press releases every day from people who think
they've got a good story for us. But we've never seen
a "media alert" quite like this one. It says:
"Beginning next week, spaceships will appear overLas
Vegas," summoned on-demand by a man who claims
he's in touch with an alien power. News 3's Steve Crupi
reports.
This sounds strangely reminiscent of "The Amazing
Kreskin." Three years ago Kreskin got worldwide
attention when he predicted that UFO's would appear
over Las Vegas . But no surprise, it turned out to be
a publicity hoax. Now, we have a man who calls himself
a prophet, predicting alien activity, and he swears
this is no hoax.
From the driveway of his downtown apartment, Ramon
Watkins is waiting for UFOs. "There are spaceships
right now, parked around the planet." On his web
site, he goes by the name Prophet Yahweh and says the
existence of extraterrestrial life will soon become
obvious to everyone. "I know you guys are skeptical,
and I don't blame you man." He has a computer filled
with home videos that he claims prove his power to summon
strange objects in the sky. And he says within the next
45 days something big is coming.
"At least one of those days a gigantic spaceship
is to set up over Las Vegas for a day and a half."
Watkins tried to give us a demonstration of his abilities,
but we watched and waited, and all we saw was an airplane.
"We tried, it's a no-show."
Watkins says the aliens won't attack us the way they
do in the movies, but he says their intentions are anything
but friendly. "And they're here, to take over,
it's just that simple."
"Should people be taking shelter and running away
from Las Vegas if the ships are coming?"
Kreskin got it wrong three years ago; Prophet Yahweh
says stay tuned, he is on a mission to prove all skeptics
wrong. Ramon Watkins says he will be discussing his
UFO prediction at length when he appears as a guest
on Coast-To-Coast, a radio talk show, Friday night.
|
Exploit
the Rift |
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 25 May 2005 |
Members of the Republican
Party's political action corps pride themselves on discipline
and adherence to the line. Most of the time they are very
good at this, which explains to a degree their ascendancy
of late. All of a sudden, however, that discipline has
started to crack, and the outlines
of a full-fledged civil war within the ranks of the GOP
are beginning to become manifestly clear.
The public rift started several weeks ago, when Majority
leaders Frist and DeLay dragged the rest of the party
along on the demented sleigh-ride that was the Schiavo
affair. Messrs. Frist and DeLay assumed, wrongly, that
the American people would happily accept the idea that
Congressmen should serve as mother, father, husband, wife,
doctor and priest on matters of life and death as they
pertain to medical decisions. When some 80% of the public
rejected this concept out of hand, according to every
poll, the cracks began to publicly appear.
This actually started as a private rift
back in November. The 'movement conservatives' - read:
fundamentalist evangelical activist Christian base of
the GOP - believed they were the ones who single-handedly
delivered electoral victory to Bush in the last election,
and were set upon being paid back for their efforts. This
expected payback amounted to the assumption that the GOP
majority in Congress would take up all the issues dear
to the movement conservative heart.
The problem arose when a good number of the old-school
conservatives within the GOP decided they didn't really
want the fundamentalists driving the bus. These old-school
conservatives were likewise developing a significant disgust
for the so-called leadership of the neo-conservatives
in the White House and Pentagon, who had led the party
into the bottomless blood-well of Iraq.
The old-schoolers were facing a significant challenge,
because the neo-cons have been using the fundamentalists
as shock troops, 'useful idiots' who helpfully carry the
combined banners of 'freedom,' patriotism, and the One
True Faith in order to obscure the neo-con's larger, less-palatable
and incredibly dangerous geopolitical goals. We saw this
repeatedly during the last election season.
The tension grew as, time and again, Congress failed
to rally to the various movement conservative banners
that were raised. Finally, the movement conservatives
got sick of waiting, and plunged headlong into the Schiavo
mess in order to promote their 'culture of life' ideals.
In fact, this was a warning shot fired across the GOP's
bow, with Frist and DeLay standing as point-men for their
own reasons - DeLay needs the fundamentalists help to
avoid going to prison for a whole rainbow of ethics violations,
and Frist needs them because he wants to run for President
in 2008.
Well, history records the outcome of that effort. When
the movement conservatives' desires met public opinion
on the matter of Schiavo, the sound was like two icebergs
colliding in the North Atlantic. All of a sudden, the
old-school conservatives found themselves lumped in with
the fundies who drove the bus off the cliff. Approval
ratings for Congress plummeted to the low 30s, and the
Democrats had been handed an unexpected public relations
coup.
Flash forward to the recent filibuster fight. Majority
Leader Frist stapled himself to the cause of getting rid
of the filibuster come hell or high water as yet another
Schiavo-esqe kowtow to the movement conservatives whom,
he believed, would catapult him into the Oval Office.
The old-school conservatives watched
all this unfold with growing disgust and, in a moment
of Caesarian calculation, stabbed their majority leader
in the back by cutting a deal with the Democrats behind
Frist's back to preserve the filibuster.
Understand what this means. For many liberals and progressives,
this deal was profoundly unpalatable, because the deal
itself included allowing a vote on three wildly unacceptable
nominees to the appellate bench. There is no way to paint
this with a rosy glow, yet the broader view may provide
succor beyond the simple fact that the filibuster was
preserved, and the terms under which it can be used remain
in the hands of the Democrats.
Simply put, the movement conservatives had their lunch
eaten by the old-schoolers on the matter of the filibuster.
Mr. Frist lost control of his caucus,
and the so-called 'moderates' who broke ranks even had
the temerity to scold Mr. Bush, reminding him that the
Senate does, in fact, have the right and requirement to
advise and consent on nominees. Furthermore, the movement
fundamentalists were slapped down because they dared to
tamper with Senate tradition.
This was the first public shot fired in the GOP civil
war, a battle between the movementarians and the old-schoolers.
Within hours, this one battle became several battles.
The day after Frist lost control of his caucus, 50 GOP
House members defied Bush's promised veto and piled onto
an impressive majority that passed legislation approving
stem cell research. Bush, whose threatened veto was yet
another political sop to the movement conservatives, expected
his threat to kill this legislation, but it didn't by
a long chalk.
Suddenly, George has a problem. Stem cell research is
very popular among the folks, and can help millions of
Americans afflicted with a wide variety of diseases. Take
diabetes for one example. There are 18.2 million Americans
suffering from diabetes today, a lot of them children.
According to the American Diabetes Association, more than
213,000 people will die of diabetes this year alone.
The total annual economic cost of diabetes in 2002 was
estimated to be $132 billion, amounting to one out of
every 10 health care dollars spent in the United States.
Right now, diabetes has no cure, though the people suffering
from it have been hearing for years that a cure is right
around the corner. Stem cell research could provide that.
George is going to have a hell of a
time explaining to these people why Jesus says they can't
be cured.
And then, of course, there was Mr. John Bolton. Bolton's
nomination as UN Ambassador exposed yet another fault
line within the GOP ranks, as seemingly loyal Republicans
balked at voting for him after hearing the details of
his working relationship with his peers, among other things.
The seemingly guaranteed approval of Bolton has been thrown
into a cocked hat, and will serve as yet another battle
front between the movementarians, backed by the neo-cons,
and the old-schoolers.
Beyond the filibuster brawl, Mr. Bolton and the looming
stem-cell crunch is the matter of Social Security reform.
Many old-school conservatives are leery of the Bush plan
to overhaul this program, probably because they can do
simple math. The plan, because of this resistance, has
appeared dead in the water for weeks, and yet the White
House keeps pushing. Bush, for his part, actually asked
Republicans on Tuesday to "resist pressure from constituents"
and support his plan. Big talk for a guy who doesn't have
to run again.
The lingering election beef. Schiavo. The filibuster
deal, which earned the following reaction from the president
of the Iowa Christian Coalition: "We'll educate people
in the caucuses, and this is not going to do them a lot
of good in terms of their presidential aspirations."
The stem cell fight, the 50 Republican defectors in the
House, and the threatened veto. Bolton. The looming brawl
over Social Security reform. The once-mighty GOP coalition
is fragmenting before our very eyes.
Those who have watched the White House and Congress
run roughshod over the best traditions and ideals of this
nation can do two things while this fight unfolds: Sit
back and enjoy the rift, or exploit it.
I vote for Option B.
The time has come to mount a bull-throated
charge to get American troops out of Iraq. Eleven
U.S. troops have died in the last 48 hours, bringing the
total to 1,647. Billions and billions of taxpayer dollars
have been poured into the sand to no avail. The public
dialogue on Iraq is paralyzed, locked between those who
believe we have to stay and those who think slogans like
'Out Now!" with no plans to augment the sentiment
are the only proper response. It is Vietnam all over again.
Rather than leave the dialogue stuck in this rut, the
time has come to develop an intelligent, effective plan
for the removal of troops from Iraq and the delivery of
that nation back into the hands of the people who live
there. Democratic leaders Reid, Pelosi and Dean must be
made to see this as the only intelligent choice. More
to the point, Republican old-schoolers who are disgusted
with the neo-cons and their 'useful idiot' movementarian
shock troops can be brought on board as a part of their
insurgency against their rotten leaders.
Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son to this Iraq mess, knows
in her heart this is possible. "Members
of Congress know that Iraq is a mistake," Sheehan
wrote me on Tuesday night. "I know, because I have
spoken to many members of the House and Senate, Democrats
and Republicans alike, who all acknowledge that Iraq is
a catastrophe. Eleven of America's children have been
senselessly killed in the last 24 hours. Hundreds have
been killed since the Duelfer Report that said that Iraq
had no WMD and couldn't have had them for about a decade."
"Dozens of our nation's children have been needlessly
murdered since the 'smoking gun' memo from Great Britain
dated 23 July, 2002, was exposed at the beginning of this
month," continued Sheehan. "My son, Casey, was
killed after 'Mission Accomplished' on 01 May 2003. How
many innocent Iraqis have been killed? We don't know,
because we don't count them. It is time to end the selfish
and destructive partisan politics that infect our government
and are responsible for so much death and devastation
in Iraq. It is time for every member of Congress to look
in their hearts and cry out for an end to the immoral
and illegal occupation of Iraq."
"It has been encouraging to me," continued
Sheehan, "to see that conscientious Republicans have
begun to split with their party line on such things as
the Bolton nomination and the so-called 'nuclear option.'
It is time that Republican members of Congress break with
their party and their President on the issue of Iraq,
and work with like-minded Democratic members of Congress
to get our troops out of the quagmire as soon as safely
possible. Tragically, for too many American and Iraqi
families, it is way past time."
Exploit the rift. The time is now. |
It was a culinary rebuke that echoed
around the world, heightening the sense of tension between
Washington and Paris in the run-up to the invasion of
Iraq. But now the US politician who led the campaign
to change the name of french fries to "freedom
fries" has turned against the war.
Walter Jones, the Republican congressman for North
Carolina who was also the brains behind french toast
becoming freedom toast in Capitol Hill restaurants,
told a local newspaper the US went to war "with
no justification".
Mr Jones, who in March 2003 circulated a letter demanding
that the three cafeterias in the House of Representatives'
office buildings ban the word french from menus, said
it was meant as a "light-hearted gesture".
But the name change, still in force, made headlines
around the world, both for what it said about US-French
relations and its pettiness.
Now Mr Jones appears to agree. Asked
by a reporter for the North Carolina News and Observer
about the name-change campaign - an idea Mr Jones said
at the time came to him by a combination of God's hand
and a constituent's request - he replied: "I wish
it had never happened."
Although he voted for the war, he has
since become one of its most vociferous opponents on
Capitol Hill, where the hallway outside his office is
lined with photographs of the "faces of the fallen".
"If we were given misinformation intentionally
by people in this administration, to commit the authority
to send boys, and in some instances girls, to go into
Iraq, that is wrong," he told the newspaper. "Congress
must be told the truth." |
Bush's
war comes home
His dream of dominating every government institution in
tatters, the US president is already plotting his revenge |
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday May 26, 2005
The Guardian |
President Bush's drive
for absolute power has momentarily stalled. In a single
coup, he planned to take over all the institutions of
government. By crushing the traditions of the Senate he
would pack the courts, especially the supreme court, with
lockstep ideologues. Sheer force would prevail. But just
as his blitzkrieg reached the outskirts of his objective,
he was struck by a mutiny. Within the span of 24 hours
he lost control not only of the Senate but temporarily
of the House of Representatives, which was supposed to
be regimented by unquestioned loyalty. Now he prepares
to launch a counterattack - against the dissident elements
of his own party.
Bush's wonder weapon for total victory was a device
called the "nuclear option". Once it was triggered,
it would obliterate a 200-year-old tradition of the Senate.
The threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate of
his appointments to the federal bench would set the doomsday
sequence in motion. The Senate Republican majority leader,
Bill Frist of Tennessee, would call for a change in the
rule, and a simple majority would vote to abolish the
filibuster. Bush's nominees would sail through.
Unlike the House, the Senate was constructed by the constitutional
framers as an unrepresentative body, with each state,
regardless of population, allotted two senators. Currently,
the Republicans have 55 senators who represent only 45%
of the country. The Senate creates its own rules, and
the filibuster can only be stopped by a super-majority
of 60 votes. Historically, it was used by southern senators
to block civil rights legislation. In
the first two years of the Clinton presidency, the Republicans
deployed 48 filibusters, more than in the entire previous
history of the Senate, to make the new Democratic chief
executive appear feckless. The strategy was instrumental
in the Republican capture of the Congress in 1994. By
depriving the Democrats of the filibuster, Bush intended
to transform the Senate into his rubber stamp.
For many senators the fate of the filibuster was only
superficially about an arcane rule change. And shameless
hypocrisy was the least of the problem. (Frist,
like most Republicans in favour of the nuclear option,
had enthusiastically filibustered against Clinton's court
nominees, 65 of which were blocked from 1995-2000.)
If Bush succeeded he would have
effectively removed the Senate's "advice and consent"
on executive appointments, drastically reducing its power.
Over the weekend, two elders, Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat
of West Virginia, and Senator John Warner, Republican
of Virginia, pored over the federalist papers, written
by the constitutional framers, to refresh their thinking
about the inviolability of the Senate. On Monday, seven
Republicans and seven Democrats signed a pact that preserved
the filibuster under "extraordinary" circumstances
and allowed several of Bush's appointments to be voted
on.
The mutiny is broader than is apparent. More than the
seven Republican signatories supported the accord, but
they let the others take a public stance without revealing
themselves. Bush's radicalism offended their conservatism.
Eisenhower would be their preferred model for a Republican
president. These Republican senators are the equivalent
of the Republicans on the supreme court, Sandra Day O'Connor
and Anthony Kennedy, who are conservative but operate
without ideology, and hold the balance against the aggressive
rightwing justices.
The day after Bush was frustrated
by Republicans in the Senate, 50 Republicans in the House
deserted him on the issue of stem cell research. His
policy limiting scientific work is a sop to the religious
right that views the stem cell question as an extension
of abortion. Debate in the House was marshalled by Republican
majority leader Tom DeLay, who argued that Bush's policy
must be supported because "Jesus of Nazareth"
began life as an embryo. Bush promised to veto the stem
cell bill passed with massive Republican defections, the
irony of his opposition to the filibuster unmentioned.
The compromise pact in the Senate on the filibuster hardly
postpones the coming storms. The White House intends to
push judicial nominees that the Democrats are almost certain
to filibuster. With the elimination of the nuclear option,
the filibuster may also be used against Bush's supreme
court appointments. Evangelical religious right leaders
denounce Republican senators as sell-outs. One of the
most influential, James Dobson, has cursed one of the
silent compromise supporters, Senator Trent Lott, the
former Republican majority leader from Mississippi, as
a Judas, and Lott has called Dobson "quite unChristian".
Meanwhile, the conflict has focused attention on the
Republican presidential succession of 2008, pitting Bill
Frist - positioning himself as the darling of the right
- against cantankerous John McCain, one of the Republican
magnificent seven. Within the party, metal is scraping
on metal. But the more the resistance, the more Bush presses
forward. His unilateralism abroad has been brought home,
with a vengeance, to his partisan wars.
In federalist paper number 69 (perhaps re-read by Byrd
and Warner), Alexander Hamilton concludes his examination
of the differences between the "qualified" powers
of the US presidency and the "absolute" powers
of the king of Great Britain: "The one has no particle
of spiritual jurisdiction; the other is the supreme head
and governor of the national church! What answer shall
we give to those who would persuade us that things so
unlike resemble each other? The same that ought to be
given to those who tell us that a government, the whole
power of which would be in the hands of the elective and
periodical servants of the people, is an aristocracy,
a monarchy, and a despotism." |
The news from Washington
is like a bad Broadway show, the kind that promises to
make you laugh and cry and be better than "Cats."
The comedy came first. On Monday, President Bush stood
beside Afghan President Hamid Karzai for a "Joint
Press Availability."
Asked if the Iraqi insurgency was getting
more difficult to defeat militarily, Bush answered with
a classic Dubya-ism.
"No, I don't think so," he
said, "I think they're being defeated. And that's
why they continue to fight."
It's the sort of answer that makes you pause and scratch
your head for just long enough to give him a chance to
change the subject. He's quite masterful at doing this,
which made me wonder if he hadn't taken Karzai aside before
the press conference and whispered in his ear, "Listen,
Hammie, these reporters are tricky. You better let me
handle 'em. I've got 'em wrapped around my finger with
this whole newspeak war-is-peace idea Karl found in some
book from the 1980s."
But Bush's Orwellian logic -- good for only a cynical
chuckle -- was definitely not the comic high point of
the afternoon. Instead, for sheer free press-thwarting
brilliance, Karzai easily won the day.
After the two men made some opening remarks, talking
about the glories of bringing democracy to Afghanistan,
Bush announced, "And in the spirit of the free press,
we'll answer a couple of questions."
Afghanistan's 'free' press
The first question dealt with the military's treatment
of Afghan prisoners of war. It was full of facts and details
and built-in follow-ups, so you could tell the reporter
asking it would probably never get called on again. And,
after this rocky start, Bush decided to let the American
reporters cool their heels for a while.
"Somebody from the Afghan press?" he asked
next.
There was an awkward silence, which Karzai gamely tried
to fill in by asking, "Anybody from the Afghan press?
Do we have an Afghan press?"
Then he spotted the single reporter his government had
permitted to travel outside Afghanistan.
"Oh, here he is," Karzai said, as the room
filled with the not-quite-warm laughter of people who
suspect they might actually be the butt of a joke but
aren't sure.
It turned out, National Public Radio
journalist David Greene reported later, there were nine
other Afghan reporters who were to have followed Karzai
on his U.S. visit but, at the last minute, the Karzai
government decided to withhold their travel permits for
fear the journalists might try to escape their troubled
homeland.
Bush seemed genuinely surprised that the Afghan reporters
weren't there -- American journalists had been asked to
fill in their empty seats -- so it seems that Karzai forgot
to mention to his good friend that the whole free press
thing has a slightly different meaning in the burgeoning
democracy that is Afghanistan.
I imagine they had a pretty good laugh about that one.
And I bet Bush was jealous.
Making a grown man cry
Later in the week, the comic first act on Pennsylvania
Avenue gave way to a tragic second act on Capital Hill.
Reports are divided as to whether Sen. George Voinovich
(R-Ohio) was crying or just fighting back tears as he
spoke on the Senate floor on Wednesday. But either way,
he was obviously very emotional as he begged his Republican
colleagues to reconsider their party line support of John
Bolton, the Bush nominee for ambassador to the United
Nations.
"I know some of my friends say, 'Let it go, George.
It's going to work out,' " Voinovich said. "I
don't want to take the risk. I came back here and ran
for a second term because I'm worried about my kids and
my grandchildren."
It was also clear that Voinovich was
worried for his political life. Conservative groups are
already running ads against him, and Bush allies have
been busily trashing him to anyone who'll listen.
The pressure, Voinovich told one interviewer,
has been "overwhelming."
Listening to Voinovich's desperately cracking voice was
utterly heartbreaking. And so was this line, written by
Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Sabrina Eaton after the
close of the senator's speech: "With that, Voinovich
returned to his seat and fidgeted with a yellow highlighting
pen until he regained his composure."
Anyone who has ever cried at work knows exactly what
that moment felt like, trying so hard to fight back tears
that it only makes you cry more. It is the loneliest feeling
in the world.
'Cats,' at least, was quick
I think we heard the Bush administration in full voice
this week, laughing at those who ask questions, wringing
tears from those who would dare dissent.
If it were a Broadway show, you could buy a ticket, watch
the show and then walk out into the open air. But this
is our real life, and there are not even fire exits. |
The International
Tribunal on Iraq, constituted in Barcelona (for members
see below), joins a series of sessions that began in
Brussels in March 2004 and will finish in June 2005
in Istanbul. Sessions have been held in Berlin, Stockholm,
Hiroshima, Rome, New York and other cities. Before the
war a session of the Permanent Tribunal of the People
was held in Rome about the illegality of armed intervention
in Iraq.
The facts considered by this Tribunal
have their roots in the long history of colonization
of the Near and Middle East and of the control of the
oil production by the European nations and, more recently,
by the USA. Control over oil production has become a
prime factor in determining military strategies, the
setting up of military bases and eventually the resources
of the war.
Various justifications -such
as the lack of democracy in the region and the fight
against terrorism, not to mention the false accusation
of the possession of weapons of mass destruction-, serve
as the pretext for armed interventions. The
messianic speech by President Bush and his neoconservative
advisors also give us the idea that this is a conflict
of civilizations, and even of religions.
Also, the so called economical, social
and political reconstruction of Iraq by the occupying
power that has involved the privatization of economical
activities in favour of mainly USA interests, the destruction
of rural agriculture in favour of exportation, the privatization
of public services such as health and education, correspond
to the orientation of the neoliberal global model promoted
by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The dramatic consequences of
this logic are: injustice, crime, violation of people's
rights, suffering and death, as it happened before in
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Columbia and in many other places
in the world. This is why
the war in Iraq isn't only a criminal aggression against
the people, but also the result of a global project
that concerns all humanity. If the project that is being
carried out in Iraq isn't stopped, there is a real danger
of it extending to other countries of the region.
The Tribunal has heard the testimonies of Iraqi citizens,
men and women who have travelled purposely to Barcelona
to explain to the Tribunal the present reality in Iraq
(see list below). The Tribunal has underlined the courage
and civil merit of these witnesses that have constituted
the fundamental principle of the pronunciation of the
Tribunal. They represent the most varied field of the
society of their country, workers, health, education,
journalism and the defence of human rights. For this
reason, and because of their immediate knowledge of
the reality, their testimonies are of the maximum credibility
and have allowed the Tribunal the access to rigorous
and true information.
And so we conclude:
1. The invasion and occupation
of Iraq and the process of transition designed by the
occupants was not aimed at the government of Iraq, but
against the State of Iraq. To the illegality
of the attack and the invasion we must add the illegality
of the measures contrary to the rules of international
law that ban any changes to the judiciary statutes of
the invaded territory, or the usurping of the sovereignty
of the occupied State, including its natural resources.
All these measures were adopted during the Provisional
Authority of the Coalition, directed by Paul Bremer,
with the intention of these changes becoming permanent.
2. According to international law, the occupation caused
by armed conflict is a factual situation. Its existence
or non-existence doesn't depend on a formal declaration,
not even on behalf of the Security Council of the United
Nations. The title of occupant derives from the real
authority, because this authority constitutes the basis
of the occupant's responsibility. The
occupying power and its allies apparently continue in
Iraq at the request of the transitional Iraqi government.
Facts show that there is no subordination of the multinational
force to the government, but to the US command.
The final authority, not only
the military but also the civil power, and the effective
control of the territory resides in the USA Government
and in the thousands of advisors dependant on
its embassy in Baghdad.
3. The dismantling of the productive structure of Iraq
and the savage introduction of the market economy, the
privatization of agriculture, industry and services
and in particular the impossibility of the Iraqi people
to benefit from their prime resource - oil - mean a
flagrant violation of international law and the privation
of the basic rights of the Iraqi people.
4. Many of the facts that have
been put forward in Barcelona constitute war crimes,
as defined in article 8, paragraphs1 & 2 of the
statute of the International Criminal Court.
They also constitute crimes against
humanity as defined in article 7 of the same statute.
These crimes are as much the responsibility of
the occupying power as that of the individuals that
commit them, allow them to happen, or aid the culprits.
5. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, against sovereignty,
individuals and collectives of the Iraqi people, give
full legitimacy to the resistance, which according to
article 51 of the United Nations Chart expresses the
right to legitimate defence, constituting the only guarantee
to a free and democratic future.
6. In the same way all forms of terrorism that only
prejudice the construction of this future are categorically
rejected.
7. The recuperation of the full sovereignty of Iraq
must first undergo the immediate removal of all the
occupier's military contingents, the dismantling of
its bases and the ceasing of its repressive rule. Whilst
this removal does not take place the local authorities
will lack a minimum legitimacy and its political and
legal decisions, particularly the implantation of a
new constitution, will not be valid. Only after this
withdrawal will a new plural and truly independent political
power be formed. This will not be the product of formulas
of designation or of elections orientated by external
agents and will not be subject to trusteeship and so
restricted in its attributions.
8. The setting up of guarantees of full and effective
respect of human rights, as well as the demands of responsibility
for all the acts committed by the occupier -including
the material and moral compensation of the people that
have suffered violations of their fundamental rights-
is indispensable.
9. Full recuperation of political sovereignty is the
first step towards the recuperation of economical sovereignty.
Only a truly free government can adopt effective policies
aimed at the dispensation of help, the normalization
of the services, the remission of privatizations, the
end of corruption and compensation for the destruction.
The Tribunal agrees to send its report to the United
Nations, to the government of the occupying powers,
to the Spanish Government and to the Generalitat de
Catalunya, to the European Union Commission and to the
person responsible for Political Security and Defence
of the European Union.
And finally, the Tribunal hopes that citizens from
all over the world will maintain their solidarity with
the people of Iraq, their sensitization in relation
with the violations of human rights and their will to
fight in favour of peace.
Barcelona, May 22, 2005
|
How much is enough
America? How much is enough before we stand up collectively
and say, "No more". America has become sedated,
tranquilized by a corporate media that keeps the truth
from coming to light on an everyday basis. Anesthetized
to the point that when the vilest acts perpetrated in
the war on terror are being carried out by us, we just
flip the channel to see if we can see who is left on
American Idol. What has happened to our collective conscience
when in latter day America we spend more time worrying
about the freak show that is the Jackson trial then
what atrocities are being committed in our name.
That is right America; this war is fought in your name,
my name, and the names of every other citizen who resides
in this country. Do you even remember why? Do you care
anymore? Tens of thousands of people have died, over
1,600 of our own and do you even remember why? Does
their blood scream out to you, as it does to me, as
an American, as a Christian, as a human?
If not, then maybe the latest story out of Afghanistan
will shake our collective conscience. You remember Afghanistan
don't you? That was where this great war started. We
were told it was where the big bad guy, bin Laden was.
As it turns out, as soon as we had him surrounded, we
let him go. We continued though to bulldoze through
the country and install our puppet government in the
name of democracy. The reality was a little more stark,
as this resulted in the return of Afghanistan is the
world's chief supplier of heroin. That aside, we were
told that Afghanistan was a great example of the success
of the war on terror. The real terror however, has been
going on after the great victories.
As reported this week, on Friday, there was another
incident of prisoner abuse that resulted in the deaths
of two suspects. These reports usually break on Friday,
so the media can ignore them and then switch subjects
come Monday. Just another shot of anesthesia for the
American populace. The deaths are not only disgusting,
but they now represent what we have become, what our
legacy is.
Mr. Dilawar was a quiet man with a wife and daughter
who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The place was Afghanistan and the time was during the
Bush Wars. Driving his taxi past a base used by American
troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the target of a
rocket attack that morning; was his undoing. In a land
dominated by an unrelenting foreign power, us, Mr. Dilawar
was promptly picked up for interrogation. His crime
was DWA, driving while Afghani. Mr. Dilawar was not
an imposing man, standing only at 5 foot nine inches
and weighing 122 pounds. That mattered not to his captors,
us, who immediately labeled him as non-compliant. Apparently
non-compliant is not a label you want in a U.S. prison
in Afghanistan.
His torture started with over 100 strikes to his legs
in a 24 hours period, while he was shackled standing
up. Three days later, he began his fourth interrogation.
His hands were slapped back up every time they fell
below his head. They were falling of course because
of the beatings and shackled positions he had been forced
to endure for the past three days. He was violently
shoved against a wall multiple times, because he could
not sit in a chair as instructed by his tormentors,
us. Of course he could not sit because of the state
of his legs, battered over 100 times in a day. After
15 minutes of this, he was so weak he could not get
up so they stood him up. It was then that the Sergeant
stepped back and kicked him fiercely in the groin. Seemingly
unsatisfied by this "interrogation", the Sergeant
then instructed them to leave the battered Mr. Dilawar
chained to the ceiling with a black hood over his head.
Soon, he was crying out for mercy
when his captors investigated. He said he needed to
see a doctor because of his legs. The attending MP said
he was ok and just trying to get out of his restraints.
The next morning began his final interrogation. Mr.
Dilawar was incoherent. The treatment was similar. He
was beaten some more, choked with his black hood, and
all in the name of you an I. By that time the next day,
God had granted Mr. Dilawar the peace his captors, us,
refused to give him for so many days. There was zero
intelligence gathered and it appears the man had done
nothing wrong.
The autopsy confirmed that death was
cause by the blunt trauma to his legs which in the word
of one of the coroners, were basically pulpified. Did
you get that America? They beat this 122 pound man in
his legs so badly that the tissue turned into pulp.
The coroner compared the injuries to someone getting
run over by a bus.
Mr. Dilawar was one of two murdered prisoners from
that prison at that time. I will not review the horrific
details of the other, except to say that it is no less
violent and no less despicable. Most of the troops working
there had decided that Dilawar was innocent before the
final interrogation that took his life. They killed
him anyway. They killed him in your name. They killed
him in my name. By God, they killed him in Christ's
name and that is what has to stop.
George Bush goes to great lengths to tell us about
his Christianity. Some say it is what clinched the last
election for him. Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace,
not war. I have read the Bible
and did not come across the word pulpify. There
is nothing Christian about this war. Yet Pastors all
over this country support this man and his policies
of death and torture. It has to stop.
We were told that these wars are to protect us. Bush
has done a masterful job of connecting two countries
that have little to do with terror and making them the
central point for his wars. The only thing that made
Afghanistan central to terror was Osama bin Laden and
he has not been there since we first got there and let
him escape. Iraq had nothing to do with it at all and
thousands have died because of nothing. In your name.
How much will be enough for
you? Monday will bring a new day and a new opportunity
for the media to ignore this story, which should be
the only story. There will be a new witness in the Jackson
fiasco. There will be more developments in the nuclear
showdown in the Senate. Even if they manage to get around
to it, will they simply tell us more fairy tales of
bad apples? How many Lyndie England's will it take to
make you say no more? How many more Charles Graner's
will it take to break through this silence? How many
more before we all realize it is not a couple of bad
apples but the farmer that is to blame. When you draft
memos designed to render the Geneva Convention "quaint",
you are the root cause of the bad apples. When you outsource
torture you are the primary cause of the bad apples.
When you invade countries that have nothing to do with
terrorism and ally with countries that support it, you
are the only cause of the bad apples. You are the bad
apple.
Bush will continue to make grand speeches that defy
the very facts that are occurring every day. His media
machine will support it, and keep giving you the sedatives
you are used to. Somewhere in a poor country that we
have annihilated though, someone else will be killed
in your name. They will be killed in my name. Where
is the outrage? Why is there nothing but silence?
Will there be any outrage for a country that pretends
to act in the cause of morality but behaves with no
morality guiding it? Will there be any outrage for a
President that claims to talk to God and then perpetrates
such blinding evil upon mankind? Will there be any outrage
that our media has sold us out?
Will there be any outrage for Mr. Dilawar, a 122 pound
innocent taxi driver from Afghanistan, murdered in your
name, for the cause of freedom. Or will there just be
more of this insufferable silence.
|
San Diego, May 25,
2005 - A CIA official testified he witnessed the "pummelling"
of a detainee at a Navy Seal base in Baghdad in 2003,
but a former Seal who beat the prisoner said he was
acting on instructions from the CIA.
The differing accounts were offered as the court-martial
of Navy Seal Lieutenant Andrew Ledford got under way
on Tuesday. Ledford, accused of charges including assault,
dereliction of duty and conduct unbecoming an officer,
faces a maximum of 11 years in military prison if convicted.
The CIA official, who was shielded from public view,
testified he recalled seeing a small crowd gathered
around a Seal who was landing blows on the back of the
prisoner who lay face down.
The CIA official described it "as a kind of pummelling"
and called it an isolated incident during his year in
Iraq. He said his senior officer notified a Seal commander
at the scene to get control of his men and halt the
abuse.
"I never saw anything like that prior with this
unit or any other unit and I never saw anything like
that again," the CIA official said.
Prosecutors have cited the October 20 2003, beating
as one of three examples of detainee abuse committed
by members of a Seal platoon commanded by Ledford. The
allegedly beaten prisoner was not named.
The former Seal, Dan Cerrillo, said
he beat the prisoner because he believed he was subject
to the orders of "the people we're not supposed
to talk about" - an apparent reference to CIA agents
who often worked on missions with the Seals to capture
suspected insurgents and other so-called high-value
targets.
"The interrogator would say make him talk and
I would try to make him talk," Cerrillo said. He
said he struck, pushed and shoved the hooded and handcuffed
detainee's head into the sand about 10 to 15 times using
what he characterised as a mix of moderate and heavy
force.
Cerrillo, who served under Ledford and received a Purple
Heart for injuries he sustained in Iraq, was one of
eight members of Seal Team Seven who received administrative
punishment earlier this year for their roles in detainee
abuse. He left the navy this month and works for a private
security company.
The only alleged attack that resulted in the death
of a detainee involved Manadel al-Jamadi, a suspect
in the bombing a month earlier of Red Cross offices
in Iraq that killed 12 people. Cerrillo and other platoon
members allegedly kicked, punched and stuck al-Jamadi
with their rifle muzzles at an army base. They also
posed for photos with the hooded and handcuffed detainee.
Al-Jamadi died on November 4
in a shower room at Abu Ghraib during a CIA interrogation.
Documents show that army guards said al-Jamadi died
while suspended by his wrists, which were handcuffed
behind his back.
|
The Torture and the
Lies Continue
"He was a murderer from the beginning , and abode
not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.
When he speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own: for he
is a liar and the father of it."
The Gospel according to St John, VIII, 44.
". . . the following acts are and shall remain
prohibited at any time . . .violence to life and person,
in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation , cruel
treatment and torture . . ."
Geneva Convention, Article 3.
At his travesty of a press conference
on April 28 Bush said "I believe we are making
good progress in Iraq . . ." If the man really
believes this he is either in a state of delusion amounting
to terminal mental incompetence or totally in the hands
of Machiavellian puppeteers who are feeding him false
information. If he does not believe it, he is a liar.
Your call.
Examination of the situation in Iraq shows that the
Bush administration's position is desperate. His occupation
forces cannot guarantee the safety of a traveler on
the only road between the airport and Baghdad city.
It is impossible for foreigners to venture outside the
US fortress called the Green Zone without a platoon-size
bodyguard and helicopter gunships, and even then they
are in extreme danger. The US military cannot provide
security for citizens in the capital city of the country
Bush invaded in the name of freedom or whatever lie
it was that he and his fellow liars told at the time
of their preparations for war. (Some squalid deceit
about Iraq being responsible for 9/11 and having imaginary
Weapons of Mass Destruction, wasn't it?)
On the day Bush made his imbecilic
boast about progress the US soldiers killed in Iraq
were Private Robert Murray, Lieutenant William Edens,
Specialist Ricky Rockholt, Sergeant Timothy Kaiser,
and Sergeant Eric Morris. That's progress?
Think about it: "Tell me, my dear, who was your
daddy?" "My daddy was a soldier and he was
killed in Baghdad the day the President of the United
States said he was making good progress in Iraq."
In April, up to the time of that insanely perky speech,
40 other American servicemen died in Iraq and 126 were
wounded. That's progress? Perhaps Bush means it is progress
when the number of dead includes more Iraqi soldiers
than American soldiers.
And while on the subject of American soldiers, did
you read Bob Herbert's account in the New York Times
of his talk with one of the seemingly few honorable
soldiers who have been in Iraq? Aidan Delgado told Mr
Herbert that "Guys in my
unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by
in their Humvees and shatter bottles over the heads
of Iraqi civilians . . . They'd keep a bunch of empty
Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."
That's liberation, Bush-style, and it makes Iraqis feel
secure and free and grateful to their liberators to
the point that when a suicide bomber blew the hell out
of Baghdad city center on May 12 the surviving bystanders
threw stones at American soldiers who arrived on the
scene. (That revealing incident wasn't shown on US television.)
* * *
After he lied about the "progress"
he is making in Iraq, Bush announced that "the
Iraqi people are beginning to see the benefits of a
free society. Nevertheless there are still some in Iraq
who are not happy with democracy. They want to go back
to the old days of tyranny and darkness [and] torture
chambers . . . ."
Little Bubba Bush, that smirking, complacent, self-righteous,
pitiable twit, must know that the Iraqi people are living
right now under tyranny and in darkness and with torture
chambers. The only difference is that the torture chambers
are being operated by US soldiers. And he must know
that hundreds of people are being tortured around the
world in the cause of his "free society".
Bush does not read books so cannot be familiar with
'Inside the Wire' by former US soldier Erik Saar who
saw much of the depravity and vileness at Guantanamo
Bay -- but this doesn't excuse him from responsibility
for the atrocities being carried out under his orders.
Harry Truman -- the model of the ordinary decent person
the vulgar and ignorant Texas glitterati despise --
had the sign "The Buck Stops Here" in the
Oval Office. But the pathetic little wind-up dummy now
sitting there relies on his care assistants to make
sure that "The Buck Stops As Low As I Can Get It
to Stop". Bush personally
signed the instrument demoting a brigadier general for
permitting the torture in Abu Ghraib, but his arrogant
Pentagon manipulators say there can be no blame attached
to the much more senior officers who were not only aware
of the torture jamboree but tried to deny and disguise
the loathsome atrocities that were committed in the
name of Bush Freedom.
They are liars, the lot of them. Right up the chain
of Command.
There are many examples of full-scale deceit in the
recent past, including the appalling lies about how
Pat Tillman was killed by the enemy when in fact senior
officers knew perfectly well he was killed by his own
side in a military disaster that disgraced the entire
profession of arms and especially the United States
Army.
The lying goes on, and we were told
two weeks ago that 125 "rebels" had been killed
by Marines in western Iraq, without a shred of evidence
that this was so. Did that number include any of the
civilians who were slaughtered when 500 pound bombs
missed their targets? Did it include civilians killed
when tanks and artillery and helicopter gunships pounded
their villages?
According to 'Stars and Stripes', the US military newspaper,
the recent Operation Matador was "aimed at smuggling
routes and safe houses for foreign fighters arriving
in Iraq through the western desert border area".
It was hailed as a success by every US news outlet,
except the papers in small towns in which there are
relatives of the nine dead and over 40 wounded Marines.
Matador was not a success, of
course : it was a bloody shambles in which an unknown
number of nomads, farmers and their families, anti-US
fighters and ordinary cross-border food and gasoline
smugglers were killed. Most of the guerrillas
just melted away to fight again another day, having
gained more recruits from the towns and villages that
were utterly destroyed by those the civilian population
now regard as the enemy : the US occupation force. But
it is vital for Bush propaganda that the best possible
story be told about all military operations, or there
might be questioning of the Great War Leader. The mind-benders
in Washington believe that to admit unsavory truth is
to admit weakness. At all costs this must be avoided.
Imagine a general telling the
truth if he might forfeit promotion by doing so. OK,
so that's hard. The last general who did it was
the honorable Major General Taguba who seems to be one
of the few honest senior officers in the whole damn'
military. He headed the inquiry into the conduct of
the infamous 800 Military Police Brigade, and he tore
it to well-deserved shreds. But he could not refer to
or comment on responsibilities of officers superior
to Brigadier General (now demoted to Colonel) Janis
Karpinski because his focus was directed solely at the
MP brigade. And no wonder, because the inquiry was set
up by the most incompetent officer in Iraq : the Commander,
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who was not about
to give broad terms of reference to an investigation
that would reveal him as a bungling nitwit.
And now we learn about the vile happenings in Afghanistan
since the US invasion. On May 20 The New York Times
published details about vicious torture and eventual
murder of helpless captives. Before the story was broken
by the Times it was denied by every spokesperson and
the slimy "sources who spoke on conditions of anonymity"
that there had been disgusting brutality. And of course
they were believed. After all, the people who suffered
torture at the hands of American soldiers were by that
time in the Nazi-style hell of Guantánamo Bay.
And those who had been tortured to death by ordinary
American boys -- "Support Our Torturing Troops"
-- were . . . ,well, dead.
On May 21 Bush declared that Afghanistan which "once
knew only the terror of the Taliban is now seeing a
rebirth of freedom . . . " That is freedom, Bush-style,
of course : freedom for US occupation troops to torture
and murder prisoners. It is unlikely the Taliban would
have agreed entirely with the American soldiers who
tortured citizens to death in their country, but there
is a certain disgusting similarity between them. The
Taliban persecuted people out of religious frenzy, and
US soldiers torture people for fun.
It was a joke to these US soldiers that their helpless
captives died lingering deaths, suffering hellishly
for days from soldiers' fists and feet and dogs before
merciful release. The documents given to the Times include
one terrifying quotation concerning one of the tortured
and murdered men : "Everyone heard him cry out
and thought it was funny." We are now told that
the men were "young and poorly trained", as
if this could be justification for torture and murder.
"Oh, excuse me while I ram this broomstick up your
ass, but I'm young and poorly trained". Tim Golden's
opening sentence in the Times sums it up : "Even
as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American
jailers continued to torment him". Can you imagine
this? Are we really talking about soldiers of the American
Army? The slogan "Support Our Troops" has
taken on a new meaning.
After the murders committed by these
dozens of US soldiers, "Military spokesmen maintained
that both men died of natural causes, even after military
coroners had ruled the deaths homicides". But what
else can we expect? The commander-in-chief tells lie
after lie after lie, so his subordinates follow his
example.
While Erik Saar is reviled and
sent hate mail by rabid 'Christian' dumdums because
he told the truth about torture, US generals are considered
heroes in spite of telling lies to Congress about torture.
The topsy-turvy world of the Bush zealots is revealed
in all its tawdry squalor by this reversal of morality.
Reveal the truth and suffer
-- but tell lies and prosper. The only thing
that matters is the Bush vision of the world, and he
must be supported at all costs. (After all, millions
of Americans, including at least one three star general,
believe that Bush was appointed president by God.)
The generals are not just liars.
They are evil and disgusting apologies for humanity,
just like the Marine who murdered - who deliberately
blew the head off - an unarmed, semi-conscious, wounded
man lying on the floor of a mosque. (There can be no
doubt about it : there is video film of the whole ghastly
atrocity.) Predictably enough, the generals protected
him, and he was not charged with any sort of wrongdoing,
which sends the message to the Iraqi people and the
world that US soldiers can murder with impunity.
On May 5 Bush declared "They [al Qaeda] hate freedom,
and they hate people who embrace freedom And they're
willing to kill innocent Iraqis because Iraqis are willing
to be free. Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming
in their country and trying to destabilize their country."
Yes indeed : Iraqis are certainly sick of foreign people
coming to their country and trying to destabilize their
country. The foreigners of whom they are sick are American
troops. Iraqis hate the Bush administration because
its arrogant swaggering bullies in uniform break down
house doors at dead of night and terrorise women and
children. They hate Bush and all he stands for because
his soldiers spray bullets at innocent Iraqis without
fear of disciplinary action. They and the people of
Afghanistan hate and fear everything about Bush because
his troops have tortured and murdered helpless people.
They will hate America forever. This is the Bush legacy
to the world.
The fact that the US military system permitted the
undeniable murder of a helpless man to be dismissed
without any judicial proceedings is not surprising in
the Bush era. The murderer, after all, was killing for
Bush freedom. But the system was quick to deal with
a young sailor, Pablo Paredes, who refused to board
his ship last December to go to the war on Iraq. He
was making the point that the war is illegal, and there
was no question of him being a coward. In fact he knew
perfectly well that the military machine would have
no mercy on him. He was, if you like, the moral equivalent
of a suicide bomber, because he hurt only himself. (The
military prosecutors claimed he was a publicity-seeker
who considered using drugs to obtain a discharge : the
usual lies and smears.)
Pablo Paredes was court-martialed and sentenced to
three months' hard labor. He never told a lie to the
US Congress. He didn't pile naked people in heaps and
set dogs on them. He didn't blow the head off a helpless
unarmed man. He didn't torture an Afghan taxi-driver
to death and laugh about it. He was entirely non-violent
and decided to follow his conscience rather than remain
under command of a proven liar.
But if you tell lies to Congress,
or murder a defenseless wounded man, or torture prisoners
to death in any number of hideous ways, and if you try
to conceal such war crimes, you will be protected as
far as the Bush machine can manage to do so, because
that's Bush Freedom and Bush Progress. Forget
about abiding in the truth or following the Geneva Conventions.
There's no promotion, power or profit in taking that
route.
|
CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C.
(AP) - A Marine Corps general dismissed murder and other
charges Thursday against a lieutenant accused of killing
two Iraqis without justification, the military said.
The decision by Maj. Gen. Richard Huck, commander of
the 2nd Marine Division, ends the prosecution of 2nd
Lt. Ilario Pantano, a former Wall Street trader who
rejoined the Marines after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The best interests of 2nd Lt. Pantano and the
government have been served by this process," the
Marine Corps said in a statement.
Pantano had been accused of premeditated murder for
what prosecutors maintained was the unjustified killing
of two suspected insurgents in 2004 near Mahmudiyah,
Iraq.
Prosecutors alleged Pantano intended to make an example
of the men by shooting them 60 times and hanging a sign
over their bodies - "No better friend, no worse
enemy," a Marine slogan.
Pantano contended he acted in self-defense after the
men disobeyed his instructions and made a menacing move
toward him.
An investigating officer had concluded in a report
to Huck that murder charges should be dropped against
Pantano.
|
FORT HOOD, Tex., May
25 -- An unarmed Iraqi cooperated with American troops
searching his house and said "USA good" minutes
before he was shot to death, a former U.S. soldier testified
Wednesday at his onetime squad leader's murder trial.
Jason Pizer testified that the Iraqi was alive with
Army Staff Sgt. Shane Werst when Pizer went to a translator
to check the Iraqi's identification against a list of
suspected insurgents.
Pizer said he radioed back to Werst to confirm the
man was on the list. He said he then heard Werst say,
"Expecting contact," and then the sound of
gunfire. Pizer said he returned to the house and found
Naser Ismail's body on the floor.
Werst, 32, is charged with premeditated murder and
obstruction of justice in the January 2004 shooting
of Ismail, which prosecutors say was in retaliation
for a mortar attack that killed an Army captain earlier
that day. Werst could be sentenced to life in prison
without parole if convicted.
Capt. Mark Santos, his defense attorney, said in opening
statements that Werst shot Ismail because the Iraqi
lunged at Pfc. Nathan Stewart and reached for his weapon.
He said Werst was following the rules of engagement
because he thought Stewart's life was in danger.
Stewart testified Tuesday that
Werst became enraged and repeatedly shot Ismail because
he thought the man had lied about his identity.
After the shooting, Stewart said, Werst pulled out a
non-U.S. military gun, fired it at a wall and told Stewart
to get the Iraqi's fingerprints on the weapon. Werst
later reported Ismail had fired first.
|
The flurry of news,
hypotheses, and disinformation about the nature of the
Iraqi Resistance against the Occupation continues unabated.
How much of this is managed propaganda against the
Iraqi Resistance?
According to both the Western mainstream media and
the alternative media, the U.S. is "building democracy"
and fighting "terrorism" in Iraq.
The distortions of reality and lack of oppositional
media leave people in the West, Americans in particular,
ill informed.
The Western media diligently diverts public attention
from the illegal Occupation of Iraq and the responsibility
of the U.S./Western governments for the horrendous crimes
committed against the people of Iraq.
Western journalists and pundits are the main agents
of this distorted propaganda. The aims are to portray
the Iraqi Resistance as violent "religious fanatics"
isolated from the rest of the population and to advocate
for ongoing occupation.
Time and again, the public have shown to be less tolerant
to the old cliché of "religious fanatics".
By contrast, people around the world have a record of
supporting national resistance movements.
In other word, portraying the Iraqi national Resistance
movement as a collection of "religious fanatics"
and "foreign" fighters "with nothing
to lose" is the Occupation's way of discrediting
the Iraqi Resistance and denying the Iraqi people their
legitimate right to fight for freedom and national sovereignty.
Amply documented, the pretexts for the war and the
Occupation were based on fake intelligence. Hence, the
U.S. and its "allies" are in the process,
through media disinformation, of not only legitimizing
the Occupation, but also of creating new pretexts for
the maintenance of continued US military presence.
The most common pretext in the media reports is that
U.S. forces are invited to stay in Iraq to prevent civil
war and "maintain stability".
But like the pretext of WMD, there is no evidence
to support these U.S. sponsored lies.
There is a U.S-engineered stalemate with no one with
a majority to govern effectively. The US installed "government"
is powerless, dominated by the same groups of expatriates
who lobbied for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The U.S. is pitting Iraqis against each other and creating
a climate of fear.
In this regard, the creation, arming and financing
of 'ethnic militias' and death squads by U.S. forces
is designed to create ethnic divisions and provoke sectarian
violence among Iraqis.
These US sponsored militia groups are:
The Kurdish Peshmerga whose leaders supported the
U.S. invasion and Occupation.
The Iranian-trained Badr Brigades,
The armed wing of the Supreme Council of the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) led by Ibrahim Al-Jaaferi
of the Da'wa party,
The INC militia of Ahmed Chalabi, and the INA militia
of Iyad Allawi.
All these groups are involved in terrorist activities
against Iraqi civilians. The latter three groups, entered
Iraq on the back of U.S. tanks, without valid Iraqi
citizenship papers.
The Kurdish militia are the Occupation's most loyal
collaborators, receiving arms and money from their masters.
Together with the occupying forces, they are responsible
for wide scale atrocities in Iraqi towns and villages.
Together with the Peshmerga, Israeli Mossad agents
and U.S. forces, the militia groups went on systematic
killings of thousands of prominent Iraqi academics,
scientists, politicians and religious leaders. They
also participated in the atrocity and total destruction
of Fallujah, which is depicted as "the storming
of Fallujah" in most mainstream media. The city
was completely destroyed and still a ‘no go zone'
for Iraqis. Other Iraqi towns and cities have not escaped
this deliberate destruction.
Their crimes have never been investigated, and no
one has been arrested. In fact the Bush Administration
is protecting these criminals elements and encouraging
their crimes.
Former U.S. administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer
at the behest of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
former Deputy of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Ahmad Chalabi
initiated the murderous policy termed "DeBaathification".
The Bush Administration is not only supporting this
murderous policy, it introduced the "El Salvador
option" of murdering Iraqi dissidents through the
appointment John Negroponte as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.
Chalabi who never lived in Iraq before the invasion,
stated that he, "wants to raise Iraq from the ground
and build ‘new' Iraq". What is taking place
in Iraq today is a U.S-instigated criminal atrocity.
In addition to the daily intrusive and aggressive
house raids being conducted by U.S. soldiers Iraqis
also witness daily, routine street patrols.
Journalist Ken Dillian of Knight Ridder wrote:
"All day long, the soldiers pointed their guns
at Iraqi civilians, whom they called ‘hajis'....
Wary of ambushes, they rammed cars that got in the way
of their Humvees. Always on the lookout for car bombs,
they stopped, screamed at, shoved to the ground and
searched people driving down the road after curfew -
or during the day if they looked suspicious".
According to a recent report by the U.S. Project on
Defense Alternatives:
"Strong majorities in the Sunni and Shiite community
oppose the occupation – and significant minorities
have registered support for attacks on US troops. ‘What
drives these attitudes more than anything else', says
the report's author, Carl Conetta, ‘are nationalism,
the coercive practices of the occupation, and the collateral
effects of military operations'".
The report, Vicious Circle: The Dynamics of Occupation
and Resistance in Iraq, notes U.S. occupation abuses
many Iraqis every day. Iraqis face: "Constant foreign
military patrols - about 12,000 per week; Ubiquitous
(and too often deadly) vehicle check-points; Raids --
8,000 total since May 2003; and Citizen round-ups --
80,000 detained since April 2003". People have
only one option left: Resistance.
All resistance movements have been required to respond
with armed resistance to defend against military aggression
and occupation. Iraq is not different.
Violent resistance arises from violent military occupation.
How the Media depicts the Resistance
It is easy for the U.S. "Left" and "Liberals"
to pontificate about ‘non-violent' resistance,
but what is at issue is the violence committed by the
occupying forces. It is a clear case of double standards
and distortion of the underlying facts. It also points
to a lack of solidarity on the part of those "progressive"
groups in the West, who put the onus on the Iraqi people,
who are defending their homeland against US imperial
aggression.
It should be borne in mind that the U.S. "is
the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today",
and all acts of violence and destruction in Iraq have
occurred under the radar of U.S. forces.
The U.S. press and Western media are focusing on civilians
casualties with a view to discrediting the Iraqi Resistance.
Regrettably, much of the coverage of the Iraqi Resistance
in the Western media has focused on the U.S-created
phantom groups of Al-Zarqawi and Al-Qaeda, described
as "radical Islamists" or "suicide bombers".
Yet despite the media hype, there exists no substantial
evidence that these groups are active inside Iraq. Most
of the attacks on the occupying forces are carried out
by the main Iraqi Resistance groups, and very few of
these attacks were on civilians.
Western media are only interested in car bombings
that kill civilians. The reality is that occasionally
the bombs missed their intended targets, which are the
U.S military convoys. Anthony Cordesman of the Centre
for Strategic and International Studies notes in this
regard that 77 percent of all attacks were against military
targets of the U.S. and "Coalition Forces",
and only 4.2 per cent of these attacks were led in civilian
areas.
According to Iraqi sources, in contrast to Western
media accounts, most of the terrorist acts such as kidnappings
and hostages attributed by the Western media to Iraqi
"insurgents" were carried out by the U.S-created
militias.
These reports also point to the role of U.S. and Israeli
(Mossad) intelligence, which are involved in a process
of distorting the image of the Resistance. There is,
in this regard, a growing body of analysis which suggests
that the various acts of violence and kidnappings attributed
to the Resistance are part of a deliberate and conscious
propaganda effort by the occupying forces to distort
reality. (See References below)
The strategy is to absolve the U.S. of any crimes
and legitimize a prolonged Occupation. "Whenever
major terrorist operations happened, it was mostly with
US knowledge or involvement. Israel's Mossad planned
major terror operations in Iraq, recruiting 2,000 mercenaries
before the war and sending them to various Iraqi cities
to offer protection and support to the occupation forces",
reported the Egyptian, Al-Ahram Weekly.
The hidden agenda is to blame the Iraqi Resistance
for these attacks. In other words, the intelligence
operation essentially consists in demonizing the Resistance
movement, thereby weakening public support for it.
Who is behind the violence in Iraq? U.S. forces and
their Israeli agents together with the main militia
groups, which now form the core of the new Iraqi army,
police and security forces. People have often been found
dead after the police and security forces have arrested
them. According to Adnan Al-Duliemi, head of the Muslim
Endowment, a religious organization that supervises
mosques and Muslim shrines, Iraqi Police Forces were
"complacent about, even complicit with those killings".
He called on the "government to open an investigation
into the killings.
The U.S. and its allies have much to gain from a divided
Iraq embroiled in sectarian violence. No investigation
of these police killings has been conducted and the
Occupation forces together with the Western media blamed
this orchestrated police violence on the Iraqi Resistance.
These fabricated stories are fed into the Western
news chain. They are used to portray the U.S fighting
one group of Iraqi (Muslim) fanatics who see the U.S.
as "infidel", rather than as a violent occupier.
Western media reports on Iraq are then linked up with
9/11 stories, namely that the U.S. had been attacked
on 9/11, and that this war is "justified".
This type of reporting, which consists in dehumanizing
the Iraqi Resistance, is aimed at a receptive Western
audience, which shares the perpetrators frame of reference,
to exploit an overarching climate of fear and prejudice,
and in the process encourage more racism and Islamophobia.
Part of the alternative media seems to have joined
the bandwagon. Several alternative media commentators
have depicted the Iraqi Resistance in much the same
way. According to to an Iraq dispatch from Patrick Cockburn
of CounterPunch, who is embedded with the Kurdish Peshmerga:
The strength of the armed resistance is misunderstood
outside Iraq. It has always been fragmented. Unlike
the National Liberation Front in Vietnam or the Provisional
IRA and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, it is not well
organised…They have no political wing. The fanatical
Sunni fundamentalists, commonly called the Salafi or
the Wahhabi, see Iraqi Shias [sic] and Christians as
infidels just as worthy of death as any US soldier.
When American forces damaged two mosques in Mosul in
the fighting last November, the resistance blew up two
Iraqi Christian churches. Such sectarianism makes it
impossible for the resistance to become a truly nationalist
movement, but there are four or five million Sunni Arabs
a strong enough base for an insurgency". (CounterPunch,
May 13, 2005).
No corroborating evidence, no names, and no concrete
documentation, however, are provided regarding the "fragmented"
nature of the Iraqi Resistance aside from anecdotal
news items, which invariably tend to downplay the violence
of the Occupation, not to mention the crimes and atrocities
committed by US forces.
Moreover, why should the Iraqi Resistance be modeled
on the Vietnamese NLF or the Irish Republican Army (IRA),
which Western journalists tend to romanticize, in order
to cast a bad light on the Iraqi Resistance? Both, the
IRA and the NLF were also involved in countless violent
acts, which resulted in civilian casualties.
While imperial occupations have a similar logic, the
circumstances of countries and their people are different.
The Iraqi Resistance targets Iraqi collaborators, who
side with the US led Occupation, because they are rightly
considered to be "spies and traitors." (Incidentally,
this pattern of executing "collaborators"
was also followed by the French Resistance during World
War II.)
It is important to remember that without popular support,
which is the basis of any national resistance movement,
the Iraqi Resistance would not be able to operate. Of
significance, is that after two years of U.S. brutality
and violence, Iraqi Resistance groups have been able
to integrate, modify their methods and fight effectively
against the biggest military machine in history.
While there are foreign volunteers fighting alongside
Iraqis, there is no evidence of "foreign fighters"
such as the Salafi and Wahhabi sects (of Saudi Arabia)
in the Resistance movement. This is part of the U.S.-created
Al-Zarqawi myth, much more useful than the myth of WMD.
Moreover, the Occupation forces themselves have yet
to provide concrete evidence of these "foreign
fighters", let alone evidence to substantiate the
presence of Al-Zarqawi. From an Iraqi perspective, the
"foreigners" in Iraq are U.S. soldiers and
mercenaries from Britain, Italy, Australia, South Korea
and Japan, etc.
Moreover, there is, in this regard, a clear distinction
between "insurgents" and "resistance".
The term "insurgents" used profusely by mainstream
and alternative journalists alike tends again to denigrate
the resistance, while upholding the legitimacy of the
Occupation, which is directed against the "insurgents".
In a subsequent dispatch from Iraq, Cockburn wrote:
"Many of the resistance groups are bigoted Sunni
Arab fanatics who see Shia [sic] as well as US soldiers
as infidels whom it is a religious duty to kill. Others
are led by officers [sic] from Saddam's brutal security
forces. But Washington never appreciated the fact that
the US occupation was so unpopular that even the most
unsavoury groups received popular support…[U.S.
forces] massive firepower meant they won any set-piece
battle, but it also meant that they accidentally killed
so many Iraqi civilians that they were the recruiting
sergeants of the resistance". (CounterPunch, 16
May 2005)
And what evidence is offered in support of these assertions?
While the US led occupation is intent on fomenting social
divisions and religious hatred, there is ample evidence
of a mass movement where Sunnis and Shiites have in
fact joined hands in opposing the US led occupation.
This over-armed military machine is unpopular because
it kills so many Iraqi civilians "accidentally".
Remember, that more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians, most
of them innocent women and children have been killed
and continue to be killed "accidentally".
And the total destruction of the vibrant city of Fallujah,
and the killing of more than 6,000 innocent civilians,
using napalm bombs deliberately designed to kill many
civilians in densely populated areas, is just by "accident".
The rate of civilian deaths in Iraq under U.S. Occupation
is far greater than anything perpetrated by the regime
of Saddam Hussein.
U.S. forces are provided with "immunity"
from prosecution, making it very easy for them to kill
Iraqis with institutionalized impunity, as if Iraqis
were not even human beings. The criminal practice emanates
from the Pentagon, it is created by the U.S. government
to encourage U.S. recruits into more wars of aggression.
All Iraqis, including the Resistance leaders and leaders
of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS),
and others have rejected the attacks against civilians
and has blamed U.S. forces and their allies for orchestrating
the violence.
Mr. Harith Al-Dhari, the head of the AMS, publicly
blamed the Badr Brigades for the recent spate of killings
of Sunni Muslim clerics in the country. "The parties
that are behind the campaign of killings of preachers
of mosques and worshippers are…the Badr Brigades.
[They] are responsible for the escalating tensions",
Mr. Al-Dhari told Al-jazeera. "Which religion allows
anyone to kill more than 100 Iraqis, destroy 100 families
and destroy 100 houses?" …."Who are
those people who do this? Where did they come from?...[This]
is a conspiracy to defame the reputation of the Iraqi
[R]esistance by wearing its dress and using its name
falsely", Cleric Ahmed Abdul Ghafour Samarrae told
Edward Cody of The Washington Post in 2004. "Any
action targeting civilians is forbidden under any circumstances",
Sayyid Muqtada Al-Sadr told AFP. "The occupiers
are trying to sow division among the Iraqi people, but
there are no Sunnis and Shi'ites. Iraqis are one. It
is not acceptable to direct to the Sunnis the allegations
of ugly acts committed by the occupier against the Shiites",
said Al-Sadr.
As I wrote previously, the Resistance is a homegrown
movement of several Iraqi groups taking directions from
members of their respective communities.
Whatever the religious and political affiliation of
the Resistance, the main aim is the liberation of Iraq
from U.S. forces.
"[The Resistance] intellectual tendencies are
usually described as a mixture of Islamic and pan-Arab
ideas that agree on the need to put an end to the US
presence in Iraq", wrote Samir Haddad and Mazin
Ghazi of the Baghdad weekly Al-Zawra.
"These groups have common denominators, the most
important of which perhaps are focusing on killing US
soldiers, rejecting the abductions and the killing of
hostages, rejecting the attacks on Iraqi policemen,
and respecting the beliefs of other religions",
added Haddad and Ghazi.
According to Molly Bingham writing in the Boston Globe,
a journalist and a fellow at Harvard University, who
spent some time with a group of Resistance fighters
in Iraq:
"I met Shia [sic] and Sunnis fighting together,
women and men, young and old. I met people from all
economic, social, and educational backgrounds…The
original impetus for almost all of the individuals I
spoke to was a nationalistic one".
Embedded journalism
Embedded journalism is an obvious source of disinformation.
It fosters false optimism regarding US military presence.
It means reporters are only present where American troops
are active, though US forces seldom venture into much
of Iraq. Embedded correspondents bravely covered the
storming of Fallujah by US marines last November and
portrayed it as a US "military success." (Counter
Punch, 16 May 2005).
Other proponents of the Occupation are those who "opposed"
the war, but are in favor of America's imperial vision
of "democracy". The deceptive argument pushed
by the Western media is that the Occupation will lead
to "democracy" and help Iraqis. This line
of reasoning is also advocated by several alternative
media sources. In a recent article in AlterNet which
claims to "provide readers with crucial facts and
passionate opinions", senior editor of AlterNet,
Lakshmi Chaudhry wrote:
"We can't simply turn our backs on the million
of Iraqis – who lack basic necessities like, water
electricity food or medical care…. It is immoral
for us to leave them to die in the cross fire of a violent
civil war fuelled by extremists that we created…We
must take the president at his word and force him to
deliver on the promise of freedom." (AlterNet,
06 January 2005).
In other words, should "Progressives" trust
George Bush's "messianic mission" and "stay
the course" in Iraq to "promote democracy"
and "prevent" civil war; anything short of
this, would be "immoral". This lie is from
George Bush's own pack of lies. It is not only supported
by rightwing pundits and pro-war advocates but also
by part of the U.S. Liberal "anti-war" movement,
which points to the "insurgents" as the primary
source of violence in Iraq. The reality is that the
so-called U.S. "democratic occupation", is
a euphemism for imperialist occupation and oppression.
Concluding remarks
The people of Iraq have rejected to live under U.S.
Occupation and voted against the U.S. presence in their
country.
The Western media distorts what is happening in Iraq
in order to provide legitimacy to Washington's agenda.
The majority of Iraqis (nearly 98 per cent) want the
U.S. forces to leave their country, and 92 percent of
Iraqis see the Americans as imperial occupiers rather
than "liberators".
Clearly, Western journalists and pundits have shown
that they lack an accurate understanding of Iraq's history
and Iraqi society.
Most reports out of Iraq have been from a Western
perspective, and rarely from an Iraqi perspective.
It would take Westerners a long time to understand
the situation in Iraq today, including the general relationship
between Islam and politics. Historically, Islam and
politics in Iraq and many other Muslim countries have
been inseparable. "Thus, the demand for the separation
of religion and state in Muslim countries is more than
secularist; it is openly [anti-Islam]", wrote the
French academic Gilbert Achcar. Even Saddam Hussein,
identified with Islam as part of the battle against
imperialism.
Today's Islam, however, is largely secular and concerned
more with political and social issues rather than religious.
Unfortunately, the common line among Western media,
pundits and politicians alike is always the same: a
consistent miscomprehension of Iraqi society and politics.
There is also no mention of the roles of the Occupation
forces, the CIA and Israeli Mossad agents in orchestrating
the current violence against the Iraqi people.
U.S. forces and their allies have needlessly killed
tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis. Iraqi men, women
and children are routinely imprisoned, abused and tortured,
by U.S. forces in daily house-to-house searches, humiliation
being conducted by U.S. forces.
The ceaseless attacks and aerial bombings by U.S.
forces have destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and people's
property. Iraq's education system has been destroyed,
health care services are on the brink of total collapse
as a result of U.S. war and Occupation.
To defend their country, the Iraqi people have a legitimate
right to resist, and use all forms of resistance to
this war and occupation. Any resistance to the current
imperial aggression is legitimate resistance.
"International law grants a people fighting an
illegal occupation the right to use 'all necessary means
at their disposal' to end their occupation and the occupied
are entitled to seek and receive support".
As I write these lines, U.S. forces are bombing Iraqi
civilians in their homes. In the town of Qaim, on the
Syrian border, U.S. forces have besieged the town for
many days. Residents told IPS by telephone: "all
the fighters here are Iraqis from this area". The
ongoing abuses by U.S. soldiers had provoked people
into confronting the occupying forces. "The fighters
are just local people who refuse to be treated like
dogs," one resident said. "Nobody wants the
Americans here", added another resident. Many innocent
civilians have been killed and the city centre "has
been almost completely destroyed", including the
city hospitals and schools. "[The Americans] are
using warplanes, mortar shells and tanks to shell the
city indiscriminately, hurt citizens and bomb the houses
with warplanes". Like the atrocity of Fallujah,
the silence of the Western media is deafening, while
Iraqi cities and towns are destroyed one by one.
It appears that the common agenda of Western governments
led by the U.S. and Britain is the revival of the old
Western colonialism masked in the fake rhetoric of "democracy"
and "liberation". Like Western governments,
Western media have bought into the so-called "federation
of Iraq", a euphemism to divide Iraq into colonies
controlled by Western powers.
Once again the media have failed to report the US
led policy of ethnic cleansing, conducted by Kurdish
terrorist groups from northern Iraq, particularly from
the city of Kirkuk. Thousands of Iraqi (Arabs and Turkomans)
families, who lived for generations in northern Iraq,
are forced by armed Kurdish Peshmerga to flee their
homes and seek sanctuaries further south. Today, the
ethnic cleansing of Iraqis is comparable to that conducted
against the Palestinian people in 1948 by Zionist terrorists.
The fact that Israeli commandos are in northern Iraq
training the Kurdish militias in the art of land dispossession
is a case in point.
Sectarianism and ethnic tensions in Iraq "are
not a product of cultural differences. They are the
product of a history of imperialism and colonialism
in the region and domestic Iraqi politics". "This
applies as much to the Arab-Kurd tension as it does
to the Sunni-Shias [sic]", wrote Rami El-Amine
of Left Turn magazine. Iraq is a mosaic society. "There
is no history of communal strife or civil war in Iraq,
and the degree of socioeconomic integration and unity
of purpose amongst the Iraqi people is often underestimated.
There is also a powerful secular tradition in Iraq that
transcends all religions and sects", said Dr. Sami
Ramadani of London Metropolitan University.
Iraqis are united against the Occupation. If there
is any divide, this "divide, already narrower in
Iraq than in some parts of the Arab world, is by all
accounts shrinking each day that Iraqis agree their
most immediate problem is the occupation", wrote
The Washington Post correspondent R. Chandrasekaran.
Only two years ago, Iraqi Christians, and Muslims lived
together in harmony despite their religious and political
differences. If there is any division between Iraqis
today, the division has been created quite deliberately
by the U.S. Occupation.
The April 19, 2005 demonstration of more than 300,000
Iraqis in Baghdad alone (the largest in Iraq for many
decades), jointly organized by the Al-Sadr movement
and the Association of Muslim Scholars, showed that
all Iraqis are united against the US Occupation and
terrorism. This unity contradicts the West's perception
of Iraqis as a divided society and rejects the occupiers'
imperialist policy of 'divide and rule'.
Sadly, neither the "alternative" nor the
mainstream media has George Galloway's courage to stand
up against an unjust war and tell the truth about Iraq
and the crimes committed against the Iraqi people.
As a result of media disinformation, many people in
the West, Americans in particular, continue to support
an illegal war of "crimes against humanity"
perpetuated in their name.
The Western media should follow an ethic of moral
responsibility toward the Iraqi people and provide impartial
and accurate information to the outside world.
Instead of serving as propaganda agents for imperial
power and an unjust war against the Iraqi people's right
to self-determination, the Western media would do well
to hold the governments behind the US led coalition
accountable for this illegal act of aggression.
Those who are responsible for this murderous crime
against the Iraqi people should face, with their accomplices,
war crimes trials similar to those conducted by the
Nuremberg Tribunal.
The only peaceful solution to the chaos in Iraq is
the full withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Ordinary Iraqis and the Iraqi Resistance groups will
continue to resist the Occupation until the U.S. leaves
Iraq. No amount of U.S. firepower will quell the desire
of the people of Iraq to achieve sovereignty and national
independence.
|
ST. PAUL - The son of a Minnesota
state senator was killed in
Iraq when his helicopter was shot down, officials said.
It was the second tour in Iraq for Chief Warrant Officer
Matt Lourey, 41, who flew helicopters with the Army's
82nd Airborne Division - though his mother, Sen. Becky
Lourey, and other relatives opposed the war and had
tried to talk him out of it.
"He didn't want to die, but nonetheless he signed
up for military service and he understood what that
meant," said his brother, Tony Lourey.
Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, a brigadier general
in the National Guard, where he also serves as a chaplain,
said he was notified Friday morning by a military official
of Lourey's death Thursday, and was asked to give word
to his mother.
She had already found out from a relative, and left
the Capitol abruptly to go home to Kerrick, about 50
miles south of Duluth.
"Every time a helicopter crash would occur, Becky
would come to see me," Johnson said. "We would
talk and pray and were hopeful it was not her son."
Becky Lourey ran for governor in 2002 and has been
mentioned as a possible gubernatorial candidate next
year. Most legislative meetings were called off after
the news.
In an e-mail statement, Becky Lourey and her husband,
Eugene, said they were overwhelmed with grief and sadness.
"We are proud of our son and everything he stood
for," they said. "This war has touched all
of us as a state, a nation, and a world community. Now,
it has touched our own family at home." [...] |
FORT EDWARD, N.Y. - Maj. Robert
Rogers, the frontiersman whose 18th century manual on
guerrilla warfare has become a blueprint for Army Ranger
fighting tactics, is getting what some consider a long-overdue
honor: a statue in his memory. But some veterans believe
unveiling the monument on Memorial Day is insensitive
because Rogers was loyal to England during the Revolutionary
War.
"I think it's a travesty that we would think about
honoring a person, especially someone who fought against
us, on that day," said Bob Bearor, who served in
the Army's 101st Airborne Division in the 1960s. "It's
a sacred day. ... Let's honor our dead who died for
our country." [...] |
ATLANTA - A 56-hour standoff with
a homicide suspect perched on a construction crane ended
peacefully early Saturday when police shocked him with
a stun gun as he reached for a cup of water, authorities
said.
"Apparently, he was thirsty," police spokesman
Sgt. John Quigley said.
Carl Edward Roland, 41, got onto the 18-story crane
around 5 p.m. Wednesday and told police he was thinking
of killing himself by jumping, authorities said.
The standoff unfolded above Atlanta's busy Buckhead
neighborhood, an area filled with clubs and restaurants.
Lunch and dinner crowds, taking advantage of summer-like
weather, have packed restaurant patios with clear views
of the standoff.
Roland was wanted by the Pinellas County, Fla., sheriff's
department in the death of ex-girlfriend Jennifer L.
Gonzalez, 36, whose body found Tuesday. An arrest warrant
affidavit accuses Roland of strangling Gonzalez and
dumping her body in a pond behind the apartment complex
where she lived.
Two days earlier, Roland told acquaintances he believed
Gonzalez was cheating on him and asked them if they
could get him a firearm so he could kill her, according
to the affidavit.
During the standoff negotiations, Roland accepted a
jacket from police, which he used to beat back the chill
at night and the sun during the day, but he refused
offers of food and water.
But early Saturday, Roland stepped
toward an officer to get some water, and the officer
used a Taser on him, said Alan Dreher, Atlanta's assistant
police chief.
Roland showed mixed emotions during the negotiations,
Dreher said.
"At times he was calm. At times he was cordial.
At times he was irate. At times he was argumentative.
It just depended on the situation," he said.
Roland was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital and police
expected to charge him with crimes in Atlanta and Florida.
Hospital officials said he was in good condition.
Since March, the Clearwater, Fla., man had quit his
job as a software salesman and filed for bankruptcy.
Roland said he owed $10,500 in federal taxes and more
than $13,000 on credit cards, court records show. |
Amnesty International
has accused Israel of committing war crimes in the occupied
West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The rights group's report for 2004 says Israeli forces
have killed some 700 Palestinians - including 150 children
- mostly in unlawful circumstances.
The report lists "reckless shooting, shelling
and air strikes in civilian areas... and excessive use
of force".
It also condemns the killing of Israeli civilians by
Palestinian militants and violence by Jewish settlers.
"Certain abuses committed by the Israeli army
constituted crimes against humanity and war crimes,"
Amnesty's report says.
"The deliberate targeting of civilians by Palestinian
armed groups constituted crimes against humanity,"
it adds.
An Israeli opposition MP has requested an urgent parliamentary
debate on the report.
But an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman denied the
charge of war crimes and said Amnesty's analysis appeared
"one-sided".
The report says Palestinian armed groups killed 109
Israelis, including 59 civilians and eight children,
in suicide bombings, shootings and mortar attacks.
'Impunity'
Amnesty's accusations against the Israeli army include
unlawful killings, torture, extensive and wanton destruction
of property, obstruction of medical assistance and targeting
of medical personnel.
Amnesty also says Israel has continued to use Palestinians
as "human shields" during military operations,
"forcing them to carry out tasks that endangered
their lives", despite an injunction by Israel's
high court banning the practice.
The report accuses Israel of offering impunity to soldiers
and settlers who commit crimes against Palestinians.
"In the overwhelming majority of the thousands
of cases of unlawful killings and other grave human
rights violations in the previous four years, no investigations
were known to have been carried out," the report
says.
"The Israeli army and police ... routinely increased
restrictions on the local Palestinian population in
response to attacks by Israeli settlers," it adds.
Dire situation
In addition to the report's focus on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, Amnesty criticises a number of regimes in
neighbouring Arab countries.
Scene of Palestinian suicide bombing in Beersheba
Palestinian suicide bombings are "crimes against
humanity"
Egypt and Syria are blamed for systematic torture and
ill-treatment of political prisoners.
In Saudi Arabia, Amnesty highlights killings by security
forces and armed groups, exacerbating the "already
dire human rights situation in the country".
Jordan is said to have made scores of political arrests,
amid reports of torture and ill-treatment in custody.
In Iraq, the report says US-led forces committed gross
human rights violations, including unlawful killings,
arbitrary detention and torture.
Armed groups in Iraq are similarly blamed for targeting
civilians, hostage-taking and killing hostages.
|
Israel has prevented
the deputy chairman of the Islamic Movement's northern
branch, Sheikh Kamel Khatib, from taking part in a conference
on the right of return, which is scheduled to take place
in London this weekend.
Khatib was summoned to the Nazereth police headquarters
on Thursday, where he was told that the meeting is being
organized by agents hostile towards Israel and that
his participation in the conference would be illegal.
"The investigator told me that if I go, the score
would be settled upon my return, by detention or a harsher
measure," Khatib said.
After consulting with his lawyers, Khatib decided not
to go abroad, and cancelled his flight, which was to
have departed Thursday afternoon.
"The state of Israel claims to be democratic,
where one has the right to freedom of expression. But
I feel like I'm in a banana republic," Khatib said
angrily.
Slated to attend the conference are Abed al-Bari Atwan,
the editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, who is known for his
radical approach towards Israel, and Muhammad Dejani,
a Palestinian historian from Cairo.
"These aren't terrorists. This is an academic
conference with well-known individuals," Khatib
said.
|
Palestinian youngster
seriously hurt by IDF fire is handcuffed at hospital.
Human rights group: Khayar Baraghoti physically unable
to escape; army: youngster is dangerous
PETACH TIKVA - A 17-year-old Palestinian has been
hospitalized in handcuffs for the past 10 days, a move
that has drawn the ire of human rights group Physicians
for Human Rights .
Khayar Baraghoti, who sustained serious injuries as
Palestinians were hurling stones and Molotov cocktails,
can barely move and is physically unable to escape,
the human rights group says.
The youngster's father, Muhammad, told Ynet his son
sustained injuries to his intestine and liver.
"We don't know what exactly happened there, but
we were told…the army arrived at the village and
shot two boys who were hurling stones and Molotov cocktails,"
he said. "We didn't know they were talking about
Khayar. We waited for him and he didn't come home, until
they told us the army took him to Beilinson (hospital)
in serious condition."
Muhammad said he initially faced problems in his attempt
to secure special permits for him and his wife to visit
his son at the hospital, but the matter was subsequently
resolved and both father and mother were able to visit
their son.
"Yesterday he started talking a little bit. Right
now he's like a baby – it's difficult for him
to talk, but God be blessed, the situation is progressing,"
the father said. "The problem is that his hands
are tied and it's very difficult for him."
Kind words for IDF
Muhammad has no qualms with the soldiers watching
over his son, but said things can be made easier for
Khayar.
"I explained it to the soldier standing guard
and he understood the problem, but it's an order from
above," Muhammad said. "I understand him.
He's merely a 20-year-old who does what they tell him.
He said (my son) is a dangerous prisoner. I know my
kid, he never gets in trouble, he's a good kid."
Despite the tragedy, the father also had kind words
for the IDF, which decided to bring his son for treatment
in Israel
"If they would have taken him to a hospital in
Ramallah, he might have been dead by now," he said.
The army, meanwhile, said the injured youngster constitutes
a danger to those around him and must be kept handcuffed.
"Notably, the (handcuffs) do not undermine the
medical treatment…and his doctors did not protest
the handcuffing," the IDF said.
|
Israel Defense Forces
soldiers barged into a Palestinian home and commandeered
its television room so they could watch a soccer match,
a military source said on Friday after a TV report on
the incident.
Footage on Channel 10 TV showed broken furniture and
windows in the room of the house in the West Bank city
of Hebron where the television station said the troops
watched Wednesday's Champions League final between AC
Milan and Liverpool.
The Palestinian family living in the house said the
soldiers caused the damage. The military source confirmed
five soldiers entered the dwelling to view the match
but said they stayed only for a few minutes and did
not break anything.
Nonetheless, the source said, the commander of the
squad had been suspended.
"The military takes a severe view of such incidents,"
the source added.
Palestinian teenager Anan al-Zrayer said he was walking
down the street when soldiers asked him if his family
had a television set and a satellite dish.
"I said 'yes,' and told them we don't have Israeli
channels. (After they entered the house,) I gave them
the remote control and they carried out a search. We
were kicked into another room," he said.
Another Hebron resident said it was not the first time
that soldiers had taken over Palestinian houses to watch
television.
Khigaji al-Batch said about two weeks ago, 11 soldiers
entered his home and stayed through the night.
"They are using our houses like a cinema,"
Batch said.
|
Speakers
at a Hebrew University symposium on the separation barrier
warned on Monday that the wall currently under construction
in Jerusalem could undermine all hopes of peace and
trigger a new war.
The symposium was sponsored by the Middle East Unit
of the Truman Institute.
Rami Nassrallah, a member of the International Peace
Cooperation Center, charged that the current route of
the separation wall in Jerusalem is only the first stage
in an alleged plan to split the Palestinian population
in the area and create a "Jewish Jerusalem"
rather than a "united Jerusalem."
Nassrallah warned that in the future Israel might build
a fence which would only annex the Old City and the
nearby Palestinian neighborhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah
and the east Jerusalem commercial district.
"The government will tolerate a maximum of 100,000
Palestinians in [Israeli] Jerusalem," Nassrallah
predicted. "Israelis will fall in love with this
kind of separation, but it will mean the end of [any
chance of] peace."
Kobi Michael, a researcher at the Jerusalem Institute
for Israel Studies, said the institute had suggested
several possible scenarios with regard to the consequences
of the construction of the wall. "I call one of
them the Fence War," he warned. "We could
face war around and because of the fence."
Jerusalem attorney Danny Seidemann, head of the left-wing
Ir Amim organization, said there was no way to divide
a city of Jerusalem's size in a "good" way.
He said the current wall, with a few exceptions, was
planned to follow the boundaries of Jerusalem that were
established after the Six Day War, when large rural
areas near Jerusalem in the West Bank were annexed to
the city. But those borders were a fiction, he continued.
There was no logic to them and they arbitrarily cut
through villages and neighborhoods, officially separating
some Palestinians from others. Now, he added, "Israel
is turning the fiction of Jerusalem's borders into concrete."
Seidemann said some Israeli leaders tried to persuade
the government to divide Jerusalem along demographic
lines, but it rejected the idea. A total of 60,000 Palestinians
who live within the Jerusalem city limits according
to the official boundaries will end up on the West Bank
side of the wall according to the current route.
Seidemann said he represented some of the Palestinians
who have been shut out of the city and are fighting
in court to get back in. It was not because they wanted
to be part of Israel but because they were afraid they
would become impoverished, as so many West Bank Palestinians
are, if they were cut off from the city.
Seidemann rejected the government's claim that the
separation barrier was a temporary measure and could
be torn down as soon as Israel and the Palestinians
agreed on their mutual borders. According to the construction
plans for the E1 scheme in the area between Ma'aleh
Adumim and Jerusalem, Israel intends to build massive
housing along the route of the fence. The housing, he
said, would be the real fence and it would be permanent.
Seidemann warned that the consequences of the fence
could be disastrous for Israel. It could radicalize
the Jerusalem Palestinian population, which has so far
been relatively quiet; it could arouse international
censure because of the humanitarian problems it causes
the Palestinian population; and it could threaten the
chances of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
dispute.
|
Dance
idol blasted for anti-Israeli quotes
Israel Prize winner and well-renowned Israeli dance choreographer
slammed for telling Canadian newspaper Israeli army commits
"war crimes" in the West Bank; He said he expressed
personal opinion |
By Itamar Eichner |
TEL AVIV - The
foreign ministry blasted a renowned prize-winning Israeli
dance choreographer on Thursday for telling a Canadian
newspaper that Israeli troops commit "war crimes"
against the Palestinians, saying his words were harmful
to the image of the Jewish state.
Ohad Naharin, currently in Montreal to choreograph a
ballet, had told the Montreal Gazette that he volunteers
as an interpreter for a women's organization that supervises
military checkpoints in the Palestinian territories, where
Palestinians often complain of humiliation and abuse by
soldiers.
"I continue to do my job
when people are participating in war crimes about 20 kilometers
away from me," he told the newspaper on Wednesday,
referring to army activity in the West Bank.
A source in the foreign ministry told the Yedioth Ahronoth
newspaper that Naharin's words were damaging to Israel,
especially in light of him being a former winner of the
prestigious Israel Prize.
"This is an unfortunate quality of people of culture,
art and academia," a source said. "When they
leave the country, they attack it and allow themselves
to say things they wouldn't dare tell Israeli media. We
are not opposed to criticism, but to accuse Israel of
war crimes is very grave."
The army mans dozens of checkpoints and small roadblocks
all over the West Bank and says they are essential for
stopping potential suicide bombers from reaching Israeli
towns and Jewish settlements.
Naharin, who Israelis have often accused of being pro-Palestinian,
said in response that his words reflected his personal
opinion as a citizen.
"I did not see the interview, but
I imagine I was quoted for saying things I've already
said many times in the past, such as the fact that most
of us, Palestinians and Israelis alike, are becoming the
innocent victims of our leaders and that evil, paranoia
and lack of heart prohibit us from changing the twisted
reality that we live in," he said.
Naharin, 53, is best known in Israel for his performances
with the Batsheva Dance Company, where he's worked since
1990 as a dancer and artistic director. A former student
at the Julliard School of Music, the Israeli native has
performed with major dance companies in Europe, Australia
and the United States. |
Last October, 13-year-old
Iman al-Hams was shot and wounded by an Israeli army unit
in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah, despite being
identified as a little girl, and wearing a school uniform.
Iman was machine-gunned by the unit's commander. She had
17 bullets in her body, and three in her head, a Palestinian
doctor told the Guardian. Iman
is one of 654 Palestinian children to have been killed
in the occupied territories since September 2000. Several
were killed as they sat at their desks in class. Three
and a half thousand children have been wounded. Over 300
are in Israeli prisons.
In South Africa's state of emergency
of the mid-1980s, declared in response to a nationwide
campaign of protest, 312 children were killed, over 1,000
wounded, 2,000 children under 16 were detained without
trial, thousands more arrested, hundreds fled into exile,
and a generation was marked for life. The Rev Desmond
Tutu wrote about one child, Johnny, whom he saw after
some time in police custody: "I wanted to cry, I
was filled with a blazing anger against a system that
could do this to a child ... Johnny's case alone ought
to be enough to fill any decent person ... with revulsion
and indignation."
Iman's is such a case, 20 years on. Archbishop Tutu has
described the situation of the Palestinians under occupation
as worse than South Africa under apartheid. In July 2004,
the international court of justice ruled that Israel's
280 mile wall, the latest burden on Palestinians, was
illegal. But Israel, like the old
South Africa faced with international disapproval, simply
ignored it.
Twenty years ago, 496 British academics responded to
an appeal from the African National Congress leaders in
exile after two academics were served with banning orders.
They signed a letter calling for an academic boycott of
South Africa. Today, some in the new generation of British
academics feel they cannot accept Israel's occupation
of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, the policies
that brought the wall, and a new generation of children
suffering like those South African children whose wounds
of mind and body never healed.
Iman and Johnny will never go to college. But
some of the Israeli soldiers implicated in crimes like
the one that killed the little girl are university lecturers
who serve in the occupation army reserve forces every
year, and who otherwise go about their academic "business
as usual" for the rest of the year. No Israeli academic
institution has ever severed its organic ties with the
military-security establishment in protest. None has issued
a public statement condemning the grave violations of
Palestinian human rights. This is part of the reason why
Palestinians have called upon the world to boycott Israeli
academic institutions.
The volcanic political response to the decision by the
Association of University Teachers (AUT) in Britain to
impose an academic boycott on Israeli universities has
dismissed the crucial comparison between Israel and South
Africa, which was the main motive behind the Palestinians'
call for boycott. Israeli universities
are not being targeted for boycott because of their ethnic
or religious identity, but solely because of their complicity
in the Israeli system of apartheid, which many see as
sufficiently analogous to its defunct predecessor in South
Africa to warrant sanctions.
In the occupied territories, Israel maintains
a strict racial and colonial segregation between Israeli
Jewish settlers and the native Palestinians (Muslims and
Christians). The former group enjoys economic benefits,
special roads, heavily subsidised and more heavily protected
housing, and full political rights. Even under apartheid
there were never whites-only roads. There was never a
comparable prolonged siege, or curfews, that cut off black
people from each other. Palestinians, on the other hand,
are under a military occupation that kills and destroys,
but also continuously dispossesses them of their lands
for the benefit of Jewish settlers.
The desire for an ethnic-religious majority of Israeli
Jews has seeped across from the occupied territories to
permeate the Israeli "national" agenda, which
increasingly views Palestinian citizens of Israel as a
"demographic threat", as former prime minster
Binyamin Netanyahu phrased it. The Palestinian minority
in Israel has for decades been denied basic equality in
health, education, housing and land possession, solely
because it is not Jewish. The fact
that this minority is allowed to vote hardly redresses
the rampant injustice in all other basic human rights.
They are excluded from the very definition of the "Jewish
state", and have virtually no influence on the laws,
or political, social and economic policies. Hence their
similarity to the black South Africans.
In addition, and related to the demographic
question, Israel continues to deny Palestinian refugees,
who were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 war, their
right to return to their lands and properties. Israel
bases its position, which is contrary to fundamental human
rights provisions and international law, on its right
to preserve its Jewish ethnic-religious supremacy. No
other country in the world today dares to claim any similar
right.
In response to all this, how many Israeli academic institutions
have criticised the racist and colonial policies of the
state? How many Israeli academics have conscientiously
objected to military service in the occupied territories?
How many university lecturers have publicly opposed the
occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land? Professors
Ilan Pappe and Tanya Reinhart stand out, leading a few
Israeli academics in calling for support for the Palestinian
academics' call for selective academic boycott.
The boycotts and sanctions ultimately helped liberate
both blacks and whites in South Africa. Palestinians and
Israelis will similarly benefit from this non-violent
campaign that Palestinians are calling for.
· Ronnie Kasrils is minister for intelligence
in the South African government and a former commander
of Umkhonto we Sizwe, military wing of the African National
Congress. He is writing in his personal capacity. Victoria
brittain is a journalist. |
On May 4th, an article, "Board's
Amazon Appeal," appeared on Jewish News, a Zionist
website. It reported that the Board Of Deputies Of British
Jews, pro-Zionist religious Jewry's central organization,
had complained to Amazon re a book I edited, 51 Documents:
Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis.
I wrote the Board. It responded. I answered their critique
& challenged them to publicly debate the issue.
Below is the Jewish News article and the correspondence
between me & the Board.
The Holocaust is being heavily memorialized this year,
the 60th anniversary of the end of WW ll. UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan attended the opening of Israel's
new museum at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Institute. NYC's
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, running for reelection, was
Bush's official representative. Documentaries have appeared
on TV re differing aspects of Nazism & the atrocity.
Although historians have examined
Nazism in detail in all its complexity, the present
general public, world-wide, is interested in little
more than the Holocaust, the Jews as victims.
Few, Jew or gentile, know anything
about the range of Jewish politics in the Hitler era.
What happened to the Jews is constantly utilized in
Zionist propaganda as justification for the creation
of the Israeli state, the silver lining around the dark
cloud of desolation. That's the tip off that there is
something missing: What did the Zionists do for the
Jews? There is no 51 Documents: Zionist Resistance to
the Nazis.
The Board's attempt to discredit my book with Amazon,
and their response to me, permitted me to briefly document
some of my charges. But this is no substitute for delving
deeper into the controversy. For this, I recommend looking
at my 1st book, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators,
in conjunction with 51 Documents, which contains complete
texts of much of the material cited in the earlier work.
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators is out of print,
but is on the internet at <www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/index.htm>.
I must thank the Board. Its crude attempt to discredit
the book with Amazon backfired. They have put some of
their later-day rationalizations for such collaboration
out there for the world to see. Now they will have to
debate me, or demonstrate, once & for all &
forever, that they don't dare defend Zionism's shameful
politics during Jewry's desperate hour. [...]
51 Documents includes complete evidentiary texts re
Zionist-Revisionist connections to Germany, Italy and
Japan, 1933-41, cited in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators.
That the Likud has a fascist history, likewise "gives
an extra edge of topicality" to 51 Documents' charges
in 2005, the 70th anniversary of Mussolini's October
1935 invasion of Ethiopia.
October also is the 10th anniversary of the 1995 Million
Man March, the largest demonstration in Black American
History. The Millions More Movement, the majority of
Black intellectual, political and religious leaders,
has called for another march on Washington. The Ethiopian
anniversary will naturally be commemorated at the gathering.
A jailed veteran of the Black civil rights movement,
I will be there. The demonstration has been denounced
by Abe Foxman of America's Anti-Defamation League and
Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee, thus
focusing Black attention onto Zionism. I intend to satisfy
their interest by providing documentation of Zionism's
alliances with white racists, including Zionist-Revisionism's
passionate support for Mussolini's poison-gas war. [...]
In 1936, Revisionist financial director Wolfgang von
Weisl declared that, "Although opinions among the
Revisionists varied, in general they sympathized with
Fascism.... He, personally, was a supporter of Fascism,
and he rejoiced at the victory of Fascist Italy in Abyssinia
as a triumph of the White races against the Black."
Promptly accepting my challenge to debate would give
your Board and its Israeli colleagues an opportunity
to put rebuttal of my documentation in front of the
Black world, prior to the MMM event. That's more advantageous
to Zionism than waiting until after the damage is done
and hoping to repair it.
On the other hand, the public will
understand failure to accept my challenge to mean that
the Board cannot defend Zionism before the bar of history.
This will permit me to, in effect, debate an empty chair,
a debate Zionism must always lose.
In any case, I am sending this email to you on Monday,
May 23rd. If I do not get a reply from you by May 31,
expressing interest in a debate, I will assume that
the Board rejects the project and will so inform the
public.
As a report of your intervention with Amazon is already
on the internet, I am also making our present correspondence,
my note of May 12th, yours of May 17th and this note,
immediately available to the public, while looking forward
to your reply. |
Professor Finkelstein
is the author of a new book The Holocaust Industry
which is causing angst and anger among Jews worldwide.
Jennifer caught up with him in London.
Transcript Broadcast: July 25, 2000
Byrne: Norman Finkelstein, thank you for joining us
Finkelstein: My pleasure.
Byrne: If there is, as you claim, a holocaust industry,
what made you take it on?
Finkelstein : My main aim in taking on the holocaust
industry is I do believe my parents endured colossal suffering
during the Second World War. I think that what they endured
deserves to be remembered, not to be cheapened, and I
also believe that there are important lessons of both
a historical and a moral kind that one can learn from
their experience. That it wasn't, so to speak, it wasn't,
completely in vain. At least I don't want to believe that.
And so I felt, both as a personal tribute to my parents,
fairly recently passed away, as well because I am a politically
engaged individual, committed to the idea that you can
learn something substantial from what they endured, for
those two reasons I decided to write the book.
Byrne: You wrote this book, as you say, as the child
of holocaust survivors, and you've been given a pretty
savage reception. Could anyone who wasn't, have survived
the sort of vitriol and attack that's been directed your
way?
Finkelstein: I think to be perfectly candid, it is true
to say that given my, so to speak - and I know it sounds
like an ugly expression, but I'll use it - given my holocaust
credentials, I command a certain amount of immunity which
a non-Jew probably wouldn't command. And probably couldn't
survive the onslaught. So I am benefiting from that, but
I think that's all the more reason why I should be doing
it, because of the questions are important, and I can
raise them in a way in which a non-Jew couldn't.
Byrne: What comprises the holocaust industry, in your
view?
Finkelstein: The holocaust industry frankly at this point
it's almost a conglomerate, which has elements in media,
in publishing. Jewish organisations which in my view are
extorting large sums of money from European governments.
It embraces a large number of contacts in American life.
Byrne: Isn't this a version of what people used to call,
anti-Semites used to describe as the Jewish conspiracy?
Finkelstein: I'm not sure - of course that criticism
has been levelled against me, but let's take a book that
came out prior to my own... Peter Novick's, The Holocaust
in American Life, which many people have compared
favourably with my own book. And
Peter Novick frankly says well the holocaust occupies
a central place in American life, because Jews occupy
a central place in the media. Let's not kid ourselves
about that. So I don't see why simply reporting sociological
facts constitutes being part of a holocaust, or claiming
that there is a Jewish conspiracy.
Byrne: But you know perfectly well that even that description,
that the reason the Jewish issues get so much attention
is because....
Finkelstein: That's one reason.
Byrne: .... there's a dominance in the media. That's
offensive to media.
Finkelstein: Well, you see this is a problem for me.
Let's say you were to report as a sociological fact that
for young people between the ages of 18 and 29, one out
of every four black young people in America is somehow
implicated in the criminal justice system. That's a sociological
fact. Now the explanations for the fact may be different.
But to simply report the facts, it doesn't seem to me
is in and of itself anti-Semitic.
Byrne: But the view is, the argument may be that whatever
your intentions, the sort of facts you're raising, the
allegations you're making, could be used by anti-Semites
with vicious effect.
Finkelstein: I agree, and again, I don't want to pretend
to this kind of self righteousness, I agree that may be
a problem. But when one intervenes in a real world, you
have to balance out concerns. And
for me the bigger concern now is that the holocaust industry
has become the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in the world
today.
Byrne: How so?
Finkelstein: Because of its ruthless
extortion tactics, in order to extract compensation monies
in Switzerland, in Germany, and now eastern Europe. If
you take for example the case of Poland, the holocaust
industry is demanding roughly in the order of 50 billion
dollars in compensation from Poland. That sum of money
will leave Poland broke, and in doing so they are throwing
peasants off their land, tenants out of their homes, school
children out of schools, that's what they're doing.
Finkelstein: Yes, and I think what's particularly egregious
about these practices - let's take the concrete example
of Poland. My mother's father owned a tobacco store in
Warsaw. My father's father owned a small lumber mill in
Warsaw. The holocaust industry has
declared itself the legitimate heir of all the assets
of the Jews who were killed during World War II. So they're
claiming my mother's father's tobacco store and my father's
father's lumber mill as theirs. That they're the legitimate
inheritors. They never asked me, they never asked my brothers.
We would not approve of evicting these Polish people from
their homes. So I think the claim they're making is on
a false pretext. They are not the legitimate heirs. That's
my family, not theirs. And they're doing it without the
knowledge of Jews.
Byrne: You're claiming it's not just a matter of extortion
of German and Swiss institutions, you're claiming further
that the people making the extortionate claims are frauds,
aren't you?
Finkelstein: Well I think there are two issues, as the
title of my last chapter reads, it's a double shakedown,
because the governments of Europe are being asked to pay,
or forced to pay huge sums of money, and then the actual
survivors of Nazi persecution never see that money. If
I could just state one example quickly. Throughout the
Swiss banks affair, the holocaust industry was saying
day in and day out, we need the money now, needy holocaust
victims are dying every day, ten thousand are dying every
month. The Swiss bankers said let's wait to see the result
of the international audit, and whoever deserves the money
should get it and whoever doesn't should not. The holocaust
industry said no, we need the money now, we need the money
now, survivors are dying.
Byrne: Are you actually saying they're not representing
the survivors, that they want the money for themselves?
Finkelstein: Well, let me just finish. In August 1998,
a settlement was reached for 1.25 billion dollars, with
the Swiss banks. Now two have elapsed, we're approaching
the second anniversary in August 2000. Of
that 1.25 billion dollars, not one dime, not one nickel,
not one penny has been distributed to the actual survivors.
Nothing.
Byrne: So who's taking the money. In that case, okay,
it's not available, but who is getting the holocaust compensation?
Finkelstein: The Jewish organisations want the money
and they claim to be acting in the name of the Jewish
people when they solicit the money, but they never give
it to the actual victims.
Byrne: But this industry - I mean your claim it's also
fostered, a spurious concept.
Byrne: So who should get the money?
Finkelstein: In my view, at this point, as I've stated
in the book, there are probably, roughly speaking, a handful
of survivors left in the world today. We're talking about
maybe between five and fifteen, maybe twenty thousand,
survivors of the Nazi death camps, survivors of the slave
labour camps and so forth. A handful. The holocaust organisations
have accumulated huge sums of money. Edgar Bronfman [?]
stated in January 2000 that the World Jewish Congress
has accumulated, roughly, he said, seven billion dollars
in compensation.
Byrne: Which has since been denied, hasn't it?
Finkelstein: Has it?
Byrne: Yes, I mean it's been denied, but you're still
making the allegation.
Finkelstein: I wasn't aware. I'd be grateful if you'd
show me where the denial appears. That's quite a lot of
money that can easily be distributed among the survivors
and they could live a very happy life, what remains of
their life.
Byrne: But why are you defining the victims so narrowly.
I mean isn't.. you're just saying only those who survived
the camps, but surely people whose property was stolen,
or who lived a miserable life because they lost their
loved ones... Aren't these victims also?
Finkelstein: Well, I'll say I define it, first of all
the way it was conventionally described, defined, until
recent years, and second of all I define it in that way
out of respect to my parents' suffering. For example I
occasionally bring up the holocaust website at home, and
a young man writes from Tel Aviv, he says I was in Tel
Aviv during the war, but my grandmother died in Auschwitz,
therefore I consider myself a holocaust survivor.
Byrne: But isn't that... it's almost like saying you
can't be, you can only be a pure blooded Indian or a pure
blooded Aboriginal, if you have a proportion....
Finkelstein: No, because I think this is - to describe
yourself as a holocaust survivor if you were in Tel Aviv
or Minneapolis during the war, that's the grossest form
of holocaust trivialisation.
Byrne: What, you have to have been in the camps?
Finkelstein: Well, that normally was meant to describe...
to pick somebody. Well, now it's
extended to the point where somebody who says I was in
Tel Aviv, but my grandmother died, I'm a holocaust survivor.
If that fellow had said that to my mother to her face,
I'm quite sure she'd have given him a brisk slap. I mean
how dare you. You're in Tel Aviv, I'm in Majdanek and
you're telling me it's the same experience. That's trivialisation.
that's morally grotesque. And if definitions are going
to have any moral content, if they're going to have any
moral content, then we can't allow for this promiscuous
expansion of the term, so that it includes, as I understand
Israel Singer claims, every Jew in the world who was alive
during the Hitler years, since Hitler purportedly targeted
all of world Jewry, every Jew who survived, even if he
or she was in Hawaii, Alaska, or Minneapolis, he or she
is a holocaust survivor. I think that's the worst kind
of holocaust revisionism.
Byrne: How would you then answer those who might say
to you, you are trivialising and negating my own suffering?
I mean the fact that I survived a labour camp, or the
fact that my property was stolen.
Finkelstein: Well labour camps were considered this -
let's just give a personal example to illustrate what
I mean. My parents, my mother and father, were in the
Warsaw Ghetto from 1939 to 1943. When the Ghetto uprising
was suppressed they were taken from the Ghetto to Majdanek
concentration camp, and from Majdanek concentration camp,
my father was taken to Auschwitz, and my mother was taken
to two slave labour camps. And a typical holocaust survivor
was considered somebody who'd experienced the ghettoes,
the concentration camps, or the work camps, the slave
labour camps. And as I write in the book, they often experienced
them in sequence. And that's actually the experience of
my parents, as it was for many.
Byrne: Without disrespecting that experience, would you
accept that for some it is unseemly to be so insistent
about this is the kind of experience you have to have
had? That people do feel aggrieved.
Finkelstein: Well, I think, you know, many people in
the world have experienced expropriation of property.
I mean let's be for real. If we were to use that standard,
then every Palestinian who was expelled from the state
of Israel experienced a holocaust. Now Palestinians don't
make that claim any more - I mean that's just pure trivialisation.
And words should have meaning. I'm not a religious person,
so I'm not going to say they should have a sacred meaning
- but they should have a morally substantive meaning.
And a holocaust survivor should not come to now symbolise
anyone who was in any way connected with anyone who was
connected with someone who was and so on and so forth.
That's trivialisation. And it should be, in my opinion,
repudiated.
Byrne: Why do you think it has taken
such a long time for someone at a popular level to take
this on, to argue this case?
Finkelstein: I think that's an excellent
question. And I think it returns to something you asked
me earlier. Namely, it's very difficult, especially in
the moral climate in the United States, to raise these
questions without immediately being branded something
- a holocaust denier, a holocaust revisionist, an anti-Semite,
and so forth.
Byrne: A fellow traveller of David Irving, which I've
heard said about you.
Finkelstein: And of course, if you're Jewish, the charge
of being a self-hating Jew. And I guess it's I suppose,
as I've said on a number of occasions, I was exceedingly
close to my parents. And I also have, over the years,
I think I've gotten a fairly thick skin about these issues,
because this is not the first time I've engaged in a kind
of, so to speak, exposee of what I consider dishonest
scholarship or in this case more than scholarship, a whole
dishonest industry. And so I'm better equipped for many
of things to handle, which frankly
-and I know my detractors are saying now, become a beneficiary
of the holocaust industry, but frankly is not a particularly
pleasant experience, especially when you get hurled in
your direction kinds of epithets which are frankly unpleasant.
Byrne: It is a fair point though, isn't it, that in writing
this book you have yourself become a beneficiary of the
holocaust industry you condemn.
Finkelstein: Well as I've said, we have to be morally
honest about these questions. I'm politically on the left,
no question about it. I oppose sweatshops, I oppose exploitation
of labour in the third world. If you look at the clothes
I'm wearing now, you can say but Professor Finkelstein,
what a hypocrite you are, your shoes are made from slave
labour in Thailand, your pants are made from slave labour
in Burma, your shirt was made from slave labour in Haiti.
Aren't you a beneficiary of the system that you're condemning,
the capitalist system. And aren't you a beneficiary. And
to be morally honest, you have to answer yes, I am. You
do become implicated in the very systems that you are
opposing. And the only thing that you can do under those
circumstances is to remain, or try to remain honest to
yourself.
Byrne: Or contribute the benefits from your book to a
charity?
Finkelstein: Allow me just to finish. Faithful to your
beliefs, and hope that you're not being corrupted in the
process. As to the benefits of my book, I published with
a very tiny publishing house, Verso Books, which I understood
yesterday, and I hope he won't kill me for saying this,
have had a great difficulty paying royalties to their
authors, because they're a tiny publishing house. I don't
expect benefits. I earn - I'm not - I don't want to claim
I'm a scholar of great stature, but I have made a certain
reputation for myself, I've published several books, I've
never been able to get a permanent teaching job. And my
income in the United States is, you'd have to translate
into Australian dollars, but I earn, in a good year, between
fifteen and eighteen thousand dollars a year. I mean I
live below poverty in my income. And I don't think anyone
who's familiar with my track record can seriously make
the claim that I do what I do for profits. You know, frankly
speaking, money just doesn't figure largely in my world
view. It just is not.
Byrne: Your book has been described as revolting, nauseous,
destructive, among other epithets. Are you conscious of
the genuine grief and affront it may cause in some quarters?
Finkelstein: First of all I have to wait and see what
the final verdict is on the book. So far the attack on
my book are, I think, fairly predicable, from people who
in many ways are beneficiaries of this industry. And the
things I have to write in the book are, I admit they're
quite ugly, I'm the first one to systematically go through
the record in the Swiss banks and come to an altogether
different conclusion. You know, people have said well
Professor - they don't call me Professor Finkelstein,
they call me Norman, they say Norman, look you're a person
of the left, you hate capitalism, you oppose capitalism,
and yet you're defending Swiss bankers and you're defending
German industrialists, what's going on here. And I said
that, look, if you want to radically redistribute the
world's wealth, I'm all for it. And if you want to expropriate,
as Marx said, the expropriators, you know, the bankers
and the industrialists, I'm all for it. But I'm not for
dirtying, besmirching my parents' memory to do it. I don't
think you should turn my parents' suffering and the suffering
of the Jews who endured the Nazi holocaust and those,
the few who managed to survive, I don't think you should
turn it into part of a shakedown industry. I find that
morally so repugnant that I am going to defend Swiss bankers
when the historical record supports them. I'm for the
redistribution of wealth, because I think it's a moral,
a moral responsibility to feed the hungry of the world.
But I'm not for it simply because I hate Swiss bankers.
Byrne: But in holding - with great respect - your memory
of your parents, as an argument for what you've done,
isn't that in a way like the people you describe, the
members of the holocaust industry, holding the suffering
of Jews before them? We can't assail you on that, but
does it really justify what you've done and the pain and
grief it may cause people?
Finkelstein: I'm not sure why trying
to uncover an accurate record of the suffering that Jews
endured, and making that record part of the legacy, not
just of the Jewish people, but something from which all
of humanity can benefit, I recoil from the claims of the
holocaust industry, that we should never compare. As I
said in my introduction, the credo of my mother was to
always compare. Wherever she saw suffering, she reached
out in a compassionate way, and sought to identify in
the suffering of others, the elements of her own suffering.
She would never have said do not compare. And so my view
is, why is trying to restore an accurate, correct view
of what happened, and treating that experience in a compassionate
way, from which the rest of humanity can benefit, why
should that upset people?
Byrne: Well, can I read you just an example. This might
be why. You describe the holocaust industry as an industry
to extort money from Europe, and it has shrunk the moral
stature of their martyrdom to that of a Monte Carlo casino.
Finkelstein: Exactly.
Byrne: These aren't compassionate words. These are very
sharp, polemical words.
Finkelstein: Right. And that's exactly what I felt or
feel has happened. That the suffering my parents have
endured has now been turned into an extortion racket.
And so I think in exposing these people, and finally ridding
them from Jewish life, and American political life generally,
you're doing a benefit for the Jewish people, and not
just the Jewish people, by doing so. Yes, these are sharp
words for my view an extremely egregious organisation.
Byrne: Just go back to what we were talking about with
the uniqueness. Do you accept that the holocaust was a
uniquely frightful, a uniquely hideous, ugly, racist period
of history? Or was it not unique at all in your view?
Finkelstein: I think at the risk of sounding trivial
- and I recognise this can come across as trivial - every
historical event has unique features, as well as features
in common with other historical events. The normal procedure
of any scholar - and not even a scholar - a layperson,
is when you look at a historical event, as I'm sure you
recall from grade school, you look for similarities and
differences, you look for continuities and you look for
discontinuities. These are the ordinary procedures. And
as I said at the end of my book, my wish would be that
the Nazi holocaust be restored as a rational object of
inquiry.
Byrne: But not a uniquely monstrous event?
Finkelstein: I don't know how you would
quantify or qualify something as uniquely monstrous.
Byrne: Six million Jewish lives, concentration
camps.
Finkelstein: Would you prefer to have
then in a gas chamber in Auschwitz or ground zero at Hiroshima?
How do you compare? What's the basis for the comparison?
I call Plato in my introduction and he says you can't
compare the misery of any two people. And I have to say
that to even embark on that kind of enterprise, to me
means already taking the first steps in a morally degrading
undertaking. My parents would never, looking at the bloated
belly of a child in Central Africa, or looking at the
incinerated flesh of a Vietnamese girl, they would never
say, Norman, that's terrible, but don't compare it to
us. What a morally repugnant stance to take.
Byrne: You must know though that that is precisely one
of the things in your book that has most upset and outraged
many Jews, because they claim the holocaust was unique.
Finkelstein: I think that how Jews have now come to conceive
the Nazi holocaust is in part, but not completely, in
part, a result of the kinds of propaganda that's churned
out by the industry. But I can assure you, speaking now
from personal experience, that that's not the universal
or the only way to interpret the Nazi holocaust, and perhaps
here I am making a personal statement, but I have to be,
I have to be adamant that that's plainly not the lesson
that my parents imparted. And I think the lesson my parents
imparted is maybe not the only one, but certainly should
be part of the discussion and the debate.
Byrne: Just finally, what in your view, is the motive
behind those who comprise what you would call the holocaust
industry? Why are they doing it if not for good reasons?
Finkelstein: I said at the beginning
of the book that I think that a lot of the motive behind
this holocaust industry is political, in large part though
not entirely, to deflect criticism of the state of Israel
and its - let's not use euphemism, because I don't usually
- its crimes against the Palestinian people, and I think
there are, you know, other sorts of motives. But I want
to emphasise, and I suspect we're coming to the end now,
I want to emphasise one point, which is perhaps didn't
come across as clearly as I wished in the book, I don't
think these people care at all about the Nazi holocaust.
I don't think they care at all about Israel, I don't think
they care at all about the Jewish people. They showed
no interest in Israel before the June '67 war, before
Israel became an American ally and it was convenient to
be pro-Israel. They showed no interest for the survivors
before June 1967, and to this day - and I get the calls
daily and I remember the anguish of my mother in the last
years of her life - if they showed any interest, if they
had any concern, even a jot, for the Nazi holocaust, its
memory, and those few who managed to survive, would they
be stealing the compensation monies from them.
Byrne: So you're saying it's greed?
Finkelstein: I'm saying that as the same sociological
standards we'd apply to any other group, we should apply
here, people are motivated by interest.
That's not a shocking revelation. People are motivated
by the desires for privilege, for power, for profit. Those
are not shocking revelations. Anyone who's had any experience
in life knows these things. So why should we be shocked
that those who claim to represent the Jewish people, those
who wrap themselves sanctimoniously in a mantle of needy
holocaust victims, why should we be shocked that they
may actually be moved by the same impulses as most mortals.
Byrne: Why would you be surprised that people who aren't
big institutions, who aren't members of the Jewish lobby
in America, would be terribly distressed by much of what
you write.
Finkelstein: I would admit, again, I don't want to pretend
to this kind of ingenuousness or naivety, yes, I think
people would be shocked, but sometimes I think it's useful
to shock people out of a stupor. You know, if I had written
a dry academic tract, it would have gotten six reviews
within a very narrow academic community. And in some ways,
I consider the book a wakeup call, because it should tell
Jews that something terrible is happening. Did the Japanese
do this to Hiroshima? Did African-Americans do this to
slavery? To turn it, the worst national tragedy the Jewish
people experienced throughout human history, to turn into
theme parks, to turn it into just the cheapest, crassest
propaganda, you have to reflect, what is going on here.
And it's a reflection at least in my case that's still
grounded in the fundamental belief that there is something
useful to be learnt. You'll laugh if I say my friends
have been telling me for 20 or 30 years, Norm, it's time
to move on. Let's do some new topic. And so this has been
a central motivating factor for me, because I could divine
from my parents that there was something there that if
you probed it in a rational and honest way, you can learn
a lot.
Byrne: Okay, you've set the bomb, you've thrown it, are
you ready for the fallout?
Finkelstein: I'll say it again. I was exceedingly close
to my parents. They invested their entire lives in giving
myself and my brothers a good education, and they lived
for their children. And I owe it to them.
Byrne: Is that a yes? Is that a yes?
Finkelstein: It means I weather the storm knowing, as
I do, that I did my best to give an honest interpretation,
as I say in my acknowledgments, an honest interpretation
of my parents' legacy.
Byrne: Norman Finkelstein, thank you very much.
Finkelstein: Thank you.
Byrne: Thanks for joining us.
Finkelstein: Thank you very much. |
UNITED NATIONS - The United States
and Israel represent the real nuclear threat to the
world, not Iran, Tehran's chief envoy to the
United Nations said on Friday after an abortive conference
on controlling nuclear weapons.
Javad Zarif, Iran's ambassador to the U.N., said the
United States never intended to scrap its nuclear arsenal,
despite promising to eventually disarm when it signed
the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the landmark
arms control pact.
Zarif, in an interview with Reuters, said Israel, which
is widely believed to have nuclear weapons, was the
threat to the Middle East region. "There is unanimity
on the threat that is posed not only by Israeli nuclear
weapons but by its aggressive policy (in general),"
he said.
Washington is backing efforts by Britain, France and
Germany to persuade Tehran to halt its nuclear fuel
program, which they fear may be intended to make atomic
bombs. Iran denies this, insisting its program is peaceful.
Zarif dismissed as hollow U.S. pledges in 1995 and
2000 reaffirming its commitment to scrap its nuclear
arsenal. "The U.S. never
had any intention of living up to its commitments under
Article 6 of the treaty," he said.
In Article 6 of the NPT the five treaty
signatories with nuclear weapons -- Russia, the United
States, France, Britain and China -- agreed to eventually
disarm.
SMOKE SCREEN
Zarif said U.S. attacks on Iran's nuclear program were
a "smoke screen to divert attention from its violations"
that included a U.S. willingness "to use nuclear
weapons against non-nuclear weapon states."
Every five years the 188 members of the NPT meet for
a month to review the landmark treaty. The 2005 review
ended on Friday without any agreement on how to improve
the accord. Many delegates blamed both Washington and
Tehran for what they described a failure of the conference
to do anything.
Washington worked hard to prevent
the conference -- which works by consensus -- from approving
any documents that refer to its 1995 and 2000 pledges
to disarm, while Iran blocked anything that referred
to it as a proliferation threat and NPT violator.
The conference approved a document that merely listed
the agenda and the participants.
Egypt also worked hard to prevent any substantive conclusion
from the conference when it saw it had no chance of
focusing criticism on Israel's assumed atomic arsenal.
"Israel is the threat to the region,"
he said. "It is one of the great ironies of our
age that a country outside the framework of legality
in the area of nonproliferation is one of the countries
that is the most active participants against Iran,"
he said.
Like atomic-armed India and Pakistan, Israel has never
signed the NPT. It neither admits nor denies having
the bomb, Israel is estimated to have some 200 nuclear
warheads. |
BAGHDAD - Two suicide car bombs
exploded outside a joint U.S.-Iraqi military base near
the northern town of Sinjar on Saturday, killing five
people and wounding at least 45, a hospital official
said.
Witnesses told the official the bombs exploded in quick
succession at the entrance to the base, which is just
south of Sinjar, in the northwest of Iraq, close to
the border with Syria.
Most of those wounded were labourers at the camp or
Iraqi troops, they said.
The blasts followed a car bomb attack on an Iraqi police
convoy in Tikrit late on Friday which killed two civilians
and wounded 24 people, including nine police, Jalal
Khoshi, a doctor at the local hospital said.
He said an ambulance driver carrying
the wounded to hospital had also been shot and killed,
but it was not immediately clear by whom.
South of Baghdad, outside the town of Hilla, unknown
gunmen stopped a car carrying five Iraqi soldiers and
opened fire, killing four of them and seriously wounding
one, a spokesman for the Hilla police said.
There has been an upsurge in violence over the past
month, with mostly Sunni Arab guerrillas stepping up
their two-year-old insurgency since a new Shi'ite-led
government was formed.
Nearly 700 Iraqis have been killed in car bomb blasts,
ambushes and shootings since the beginning of May, while
more than 60 U.S. troops have also died in the same
period.
As well as the sustained high number of attacks on
Iraqi security forces, there has been an increase in
sectarian killings, with Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims dying
in tit-for-tat attacks. |
TENTENA, Indonesia - Two bombs
ripped through a busy market in a Christian town in
eastern Indonesia on Saturday, killing up to 21 people
in an attack likely to raise
fears sectarian bloodshed could again break out in the
region.
The explosions left a trail of blood and destruction
in the lakeside town of Tentena, on the eastern island
of Sulawesi, part of an area
where three years of Muslim-Christian clashes killed
2,000 people until a peace deal was agreed in late 2001.
Periodic unrest has flared since, but Saturday morning's
attack was among the worst. Tensions rose after the
bombings, with hundreds of residents converging on the
local hospital and destroyed outdoor market, demanding
police find the killers.
The official Antara news agency, quoting local government
officials, said the death toll was 21. Police earlier
told Reuters it was 19.
A local hospital official said 32 people were wounded,
many seriously. One toddler was among the dead, officials
said.
Crowds of people banged their hands on the local police
chief's car when he arrived on the scene soon after
the attacks, but there was no violence.
"The situation is getting tense," Andi Asikin,
the mayor of Poso town not far from Tentena, told El
Shinta radio station.
"People are upset because their families are victims.
Crowds of people who are relatives of the victims are
condemning the act. They are demanding officials hunt
the perpetrators."
Police on the scene said the bombs comprised high explosives,
adding that the blasts could be heard 12 km (7 miles)
away. The second explosion came 15 minutes after the
first, and was the bigger of the two, residents said.
The roofs of shops near the market were torn off and
food and goods scattered over a wide area in Tentena,
1,500 km (900 miles) northeast of Jakarta. Windows in
a police station were blown out.
Much of the past Sulawesi violence
focused on nearby Poso in a conflict that drew Muslim
militants from groups such as the al Qaeda-linked Jemaah
Islamiah, a Southeast Asian network blamed for numerous
bomb attacks across Indonesia.
Some 85 percent of Indonesia's 220 million people are
Muslim. But in some eastern parts, Christian and Muslim
populations are about equal in size.
Picturesque Tentena, famed for its churches and surrounded
by clove-covered hills, lies 40 km (25 miles) to the
south of Poso. Police were checking vehicles leaving
Tentena, while security had been tightened. Most shops
had closed.
"I was standing in front of a store when suddenly
there was an explosion. I lost consciousness,"
said one victim, Jonathan, from his hospital bed after
being wounded by shrapnel.
TERRORISM WARNINGS
Religious figures called the bombings an act of terrorism.
"The people behind this do not want Poso to be
safe," said priest Renaldi Damanik.
Police said one suspicious package was found nearby
after the explosions, but added it was not a bomb.
The two explosions follow heightened warnings from
Western governments about terrorist attacks in the world's
most populous Muslim nation, although few foreigners
venture to the Poso region because of its history of
bloodshed.
On Thursday, the United States closed
all its four diplomatic missions in Indonesia because
of a security threat.
Attacks against Western targets and blamed on Jemaah
Islamiah include blasts at Bali nightclubs in October
2002 that killed 202 people, mostly foreigners, and
one last September outside the Australian embassy in
Jakarta that killed 10.
The Tentena bombings follow an attack by gunmen on
a police post in the Moluccas islands further to the
east that killed five police this month.
The Moluccas islands, 2,300 km (1,440 miles) east of
Jakarta, were also the scene of vicious communal fighting
between Muslims and Christians from 1999 to 2002 that
left more than 5,000 dead. A peace agreement was reached
there in early 2002. |
MADRID - Spanish police said on
Saturday they were investigating a report that Basque
guerrilla group ETA had placed a bomb in the Valle de
los Caidos, the burial place of dictator Francisco Franco
near Madrid.
The warning, issued in the name of ETA, which is seeking
a separate homeland, was given to Basque-language newspaper
Gara, a police spokesman said.
"Security forces are inspecting the area,"
he said.
No further information was immediately available.
Gara is the usual channel used by ETA to give bomb
warnings, as happened earlier this week when a bomb
exploded in Madrid wounding more than 50 people.
Valle de los Caidos, a huge mausoleum to the northwest
of Madrid, was hewn out of a mountainside over nearly
two decades by Republican prisoners after Spain's 1936-1939
civil war.
It houses the remains of Franco, the fascist dictator
who brutally repressed Basques in his rule of more than
30 years.
The bomb warning followed the release on bail on Friday
of Arnaldo Otegi, the leader of the outlawed Basque
party Batasuna. He had been ordered held on suspicion
of belonging to the armed separatist movement. |
A
restraint of liberty
Faced with a choice between market freedom and human
life, governments have chosen to preserve the former |
George Monbiot
Tuesday May 24, 2005
The Guardian |
The
British government recognises two kinds of freedom. There
is the freedom of the citizen, which it appears to perceive
as a threat to good order. It has permitted (through
the Serious Organised Crime Act) the police or courts
to ban any public protest. It is introducing identity
cards, restricting immigration, seeking to curb the right
of habeas corpus and extending antisocial behaviour orders.
Then there is the freedom of business.
Though the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise
are already incapable of dealing with tax evaders, Gordon
Brown is cutting 10,000 of their staff. Tony Blair is
trying to destroy the European working time directive,
which prevents companies from working their employees
to death. The draconian measures in the Queen's speech
restraining the citizen were immediately followed by a
promise to deregulate business. The government is prepared
to micro-manage us, while leaving the more powerful agents
- the corporations - free to manage themselves.
Like the patricians in Coriolanus, Tony Blair will "repeal
daily any wholesome act established against the rich,
and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up
and restrain the poor". For
business to be free, we must be kept in check.
This isn't, according to the high priest of this religion,
how it was meant to be. Adam Smith held that market freedom
was desirable for one reason: that it improved people's
lives. Where he perceived that it had the opposite effect,
he called for restraint. "Those exertions of the
natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger
the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be,
restrained by the laws of all governments," he wrote.
Governments have "the duty of protecting, as far
as possible, every member of the society from the injustice
or oppression of every other member of it".
Such warnings were of course ignored. Sixty years later,
John Clare surveyed the devastation wrought by the new
liberties. "Thus came enclosure - ruin was its guide
/ But freedom's clapping hands enjoyed the sight / Though
comfort's cottage soon was thrust aside / And workhouse
prisons raised upon the site."
But the most breathtaking contradiction of the past week
was the prime minister's demand for respect: for everyone
except those whose lives we are destroying. We might no
longer be allowed to wear hooded tops in public places,
but we will remain free to kill the people of south Asia.
Though Tony Blair has acknowledged that climate change
will radically alter human existence, there were no new
proposals to tackle it in the Queen's speech. Figures
published by the Office for National Statistics last week
show that greenhouse gas emissions from flights by UK
residents almost doubled between 1990 and 2003, while
emissions from private cars rose by 14%. Britain's carbon
dioxide production is supposed to fall to 80% of 1990
levels by 2010, but even before the air transport figures
are counted, it has risen in the past two years. Only
government intervention could put us back on course, but
Blair has already filled up his legislative programme:
his contribution to solving the problem will now, it seems,
be rhetorical.
It is not just that we are free to kill
other people; market freedom constrains us to do so. The
economy is so organised as to make it almost impossible
to do the right thing. If your village isn't served by
public transport and there is nowhere safe to cycle, you
have, for all the talk of freedom to drive, no choice.
If the superstores have shut down all the small shops,
you must give your money to a company whose purchasing
and distribution networks look like a plan for maximum
environmental impact.
So we are encouraged by the market and left free by the
law to inflict the most grievous harm that any group of
people has ever inflicted on any other. There are several
good reasons for supposing that climate change, within
the course of this century, will throw the world into
food deficit. The glaciers of the Himalayas, which feed
the great rivers watering the farmland keeping Asia alive,
are disappearing. As the temperature rises, plant growth
in the tropics is likely to slow down: already this appears
to be happening to rice crops in the Philippines. Drought
zones are expanding: even in the early 1990s the nomadic
people I worked with in east Africa were complaining that
the 40-year famine cycle had been compressed to four or
five.
Already, with a net food surplus, some 800 million people
on earth are permanently malnourished. With a net food
deficit, this figure could rise into the billions. We
will be responsible for this. By the time we reach the
end of our lives, every one of us, however kind and mild
and well-meaning we might be, will have been responsible
for the equivalent, in terms of human suffering, of a
medium-sized act of terrorism.
Climate change reverses Smith's central dictum: that
"by pursuing his own interest [a man] frequently
promotes that of the society more effectually than when
he really intends to promote it". Now the interests
of global society will be served primarily by restraint.
Everything we thought was good
turns out also to be bad. It is an act of kindness
to travel to your cousin's wedding. Now it is also an
act of cruelty. It is a good thing to light the streets
at night. Climate change tells us it kills more people
than it saves. We are killing people by the most innocent
means: turning on the lights, taking a bath, driving to
work, going on holiday. Climate change demands a reversal
of our moral compass, for which we are plainly unprepared.
It is hardly surprising that no government really wants
to confront us. It is left to Greenpeace, which occupied
the Range Rover factory last week, to restrict the exercise
of market freedom that Blair refuses to touch.
As Gordon Brown, the man who keeps the markets free,
says, "what is morally wrong cannot be economically
right". In terms of raw GDP, Adam Smith's "perfect
liberties" are economically right. No one who has
understood the threat of climate change could fail to
see that they are also morally wrong.
The Economist argued recently
that the best means of solving this problem is through
greater market freedom: this, of course, is the cure it
prescribes for all ills, even before it has investigated
the nature of the disease. The problem is that the deaths
of people in Bangladesh or Somalia cost us nothing: we
have no financial incentive to minimise them. Carbon
trading, in its current form, rewards the polluting companies
most responsible for the problem. It reminds me of the
contract won by Degussa, a company which had supplied
Zyklon B to the gas chambers, to provide the protective
coating for Berlin's Holocaust memorial: they are profiting
twice from mass death.
We can deal with climate change only with the help of
governments, restraining the exertions of our natural
liberties. So far, however, when confronted with a choice
between the two sacred commodities - market freedom and
human life - the one they have chosen to preserve is market
freedom. |
It ain't over 'til
la grosse dame chante, as they don't say in French, but
every French opinion pollster now believes it will be
a remarkable upset if the nation votes yes to the European
constitution on Sunday.
So what was it all about? Why are France's voters about
to reject a constitution that France asked for, negotiated
tooth and nail (getting almost all of what it wanted in
the process) and wrote (a former president, Giscard d'Estaing,
chaired the convention that drafted it)?
A treaty that, moreover, undeniably strengthens France's
position within the EU and incontestably marks major advances
over the union's previous efforts on some of the human
rights issues France holds particularly dear: it defines,
for example, racial and sexual equality and the protection
of children, as goals for the whole union.
It's a big question, and there are almost as many answers
as there are French voters who intend to say "non".
For my final French blog of the week, with two days to
go before R-day, here (in no particular order) is a doubtless
incomplete list of Why Just Over Half The French Are Saying
Non. It's been a great debate.
It is partly because:
- They detest their current government and are reluctant
to vote for anything that it proposes
- They are fed up with their entire political class,
on both right and left, which they feel is arrogant, self-serving,
removed from real life and has refused to listen to their
concerns for too long
- They believe the treaty is a blueprint for an ultra-liberal,
Anglo-Saxon Europe that will promote unfettered capitalism
- They believe it will degrade French public services
and cost French jobs
- They feel that when the president, the government and
the mainstream opposition combine to trumpet the merits
of something and to implicitly denounce its opponents
as half-wits who have understood nothing, it is their
moral duty to revolt
- They feel ditto, but even more strongly, when virtually
every newspaper, TV and radio commentator more or less
explicitly backs the constitution and expresses amazement
at the very possibility of a no vote
- They are worried about the expanded (and expanding)
union and about its impact on their lives, particularly
the arrival in France en masse of the key bogeyman of
this debate, the Polish plumber (don't even mention the
Turkish taxi-driver)
- They believe the French social model is preferable
to any other, is at threat, and is worth defending
- They have finally been asked to give their opinion
on a Europe that they feel has been constructed more or
less behind their backs, and they're damned well going
to give it
- They remember that every time over the past decade
that a French politician has had to make a difficult announcement,
he has blamed Brussels
- They do not feel that saying no will weaken France's
position in Europe, because they think it will trigger
a tidal wave of comprehension and support in a great many
other countries leading to a "salutary crisis"
that will eventually create a better, more social Europe
- They believe the text of the treaty can be renegotiated
to take account of France's concerns and objections
- They reject the argument of European institutional
chaos, saying the treaty of Nice will continue to apply
for as long as necessary until the mess is sorted out
- They feel they are not anti-European, just anti the
Europe they perceive as enshrined in this constitution,
so voting no is actually a pro-European act
- They recognise that the yes camp ran a rubbish campaign
led by a president and a prime minister with zero credibility
and a Socialist party that could not make its mind up,
and whose sole argument for far too long was to say no
to the no
- They realise that from the start, the yes was on the
defensive rather than the offensive; it admitted the text
was "not perfect" and (on both left and right)
was never comfortable handling the fundamental issue (very
sensitive in France) of economic liberalism
- They are reacting belatedly to the fact that no French
politician has ever dared tell them that France will,
in one way or another, have to adapt at some stage to
the phenomenon of globalisation, and that it will probably
involve some degree of pain
- Their very French instinct (and, up to a point, it's
one to be proud of) is: Resist
- They subscribe to the notion that "le compromis
n'est pas français"
- Being French, and not living in a colourless Anglo-Saxon
world, they were itching for the mother of all ideological
debates, the one that would finally pit the true socialism
against wicked liberalism, and the treaty gave them the
perfect opportunity because its clauses are open to interpretation
(that's the point of them, of course - they are not supposed
to be doctrine)
All that said, the bottom line seems, with plenty of
exceptions, to be that if your socio-professional situation
allows you to feel that, on the whole, the future is an
opportunity, you will probably vote yes. If, on the other
hand, your socio-professional situation leaves you feeling
threatened and anxious, you will probably vote no. |
PARIS, May 26 (AFP)
- The French are the champion holiday-takers,
enjoying an average 39 days of annual leave from work,
according to a new study, carried out in six major western
nations, which was published Thursday.
The poor old US worker languishes at
the bottom of the holiday heap with just 12 days off per
year, according to the study carried out by the US Harris
Interactive-Novatris research institute.
Among the other countries included in the survey, the
Germans came out second best with 27 days annual holiday,
followed by the Dutch (25), the British (23) and the Canadians
(21).
The study, published by the on-line travel agents Expedia
France,
pointed out that the French figure included an average
of nine days given to employees here as recompense for
working more than the statutory 35-hour week. |
WASHINGTON - A member of a terrorist
group linked to al-Qaida has been deported to Pakistan
after being detained for over a year, Homeland Security
investigators said Friday.
Pakistani native Khamal Muhammad told authorities he
was an armed guard and cook for Harakat ul-Mujahidin
- designated by the State Department as a terrorism
organization associated with al-Qaida.
Muhammad, 23, was living in the San Francisco area
when he was arrested in January 2004 for overstaying
his visa by eight months, according to U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, an arm of the Homeland Security
Department.
He entered the United States in 2001, a year after
ICE officials said he trained to use pistols, rifles
and grenades in a Harakat ul-Mujahidin camp in Afghanistan.
The leader of Harakat ul-Mujahidin is believed to be
a close ally to Osama bin Laden, ICE officials said.
The Justice Department did not pursue criminal charges
against Muhammad. "Knowledge
or connection to a terrorist activity may not be sufficient
to prove a terrorism crime," said Justice spokesman
Kevin Madden.
"Sometimes the best alternative from a national
security standpoint is to pursue other disruption efforts,
including removal from the United States."
Muhammad was held on immigration charges for 15 months
before being sent back to Pakistan last week, ICE officials
said. "We brought all the charges that we could,
using the administrative authorities that we have,"
ICE spokesman Dean Body said Friday.
Muhammad was deported May 17. Separately, ICE deported
another Pakistani man the same day after he finished
serving a 16-month sentence for lying to federal agents
about the whereabouts of a militant leader.
Hamid Sheikh, 41, had refused to help federal agents
in Philadelphia locate Agha Ali Abbas Qazalbash, who
authorities said is a member of a militant Shia organization
in Pakistan. The group, Sipah-e-Mohammed Pakistan, was
outlawed in Pakistan in August 2001.
Both cases "demonstrate how ICE is prioritizing
for removal those individuals who pose threats to our
national security," Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Garcia said in a statement Friday. |
You know, I hate to be accusatory,
but there comes a time when you've got to call people
out on their bogus logic. This incredible smoking gun
memo just came out, now we KNOW that Bush Lied to start
the war and that all the WMD threats were bogus, the
neocons were 'fixing the facts' to sell it to the gullible
American public. Why aren't all
honest members of Congress raising hell? Troops
are still dying every day - dying so Bush the Liar can
save face - we need to stop this NOW. Immediate action
is called for, protests now to Demand Congressional
Action.
It is up to US to Demand Action from Congress
And what do US anti-war groups think?
These 'progressive leaders' have called for protests
Sept 24-26.
Huh? Why September?
Bush lied, it's all come out, they stole $9 billion
and didn't investigate, they spread radioactive waste
across Iraq, and they PLANNED THE WAR IN 2002!!!
This equates to pre-meditated murder on a mass scale.
How much proof does one need? They lied, they're looting,
sinking our kids in debt - it's sick... and the biggest
US anti-war groups plan a protest this fall? All those
kids that are going to die between now and then... it's
ok because you're busy til late September?
Where is the logic in waiting 4 months?
It's too hot in the summer? College kids are getting
summer jobs? What possible reason could they have to
protest in September, rather than right NOW!
To me, it just seems logical that
this call for a late September protest is a Cointelpro
action. Cointelpro (peace group infiltration) was real
in the '70s, and everything Bushco is doing today is
much worse than what Nixon did in the '70s... It is
entirely possible, and judging by their actions probable,
that the biggest 'anti-war' groups are infiltrated,
if not setup by Cointelpro type influences.
It's not too hard a leap to make... they lied to start
the war, they knew they couldn't fool everybody with
the mass media lies, so they setup phony protest groups
to divert and weaken the movement. If you think this
is 'conspiracy theory' fine, but back it up with logic
- why should we wait until Sept 24th, why should we
allow another 2 troops to die everyday?
Anti-war Groups that have called for a protest in
late Sept. (as of 5/25):
* TroopsoutNow.org - Never heard of 'em before, but
this was the first email I received calling for 'unity'
rally in late September.
* A.N.S.W.E.R. also has a call for a National Day of
Action June 13th: Send Posada to Venezuela. ?! (Ever
notice that ANSWER always manages to get their protests
covered on national tv (C-span)- and the rallies always
fail to provide important facts, fail to make a real
case to the tv audience. ANSWER loves cheerleading chants-
very easy for the public to dismiss.)
* United for Peace and Justice- here's part of their
statement:
"It's time to hold all pro-war politicians accountable
for the deaths, the destruction, the lies, and the toll
on our communities from the illegal and immoral Iraq
war!"
....so join us in September?!
Simply put, does Karl Rove want us to protest now, or
in September? Why are the anti-war groups siding with
Karl Rove? That's two of the largest anti- war groups
in America, UfPJ and ANSWER, both committing to wait
until September to protest. Why? (Note: 'Progressives'
have scheduled the Take Back America conference in DC
next week as well. Activists from around the country
will travel to DC and whadda-ya-know, their Reps won't
be there as it's Home District Week. fyi- there's another
one the week of July 4th)
Here is an alternative to waiting until September
24th to raise your voice.
Take the Time to Give Congress A Piece of Your Mind!
Can't make it to DC, that's fine - all CongressCritters
are returning home next week, from Memorial Day, May
30 until Friday June 3rd. There should be informed citizens
in every state, giving their "Reps" and earful.
There are millions of Republicans and Democrats disgusted
with what Bush has done to America, they would all be
in the streets if they just knew when and where to be.
Every State is going to have a Memorial Day ceremony,
attended by a Senator or Congressman... why not show
up with a few friends and ask them some questions?
-Why didn't they investigate the 'lost' $9 billion?
-Why did they stiff our troops $2 billion for Health
care?
-Why did they vote for a "Soviet-style" National
ID Card?
-Why are they still giving halliburton more cost-plus
contracts?
-Why don't they care about The Memo and it's grave
implications?
-Why is lying about a dress impeachable, but lying
to start a war is
acceptable?
"Do something dammit! Use your power as a Senator
to commandeer a tv station, let's replace the sitcoms
with the truth and save our country!"
Every member of Congress swore
to uphold the Constitution. Lying to start a war is
as bad as it gets - impeachment proceedings should begin
immediately. If they don't hold Bush Accountable, those
members of Congress are guilty of treason, and they
too, must be held accountable. If possible, go
to their office and give them an earful next week! ;-) |
Two Army analysts who
mistakenly claimed that aluminum tubing bought by Iraq
was for centrifuges to enrich uranium received job performance
awards during the past 3 years. When the specifications
of the tubing were finally shown to the International
Atomic Energy Commission in March of 2003, Mohammed ElBaradei
was able to falsify the allegation within 24 hours, issuing
a statement that tubing with those specifications could
not be used for uranium enrichment. If Elbaradei could
see the falsehood of the claims almost immediately, it
is not plausible that US analysts could not. |
The [Ohio class] submarine
has the capacity for 24 Trident missile tubes in two rows
of 12. The dimensions of the Trident II missile are length
1,360cm x diameter 210cm and the weight is 59,000kg. The
three-stage solid fuel rocket motor is built by ATK (Alliant
Techsystems) Thiokol Propulsion. The US Navy gives the
range as "greater than 7,360km" but this could
be up to 12,000km depending on the payload mix. Missile
guidance is provided by an inertial navigation system,
supported by stellar navigation. Trident II is capable
of carrying up to twelve MIRVs (multiple independent re-entry
vehicles), each with a yield of 100 kilotons, although
the SALT treaty limits this number to eight per missile.
The circle of equal probability (the radius of the circle
within which half the strikes will impact) is less than
150m. The Sperry Univac Mark 98 missile control system
controls the 24 missiles.
The 14 Trident II SSBNs carry together around 50 percent
of total U.S. strategic warheads. (The exact number varies
in an unpredictable and highly classified manner below
a maximum set by various strategic arms limitation treaties.)
Although the missiles have no pre-set targets when the
submarine goes on patrol, the SSBNs are capable of rapidly
targeting their missiles should the need arise, using
secure and constant at-sea communications links. The Ohio
class are the largest submarines ever built for the U.S.
Navy, and are second only to the Russian Typhoon class
in mass and size. A single submarine carries the destructive
power more than nine times greater than all Allied ordnance
dropped in WWII.
Only the whales and dolphins know where these submarines
are when they are out on patrol. Not even the president
knows their exact location. "Somewhere in the Pacific."
When the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity with the
United States, the Cold War had entered a new phase. The
cold war became a conflict more dangerous and unmanageable
than anything Americans had faced before. In the old cold
war Americans had enjoyed superior nuclear force, an unchallenged
economy, strong alliances, and a trusted Imperial President
to direct his incredible power against the Soviets. In
the new cold war, however, Russian forces achieved nuclear
equality. Each side could destroy the other many times.This
fact was officially accepted in a military doctrine known
as Mutual Assured Destruction, a.k.a. MAD. Mutual Assured
Destruction began to emerge at the end of the Kennedy
administration. MAD reflects the idea that one's population
could best be protected by leaving it vulnerable so long
as the other side faced comparable vulnerabilities. In
short: Whoever shoots first, dies second.
If Iran needs to be invaded, and occupied, to prevent
them from ever developing and possibly using a nuclear
weapon against the mainland United States, then our parents
and grandparents wasted untold billions in producing nuclear
weapons and submarines to defend against just such a threat.
And we want our money back. |
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - King
Fahd, whose efforts to strengthen ties between Saudi
Arabia - the world's largest oil exporter - and the
United States provoked the wrath of Islamic militants,
was hospitalized Friday, apparently suffering from pneumonia.
Fahd's half brother, Crown Prince Abdullah, has been
Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler since Fahd suffered a
debilitating stroke in 1995. Abdullah is expected to
become king should Fahd die.
Fahd's hospitalization triggered reports that an emergency
had been declared in the kingdom. Officials said on
condition of anonymity that an alert had been declared
and that military leaves had been canceled or at least
discouraged. However, this was firmly denied by the
Interior Ministry.
"This is absolutely not true," ministry spokesman
Mansour al-Turki said. "There's no canceling of
leaves and no state of emergency or anything."
Saudi television station Al-Ekhbariya reported that
Abdullah assured Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during
a phone call late Friday that Fahd's health was good
and that the medical examinations were going normally.
The official Saudi Press Agency said that Fahd, who
is believed to be 82, was admitted to King Faisal Specialist
Hospital in Riyadh for unspecified medical tests.
But reports of Fahd's deteriorating health had been
blamed for sending the Saudi stock market tumbling 5
percent earlier in the week. Friday's news that he was
taken to a hospital helped push crude oil futures to
near $52 a barrel ahead of the U.S. Memorial Day holiday
weekend, the start of the American summer driving season.
Saudi Arabia's strategic importance
as the holder of the world's largest oil reserves and
the fact that it is home to Islam's two holiest shrines
means even a stable succession could impact world markets
and have widespread political fallout.
Asked about the king after a speech in San Francisco,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she did not
know the extent of his health problems.
"He has in fact had some health problems for quite
a long time. We have an excellent relationship with
Crown Prince Abdullah," Rice said.
With the portly, goateed Fahd only a figurehead in
the last decade, it has been Abdullah who has overseen
the kingdom's crackdown on Islamic militants after followers
of Saudi-born Osama bin Laden launched a wave of attacks.
Abdullah tried to rebuild relations with the United
States in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks; 15 of the
19 hijackers were Saudi.
At one Riyadh coffee shop Friday, patrons flipped from
channel to channel on a television set, intently seeking
information on Fahd's condition.
"This is all we're talking about tonight,"
said one man who would give his name only as Khaled.
"Everyone is talking about what is going on. ...
We're waiting for more news."
On the streets, there was no sign of an increased security
presence.
One official said doctors believe the monarch has pneumonia.
The official requested anonymity because of the sensitivity
of his position.
A royal office official said the king had a fever and
"water in his lung" but was expected to leave
the hospital soon. He did not elaborate. [...]
During his rule, Fahd brought the kingdom closer to
the United States. His most significant action was a
step that enraged many Islamic extremists - allowing
the basing of U.S. troops on Saudi soil after the 1990
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. [...]
In 1981, when he was still a crown prince, Fahd proposed
a plan calling for Israel to withdraw from all Arab
territory occupied in 1967, including Arab East Jerusalem.
According to that plan, Israeli settlements built on
Arab lands after 1967 would be dismantled. The West
Bank and Gaza Strip would come under U.N. control for
a limited period, after which an independent Palestinian
state would be set up with Jerusalem as its capital.
|
HAVANA, May 27 (Xinhuanet)
-- Cuban President Fidel Castro said his country will
continue fighting terrorism and the hostile policies of
the United States.
Cuba will insist that extremist anti-government figure
Luis Posada Carriles, who was arrested in the United States,
be brought to trial for his crimes against the island,
said Castro, as cited Friday by local state-run daily
Granma.
Posada, considered by Havana as a terrorist, was supposedly
arrested in the United States because of his illegal entry
into the US territory.
Castro said last week that the arrest of Posada in the
United States was only a farce as the accused is in the
payroll of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
He also said that Cuba, which faces a constant harassment
by the United States, has the capacity to handle its internal
affairs, including the raising of the living conditions
of its people.
Cuba said Posada is involved in an attack on a Cuban
airliner in 1976 that exploded while flying over the waters
of Barbados. The tragedy killed 73 people. He was also
involved in a series of bomb attacks in Havana in 1997,
which led to the death of an Italian vacationer. |
It is easy to see
how you could be tempted. It might start with genetically
screening your children for a lower risk of a hereditary
cancer. Or perhaps with a pill that promised to keep
your memory fresh and clear into old age.
But what if, while you were having your future children
engineered to be cancer-free, you were offered the chance
to make them musically gifted? Or, if instead of taking
a memory-enhancing pill, you were offered a neural implant
that would instantly make you fluent in all the world's
languages? Or cleverer by half? Wouldn't it be difficult
to say no? And what if you were offered a whole new
body - one that would never decay or grow old?
A growing number of people believe these will be the
fruits of the revolutions in biotechnology expected
this century. And they consider it every individual's
right to take advantage of these changes. They think
it will soon be within our reach to become something
more than human - healthier, stronger, cleverer. All
we have to do is live long enough to be around when
science makes these advances. If we are, then we may
just live forever.
This idea, known as transhumanism, is steadily spreading
from a handful of cranks and Star Trek fans into the
mainstream and across the Atlantic. But it is an idea
that Francis Fukuyama, famed for proclaiming the end
of history when US-style liberal democracy triumphed
in the cold war, has described as the most dangerous
in the world.
In a world at war with terrorism, divided by religious
fundamentalism and haunted by racism, sexism and countless
other prejudices, how is it that transhumanism has earned
the hotly contested title of the most dangerous idea
on earth?
According to Nick Bostrom's "The Transhumanist
FAQ", transhumanists believe "that the human
species in its current form does not represent the end
of our development but rather a comparatively early
phase". With the help of technology, we will be
able to enhance our capacities far beyond their present
state. It will be within our reach not only to live
longer, but to live better.
Bostrom, a lecturer at the University of Oxford and
the intellectual spearhead of the transhumanist movement
in the UK, sees it as the natural extension of humanism
- the belief that we can improve our lot through the
application of reason. In the past, humanism has relied
on education and democratic institutions to improve
the human condition. But in the future, Bostrom claims,
"we can also use technological means that will
eventually enable us to move beyond what some would
think of as ‘human'".
Transhumanists are utopians. They foresee a world in
which our intellects will be as far above those of our
current selves as we are now above chimpanzees. They
dream of being impervious to disease and eternally youthful,
of controlling their moods, never feeling tired or irritated,
and of being able to experience pleasure, love and serenity
beyond anything the human mind can currently imagine.
But dreams of eternal youth are as old as mankind and
no dreamer has yet escaped the grave. Why transhumanists
believe they are different - and why Fukuyama considers
them so dangerous - is because their hopes are based
on technologies that are already being developed.
Around the world, there is a growing number of patients
who are being helped through the insertion of electrodes
and microchips into their brains. These "brain-computer
interfaces" are returning sight to the blind and
hearing to the deaf. They are even enabling the completely
paralysed to control computers using only their thoughts.
According to computer scientist and writer Ramez Naam,
it is only a matter of time before we can plug these
interfaces into the higher brain functions. We will
then be able to use them not only to heal but to enhance
our mental abilities. Naam foresees a world in which
we can do away with paraphernalia such as keyboards,
accessing the enormous power of computers using our
thoughts alone. It is the stuff of comic books: he predicts
super-normal senses, X-ray vision, and sending e-mails
just by thinking about it. We could lie in bed surfing
the internet in our heads.
In his new book, More Than Human, Naam pins down the
defining belief of transhumanism: that there is no distinction
between treatment and enhancement. Practically and morally,
they are a continuum. In a breathless account, he details
the astonishing advances in medicine over the past 20
years. And he shows how the same technologies that could
cure Parkinson's or give sight to the blind could also
transform the able-bodied.
An ultra-liberal technophile, Naam gushes that "we
are the prospective parents of new and unimaginable
creatures". He is at his best when indulging his
futurological visions, skipping through some of the
trickier moral and social questions. He prophesies a
revolution in human interaction whereby we can send
pictures or even feelings direct into each other's brains
and can read the thoughts of those too young, stubborn
or sulky to communicate. Extrapolating from technologies
that are already being developed, he argues that there
will come a time when we are all linked together through
a single worldwide mind.
In the self-consciously sober prose of the Transhumanist
FAQ, a free online publication found on the World Transhumanist
Association's website (http://transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/faq),
Bostrom describes a yet more radical dream: that the
integration of brains and computers will one day enable
us to leave the confines of our grey matter altogether.
The ultimate escape from the deterioration that flesh
is prone to would be to have our minds "uploaded"
on to new bodies made of silicone. Our new metal brains
would be composed of super computers that would run
our thought processes many times faster than their fleshy
equivalents. We could even make back-ups of our minds
and have ourselves reloaded in the event of emergencies.
The FAQ also pins the hopes of transhumanists on areas
of research which are now only in their infancy, such
as nanotechnology. Theorists believe that one day nanotechnology
will enable us to build complex objects atom by atom.
These nanotech "assemblers" would work like
computer printers but in three dimensions. Just as a
machine now will print out whatever we ask it to in
two dimensions, in the future, these assemblers will,
like a magic lamp, instantly create whatever we ask
- anything from diamond rings to three-course dinners.
The holy grail of nanotechnology is to use it to help
us live longer and healthier lives. With the ability
to move atoms and molecules around, it will be possible
to destroy tumours and rebuild cell walls and membranes.
Ultimately, all diseases can be seen as the result of
certain atoms being in the wrong place and therefore
could be curable by nanotech intervention.
Transhumanists also foresee nanotechnology contributing
to a second scientific revolution this century - the
development of superintelligence. We will one day be
able to build computers that can radically outperform
the human brain. These superintelligent systems will
not only be able to do sums faster than we can, but
could be wiser, funnier and more creative. As the FAQ
puts it, they "may be the last invention that humans
will ever need to make, since superintelligences could
themselves take care of further scientific and technological
development".
But even the most optimistic of trans-humanists recognises
that not all of these breakthroughs will happen tomorrow.
So in order to be around to see this new dawn, many
of them are investing in expensive insurance policies.
For a few thousand pounds, you can ensure that as soon
as you are declared dead, your body will be flown to
one of the US's growing number of cryonics institutes.
There your cadaver will be frozen in liquid nitrogen
and thawed only when medical technology is capable of
undoing the ravages of whichever disease caused your
demise.
Needless to say, cryonics may not work - currently,
the technology does not exist to reverse the damage
caused by freezing, let alone lethal cancers. But there
is no question that it will improve the odds of a comeback
compared with the conventional alternative: rotting
in a grave. As Bostrom puts it, "cryonics is the
second worst thing that can happen to you."
The more laborious approach to sticking around long
enough to become transhuman involves changing to a radically
healthier lifestyle. In Fantastic Voyage: Live Long
Enough to Live Forever, published in the UK this month,
inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil and physician Terry
Grossman offer a 450-page step-by-step guide to achieving
immortality.
Like Bostrom and Naam, Kurzweil and Grossman are wowed
by the potential of new technologies such as genetic
engineering and artificial intelligence, and they sketch
the ways in which they might add to the human life span.
But for the ageing baby boomer generation to which they
belong, keeping going long enough to reap these benefits
is a real and pressing concern. The bulk of their book
is therefore dedicated to a detailed compilation of
cutting-edge health advice.
Although many of their recommendations - such as to
eat more veg and take more exercise - are the stuff
of all our New Year's resolutions, others are not for
the half-hearted. They prescribe a regime of "aggressive
supplementation" which would transform any kitchen
into a pharmacy. For some vitamins they advocate between
ten and 100 times the current recommended daily allowance.
But despite its extraordinary ambitions, Fantastic Voyage
is serious and extensively researched. Combined with
the boldness of its prescriptions, this puts it in a
league above most other health books on the shelf.
There is a long and colourful history of those who
have striven for physical immortality, from the advocates
of ingesting precious metals to the supporters of pickling
oneself in wine. The one thing these advocates have
in common is that they are now all 6ft under. To many,
transhumanism will seem a continuation of this age-old
and egoistic quest, updated with the modish language
of science fiction.
But to transhumanists it is a mission to save the world.
Every week, one million people die on this planet. So
instead of bans and moratoria, transhumanists want to
see greater investment in the kind of research that
could make death through disease and old age entirely
avoidable. In Kurzweil and Grossman's words, "even
minor delays will result in the suffering and death
of millions of people." For them, this makes it
a moral imperative.
Fukuyama disagrees. He counsels humility before meddling
with human nature. In last September's Foreign Policy
magazine article, when he labelled transhumanism the
world's most dangerous idea, he argued that "the
seeming reasonableness of the project, particularly
when considered in increments, is part of its danger."
We might not all buy the fruits of transhumanism wholesale,
but "it is very possible that we will nibble at
biotechnology's tempting offerings without realising
that they come at a frightful moral cost."
In his sophisticated and deeply researched book Our
Posthuman Future, Fukuyama expands his case, arguing
for caution on two main grounds. First, he believes
the transhumanist ideal is a threat to equality of rights.
Underlying the idea of universal human rights, he argues,
is the belief in a universal human essence. The aim
of transhumanism is to change that essence. What rights
may superintelligent immortals claim for themselves?
"What will happen to political rights once we are
able to, in effect, breed some people with saddles on
their backs, and others with boots and spurs?"
Fukuyama's second argument is based on what he calls
the miraculous complexity of human beings. After hundreds
of thousands of years of evolution, we cannot so easily
be unpicked into good qualities and bad. "If we
weren't violent and aggressive," he argues, "we
wouldn't be able to defend ourselves; if we didn't have
feelings of exclusivity, we wouldn't be loyal to those
close to us; if we never felt jealousy, we would also
never feel love."
Fukuyama's answer to the threat of transhumanism is
straightforward: stringent regulation. Despite the current
deregulatory mood in America, his views chime with those
of the anti-abortion right, a core constituency of the
Bush administration. When President George W. Bush first
came to power, he set up his Council on Bioethics to,
as he put it, "help people like me understand what
the terms mean and how to come to grips with how medicine
and science interface with the dignity of the issue
of life and the dignity of life, and the notion that
life is - you know, that there is a Creator".
Members of the president's Council on Bioethics, on
which Fukuyama sits, are widely credited with crafting
Bush's stem cell policy, which saw a ban on federal
funding for research on new stem cell lines. This propelled
the question of regulating biotechnology to the top
of the political agenda. During the Democratic Party
Convention last year, presidential candidate John Kerry
mentioned stem cell research more often than unemployment.
Much of the transhumanist literature has been written
in response to Fukuyama's book and the edicts of the
president's Council. Permeating their work is the sense
that technologically they are advancing steadily, but
politically the bio-conservatives are holding the centre
ground. They therefore oscillate between proselytising
the good news that technology is soon to free us from
the bonds of mortality and plaintively arguing for the
right to use this technology as they see fit.
In Citizen Cyborg, James Hughes maps what he sees as
these emerging parties in bio-politics and their relationship
to the ideologies and isms of the 20th century. A transhumanist,
he nonetheless believes it is possible to find a middle
way between the libertarians who advocate a technological
free-for-all and the bio-conservatives who want the
lot banned. He places himself within the traditions
of both liberal and social democracy, arguing that "transhumanist
technologies can radically improve our quality of life,
and that we have a fundamental right to use them to
control our bodies and minds. But to ensure these benefits
we need to democratically regulate these technologies
and make them equally available in free societies."
Contrary to Fukuyama, Hughes does not believe that
the biotech wonders of the transhumanist era will create
new elites. He argues that they could even strengthen
equality by empowering those who are currently downtrodden:
"a lot of social inequality is built on a biological
foundation and enhancement technology makes it possible
to redress that."
But despite his support for some regulation of transhumanist
inventions, Hughes, like Naam, is unrelentingly technophile.
At times this becomes a naive utopianism, such as when
he claims that "technology is about to make possible
the elimination of pain and lives filled with unimaginable
pleasure and contentment." He rightly argues that
in Our Posthuman Future, Fukuyama "treats every
hypothetically negative consequence from the use of
technology with great gravity, while dismissing as hype
all the possible benefits". Unfortunately, he does
not always recognise when he is mirroring that very
mistake.
The biotechnology revolution has caused Fukuyama to
revise his contention that we have reached the end of
history - history rolls on, but driven by scientists
instead of kings. What all these writers have in common
is the firm belief that the biotech era will shake up
the old political allegiances and create new dividing
lines. On one side will be those who believe such meddling
unnatural and unwise. On the other, those who want to
take the offerings of the biotech revolution and become
something more than human. Won't you be tempted?
|
Death could become
a thing of the past by the mid-21st century as computer
technology becomes sophisticated enough for the contents
of a brain to be "downloaded" onto a supercomputer,
according to a leading British futurologist.
However, he told the Observer newspaper on Sunday, this
technology might be expensive enough to remain the preserve
of the rich for a decade or two more.
Among other eyebrow-raising predictions by Ian Pearson,
head of the futurology unit at British telecommunications
giant BT, is the prospect of computer systems being able
to feel emotions.
This could eventually involve such things as aeroplanes
being programmed to be even more terrified of crashing
than their passengers, meaning they would do whatever
possible to stay airborne.
While the predictions might sound outlandish, they were
merely the product of extrapolations drawn from the current
rate at which computers are evolving, Pearson said in
an interview with the newspaper.
"If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050
we would expect to be able to download your mind into
a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem,"
he said.
"If you're rich enough then by 2050 it's feasible.
If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075
or 2080 when it's routine.
"We are very serious about it. That's how fast this
technology is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time
in IT."
As an example of the advances being made, Pearson noted
that Sony's new PlayStation 3 computer games console is
35 times as powerful as the model it replaced, and in
terms of processing is "one percent as powerful as
a human brain".
In views which those of a religious persuasion might
find hard to handle, Pearson said the next computing goal
would be to replicate consciousness.
"Consciousness is just another sense, effectively,
and that's what we're trying to design on a computer,"
he said.
"Not everyone agrees, but it's my conclusion that
it's possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman
levels of intelligence before 2020."
One of the "primary reasons" for such work
would be to give computers emotions, Pearson said.
"If I'm on an aeroplane I want the computer to be
more terrified of crashing than I am so it does everything
to stay in the air until it's supposed to be on the ground." |
BEIJING - After stonewalling for
weeks, China acknowledged Friday that two epidemics
had spread among its animal and bird populations, renewing
questions about its readiness to provide prompt information
about infectious disease.
The belated announcement came amid fresh criticism
that China's disease-surveillance system is inadequate
to deal with an avian flu virus that scientists say
may turn into a global pandemic among humans.
An outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease, which causes
livestock to waste away, was detected in cattle in five
regions of China, leading animal-health experts to slaughter
4,383 head, the nation's chief veterinarian, Jia Youling,
said at a news conference.
Rumors had spread in rural areas about the outbreak
as animal-health agents began culling cattle and spreading
disinfectant along roads. But the matter was subject
to a news blackout, and journalists were barred from
affected regions. As recently as this week, officials
said they knew nothing about a hoof-and-mouth contagion.
Jia defended the belated announcement about the epidemic
among dairy and beef cattle.
"There is nothing strange about the delay of 20
days," Jia said. "It takes quite a while after
discovering a disease to confirm it. ... We have controlled
the epidemic."
Highly contagious hoof-and-mouth disease affects cloven-hoofed
animals, such as pigs, cattle, sheep, goats and deer.
It doesn't affect humans.
China came under fierce criticism in 2003 for its slow
and secretive response to the outbreak of severe acute
respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which sprang up in southern
Guangdong province and spread to 30 countries, killing
more than 770 people, mostly in Asia. Since then, China
has pledged to be more open about outbreaks of infectious
disease.
In another announcement, Jia said avian flu had killed
1,000 migratory wild birds in the northwestern province
of Qinghai, but that it hadn't spread to poultry or
humans. The toll marked a fivefold increase from previous
reports China had offered to the Paris-based World Organization
for Animal Health.
Earlier this week, authorities dispatched experts to
vaccinate 3 million chickens, ducks and other poultry
in Qinghai, a sparsely populated province in the Himalayan
steppes that's a migratory route for birds between Central
Asia and India. Jia said the wild birds found dead include
bar-headed geese, cormorants and great black-headed
gulls.
An aggressive virus, avian flu has been plaguing poultry
and wild birds in about a dozen countries in Asia over
the past two years. While the virus hasn't yet mutated
to allow human-to-human transmission, it's killed about
40 people who came in contact with poultry. Scientists
say it's only a matter of time until a virulent new
strain of the virus, known as H5N1, begins to spread
among humans.
An international weekly science journal, Nature, devoted
a special issue this week to the threat of a global
avian-flu pandemic among humans. It criticized China's
lack of transparency and preparedness to deal with avian
flu.
"There is little doubt that China will be in deep
trouble if the flu pandemic were to strike in the next
few years. It has a moral obligation to its own people,
and to the world, to rectify the situation as soon as
possible," wrote a virologist, David Ho, of the
Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller University
in New York City. |
A lineup of leading infectious
disease experts warned Wednesday that the world is unprepared
for the health and economic consequences of an outbreak
of pandemic influenza that could spring from a lethal
strain of bird flu now ravaging poultry flocks in Southeast
Asia.
In commentaries published in the British science journal
Nature, doctors used some of the strongest language
yet to suggest that the bird flu virus known as H5N1
could mutate into a form easily transmitted among people,
creating a strain capable of killing millions.
"This virus has the potential
to trigger the next pandemic, which, judging from history,
is well overdue," wrote Dr. Anthony Fauci,
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases in Bethesda, Md. "Clearly, there is much
to be accomplished, and time is of the essence."
Flu pandemics are global outbreaks of virulent influenza
caused by a viral strain so different from those of
prior years that the human population has no natural
resistance to it.
The 1918 Spanish flu was such a pandemic, and it killed
an estimated 20 million to 100 million people around
the globe. The H5N1 virus has worried flu experts since
1997, when it first appeared in the Hong Kong chicken
markets as a lethal virus dubbed bird Ebola. After it
infected 18 people, killing six of them, Chinese authorities
ordered the slaughter of 1.5 million chickens, abruptly
stopping the outbreak.
In December 2003, H5N1 re-emerged in Southeast Asia
and has killed millions of birds and 53 people. Efforts
to contain the virus by culling birds have failed.
The virus is being spread by wild ducks, which carry
the virus but don't die of it.
In an interview, Fauci said the purpose of the Nature
commentaries is to draw more world attention to the
problem. "The ingredients (for a pandemic) are
starting to accumulate," he said. "This is
a situation that might go away this season, but it's
not going away forever."
Fauci said that federal spending on influenza preparedness
has increased to $419 million from $40 million over
the past five years but concedes he
is not satisfied with the United States' current level
of readiness. [...]
In another Nature commentary, famed virologist Dr.
David Ho of New York's Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center
argued that China needs to confront the emerging threat
of bird flu openly. "The world, China included,
must respond as if the next pandemic is imminent,"
he wrote. Ho estimated that up to 207,000 Americans
could die in it. "What will the death toll be in
China?" he asked.
Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's
Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, warned
in his Nature paper of the economic consequences of
a major pandemic.
"The world today is much more
vulnerable to the collapse of trade than it was in 1918,"
he wrote. He dubbed the potential economic fallout "pandemic
shock."
Osterholm wrote that an H5N1 pandemic
strain could rival the devastation of the 1918 pandemic.
Industrialized nations reliant on "just in time"
delivery of health care goods do not have enough medical
supplies to care for the sick. "Nor are there detailed
plans on how to handle the dead bodies whose numbers
will soon outstrip our ability to process them,"
he wrote.
Osterholm said the world's leading economic powers
need to confront the problem directly at the forthcoming
G8 meeting in Scotland. He calculates that, with the
world population swelled to 6.5 billion, a flu strain
as lethal as the one in 1918 could kill 180 million
to 360 million people worldwide.
Also an expert in terrorism, Osterholm
observed that there were ample warning signs that an
event such as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was possible.
Those warnings were fully recognized only after the
fact.
"People like myself are often seen as scaremongers,"
he said, "but I'm afraid we are doing this all
over again." |
The 192 members of the World Health
Organisation yesterday approved international rules
giving the WHO sweeping powers to tackle disease outbreaks
and other health threats.
The WHO said the need for new international health
regulations had been underlined by the 2003 outbreak
of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and the
more recent bird flu epidemic in Asia. The current regulations,
introduced half a century ago before the days of mass
air travel and global mobility, cover only cholera,
plague and yellow fever. |
SEATTLE - Make that an iced coffee.
While the Northeast was bidding farewell to unseasonable
temperatures in the 40s, residents of the northwest
corner of the nation dusted off the sunscreen and shorts
Friday as the National Weather Service issued its first-ever
heat advisory for Seattle.
The advisory covering the urban corridor from Tacoma
north to Everett was prompted by a second day of record
temperatures. Friday's high of
89 degrees at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport broke
a 33-year-old record for the date. Thursday's high -
also 89 degrees - broke a 58-year-old record.
Phyllis Cameron, 92, planned to keep cool with lots
of iced tea and a few gin-and-tonics. "I'm just
going to enjoy it on the chaise on my deck," said
the lifelong Seattle resident.
The weather service, however, was advising that people
should drink lots of water, stay indoors and out of
the sun, and check on relatives and neighbors.
The advice didn't seem to be taking. Winter-pale flesh
was on display in the city's parks, and the streets
were packed with people drinking iced coffee.
Seattle is among the cities added this year to the
weather service's excessive heat program. A heat advisory
means conditions could lead to heat stress in some people
and a warning indicates a higher possibility that people
will get sick or die.
The organizers of the annual Northwest Folklife music
festival welcomed the heat, which boosted attendance
for the normally slow first day. Concertgoers crowded
into Seattle Center, enjoying the music, the sun and
a giant fountain shooting cool water 120 feet into the
air.
Last year it rained, said Rafael Maslan, 20, a festival
board member.
Seattle-area temperatures were expected to cool over
the weekend, and Weather Service meteorologist Dustin
Guy said the heat advisory would not be renewed for
Saturday. |
NIJMEGEN, The Netherlands - Dikes
and dams will not be enough to stop the deluge. With
climate change, people will have to learn to live with
floods and tidal waves, scientists at an international
conference said.
"We have gone from the
point of defending ourselves from flooding to managing
floods and learning to live with them,"
said Eelco van Beek, who was among the 300 experts attending
a conference in the Dutch city of Nijmegen.
During the past two years, more than 600 floods have
been recorded in the world, causing the deaths of 19,000
people and damage valued at about 25 billion dollars
(20 billion euros).
The figures do not include the deaths of some 273,000
people when a tsunami hit the countries bordering the
Indian Ocean last December.
The conference in the Netherlands brought together
scientists and humanitarian specialists to try to find
ways of handling inundations, whether from the sea or
rivers.
"It is time to say good-bye to the traditional
approach of making ever higher dikes and ever stronger
pumps," said Melanie Schultz van Haegen, the Dutch
state secretary for water management.
A purely defensive strategy is "untenable,
especially because of the difficulty of defending against
the consequences of climate change," she said.
Pioneers in the fight to control water, the Netherlands
now prefers to allow rivers to overflow into specific
spill-over zones.
As for crises such as the Asian tsunami, the conference
called for a global alert and prevention system, including
the means to reach people who do not have access to
mass communication such as the Internet or telephones.
In Africa, for example, transistors have been handed
out to residents in certain areas at risk of flooding
so they can get the alerts. The operation is set to
be extended to southeast Asia.
"These systems can give an alert for all types
of disasters because a tsunami does not hit just once
in their lives," said Avinash Tigay, the Indian
director for water management issues at the
World Meteorological Organization. |
An earthquake measuring
4.2 on the Richter scale hit suburbs of the northern city
of Astara in the Caspian Sea province of Gilan Thursday
morning.
The seismological base of Geophysics Institute of Tehran
University recorded the tremor at 06:29 hours local time
(0159 GMT).
The tremble was registered at Astara outskirts, in an
area located in 38.40 degree latitude and 48.64 degree
longitude.
There was no report on possible damage to properties
caused by the earthquake. |
WOODS HOLE, Mass, May
26 (AScribe Newswire) -- An international team of scientists,
led by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of Oregon
and University of Sydney, has discovered an active underwater
volcano near the Samoan Island chain about 2,400 miles
southwest of Hawaii.
During a research cruise to study the Samoan hot spot,
scientists uncovered a submarine volcano growing in the
summit crater of another larger underwater volcano, Vailulu'u.
Researchers explored the unique biological community surrounding
the eruption site, and were amazed to find an "Eel
City," a community of hundreds of eels.
This new volcano, dubbed Nafanua after the ferocious
Samoan goddess of war, did not exist just fours years
ago, according to co-chief scientists Stan Hart, a geochemist
at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) , and Hubert
Staudigel, a geologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
With a growth rate averaging eight inches per day, the
volcanic cone has rapidly formed since the scientists'
last expedition to this area in May 2001. Nafanua now
stands at 300 meters, or nearly 1,000 feet.
"To actually have a documented case of an underwater
volcano that has been constructed within a known period
of time is very rare--this is one of those cases,"
said Hart. Scientists were tipped off to the volcano's
existence when they profiled the seafloor of the Vailulu'u
crater using multi-beam mapping. Existing maps of the
seafloor in the area gave little indication that this
volcano existed. When sound beams were directed into the
crater this time, they measured an unusually shallow depth.
These interesting results prompted further investigation
of the area using the manned submersible Pisces V--a seven-foot
sphere that can to dive to more than 6,000 feet, operated
by NOAA's Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory.
The water surrounding the volcanic cone is extremely
turbid due to hydrothermal activity and the vigorous vents
that produce this volcanic "fog" are obscured,
according to Staudigel. Although visibility from the submersible
was less than 10 feet, the researchers were able to observe
the unique biological community surrounding the newly
formed volcanic cone. Much of Nafanua is covered with
yellow "fluff," microbial aggregations that
are produced by microscopic life feeding on chemical energy
from the volcano's hydrothermal system. ---As this international
team explored the area, they discovered a number of large
communities of eels inhabiting the fragile cavernous rock
pillars surrounding the hydrothermal vent area. As the
submarine landed near this area, scores of eels, each
approximately one foot long, emerged from the rock caves
and crevices. The scientists named this novel marine hydrothermal
community "Eel City."
"At this point we do not know why we found such
extensive eel communities surrounding this volcano--it's
a mystery that we hope to learn more about on future cruises,"
Staudigel said.
Within decades, continued growth of Nafanua could bring
the summit of this volcano from its current depth of 600
meters to a depth of approximately 200 meters--close enough
to the sea surface that it could provide a potential hazard
to ocean navigation and coastal communities. Such hazards
may include the explosive reaction between red-hot lava
and seawater, or tsunamis that may be caused by the collapse
of the newly built volcano.
"It is a good idea for us to keep our eyes on this
area, but there is no real reason for concern about immediate
danger," said Hart. |
The March earthquake
that struck near Nias island off Sumatra was so powerful
that it created about 10 new islands, Japan's Geographical
Survey Institute said.
Researchers, led by Mikio Tobita, spotted the new islets
on images taken by the European Space Agency's Envisat
satellite, GSI officials said earlier this month.
The March 28 temblor had a magnitude of 8.7, but unlike
the Dec. 26 quake off Sumatra, it did not trigger killer
tsunami.
GSI researchers said they compared images taken in February
with those from April. They found the seabed near the
northwestern coast of Nias island upheaved about 2 meters
due to crustal movements caused by the quake.
This created about 10 new islands ranging in length from
100 meters to 1.5 kilometers, they said.
The quake also pushed the northwestern coastline out
to sea by up to 1 km, they said.(IHT/Asahi: May 28,2005)
|
LONDON, May 27 (IranMania)
- Two moderate earthquakes jolted cities in Iran's northeastern
and southeastern provinces on Friday but have left no
reported damage or casualties, IRNA reported.
An earthquake measuring 4.1 degrees on the Richter scale
hit the city of Raz in the northeastern province of North
Khorasan on Turkmenistan border early Friday.
According to the seismological base of the Geophysics
Institute of Tehran University, the tremor occurred at
00:22 hours local time (0752 GMT on Thursday).
The quake was felt in an area at Raz outskirts, located
in 38.06 degree latitude and 57.70 degree longitude.
Meanwhile, an earthquake measuring 3.7 degrees on the
Richter scale jolted the city of Zarand in the southeastern
province of Kerman early on Friday.
The seismological center of the Geophysics Institute
registered the tremor at 00:05 hours local time (0735
GMT on Thursday) at Zarand's outskirts.
There are no reports of damage to property caused by
the quakes, the report added.
Zarand was hit by a strong 6.6 magnitude earthquake on
February 22, 2005, which claimed over 600 lives and leveled
some 20 villages.
Iran is situated in one of the world's most active seismic
fault lines and quakes of varying magnitudes are of usual
occurrence. |
SOFIA, May 28 (Xinhuanet)
-- Heavy rains have swept across Bulgaria over the past
days, with some areas of the hardest-hit central-east
part having declared emergency, Bulgarian media reported
Saturday.
Torrential rains began to slam Bulgaria on Wednesday,
with the rainfall in some areas of the central-east part
hitting a 30-year high.
The heavy rains caused mountain torrents in central
Lovenchi, swamped 10 villages, cut off power and displaced
500 families in Osem and Vit, and cut road links north
Ruse.
In southeast Smolian, egg-size hailstones destroyed
large areasof crops and damaged many houses.
The towns of Ruse and Lovechi have declared emergency
due to the usual rainfall. Relief supplies are being sent
to the flood-hit areas.
Bulgarian meteorological bureaus have urged more flood-pretection
measures, saying the rainfall would continue for several
days. |
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