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P
I C T U R E O F T H E D
A Y
This
Reuters
photo of June 4th carried the caption: "Friday June 3,
A boy lies in Balad, Iraq, hospital after he got wounded in
a suicide car bomb attack on a Sufi religious ceremony."
Of
course, the irony of a young, innocent Iraqi victim of Bush's
"war on terror" lying in an Iraq hospital with a US
Flag emblazoned across his shirt was either lost on, or ignored
by, Reuters.
In the three and one half years
that this so-called war on terrorism has raged on, I
continued to be utterly dismayed at the amount of controversy,
conjecture and conspiracy theories that continue to
be embraced by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
While it is safe to say that most people don’t
believe the US military and the mainstream press that
dutifully follows along, it is astounding when
facts are presented, that a whole host of chatter,
gossip and speculation continues even from those who
claim to be among the most pious Muslims.
From the time I started JUS, not
a week goes by that we don’t receive an email
from a Muslim or a non-Muslim that continues to believe
that Sheikh Osama Bin Laden is connected to the CIA,
that 911 was a CIA (or Mossad) operation and that Al-Qaeda
doesn’t exist! While we may be able to
justify why non-Muslims think this way, the Muslims
have got to stop believing this conspiracy nonsense!
While the Panac document
give us real clues to the American agenda, over the
past three years we have translated and archived under
our Inside Bin Laden’s Department, hundreds of
pages of material so that Muslims and non-Muslims understand
where and how this conflict started, with some material
dating back to 1994.
The conspiracy theories that have been spun are easily
sold to the Muslims; they are buying it hook, line and
sinker because its is a means they can sit on their
rear ends and not have to participate in the battles
that are raging while still benefiting from a higher
living standard and better lifestyle outside the Middle
East.
Interestingly, the Muslims in the Middle East blame
Mossad and the Muslims in the West blame the CIA. Neither
is correct. The Al-Qaeda Strategic Plan To the Year
2020 (currently on our front page) clearly shows that
they have a plan too and this plan dates back to Sheikh
Osama bin Laden’s Declaration of War in 1996,
long before the Panac document!
The fact that the US hasn't caught Bin Laden is because
they aren't looking.
Of course they want war; the US is so arrogant that
they think they can use "terrorism" to take
over the Middle East but thank goodness a few Muslims
understand their obligations. Alhamdulilah, we have
the soldiers of Allah and Allah is the best of planners.
Even when presented with direct facts, the Muslim
will cry conspiracy. Last week’s press release
by Al-Qaeda in Iraq stating the Sheikh Abu Musab Zarqawi
had been injured is a prime case and point. Al-Qaeda
has always been factual in their statements but of course
the US military, the DOD, the MOD, mainstream press
and even the Muslims went to town on this. When news
finally broke yesterday that Al-Zarqawi was back in
command of the jihad in Iraq, it barely made news at
all and as I write this there are still reports that
Zarqawi is dead! While it is easier to spin a story
than it is to retract it, why is it that some still
believe the incorrect?
We all know the US war on Afghanistan
was planned before 911, we know there was no WMD in
Iraq, we know that Syria, Lebanon and Iran are next
and we know that war is coming to the whole Middle East
to establish greater Israel.
And we all know the "war on terror" is a means
by which the Fathers of Terrorism can accomplish this.
After all the lies that have been told, how can any
sane person believe that the US government, Britain,
its allies who should have long ago packed their bags,
are telling them the truth and how can they believe
a feudal mainstream press?
Ted Turner once said that the days of big production
crews would end and today’s politically controlled
media would end because you and I with DVD cams would
be out on the street capturing the real news and he
was absolutely right. If you want real news, you don’t
go to the US military that have a 50 year history of
lying or mainstream news that care about what their
stock is worth from advertising revenue, not the reader.
Yet even now, with uncensored
news sources, all the history of where the conflict
came from published, footage and first hand reports,
how can Muslims continue to insult the Mujahideen by
believing these engagements are carried out by the CIA
or Mossad or refer to all those defending Muslims lands
as "resistance fighters"? [...]
It really isn’t rocket science to know that
something is wrong when people start flying jets into
skyscrapers but it is surely much easier to cope with
if we blame it on "terrorists’ or dream up
conspiracy theories rather than look at where the breakdown
has come the resulted in these incidents. The worse
part is, the longer America keeps killing the more hatred
is being fueled. This cowboy mentality to resolving
problems is incomprehensible. In fact, the West as a
whole dismisses that they have had any hand in creating
the backlash of violence that can directly be attributed
to a wicked American foreign policy aimed at the resource
rich Middle East that is specifically designed to further
the military industrial complex. [...]
The conspiracy theories are hogwash and it’s
time to support our Mujahideen brothers as Allah commands
us to. If by presenting the real
truth of this war labels JUS as a "mouthpiece
for CIA propaganda"
because the Muslims refuse to believe that Sheikh Osama
bin Laden does not work for the CIA or Mossad, that
911 was not the work of the US government or Mossad
or that Sheikh Abu Musab Zarqawi is not a mythical character,
then it's time to take a reality check.
If at least one Muslim comes to know the truth and
rises to their obligation through our work, then I know
in my own conscience that I, and those with me, are
doing our part to serve to the best of our ability the
Lord of the Worlds, which is collectively, our first
and only consideration. |
(Liberty Forum) This professionally
managed website [Jihad Unspun]
with eyecatching design and graphics and daily news
features, video store and reporters emerged on the net
sometime after Sept. 11th 2001.
What really struck me as odd was
all the professional glitz of the website as well as
its deliberate attempt to look Arabic . . .
From what I know of pro-jihad websites, they operate
on a shoestring budget, provided they happen to find
volunteers and donors who are willing to risk being
deported and detained. They get kicked off from ISP
to ISP and use cheap frontpage templates. Real Jihad
websites try to imitate the West in web design rather
than coming up with colors that seem to resemble the
robes of a sand dune shape and Arabic shaped English
text. One such authentic website was the one run by
a well known Saudi dissident, Azzam.com. More about
Azzam later.
Now getting back to Jihadunspun (JUS), the Related
links tab first displayed the address of some Muslim
name in British Columbia Canada.
So right in our backyard we have a semi Al Qaeda operation
which unlike Azzam doesnt even lose its ISP, let alone
get shut down.
Next, take a closer look at the website.....This is
a very sophisticated operation and I am sure that even
some of its own Muslim reporters have no clue what is
going on. . . .
But again, as the graphic on its homepage portrays
Bush on one side and Binladen on the other. For
an agitated Muslim as well as reactionary goyim, the
NWO reinforces the assertion it made on Sept.11th by
bringing down those towers by "heated jet fuel
": The war of civilisations is on : Binladen after
grandly bringing down the towers now seeks to further
his Jihad on the West.
Secondly, unlike other genuine
Jihad sites, there is not even a whisper of conspiracy
regarding Sept 11th on this site. In other words,
1. The goyim must continue hunting "Al Qaeda"
2 The muslims should resume the "jihad"
on the West inaugurated by Binladen.
OR IN OTHER WORDS, NWO/ JEWISH CABBAL/ ILLUMINATI /SATAN/
CIA AGENDA! Notice how the tab "The players"
has only Bush Binladen and Co. whereas the Real players
are simply missing.
There is also another purpose. Suppose Bush is having
a real unpopular moment. Jihadunspun could furnish another
lab doctored video/audio recording of Binladen urging
war on Americans. This will serve to distract and at
the same time emphasise the need for a war. With its
Al Qaeda credentials, few would doubt the source.
Here is what I found in a Chicago Tribune article
Quote:
Some Web watchers, including Katz, believe the U.S.
government may be using the Internet jihad to spy.
They speculate that Jihad Unspun,
an English-language site that appears to promote terror,
may be a CIA creation, designed to find out who visits
or orders videos glorifying bin Laden.
A lengthy notice on Jihad Unspun denies the allegations,
saying the site is "a labor of love for Allah."
Bruce Kennedy, identified on the site as editor in chief,
said by e-mail that Jihad Unspun's operators
"are not doing any interviews with American press
at this time." A CIA spokesman denied the site
has any connection to the agency.
Labour of love for Allah? Doesnt that sound a bit too
wannabe muslim? Trust me, the muslims I know have Allah
an established factor. They dont take in this "pleasing
the emperor style which more depicts stereotypes of
muslims.Why do I get the same feeling when I bumped
into a male posing as 16/f/nyc?
Another tidbit.....a buddy
of mine started liking JUS and decided to get involved
on its fancy forums. Whatever got into him, the first
article he posted was about How the CIA backed Saddam.
Next day, he discovers he is a non-entity! no invalid
p/w or email notification....it simply says he is not
a member! If you guys have time, try it out.
Post some hard stuff on the CIA and tell me here how
long you lasted.
Here is some interesting stuff I found in the contact
information under domain name lookup.
Jihad Unspun
Bruce Kennedy, #300 - 1497 Marine Drive
West Vancouver, BC V7T1B8 Canada
1 604 913 2241, Fax: 1 604 913 2240
bkennedy@jihadunspun.net
Interesting.....who is Bruce Kennedy? That would be
a name I would like to keep as a handle. Well, as I
have said before, some time back there was a muslim
name and address in British Columbia (Canada). It seems
the muslim paypal screwed it up or something so now
they got this all white American convert to try explain
where all the expertise and $$$ are coming from.
The website is hosted by two servers, one is a rather
unheard of server in NWO backyard Canada
209.139.224.132
GT Group Telecom Services Corp. -Pacific
20 Bay Street, Suite 700
Toronto ON
M5J-2N8
Canada
1-416-848-2000
hostmaster@gt.ca
Apart from jihadunspun.com, These creatures even have
$$$ to keep jihadunspun.net registered in their name
on another Canadian server
24.83.123.12
Shaw Communications Inc.
Suite 800
630 - 3rd Ave. SW
CalgaryAB
T2P-4L4
Canada
ipadmin@sjrb.ca
1-403-750-7428
Now do you suppose These Canadian Companies would
be interested in hosting pro-Al Qaeda websites?
In addition, both servers are hosted through YOURGALAXY.COM
which seems to be some newfangled business AGAIN in
British Columbia Canada for providing streaming video
support for JUS Binladen videos! Here is what I found
about YOURGALAXY.COM
E-Tech Computers Inc.
#3080 - 8888 Odlin Cres.
Richmond, British Columbia V6X 3Z8
Canada
jason@gigasales.com
Boy thats a lot of $$$.....if JUS is a genuine Jihad
Site, then the Saudis must be pouring in money like
sand.
Now here's what happened lately..... Genuine
Jihad site Azzam.com smelt something wrong in wannabe
jihadi site JUS and sounded the alarm by publishing
articles titled "JUS is CIA". Since Azzam
is widely read, it had to be closed, or it would be
the end of an expensive well orchestrated operation.
For reasons unknown, Azzam.com was instantly shut down
and has been offline since then.
In order to counter the damage done by Azzam.com,
JUS published some damage control, which can be best
described as the work of some other "Bruce Kennedy"
whose experience with Islamic Arabs is Lawrence of Arabia
movies and Tintin comics. Dont be impressed by the dropping
of Koranic verses and Arabic lines. You can get Pakistani
muslims@ 5$ an hour to do that. I am posting the whole
article just in case JUS deletes it from its website
noticing clumsiness.
AND I INVITE ALL OF YOU TO TAKE A GOOD READ AND JUDGE
FOR YOURSELF WHETHER "BRUCE KENNEDY" WILL
PLAY A GOOD ARABIAN FEMME ONLINE OR SHOULD BE REPOSTED
BACK TO THE CIA RADIO STATION IN ALASKA. |
The
Fix Was In
Did Bush Deliberately Deceive America About Iraq? |
By Rep. JOHN CONYERS
June 6, 2005 |
We have reached a point where all
but the most delusional enthusiasts of the Iraq war
have now acknowledged that Iraq did not possess weapons
of mass destruction at the time of the U.S. invasion
and likely for over a decade preceding the war. Fox
News and the President were slow to acknowledge this
fact, but now have.
Unfortunately, it seems this rare consensus has lulled
many into failing to ask the follow-up question: why
were the President and other high-ranking administration
officials so definitive in their statements that Iraq
possessed WMD? This question is not of a merely historical
significance: we deserve to know whether these statements
were the result of a "massive intelligence failure"
as some have contended or a deliberate deception of
the Congress and the American people.
Essentially, the question boils down to what lawyers
call "mens rea". Before a defendant can be
convicted of a crime the judge or jury must find not
only that the defendant committed the wrongful act but
also did so with a state of mind indicating culpability.
In the case of a fraud, the jury must find that there
was intent to deceive. In the case of Iraq, the weight
of evidence continues to accumulate indicating that
the American people and Congress may well have been
the victims of a deliberate deception.
On page A26 of the Sunday, May 22 edition of the Washington
Post, under the headline "Prewar Findings Worried
Analysts," we learned that four days before the
President made the now retracted claim that Iraq was
trying to buy "significant quantities" of
uranium from Africa, the National Security Council thought
this case was so weak that it put out a frantic call
for new intelligence.
In the same article, we learned that before an Oct.
7, 2002 Presidential speech in which the President claimed
there was a potential threat to the U.S. by Iraq through
unmanned aircraft "that could be used to disperse
chemical or biological weapons," and a contemporaneous
claim to Congress by Vice President Cheney and then-CIA
Director George Tenet that this was the "smoking
gun" justifying the war, " the CIA was still
uncertain whether the [source of the information] was
lying."
On page A1 of the Saturday, May 28 edition of the Washington
Post, under the headline "Analysts Behind Iraq
Intelligence Were Rewarded", we learned that the
analysts who pushed the now discredited claim that Iraq's
purchase of aluminum tubes was for the purpose of furthering
a nuclear weapons program, have been richly rewarded
for this conspicuous failure, receiving job performance
rewards in each of the three years since this grave
error.
The same article quotes "some current and former
officials" as generally stating "the episode
shows how the administration has failed to hold people
accountable for mistakes on prewar intelligence."
Early this morning on the Associated Press wire, under
the headline "Bolton Said to Orchestrate Unlawful
Firing," we learn that the President's nominee
to be Ambassador to the United Nations once again exercised
his unique diplomatic talents, flying "to Europe
in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control
agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing
of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal
has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved."
The diplomat's sin? He was "trying
to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That
might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi
weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war."
Thus, absent any contradictory evidence, in the past
two weeks alone (leaving out the reports of the last
three years), we have a pretty clear pattern. This Administration
had a cover story, namely that a clear and present danger
to the United States was posed by Iraq's WMD, for something
they knew they wanted to do: go to war with Iraq. Those
who brought forward the weight of evidence disputing
these claims were first ignored and later punished.
Those who assisted in the cover story were rewarded.
Sounds like the intelligence and facts
were being "fixed" around the policy, as the
Downing Street Minutes claim. That sounds like deliberate
deception to me.
John Conyers represents the Michigan's 14th Congressional
District. |
Many of the nation's newspaper
editorialists have roused themselves from seeming acceptance
of the continuing slaughter in Iraq to voice outright
condemnation of the war.
Suddenly there seems to be something in the air --
the smell of death? Or something in the water -- blood?
In any case, this past week, widely scattered newspaper
editorialists roused themselves from seeming acceptance
of the continuing slaughter in Iraq to voice, for the
first time in many cases, outright condemnation of the
war.
While still refusing to use the "W"
word in offering advice to Dubya -- that is, "withdrawal"
-- some at least are finally using the "L"
word, for lies.
Memorial Day seemed to bring out the anger in some
editorial writers, who at that time are normally afraid
to say anything about a current conflict that might
seem to slight the brave sacrifices of men and women,
past and present. Maybe it was the steadily growing
Iraqi and American death count, or the increasing examples
of White House "disassembling" (to quote the
president this week), or the horror stories emerging
from Gitmo.
Or perhaps it's a hidden trend that might have even
more impact than the rest: the writing on the wall spelled
out by plunging military recruitment rates. That only
adds to the sense that, overall, the Iraq adventure
has made America far less safe in this world.
For whatever reason, it's possible that more than a
few editorial pages may finally be on the verge of saying
"enough is enough." Perhaps
they might even catch up with their readers, as the
latest Gallup polls find that 57% feel the war is "not
worth it," and nearly as many want us to start
pulling out troops, not sending more of them.
There were numerous signs of editorial unrest in the
past week, too many to cite. The Sun of Baltimore, in
its Memorial Day editorial, declared: "If the president
truly wished to honor their memory, he would demonstrate
to the nation that the government that has botched so
much of the war at least has some inkling as to how
to draw it to a successful conclusion -- so that the
dead will not have died in vain." The
Minneapolis Star-Tribune called Iraq "an unnecessary
war based on contrived concerns. ... President Bush
and those around him lied, and the rest of us let them.
Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes."
Steve Chapman, syndicated columnist and editorial writer
for the Chicago Tribune (and generally considered a
conservative), on Thursday declared: "The dilemma
the U.S. faces in fighting the insurgents is that military
methods are not enough to solve the problem and may
make it worse. If the movement is a reaction to the
U.S. military presence, keeping American troops in Iraq
amounts to fighting a fire with kerosene.
"That explains why the longer we stay, the more
suicide attacks we face. And it suggests that the only
feasible strategy is to withdraw from Iraq and turn
the fight over to the Iraqi government. The alternative
is to stay and keep doing what we've been doing for
the last two years. But that approach has shown no signs
of fostering success. It only promises to raise the
cost of failure."
But perhaps the most powerful denunciation came from
an unlikely source, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
An editorial in that Hearst paper this past Wednesday,
just after Memorial Day, really thundered, and deserves
reprinting here:
President Bush was among the 260,000 graves at Arlington
National Cemetery when he said it. But it was clear
Monday that the president was referring to the more
than 1,650 Americans killed to date in Iraq when he
said, 'We must honor them by completing the mission
for which they gave their lives; by defeating the
terrorists.'
Bush insists on clinging to the
thoroughly discredited notion that there was any connection
between the old Iraqi regime -- no matter how lawless
and brutal -- and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,
2001.
U.S. military action against an Afghan regime that
harbored al-Qaida was a legitimate response to the
9/11 attacks. The invasion of Iraq was not.
As of Memorial Day 2003, Bush had declared major
combat operations at an end, predicted that weapons
of mass destruction would be found and that U.S. forces
were in the process of stabilizing Iraq. One hundred
sixty U.S. troops had died.
The U.S. death toll has grown more than tenfold.
No weapons of mass destruction were found. More than
700 Iraqis have been killed since Iraq's new government
was formed April 28.
Bush said of the insurgents at a news conference
yesterday, 'I believe the Iraqi government is plenty
capable of dealing with them.'
Of course, this is the same president that assured
the world that military intervention in Iraq was a
last resort and that the United States would make
every effort to avoid war through diplomacy. Giving
lie to that as well is the so-called Downing Street
War Memo, which shows that as early as July 2002,
'Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action,
justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD
... the intelligence and facts were being fixed around
the policy.'
Perhaps all presidents' remarks in military graveyards
are by nature self-serving. But few have been so callow
as the president's using the deaths of U.S. troops
in his unjustified war as justification for its continuance.
At the close of the editorial online, the paper polled
readers, asking if they thought it was "time to
begin the careful but quick withdrawal of American forces
from Iraq?" These highly
unscientific surveys usually should be ignored. But
the result in this case, from over 2,600 votes, was
so one-sided it deserves mention: Nearly 92% called
for the beginning of a pullout. |
Liberate
America!
25 Reasons to Impeach George W. Bush |
By GARY STEVEN CORSERI
June 6, 2005 |
Among other things, the U.S. Declaration
of Independence is a lengthy bill of particulars against
the "abuses and usurpations" of King George
III. If the revolutionary founders had had their own
government, Jefferson would have used his writing skills
to frame an impeachment bill. Among the "abuses"
T.J. cited was the King's refusal to "Assent to
Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public
good." If the colonists were riled enough over
taxes on stamps and tea to shake the world with revolution,
what will their inheritors do with the "usurpations"
of our present Chief Executive? As Jefferson wrote,
"Let facts be submitted to a candid world":
1. He lied us into war in Iraq. According to the U.S.
media-ignored British "Downing Street Memo,"
he "fixed" intelligence around a pre-determined
policy of preemptive war. Results: 100,000 Iraqi civilian
deaths; about 1800 U.S. soldiers dead in two wars, 100s
of thousands wounded and traumatized.
2. Under his watch, the U.S. suffered its worst terrorist
attack on its soil. He opposed an official investigation,
then stalled for months on testifying before a hand-picked
committee. Finally testified behind closed doors.
3. He was "elected" under dubious circumstances
in 2000.
4. He was "elected" under dubious circumstances
in 2004.
5. He has approved (and his Attorney General Gonzales
has re-defined) torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram
and elsewhere, while simultaneously opposing the International
Criminal Court established to check such abuses. According
to Amnesty International, the United States has established
a Soviet-style "gulag" of torture around the
world.
6. He failed to support the Kyoto Protocols, reducing
greenhouse gases, but worked to open up Alaska's ANWR
to drilling-despoiling an eco-system and increasing
greenhouse gases.
7. He chose Halliburton toady Dick Cheney to be his
running mate-twice.
8. He has attempted to pack the courts with ideologue-judges
intent on overthrowing Roe v. Wade, and institutionalizing
the police-state abuses of Patriot Acts I and II.
9.His "No Child Left Behind" education policies
have replaced learning with testing and allowed military
recruiters access to our schools, cajoling our children
with military options before their minds have had a
chance to open, question and challenge.
10.He is attempting to dismantle the Social Security
system that has ensured "peace and freedom"
for tens of millions of working Americans for seven
decades ("peace" of mind and "freedom"
from economic crises)-- rights hard-won by Labor and
Progressives in decades-long struggles.
11. He has allied himself with Right-wing ideologues
to curtail or abolish stem-cell research vital to the
conquest of debilitating and fatal diseases.
12. He has failed to develop a coherent energy policy-except
to prosecute wars for other peoples' resources. He fails
to acknowledge the reality and impending disasters of
Global Warming.
13. He has continued the Globalization project of his
predecessors: outsourcing jobs, hollowing our middle
class.
14. He has undermined the legitimate protective protocols
of the C.I.A., politicizing the agency, awarding positions
on the basis of ideological orthodoxy rather than merit
and astute analysis.
15. He has subjugated his Administration to Neocon
ideologues like Richard Perle, William Kristol and Douglas
Feith; men who have endorsed the "settlement,"
expansionist and Wall-them-in policies of Ariel Sharon,
sowing the seeds of anti-Arab racism, war and destruction
in the Middle East for generations to come.
16. In spite of his rhetoric about freedom and democracy,
he has allied himself with dictators in Pakistan, Uzbekistan,
Egypt and elsewhere. He has increased the flow of arms
to these states and others, fomenting instability, turmoil
and war.
17. He chose Rumsfeld as DoD Secretary twice, in spite
of Rumsfeld's obvious failure to adequately plan for
the post-Saddam era in Iraq, inducing massive "collateral
damage," the looting of ancient treasures, and
infrastructure destruction in a country we were legally
and morally bound to rehabilitate.
18. He endorses the weaponization of space, "Rods
from Gods," and other exotic, Star-Wars technologies
to establish a twenty-first century American global
empire that is doomed to create an arms race with China
and other opposing coalitions, sowing discord and wasting
the resources of the world.
19. He has presided over the most egregious media consolidation
in the nation's history. While we have had "yellow
journalism" and other media abuses throughout our
two centuries of Republic/Empire, we have never suffered
the consolidation of power that we have today. He has
presided over the emasculation and cowering of PBS,
while his disinformation troops have peddled fraudulent
stories and comments to "reporters" like Judith
Miller, Armstrong Williams and Jeff Guckert-"Gannon,"
poisoning the well of information, adding to the general
confusion and Goebbelsization of our news.
20. He lied about, misled, or misunderstood the astronomical
costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He continues
to do so, diverting tax money for education, health
care, the EPA, transportation and social infrastructure
into war-making and destruction.
21. He has continued and enlarged the depraved Clinton
policy of using depleted uranium on the battlefield;
a policy bound to cause massive suffering and death
to Americans and others for generations to come.
22. He has alienated our traditional allies and more
than a billion Muslims around the world. He has ransacked
the good will extended to the nation after the 9/11
attacks, leading a crusade of vengeance and reprisal,
most often against innocents, judging without sufficient
evidence, arrogating to himself a crooked, self-righteous
Texas sheriff's power to execute without justice.
23. Under his watch, millions more Americans have been
added to the ranks of the uninsured while health-care
costs have exploded. His answer to these and other pressing
social problems appears to be faith-based charities-in
other words, preaching to the choir while stealing from
the pews.
24. Under his watch, the North Koreans have, apparently,
developed eight nuclear weapons and Israel has continued
to increase and refine its arsenal-now estimated as
high as five hundred.
25. He has murdered the English language.
Gary Corseri has published 2 novels, 2 poetry collections,
the Manifestations anthology [edited], and his work
has appeared at CounterPunch,Common Dreams, The New
York Times, Village Voice, Axis of Logic, Dissident
Voice, Redbook and elsewhere. His dramas have been presented
at PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere. He can be reached at:
corseri@verizon.net. |
WASHINGTON -- President Bush on
Wednesday left open the possibility that the U.S. prison
camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be shut down.
"We're exploring all alternatives as to how best
to do the main objective, which is to protect America,"
Bush told Fox News Channel's Neil Cavuto in an interview.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he did not
know of anyone in the administration who was considering
closing Guantanamo.
The military provides "a stable and secure and
safe environment," he told reporters traveling
with him in Norway. "Information gained from detainees
there has saved the lives of people from our country
and from other countries." [...] |
Rendition is one of those words
that bureaucracies craft to hide official monstrosities.
As an artistic term, rendition means "a performance
of a dramatic role." Webster's 1913 dictionary
defines rendition as "the act of surrendering fugitives
from justice at the claim of a foreign government."
In its brand new usage, rendition has come to mean surrender
of aliens. It is a quasi-legal practice under which
US intelligence agencies "render terrorists"
to friendly governments, mostly in the Islamic world,
for detention and interrogation and more.
Ghastly stories have surfaced how Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan,
Uzbekistan, and other Muslim states abuse and torture
rendered men, inflicting more indignities on them than
Muslim inmates have suffered at Guantanamo. Beatings,
physical suspensions, electric shocks, and other cruel
and degrading treatments have been reported. International
human rights groups claim that in Uzbekistan two rendered
prisoners were boiled to death. Renditions
are now firmly associated with America, torture and
Muslim states. (See, Jeffrey St. Clair's Torture
Air.).
More than anything else, the law (or lawlessness) around
renditions is most intriguing. Rendered men cannot be
lawfully extradited because they have committed no crime
in the Muslim state to which they are rendered. Sometimes,
the friendly government has no clue about the identity
or activities of the person before he is rendered. Sometimes,
the rendered man is not even a national of the receiving
state. Hence the contrast between extradition and rendition
is vivid. Extradition is an open
procedure under which a fugitive is lawfully sent to
a requesting state where he has committed a serious
crime. Rendition is a covert
operation under which even an innocent person may be
forcibly transferred to a state where he has committed
no crime. It is like a bully dispatching a helpless
prey to another bully in another town.
Rendition is not even deportation. A person may be
deported under US immigration laws for a variety of
reasons including charges of terrorism. Deportation
however implies that the person is in the United States.
Rendition is not territorial.
US agencies can abduct a Muslim anywhere in the world
and render him to a friendly government. In December
2003, US agents pulled Khaled el-Masri from a bus on
the Serbia-Macedonia border and flew him to Afghanistan
where he was drugged and tortured. But the man was a
tad lucky. Though born in Lebanon, el-Masri had obtained
German nationality. Germany came to his rescue for he
was no terrorist. El-Masri was released, though he would
still be languishing in Afghan torture chambers if he
were, say, the national of a Muslim state that does
not care.
Defying international treaties and US laws, rendition
works on dark fringes of legality. The Torture Convention
specifies that no signatory state shall expel, return
or extradite a person to another state where there are
substantial grounds for believing that he would be in
danger of being subjected to torture. The Convention
is so strict in its prohibition of torture that it allows
no exceptions under which any such transfer may be justified.
Additionally, it is a crime under US laws to commit
torture outside the United States. If the victim dies
of torture, the crime is punishable with death. It is
also a crime for US officials to conspire to commit
torture outside the United States. Under
both the Convention and US laws, therefore, rendition
is strictly prohibited if the rendered person would
be subjected to torture.
Sadly, such has become the nature of law in the United
States that fertile minds trained in top law schools
can find believable exceptions to even clearest provisions
of law. Law is a game and talent lies in finding loopholes.
Accordingly, the laws against shipping detainees to
torture chambers tickle the legal imagination of government
lawyers and, surely, they find ways to dodge legal texts.
To escape the reach of law, US agents seek verbal assurances
from friendly governments that no torture would be committed.
Friendly governments nod and receive the cargo. No one
winks an eye but all know the script. As soon as men
are thrown into torture chambers, lips are sealed. US
agencies do not ask and friendly governments do not
tell what is being done to "terrorists."
One might ask why the US is abducting and rendering
men to friendly states. There are many answers. Sometimes,
men are rendered because they have nothing more to tell
to US agents but still out of caution they cannot be
freed; it is cheaper for the
US to detain these men in Muslim prisons than here in
America. Sometimes, the rendered men need 'pressure'
to disgorge their stories, and the torture techniques
employed in friendly states are just perfect to do the
job. Sometimes, men are rendered as a loyalty test,
just to make sure that Muslim intelligence agencies
are indeed supportive of the US war on terror. Sometimes,
it is safer to tuck away minor terrorists elsewhere
because lawsuits in America may pester for truth and
embarrass the government. No such pestering exists
in friendly Muslim states where pro-American, autocratic
governments are well removed from public accountability
and would love to oblige their friends and masters.
And for American neo-conservatives, rendition stories
are fun. Don't be surprised if at dinner tables, they
drink and laugh and talk about Muslims degrading Muslims.
Some of them are even talking about closing the Muslim
prison at Guantanamo. Thomas Friedman of New York Times,
who vigorously supported the neo-conservative invasion
of Iraq, recently wrote a column suggesting that the
Guantanamo camp be shut down for it has become "corrosive"
for America's standing abroad. Many good-hearted Americans
who have nothing to do with neo-conservatives also favor
the closure of this eyesore.
Ironically, though, the timing
for shutting down the Guantanamo Gulag is near perfect.
The inmates have emptied their minds and their spirits
are broken beyond repair. They are no longer useful
though they are still considered dangerous. The
time is ripe for their renditions. Men
in orange, shown coiled in fetal position, will perhaps
go home where, surely, no Quran will be desecrated but
where their limbs will be hung on hooks, their genitals
will be shocked with erratic electricity, and their
fingernails will be plucked off with primitive pliers.
America will get rid of its guilt, claiming moral superiority
over the rest of the world. And
the name of Islam will be further smeared with barbaric
details coming from torture chambers, serving America,
but maintained by friendly governments in not Kafir
but Muslim states.
Ali Khan is a professor of law at Washburn University
School of Law in Topeka, Kansas. His book, A Theory
of International Terrorism, will be published in 2005
by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Send comments to ali.khan@washburn.edu. |
Nixon's
empire strikes back
Bush's imperial project has succeeded by learning the
chief lesson of Watergate - muzzle the press |
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday June 9, 2005
The Guardian |
The unveiling of the
identity of Deep Throat - Mark Felt, the former deputy
director of the FBI - seemed to affirm the story of Watergate
as the triumph of the lone journalist supported from the
shadows by a magically appearing secret source. Shazam!
The outlines of the fuller story we now know, thanks not
only to Felt's self-unmasking but to disclosures in the
Albany Times Union of upstate New York, unreported so
far by any major outlet. Felt was not working as "a
disgruntled maverick ... but rather as the leader of a
clandestine group" of three other high-level agents
to control the story by collecting intelligence and leaking
it. For more than 30 years the secrecy
around Deep Throat diverted attention to who Deep Throat
was rather than what Deep Throat was - a covert FBI operation
in which Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward was almost
certainly an unwitting asset.
When FBI director J Edgar Hoover died on May 2 1972,
Felt, who believed he should be his replacement, was passed
over. The Watergate break-in took place a month later.
As President Nixon sought to coerce the CIA and FBI to
participate in his increasingly frantic efforts to obstruct
justice, Felt, who had access to raw intelligence files,
organised a band of his most trusted lieutenants and began
strategic leaking. The Felt op, in fact, was part of a
widespread revolt of professionals throughout the federal
government against Nixon's threats to their bureaucratic
integrity.
Nixon's grand plan was to concentrate executive power
in an imperial presidency, politicise the bureaucracy
and crush its independence, and invoke national security
to wage partisan warfare. He intended to "reconstitute
the Republican party", staging a "purge"
to foster "a new majority", as his aide William
Safire wrote in his memoir. Nixon himself declared in
his own memoir that to achieve his ends the "institutions"
of government had to be "reformed, replaced or circumvented.
In my second term I was prepared to adopt whichever of
these three methods - or whichever combination of them
- was necessary."
But now George Bush is building a leviathan beyond Nixon's
imagining. The Bush presidency is the highest stage of
Nixonism. The commander-in-chief has declared himself
by executive order above international law, the CIA is
being purged, the justice department deploying its resources
to break down the wall of separation between church and
state, the Environmental Protection Agency being ordered
to suppress scientific studies and the Pentagon subsuming
intelligence and diplomacy, leaving the US with blunt
military force as its chief foreign policy.
The three main architects of Bush's imperial presidency
gained their formative experience amid Nixon's downfall.
Donald Rumsfeld, Nixon's counsellor, and his deputy, Dick
Cheney, one after the other, served as chief of staff
to Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, both opposing congressional
efforts for more transparency in the executive.
With perfect Nixonian pitch, Cheney remarked in 1976:
"Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle
doesn't do any good if you lose." During the Iran-contra
scandal Cheney, a Republican leader in the House of Representatives,
argued that the congressional report denouncing "secrecy,
deception and disdain for the law" was an encroachment
on executive authority.
The other architect, Karl Rove, Bush's senior political
aide, began his career as an agent of Nixon's dirty trickster
Donald Segretti - "ratfuckers" as Segretti called
his boys. At the height of the Watergate scandal, Rove
operated through a phoney front group to denounce "the
lynch-mob atmosphere created in this city by the Washington
Post and other parts of the Nixon-hating media".
Under Bush, the Republican Congress has abdicated its
responsibilities of executive oversight and investigation.
When Republican senator John Warner, chairman of the armed
services committee, held hearings on Bush's torture policy
in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations, the White
House set rabid House Republicans to attack him. There
have been no more such hearings. Meanwhile, Bush insists
that the Senate votes to confirm John Bolton as US ambassador
to the UN while refusing to release essential information
requested by the Senate foreign relations committee.
One of the chief lessons learned from Nixon's demise
was the necessity of muzzling the press. The Bush White
House has neutralised the press corps and even turned
some reporters into its own assets. The disinformation
on WMD in the rush to war in Iraq, funnelled into the
news pages of the New York Times, is the most dramatic
case in point. By manipulation and intimidation, encouraging
an atmosphere of self-censorship, the Bush White House
has distanced the press from dissenting professionals
inside the government.
Mark Felt's sudden emergence from behind the curtain
of history evoked the glory days of the press corps and
its modern creation myth. It was a warm bath of nostalgia
and cold comfort.
Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President
Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars |
[...] Felt's devotion
to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI caused him, I believe,
to place the bureau ahead of the Constitution and his
own faithfulness to the Bill of Rights.
Felt's Watergate heroics notwithstanding,
he was also on board when the FBI's series of covert action
programs against Americans was well underway. He was a
high FBI official when the bureau, arrogating unto itself
the role of judge, jury and vigilante, trampled with impunity
on the rights of citizens. Felt was there when the FBI
sought to get teachers fired, when it tried to stop people
from speaking on campus, when it prevented the distribution
of books and newspapers and when it disrupted peaceful
demonstrations and antiwar marches. Those shameful
activities are cited in stark detail in Book III of the
April 1976 Final Report of the Select Committee to Study
Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities
of the United States Senate. In the name of protecting
national security and preventing violence, the FBI tried
to promote factionalism and violence between groups it
regarded as domestic threats. It planted informants to
spread false rumors, labeled innocent people as "snitches"
and passed along derogatory information to the families
and friends of investigative targets, sometimes through
anonymous letters or telephone calls. These despicable
actions were carried out under COINTELPRO, an FBI acronym
for "counterintelligence program."
Mark Felt knew all about it. [...]
Lest there be any misunderstanding, Felt was not a passive
observer as FBI agents conducted clandestine and illegal
operations against innocent Americans. As The Post stated
in Wednesday's editorial, Felt "was convicted of
(and later pardoned for) authorizing illegal acts in pursuit
of leftist radicals in the early 1970s." Here's the
rest of the story.
When Felt was the No. 2 official in the FBI, he and Edward
S. Miller, chief of the bureau's intelligence division,
authorized burglaries at the homes of friends and relatives
of members of the radical Weather Underground. The break-ins
were illegal and a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Felt and Miller were prosecuted in 1980 for their unconstitutional
invasion of privacy by John W. Nields Jr., later chief
House counsel to the Iran- contra hearings and earlier
chief counsel to the 1977-78 House investigation of Korean
influence-peddling in Congress. [...]
Felt and Miller, after an eight-week trial, were convicted
of conspiracy for authorizing illegal searches and fined
a total of $8,500. The Post stated in an editorial at
the time [Dec. 15, 1980]:
"The crime of which they were convicted by a jury
is a serious one. It grew out of one of the more tawdry
episodes in federal law enforcement -- the burglaries
of private homes by FBI agents in pursuit of opponents
of the war in Vietnam. . . . The dimensions of the wrongdoing
by the FBI in those days - - and before -- are far larger
than the specifics of the case against Messrs. Felt and
Miller. The 'black bag jobs' were only part of a system
of so-called law enforcements that ignored the principles
of individual rights and personal privacy that are at
the heart of this nation's political legacy."
Four months later, without talking to
the prosecution, consulting the judge or conducting the
customary Justice Department review, President Ronald
Reagan, asserting that Felt and Miller were motivated
by "high principle to bring an end to the terrorism
that was threatening our nation," pardoned the two
high-ranking FBI officials.
To be sure, Mark Felt's role as "Deep Throat"
earned him a place in history. So, however, did his complicity
in COINTELPRO, the FBI's dirty little secret war against
Americans. |
Finally, for all the
good it will do, we are hearing about the real Mark Felt,
not the Watergate "hero," in the corporate media.
Colbert I. King, writing for the Washington Post, makes
mention of Felt’s grubby fingerprints smudged on
the Constitution, telling us COINTELPRO was launched in
the "name of protecting national security and preventing
violence" when in fact it was undertaken primarily
to get rid of critics of the government, opponents of
the Vietnam war, and people who were sick and tired of
being treated like second and third class citizens (African-Americans,
Native Americans, and Puerto Rican nationalists).
In fact, as King notes, "the FBI tried to promote
factionalism and violence" between these groups,
in other words, much of the above mentioned violence was
the product of the FBI and its agents and freelancers.
Tried nothing—in fact they did a smash up job.
Reading the corporate media, you get the impression Felt’s
hands-on management of the trampling the Bill of Rights
was a minor infraction, something unfortunately required
to stop a bunch of anti-American miscreants from endangering
national security. It is treated as an isolated incident,
a product of the times (the words "Weather underground"
are invariably tossed around, as if millions of people
in opposition to the Vietnam War were bomb- throwers and
bank robbers).
In fact, COINTELPRO was simply one act in a larger history
of government subversion of constitutional rights. It
can be argued that the government has cracked down on
dissidents since the founding of the republic, beginning
with George Washington dispatching 12,000 troops to Pennsylvania
in order to put down the Whiskey Rebellion (an insurrection
in opposition to taxation but also a lightning rod for
settlers of the region for a variety of grievances).
John Adams contrived the Sedition Act (1798) for "criticizing
federalist policies" and made it a crime to publish
any "false, scandalous and malicious" writing
against the government, the Congress, or the President
"with intent to defame" them or bring them "into
contempt or disrepute or to stir up sedition," a
law directly in conflict with the First Amendment, which
states "Congress shall make no law… abridging
the freedom of speech, or of the press."
Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus (a violation
of Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution) during the
Civil War and had opponents who "had done nothing
worse than bad-mouth the president," as David Greenberg
writes, locked up in federal jails and stockades. "Overall
between 10,000 and 15,000 people were incarcerated without
a prompt trial."
On 16 May, 1918, Congress passed the U.S. Sedition Act
(following the Espionage Act of 1917), making it a crime
to "print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane,
scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government
of the United States," thus criminalizing thousands
of people opposed to U.S. entry into the First World War.
"Some corporations and political leaders used sedition
laws to crush trade unions," writes John J. Dwyer.
"Historian Walter Karp recalled a woman who wrote
to a newspaper during the war that ‘I am for the
people and the government is for the profiteers’
received a ten-year prison sentence. Federal agents seized
a motion picture, The Spirit of ‘76, because the
‘portrayal of the American Revolution had cast British
redcoats in an unfavorable light.’ That film’s
producer, too, received ten years in prison."
The labor and political leader (and presidential candidate)
Eugene Debs was convicted and sentenced to serve ten years
in prison and disenfranchised for life, losing his citizenship,
after delivering an anti-war speech on June 16, 1918.
Anarchist Emma Goldman and others were arrested, convicted,
and eventually deported for organizing against the war.
In 1940, the Smith Act was passed. It criminalized speech
and activism. "Federal Bureau of Investigation director
J. Edgar Hoover, immensely proud of his leading role in
the government’s nationwide persecution and deportation
of radicals and immigrants during the 1919 Palmer Raids,
suggested to President Harry Truman in 1948 that the Smith
Act be used against the Communist Party and its sympathizers,"
writes Michael Steven Smith. "The successful use
of the Smith Act by the Truman administration against
the top leaders of the Communist Party drove a large stake
into the heart not only of the Party but of every organization
in which the Communists had been active and influential.
Not least of the indirect casualties was the newly formed
Progressive Party."
Although progressives were crippled by the Smith Act,
it did not do enough damage for the government. "When
congressional investigations, political trials and other
traditional legal methods of repression failed to counter
the growing movements of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s,
and even helped fuel them, the FBI and police moved outside
the law," explain Mike Cassidy and Will Miller.
Thus COINTELPRO was created.
The FBI and Mark Felt "used secret and systematic
methods of fraud and force, far beyond mere surveillance,
to sabotage constitutionally protected political activity.
The purpose of the program was, in FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover’s own words, to ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect,
discredit and otherwise neutralize’ specific groups
and individuals."
Thanks to Reagan’s pardoning of Mark Felt, the
old man is not locked up in a federal penitentiary for
violating the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of
people. It is disgusting to see video of this vile old
man smiling and waving from the door of his home—and
almost as disgusting to witness the corporate media sucking
it up.
Meanwhile, ever the shameless opportunist, Bob Woodward
"is racing out a book on Felt’s story"
because "Felt is really old and full of contradictions
in his recounting of the Deep Throat tale," according
to Bob Rosner (no doubt Woodward will "fix"
these "contradictions" so they jive with the
official version of events). "Woodward wrote a long
article in The Washington Post recently about how Felt
took him under his wing when Woodward was a young officer
in the Navy. He gave him career advice for many years.
As the No. 2 guy in the FBI, Felt met repeatedly with
Woodward to help steer his investigation into the Nixon
administration. Felt risked his career to deliver the
story of a lifetime to Woodward."
Now isn’t that special.
No mention here of Woodward’s stint working for
the CIA in Navy intelligence (or as a CIA recruiter) and
his earlier membership in Yale’s Book and Snake
(described by Lisa Pease as "a cut below the more
infamous Skull and Bones," the secret society where
Bush and Kerry once romped with select members of the
ruling elite). "Whatever his background, whatever
his connections, one cannot trust what Woodward says as
fact," writes Pease. "Given his role in the
Watergate cover-up, and the misrepresentations in his
own work, it remains to us a huge mystery why this man
is treated with the reverence he is. Considering his behavior,
his background, his credibility, and his connections,
we now feel compelled to [ask] who is Bob Woodward? Whom
does he serve? Is his career sustained for the purposes
of those with a ’secret agenda’?"
As Pease documents, there are plenty of fishy things
about Woodward’s Deep Throat story and many of the
details are downright silly. Considering Woodward’s
intelligence background (and his none other than meteoric
rise as a reporter at the Washington Post and Post publisher
Philip Graham’s connections to the CIA’s Operation
Mockingbird, as documented by Alex Constantine), it is
fair—in fact, a more than safe assumption—to
say we are not getting the whole skinny on the Mark Felt
Deep Throat story. There is more to it than a senile old
man, a serial violator of civil rights, wanting to get
his fifteen minutes of fame as he peers into the grave.
Now Bob Woodward, as a chronicler for the ruling elite
and plutocracy, will write the official version of what
happened and the role Mark Felt supposedly played in those
events.
Point is, you cannot trust these guys—serial violators
of civil liberties and CIA newspaper reporters—far
as you can throw them. |
WASHINGTON - Mock bombs and armed
assaults at the
Pentagon on Wednesday capped what officials described
as the largest and most complex terrorism-response exercise
ever held at the nation's military headquarters.
The exercise, designed to test the response of military,
federal and local police and emergency services to a
terrorist attack at several nearby locations, was code-named
Gallant Fox III. It involved more than 20 agencies and
900 people. Volunteers from the
American Red Cross played the victims, their screams
echoing at the Pentagon's bus terminal late Wednesday
morning.
The attack began with armed terrorists assaulting the
Pentagon and taking hostages, while their associated
bombed a bus nearby. Military stun grenades, called
flashbangs, were used to simulate the bombs.
These events were followed by another bombing and assault
at the nearby cluster of buildings known as the Navy
Annex, then a third bombing at a Defense Department
office in Crystal City, a complex of office towers in
Arlington, Va., a short distance from the Pentagon.
Police and firefighters on the scene approached each
of the bombing sites slowly, taking several minutes
to reach the wounded, said Brett Eaton, a Pentagon spokesman.
They moved cautiously out of fear of exposure to chemical,
biological or radiological weapons, as well as secondary
bombs terrorists sometimes set to kill those responding
to the initial bombing.
No secondary bombings or unconventional weapons were
part of the exercise, but officials called the cautious
response the correct one for such a situation.
Twenty-five people were counted as killed in the simulation.
More were injured and taken to local hospitals as part
of the exercise. As for the mock
terrorists, they were all captured or killed, Eaton
said. |
WASHINGTON -- The Army appears
likely to fall short of its full-year recruiting goal
for the first time since 1999, raising longer-term questions
about a military embroiled in its first protracted wars
since switching from the draft to a volunteer force
32 years ago.
Many young people and their parents have grown more
wary of Army service because of the likelihood of being
dispatched on combat tours to Iraq or Afghanistan, opinion
polls show. U.S. troops are dying at a rate of two a
day in Iraq, more than two years after President Bush
declared that major combat operations had ended.
The Army says today's economy offers
attractive alternatives to many high school and college
graduates.
The recruiting statistics appear to bear that out.
Officials said Wednesday that although the Army will
not release its numbers until Friday, it fell about
25 percent short of its target of signing up 6,700 recruits
in May. The gap would have been even wider but for the
fact that the target was lowered by 1,350.
The Army said it lowered the May target to "adjust
for changing market conditions," knowing that the
difference will have to be made up in the months ahead.
The Army also missed its monthly targets in April,
March and February - each month worse than the one before.
In February it fell 27 percent short; in March the gap
was 31 percent, and in April it was 42 percent. [...]
|
France's new prime
minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused yesterday to
push the country down the road towards free-market reform,
saying "Gallic genius" would help put back on
its feet a "suffering, impatient and angry"
nation that has failed to adapt fully to a changing world.
In a speech to the packed lower house of the national
assembly, Mr Villepin said his top aim was to cut the
country's stubborn 10%-plus unemployment rate and announced
€4.5bn (£3bn) of extra money to achieve it.
But he insisted that an increasingly
heated public debate about the shortcomings of France's
high-tax, high-protection social model compared with the
more liberal Anglo-Saxon system was irrelevant.
"In a modern democracy, the debate
is not between the liberal and the social, it is between
immobilism and action," he said. "Solidarity
and initiative, protection and daring: that is the French
genius."
The part-time poet and former foreign minister added:
"My government will be guided by one principle: the
imperative of justice; by one criterion: the general interest;
by one aim: to improve the lot of every French man and
woman."
His speech came as speculation mounted in France over
Tony Blair's plans for the British presidency of the EU,
which starts next month.
Many commentators have said the British prime minister
will seek to capitalise on the crisis after the French
and Dutch rejection of the EU constitution by trying to
persuade "old Europe" to modernise its creaking
social systems.
"Tony Blair will try to convince his partners that
the policy ... of flexibility and solidarity that has
been followed with success in Britain ... can also serve
Europe," Le Monde said yesterday, adding that "Blairism"
is taboo in France, despite the concrete responses it
has offered to unemployment and globalisation.
Mr Villepin said he was convinced France was still committed
to Europe and its vote was "not a signal of French
isolation". But he acknowledged that the country
was at "an exceptional moment in its history"
and that his first duty was to "look reality in the
face".
France faced a difficult situation, he said: "While
the world is undergoing unprecedented change, Europe is
divided and the process of adaptation in France is lagging
behind ... We have to get this country working again."
Polls showed most French voters rejected
the EU treaty in their May 29 referendum because they
feared it would lead to more unemployment, and were unhappy
with the social and economic situation. Many on the left
also felt the constitution enshrined a free-market vision
of Europe at odds with France's social ideals.
Sociologists have also said the referendum result was
a huge vote of no confidence in France's political and
administrative elite, and particularly in President Jacques
Chirac, who is seen as having presided over the country's
slide over the past 10 years.
Mr Villepin will take no comfort from a new poll yesterday
showing that 65% of the French were pessimistic about
the country's political situation, 79% felt the new government
would be unable to do anything about unemployment in the
near future, and 72% thought social unrest was "certain"
or "likely" to mount over the next few months.
Most economists believe the key to getting France back
to work is reform of the country's inflexible, over-protective
labour laws. But France's powerful public sector unions
warned the prime minister this week that any attempt to
water down jobs legislation would prompt protests.
Mr Villepin said he was setting aside an extra €4.5bn
for job creation next year and unveiled a series of steps
to boost job creation by small and very small businesses.
These include encouraging firms with fewer than 10 workers
to hire more people by cutting social charges and paperwork.
He also ordered France's job centres to redouble their
efforts to find jobs for the one in four young people
who are out of work, and said that penalising the hiring
of unemployed workers over 50 would be scrapped. France
currently has among the worst unemployment rates in Europe
for the under-25s and over-55s.
Among other measures, Mr Villepin announced a major increase
in public infrastructure projects such as new railway
lines and motorways, and said tax cuts pledged by Mr Chirac
in his 2002 election campaign would be suspended to help
pay for the job creation measures. "All the spare
money in the budget will go on jobs," he said. "All
the energy of my government will be thrown into this battle."
|
When
Rimbaud meets Rambo
The new French Prime Minister's grandiose poetic style
won't cut much ice with the White House action men |
June 04, 2005
Ben MacIntyre |
"A SINGLE VERSE
by Rimbaud," writes Dominique de Villepin, the new
French Prime Minister, "shines like a powder trail
on a day’s horizon. It sets it ablaze all at once,
explodes all limits, draws the eyes to other heavens."
Here is a rather different observation, uttered by George
Bush Sr in 1998, that might stand as a motto for his dynasty:
"I can’t do poetry."
In that gulf of sensibility lies the cultural faultline
of our times. For George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld words are blunt instruments, used to convey meaning,
not feeling. Actions speak louder. The President of France,
by contrast, rocked by the rejection of the EU constitution,
has attempted to shore up his Government by appointing
a poet as his Prime Minister, a patrician intellectual
in the French romantic mould, a true believer in the transcendental
and redemptive power of words.
These are the polar extremes of poetry, Rimbaud in one
corner and Rambo in the other: the French patron saint
of sensitive, tortured adolescents alongside the monosyllabic
American action man.
M de Villepin’s poetry — four volumes so
far — is a triumph of French style over substance,
a torrent of adjectival acrobatics: grand, uplifting and
painfully obscure. He speaks in a grandiloquent style
that delights French audiences, but baffles most English-speakers.
His high-flown rhetoric before the United Nations in the
build-up to the Iraq war ("We are the guardians of
an ideal") marked him as the political and cultural
antithesis to the US, and his appointment is intended
to send the message that French exceptionalism is alive
and well.
M de Villepin has set himself 100 days to restore French
self-confidence, to infuse France with a sense of its
poetic destiny: "We need a heart that beats for everyone."
For this poet, practical considerations are secondary.
As he wrote in his recent 823-page treatise on French
poetry: "What does it matter where this path leads,
nowhere or elsewhere, if the furrow continues flowering,
if the flash of lightning still inflames the night . .
. If the poet still consumes himself, he refuses the enclosures
of thought, certainties, to camp in the heart of the mystery,
in the living spirit of the flame."
To which the American response will be a resounding:
"Whatever." The Bush White House does not do
poetry. At a Nato summit in Prague, Donald Rumsfeld was
once forced to sit though a performance of modern dance
and poetry. Asked for his reaction afterwards, he shrugged:
"I’m from Chicago."
Les Anglo-Saxons — as Villepin likes to categorise
America and Britain — have seldom mixed poetry and
politics. There have been numerous British writer-statesmen,
but no poet-politician of note. Clement Attlee scribbled
self-mocking limericks, but can you imagine Tony Blair
penning anything more poetic than pop lyrics? John Prescott
might have been invented for the purposes of doggerel:
"There was a young man from ’ull/ Who usually
spoke total bull . . ." Abraham Lincoln and John
Quincy Adams were both published poets, but in modern
times the only president-poet was Jimmy Carter. His 44-poem
collection Always, as brave as it is bad, was received
with thinly disguised and richly deserved mockery: "The
geese passed overhead/and then without a word/We went
down to a peaceful sleep/Marvelling at what we’d
seen and heard." John F. Kennedy commissioned Robert
Frost to deliver a poem at his inauguration, and Bill
Clinton had Maya Angelou do the same. But poetry does
not stir the soul of President Bush, unless you count
the Bible and George Jones singing A Good Year for the
Roses.
To the Anglo-Saxon mind there is something dodgy, even
dangerous, in the man who rules the world by day and writes
verses by night. As W.H. Auden wrote: "All poets
adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornados, conflagrations,
ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination
is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman."
Indeed, the precedents are not happy ones, for there is
a peculiar link between frustrated poetic ambition and
tyranny: Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Castro, Mao Zedong
and Ho Chi Minh all wrote poetry. Radovan Karadzic, fugitive
former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, once won the Russian
Writers’ Union Mikhail Sholokhov Prize for his poems.
On the whole, you do not want a poet at the helm.
Yet in France, proof of a refined literary consciousness
is a prerequisite of high office, and the virtue that
eclipses sin. When François Mitterrand died, French
commentators touched only briefly on such aspects of his
career as wartime collaboration, cynical political opportunism
and obsessive adultery, while devoting acres of print
to his love of books and remarkable literary output. Every
French politician is expected to produce a trophy bouquin.
Before writing the ailing EU constitution, former President
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing penned sensitive
novels.
M de Villepin has placed himself firmly in the tradition
of French diplomat-poets. In the preface to his 2003 book
he effused: "This eulogy owes nothing to artifice
or chance. It has ripened inside me since childhood. From
the bottom of my pockets, stuck to the back of my smock,
hidden in the corner of abacuses, poetry gushed out."
That statement immediately earned him a nomination as
Poseur of the Year by a New York newspaper.
His appointment is certain to increase the accusations
of pretentiousness from the American side, and philistinism
from the French. The chasm has never been wider, or more
in need of a bridge. America’s public image could
benefit from a sense of imaginative wonder, a little more
Rimbaud and a lot less Rambo. Anglo-Saxon mockery is the
essential antidote to Left Bank belle lettrism, which
too often uses poetic complexity to state the obvious,
or nothing at all.
George Bush and Dominique de Villepin might learn much
from each other, but no amount of translation could allow
them to speak the same language.
In the aftermath of 9/11, M de Villepin walked through
Manhattan: "In the flayed city, facing the raging
winds, I called upon the words of Rimbaud, Artaud or Duprey.
At such a grave hour, how could one not think of these
thieves of fire who lit up, for centuries, the furnaces
of the heart and the imagination, of thirst and insomnia,
to build an empire only within oneself." Mr Bush
also surveyed the city, but did not think of poetry or
imagination: he invaded Afghanistan. |
Paris.
Since French-bashing is more fashionable than Dutch-bashing,
the Dutch "neen" has not come in for such furious
denunciation as the French "non". Both votes
express mixed motives, and the mixture of motives may
well be somewhat different from one country to the next.
It seems that the left revolt against free market dogma
played a proportionately greater role in France, and the
objection to immigration and the prospect of Turkish membership
a more prominent role in the Netherlands. But both votes
said "stop!" to a process of "European
construction" that has been going on for too long
over people's heads. The common denominator was a last-gasp
effort to save democracy from Eurocracy.
Except for its author, former French president Valéry
Giscard d'Estaing, hardly anybody in the "yes"
camp really seemed to like the Constitution all that much.
What horrifies the Eurocrats the
most is the upsurge of what they tend to call, not democracy,
but "populism" -- a pejorative term for roughly
the same thing. Democracy is when voters approve what
their leaders propose, "populism" comes when
voters have ideas of their own. So it is "populism"
that has unexpectedly halted what was supposed to be a
smooth, uninterrupted construction of a mammoth European
economic and political powerhouse -- free of inner conflict,
free of national identity and free of popular revolt.
The European Union was designed to be a gigantic lid over
the melting pot. But the pot is still boiling, and the
lid is wobbling.
Yes, the "no" vote augurs a time of political
turmoil for Europe. The artificial consensus is broken,
and there is no new consensus behind the "no".
This is dangerous, as life is more dangerous than stagnation.
The "Cupidity" of the French working class
In a petulant article distributed by AlterNet, Ian Williams
accused the French of "cupidity" for voting
"non" to the European Constitution, and described
American left solidarity for this choice as "blinkered".
The rejected Constitution, says Williams, "guarantees
rights undreamt of by any liberal in the United States".
This may be true, but such rights, and even more, are
already guaranteed by French and other constitutions and
charters which remain intact.
Williams asks rhetorically of the American left, "How
can so-called liberals in a country that has 45 million
uninsured citizens dismiss a document that ensures the
right of access to preventive health care and the right
to benefit from medical treatment?"
This is a truncated citation. The full sentence from
Article II-95 reads: "Everyone has the right of access
to preventive health care and the right to benefit from
medical treatment under the conditions established
by national laws and practices ." [My emphasis.]
All this really says is that "right of access"
(a vague term) will continue to be governed by national
laws, which at present provide largely reimbursed health
care to French patients but not to those in Portugal.
Article III-278 (7) reaffirms "the responsibilities
of the Member States for the definition of their health
policy and for the organisation and delivery of health
services and medical care". Rejecting this provision
does not deprive anyone of health coverage.
In France, salaried workers, farmers, the jobless, those
with the lowest incomes voted heavily "non"
while the higher the income, the greater the percentage
of "oui". The "cupidity" of the French,
deplored by Ian Williams must have been the "cupidity"
of the French working class (80% no). This indeed contrasts
with the generosity of the United States working class,
which in large numbers votes against its own interests
in favor of politicians who cut social services and provide
huge tax cuts for the super-rich. Does Williams consider
that in France, the wealthy classes are less guilty of
"cupidity" since they overwhelmingly voted "yes"?
Apparently so, and the workers who fear for their jobs,
the unemployed on the edge of despair, the middle classes
who see their costs rising and benefits shrinking, show
a lack of civic responsibility by thinking of their own
selfish interests, instead of trying to please all those
beaming corporation executives, decision-making politicians
and movie stars who had their hearts set on the Constitution
Treaty.
Differing motives
The very worst of all reasons for condemning the "non"
vote is the "guilt by association" charge. Ian
Williams considers that the fact that leftists "voted
'no' alongside Le Pen's racists and fascists" is
a "sight that should at least give U.S. progressives
some pause for thought".
In short, Le Pen should set the agenda for leftists:
if he says "yes" they should say "no",
and vice versa. This is absurd. Every winning vote is
the product of misunderstandings and contradictory motives.
To point to an obvious historic example, FDR's New Deal,
which was supported by the U.S. Communist Party, won elections
only thanks to the votes of Southern Democratic Party
racists. Should the left have rejected social security
for that reason? Only autocratic choices can be based
on a single motive. Democratic choices are always the
product of mixed motives.
In any case, the constant fuss about Le Pen is symptomatic
of political impotence. The individual, Jean-Marie Le
Pen, is an old-fashioned nationalist who specializes in
provocative oratory, a sort of political clown who is
currently fading. His only real political function for
the past 20 years has been to enforce the politically
correct consensus against him. In terms of organization
and program, he is not even a "fascist", but
simply a reactionary with a snowball's chance in hell
of ever coming to power. There are many more truly dangerous
politicians in the respectable mainstream.
The Myth of the EU Challenge to the U.S. Superpower
Williams blamed "French communists and leftists
for their success in frustrating a multinational challenger
to U.S. global dominance".
The notion that the Constitution would
amount to a bold challenge to the United States was indeed
a favorite selling point of the "yes" camp.
The constitution was supposed to be the necessary (and
perhaps even sufficient) condition enabling the European
Union to assert itself as a "counterweight"
vis-à-vis the United States.
Asked which is the most powerful argument in favor of
voting "yes" for the treaty establishing a European
Constitution, the French centrist party leader François
Bayrou replied: "The world is dominated by American
power, rivaled by Chinese power. Do we want to accept
the domination of those empires, of their social model?
Or do we also want to count in defending our values?"
Socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn put it more bluntly
: "We need the European constitutional treaty to
counter American hegemonism".
This argument was no doubt sincere. But
the plain truth is that the dream of a political Europe
on the U.S. model, able to act as a united, rival superpower,
was already a thing of the past. The advocates of a strong
United States of Europe were long since outfoxed by the
British "Trojan horse", which pushed successfully
for an enlarged EU that could only be a big open market.
U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's rude reference
to "new" and "old" Europe pointed
to a real split between nations whose governments identified
with Europe and those more closely tied to Washington.
The botched Constitution was supposed to make up for an
overly hasty enlargement by tightening the bonds. But
it was already too late.
The death knell of politically unified Europe, the old
dream of the original geographic core group (France, Germany,
the Benelux States), was sounded just one year ago when
Britain vetoed their choice for E.U. Commissioner and
imposed Juan Manuel Barroso, a conservative Portuguese
former Maoist who had studied in the United States. Barroso's
youthful Maoism was of the variety aimed mainly at combating
the Communists and leftists who made Portugal's 1974 anti-fascist
revolution and their friends in the African liberation
movements. In his choice of Commissioners to run the EU
"government", Barros heavily favored the small
countries of "new Europe" and neoliberal free
marketeers.
If the "counterweight"
claim was not valid, the French leftists were quite right
to ignore it. The claim was contradicted by the text of
the Constitution itself. The European Constitution ties
the European Union to NATO, the main instrument of U.S.
domination of Europe, and even to its current crusade:
the "war against terrorism". What more could
Washington want? That Europe and its member States
are deprived of any possibility of defining and pursuing
a clair and effective independent foreign policy? Well,
the proposed constitution would do precisely that, by
obliging all member States to go along with a foreign
policy decided unanimously. A perfect recipe for paralysis.
War and Peace
Far from fearing the European "rival
superpower", the United States has consistently supported
European construction in the way it has developed, that
is, as a big market economically open and politically
harmless. The influence of the business community
has progressively shoved aside the influence of the European
federalists, whether they realized it or not. Economic
strength and political weakness go hand in hand, as business
lobbies rather than electorates dictate policies.
The original rationale of European unification was to
bind together essential German and French industries so
tightly that war between them would be impossible. As
a further guarantee, the trans-Atlantic guardian angel
would link the military forces of the former belligerants
in a single alliance under its leadership. Many European
Atlanticists have shared the belief that this double bond
-- economic and political unification of Europe, plus
U.S. management of security -- is the only way to ensure
peace and prosperity for their countries.
Regarding peace, this would be more
convincing had the United States drawn the same lesson
from two world wars as the majority of Germans, French
and Italians who, having suffered from destruction, foreign
occupation and defeat, genuinely wanted to renounce war.
The same applies to the Russians who, while finally victorious,
had suffered the greatest human and material losses.
The problem is that for the United States,
the lesson was not at all the same. In the American (and
even British) mythology, the Second World War was the
"good war" by which Good crushed Evil, thanks
to U.S. military power, with the blessing of an interconfessional
God. And they are ready to start over again.
A dangerous contradiction lies in the fact that this
Europe, pacified by its own warlike excesses, feels secure
entrusting the leadership of its military affairs, via
NATO, to that superpower of European origin which for
its part has not at all given up making war. The paradox
is that this Europe which has given up making war against
itself now risks being drawn by its U.S. protector into
endless war against the rest of the world.
Ironically, the hasty eastward enlargements of the European
Union owe a lot to a growing, unspoken rivalry with the
United States. The pro-Europeans have long insisted on
the need to "deepen" the Union before enlarging
it. That is a simple matter of good sense: one can spoil
everything by going too fast. Instead, they agreed to
the rash incorporation of the Baltic States, with Rumania
and Bulgaria coming up next. Certain of those countries
(notably the Baltic States) seem to feel permanently threatened
by Russia, despite Russia's voluntary peaceful withdrawal.
But Western leaders know perfectly well that Russia is
not a threat. In reality, the E.U. enlargement to the
East has much more to do with rivalry with the United
States, whose influence is already predominant in those
countries and which is strengthened by the enlargement
of NATO. Of course, eastward EU enlargement must strengthen
the influence there of Western European countries, but
at the price of the European Union's weakened independence
from the United States.
The End of History Postponed Once More
A constitutionalized European Union
has been the latest "end of history" Utopia.
This super-corporation Europe, run by bureaucrats carrying
out the recommendations of lobbyists (the real collective
power in Brussels), is meant to cleanse Europe of politics.
Because politics, and especially "populism",
are condemned as the source of fascism, of communism,
and thus of the Gulag and Auschwitz. The people must be
locked in an economic straitjacket where they can no longer
do any harm. They must be neutralized, so the elites can
run things undisturbed.
It takes a heavy dose of Utopian illusion to believe
that a meaningful single foreign policy capable of challenging
the United States could be agreed upon by consensus among
25 (and more to come) European countries. Such a Europe
is incapable of challenging U.S. dominance.
In the sixty years since the end of World War II, the
only European leaders to have openly defied U.S. international
policy were Olof Palme in Sweden and French President
Charles de Gaulle at the time of the Vietnam war, and
Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and the Belgian leaders
at the time of the invasion of Iraq. They had their people
solidly behind them, and could therefore be uppity. It
is inconceivable that a European foreign minister, who
must follow the instructions of 25 governments from Portugal
to Estonia, could ever be so bold.
As for the economy, if, as Margaret Thatcher claimed,
"there is no alternative" to her type of policies,
everyone will end up there anyway, so why insist? On the
other hand, if alternatives are possible, people must
be free to develop them. The plain truth is that "Europeans"
do not all agree by consensus on every possible issue,
economic or political. Forcing them into a false unity
can only kill their enthusiasm and initiative. The European
"Superpower" is the dream of a small layer of
business and political leaders.
It is excellent that European states have renounced war
between themselves and moved to cooperate closely in many
areas. This process can continue without a "constitution".
Europe's richness is in its diversity, which should not
be strangled by a fear of "nationalism" and
"populism". It is clear that, as things stand
today, the majority of French people value social services
above an unrestrained free market capitalism. Perhaps
the British (but this is not certain) prefer to put free
market capitalism above social services. Well, why not?
Why not keep the European ties loose enough to allow social
and economic experimentation? Let Europe's peoples cooperate
with each other, and with non-European peoples, when and
as they want, in search of more just and viable economic
and social solutions. |
Talk about fair-weather
friends!
When nine French fighter jets and a weather plane from
a French carrier taking part in a joint exercise with
Canadian Naval forces in the Atlantic off New Jersey ran
perilously low on fuel last Friday because of a freak
storm that prevented them from returning to their ship,
they figured, no problem. They weren't too far from the
U.S. mainland, and so they could just land at McGuire
AF Base in southern New Jersey.
No dice, the Francophobe U.S. military told them. According
to a State Department source, quoted in the Philadelphia
Inquirer, they were denied landing rights at the facility.
Faced with the choice of ditching their planes or finding
an alternative landing site, the French pilots, with the
help of frantic State Department and Federal Aviation
Administration officers, managed to arrange landing permission
at the commercial airfield in Atlantic City, though this
necessitated delaying and rerouting several commercial
flights because of the number of planes that were coming
in at once.
No national American media mentioned
this stunning--and potentially life-threatening--breach
of basic air etiquette by the U.S. military. And not for
lack of knowing about it: many news organizations covered
the whole thing as a humor item, focusing on the French
pilots spending a night in the debauchery of America's
East Coast Vegas.
Even the Inquirer, which did report on the incident with
at least a modicum of seriousness, failed to go to the
Pentagon and ask the obvious question: Why were ten planes
from a European ally denied emergency landing rights at
a fully equipped and prepared U.S. Air Force base when
they were in danger of crashing from lack of fuel? (I
did make that call, and was referred to the media relations
office at McGuire, where a spokeswoman denied that the
French planes had been turned away-a direct contradiction
of the story out of the State Department. She had no answer
when asked whether the French pilots had requested permission
to land at the airbase.)
It boggles the mind to think that this nail-biting incident
could have been the result of Pentagon pique at France
for having refused to go along with the Bush Iraq War
plan, but one is hard-pressed to come up with an alternative
explanation.
Even Soviet planes, at the height of
the Cold War, weren't turned away in emergencies.
And this was an ally.
At least the people of Atlantic City were gracious hosts
to the plucky French pilots, reportedly offering them
meals and hotel rooms.
One wonders what the American reaction would be if a
French military airport turned away American pilots in
similar circumstances-or what the French reaction would
have been if the planes hadn't made it safely to Atlantic
City. |
STOCKHOLM, June 8 (Xinhua)
-- Denmark will not prohibit planes of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) of the United States carrying terror suspects
from flying across its airspace, nor will it be responsible
for such flights' violation of related international laws,
a senior official said Wednesday.
Given the complexity of the case, Denmark cannot shoulder
the responsibility for the consequence of such flights,
said Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, quoted
by reports from Copenhagen.
The CIA planes enter Danish airspace under the status
of civil planes, and Denmark cannot prohibit such civil
flights as it is against related international laws, he
added.
Denmark's left-wing alliance urged the government to
take action to prevent CIA planes of terror suspects from
flying over its sky after the Danish newspaper Politiken
revealed that the CIA had made at least 16 such flights
via the Danish airspace since 2001.
The alleged terror suspects had been transported by
CIA-chartered planes to countries outside the US for torture
and trial, for which the International Red Cross had repeatedly
lodged protests before the US government, according to
the newspaper.
Other reports said since the US launching of a global
anti-terror war, the CIA has made approximately 100 flights
carrying terror suspects to foreign countries such as
Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Uzbekistan for trial. |
MADRID, June 8 (Xinhuanet)
-- The Spanish government supports a Spanish judge's investigation
into and prosecution of three US soldiers implicated in
the shooting of a Spanish TV cameraman two years ago in
Baghdad, Spanish Minister of Justice Juan Fernando Lopez
Aguilar said Wednesday.
At a press conference held here, Aguilar said the Spanish
government is to assist High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz
in his investigation.
He also expressed regret over the US refusal to question
the three soldiers under the pretext that such investigation
should be conducted by a judge of a third country.
Spanish cameraman Jose Couso, who worked for Telecinco,
was killed along with a Ukrainian cameraman when a US
tank fired directly onto a hotel housing foreign journalists
during the 2003 assault on Baghdad.
Judge Pedraz was entrusted on Tuesday by the Reporters
Without Borders group to question and bring to justice
the three US soldiers implicated in Couso's death. These
soldiers were accused of "offense against the international
community."
If found guilty, the three soldiers would face 10 to
15 years in jail under Spanish law, said Aguilar. |
Electronic drawings that give comprehensive
details of how to build and test equipment essential
for making nuclear bombs have vanished and could be
put up for sale on the international black market, according
to UN investigators.
The blueprints, running to hundreds of pages, show
how to make centrifuges for enriching uranium. In addition,
the investigators have been unable to trace key components
for uranium centrifuge rigs and fear that drawings for
a nuclear warhead have been secreted away and could
be for sale.
Inspectors at the UN's nuclear
authority, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have
been investigating the worst nuclear smuggling racket
ever uncovered, headed by the Pakistani scientist
Abdul Qadeer Khan. The operation was discovered two
years ago to be selling sensitive nuclear technology
to Libya and Iran.
A senior official said several sets of blueprints for
uranium centrifuges - the so-called P-1 and more advanced
P-2 systems which were peddled by the Khan network -
have gone missing.
"We know there were several sets of them prepared,"
said the official. "So who got those electronic
drawings? We have only actually got to the one full
set from Libya. So who got the rest, the copies?
"We have no evidence they were destroyed. One
possibility is another client. We just don't know where
they are."
A European diplomat privy to western intelligence on
the Khan network added: "This is what keeps people
awake at night. It's very sensitive. The fact that there
are [nuclear] proliferation manuals kicking around is
deeply disturbing."
The blueprints detail how to manufacture the components
for a uranium centrifuge, what materials are needed,
how to assemble the machines, and how to test them.
The centrifuges are the main route to producing bomb-grade
uranium. Uranium concentrate is converted into uranium
hexafluoride gas which can be spun through cascades
of centrifuges at super-high speeds to be enriched to
weapons grade.
"The big question is who else got this stuff [apart
from Iran and Libya]," the European diplomat said.
Another diplomat pointed out that the Khan network
was based in the Middle East and that Khan was known
as the father of the Islamic bomb. He suggested that
Syria and Egypt could be potential customers for the
materials if they were still being offered.
Khan is a national hero for creating the Pakistani
nuclear bomb but is under house arrest in Islamabad
since confessing to heading the network and being pardoned
in February last year. [...] |
Washington: North Korea has a stockpile
of nuclear bombs and is building more such weapons,
the country's vice foreign minister Kim Gye Gwan said
in a US television interview.
"I should say that we
have enough nuclear bombs to defend against a US attack,"
the North Korean official told ABC News when asked how
many nuclear bombs it possessed.
Asked whether Pyongyang was building more nuclear
bombs, Kim said: "Yes."
His open admission about North Korea's nuclear weapon
ambitions further clouds efforts to bring a diplomatic
resolution to the nuclear crisis gripping the Korean
peninsula.
Washington believes North Korea possesses one or two
crude bombs and may have reprocessed enough plutonium
for half-a-dozen more, from spent fuel rods at its Yongbyon
nuclear complex.
The Stalinist state also has an arsenal of missiles.
It fired a long-range missile over Japan and into the
Pacific Ocean in 1998.
Kim, North Korea's chief negotiator in six-party talks
designed to wean the hardline communist state from its
nuclear weapons program, would neither confirm or deny
that North Korea had a missile capable of hitting the
mainland United States.
He was also non-committal when asked about North Korea's
ability to put a nuclear warhead on its long range missiles.
"I want you to know that our scientists have
the knowledge, comparable to other scientists around
the world," he said. "You can take it as you
like."
But Kim stressed that North
Korea "don't have any intention at all of attacking
the US." [...] |
ALGIERS : Thirteen communal guards
fighting armed Islamists in Algeria were killed and
six wounded when a bomb exploded under their truck more
than 400 kilometres (250 miles) south of Algiers, Algerian
dailies reported late Wednesday on their web sites.
The truck carrying 19 guards on their way to take part
in a security force mopping-up operation was blown up
on a track near the village of Ain Rich, 180 kilometres
(110 miles) southwest of the town of M'Sila, the newspapers
said.
Twelve communal guardsmen died on the spot, a thirteenth
dying later on the way to hospital. [...] |
JAKARTA : A small bomb exploded
Wednesday at a house rented by an Indonesian Muslim
preacher who was once detained for two years without
trial in Malaysia for alleged involvement in terrorism,
a fellow activist said.
No one was injured in the blast on the outskirts of
Jakarta, said Irfan Awwas, chairman of the hardline
group Indonesian Mujahedin Council. The preacher, Muhammad
Iqbal, also known as Abu Jibril, was being questioned
by police, Awwas told AFP.
"We condemn this heinous terror attack. We suspect
that police are trying to twist facts by putting the
blame on the victims," he said.
Awwas said police searched the house after the explosion,
which occured in the grounds near the garage. An AFP
photographer at the scene said the blast caused no damage
to the house. [...] |
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia —
Ethiopian security forces opened fire Wednesday on stone-throwing
protesters in the central business district, and a human
rights group said at least 20 people were killed.
Abebe Terfe, executive secretary of the Ethiopian
Human Rights Council, said 20 people were killed in
a third day of protests over election results. The claim
could not immediately be verified, but the group has
supplied reliable information in the past.
An Associated Press reporter saw 11 bodies packed
into a room in the city's main hospital, many with gunshot
wounds, and was told they represented only some of the
casualties. Doctors at another hospital reported two
dead bodies were taken to that facility.
The government's spokesman did not answer calls seeking
comment after the shooting; no other officials were
available. [...] |
Poison gas and explosions in two
mines in China killed at least 30 people on Wednesday,
government media reported.
At least 21 people were killed when poison gas leaked
into an underground work area at the state-owned Zijiang
coal mine in Lengshuijiang city in central Hunan province,
state television said.
A government report released in May criticized mine
safety at the Zijiang site and 60 other state-owned
coal mines.
Nine others were killed in an explosion in an iron
mine at Shahe City, in Hebei Province, the state news
agency Xinhua said.
Another explosion earlier Wednesday above-ground at
the same site injured eight people.
The world's deadliest coal mines are in China, which
has suffered a series of mine disasters. |
PRESQUE ISLE, Maine (AP) -- A
dog was stolen from a Presque Isle home, mutilated and
killed in what police Chief Naldo Gagnon described as
"a horrific crime."
Two 17-year-olds and a 16-year-old, whose names were
not released, have been charged with aggravated animal
cruelty and theft, police said. Two of the teens were
on probation from the Mountain View Juvenile Correction
Facility in Charleston for prior felony crimes.
A court date for the teenagers is set for Aug. 4.
The youths are being held at a state youth detention
center or are under house arrest.
Police said a 4-year-old female
mixed breed dog was stolen from a local resident, tied
near a fallen tree late last week and was cut, stabbed
and sliced. There were also signs of blunt force trauma.
Police said the dog was left in a bike path near Presque
Isle High School and an elementary school.
"We get complaints of abuse to animals, but not
like this," Gagnon said Tuesday. "It's quite
a horrific crime."
Detective Wayne Selfridge said the dog trusted humans
and offered no resistance, even during the assault.
The motive for the crime was cited
as "wanting to kill something not human,"
the detective said. |
Ontario has passed
a bill the government says is the strictest anti-tobacco
legislation in North America. [...] |
Controversial plans
to make incitement to religious hatred illegal are being
unveiled by the government.
Critics say the re-introduced bill - which bans insulting
words or behaviour intended or likely to stir up religious
hatred - will stifle free speech.
But ministers have pledged the new law will not affect
"criticism, commentary or ridicule of faiths".
If it mirrors racial hatred laws, the maximum sentence
for those found guilty will be seven years in prison.
The bill will apply to comments made in public or in
the media, as well as through written material.
Freedom of speech
The government says the legislation is a response to
the concerns of faith groups, particularly Muslims.
The Muslim Council of Britain has welcomed the move,
arguing that the courts have already extended such protection
to Sikh and Jewish people.
Sher Khan, a council spokesman, said to protect some
groups but not others contravened the European Convention
on Human Rights.
"This is not protection of faith, it is a protection
of those who are attached to a particular identity marker,"
Mr Khan said.
Rabbi Jacqueline Tabick, chairwoman of the World Congress
of Faith, also said the legislation was necessary. [...] |
Jesus
may have died from a blood clot in his lungs, Israeli
doctors believe.
Dr Benjamin Brenner from Rambam Medical Centre bases
his theory on New Testament and contemporary religious
sources about the crucifixion.
He believes Jesus developed a deep vein thrombosis in
his legs while nailed to the cross, which then travelled
from his legs to his lungs and killed him.
Other scientists dismissed the theory. Bible scholars
said the spirituality behind Jesus' death was more important.
[...] |
HONG KONG - Hundreds of geese in
China's northwestern Xinjiang region have died from
bird flu, Hong Kong authorities said they were told
by their Chinese counterparts on Wednesday.
"It was understood that there were about 1,042
geese with signs of illness, of which 460 died,"
the Hong Kong government information service reported
late Wednesday, citing a spokesman for the city's Health,
Welfare and Food Bureau. "The spokesman said mainland
authorities informed the bureau this afternoon that
dead geese were found in an individual farm in Tacheng
in Xinjiang," the statement issued late Wednesday
said.
It said 13,000 birds were culled and Xinjiang authorities
took other measures including isolation and disinfection.
"Mainland authorities also carried out vaccination
immediately at all poultry farms in the nearby areas
and the situation had now been brought under control,"
the Hong Kong statement said.
The outbreak in Xinjiang follows the deaths from H5N1
of more than 1,000 migratory birds last month in Qinghai
southeast of Xinjiang, the first confirmed outbreak
in China in nearly a year from the H5N1 virus.
A Chinese veterinary official said then that the disease
was spreading along a western China migratory bird route
that stretched from South Asia to Central Asia and flew
over the Himalayas through the Tibet and Qinghai regions.
Xinjiang and Qinghai border Tibet.
The H5N1 virus has been fingered as a possible new
strain of flu that could be devastating to humans if
it genetically mutates and develops the capacity to
be transmitted from human-to-human.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that
if this happens it could trigger a new human flu pandemic,
potentially killing up to 50 million people worldwide.
So far, a total of 54 deaths have been recorded from
H5N1 in Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. [...] |
PARIS, June 8 (Xinhuanet)
-- France has done a lot of work to prevent a possible
massive spread of bird flu to human beings, French government
health consultant Didier Houssin said on Wednesday.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the
bird flu virus has acquired the capacity to be transmitted
to human beings, although its animal-to-human and human-to-human
transmission capacity is still limited at the current
stage, said Houssin.
Hospitals across France are now well-prepared to host
a 10- to 46-percent increase in patients in case of a
possible outbreak of the virus among humans and a large
team of medical personnel is ready to render home services,
he said.
France currently has a reserve of 13.8 million doses
of antiviral drugs and more is under production, he added.
Moreover, the country has purchased about 40 million
doses of vaccine and more than 10 million masks, which
will be ready for use by 2006, when maneuvers against
a massive bird-flu outbreak among humans will be staged,
he said.
According to reports, H5N1 bird flu has caused 54 human
deaths since 2003. It is yet to know what changes the
virus has experienced in birds before it was transmitted
to humans.
Fearing that the virus might become adapted to human
bodies, the WHO has asked countries around the world to
adopt preemptive measures against massive outbreaks among
humans. |
JAKARTA, June 8 (Xinhuanet) --
An earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale struck
off the coast of Sumatra on Wednesday, however, it was
not immediately clear if there were any casualties or
damage, the website of English-language daily Jakarta
Post reported.
The tremor was centered 270 kilometers southwest of
Medan, North Sumatra, and was recorded at 2:34 p.m.
(0634 GMT), said the paper.
The quake prompted panic on the island off Simeulue
which was hit by massive tremors earlier this year,
witnesses said.
Inhabitants of Sinabang, the main town on the island
of Simeulue, rushed out of their homes and offices and
gathered in the streets after the tremor hit, witnesses
said. |
TRANG, – The latest earthquake
to hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra recently has
caused massive earth craters to appear in Thailand's
southern province of Trang, Provincial Governor Naret
Jitsucharitwong confirmed today.
Several houses in Wang Wiset district reported cracks
today, while officials from the Department of Mineral
Resources have discovered four-metre deep soil craters.
The limestone soil of the area is particularly prone
to earthquake-related subsidence, as limestone is characterized
by air bubbles under the soil. |
Kalamata, GREECE - An earthquake
measuring 4.3 on the Richter scale was recorded in the
sea region south of Methoni in Messinia, Peloponnese
southern Greece, at 9:05 am today. The tremor was especially
felt in the city of Kalamata alarming the people.
Seismologists characterized the phenomenon as regular
and pointed out that such earthquakes are recorded often
in the region and local residents should not be alarmed.
No damages were reported to police. |
A scientist who predicted the second
Indonesian earthquake fears a third devastating jolt,
powerful enough to cause another major tsunami, is "imminent".
The waves could sweep north-western Australia, reaching
as far as Perth.
John McCloskey, of the University of Ulster, said
building the Indian Ocean tsunami warning system was
"an urgent priority".
"Don't take the foot off the gas. This is very
urgent work."
In mid March, Professor McCloskey warned that the
Boxing Day quake, which triggered the tsunami that killed
300,000 people, had shifted tectonic stresses to another
spot on Sumatra's geological fault line.
He predicted a second strong quake, noting many did
not believe lightning could strike twice. "But
with earthquakes it's exactly the opposite ... I quite
honestly hope we're completely wrong."
He wasn't. The second quake, measuring 8.3, struck
on March 28 near the Simeulue and Nias islands, killing
2000 people.
In a new study, published in Nature, Professor McCloskey's
team reports that "stresses imposed by the second
rupture have brought closer to failure" another
zone "immediately to the south, under the Batu
and Mentawai islands".
"The historical record and the experience of
the Sumatra-Andaman and Simeulue-Nias events indicate
that a tsunami could be a possibility."
Professor McCloskey told the Herald it would likely
strike near the Mentawai islands, triggering a repeat
performance of the 8.5 quake of 1833. "The 1833
earthquake is probably a reasonable model. It did trigger
a tsunami and there were many casualties. That's the
type of earthquake we fear it definitely could be."
Professor McCloskey noted that the 1833 tsunami reached
north-western Australia. Next time "the waves would
be felt in Perth," he said, adding he could not
say how strong they would be.
It was impossible to say when it would happen, but
the evidence, including historical data, showed it could
be within 30 years, following the pattern of the 1833
and 1861 Sumatra quakes.
"It may be sooner. We must assume it's imminent
and behave accordingly. We can't bury our heads in the
sand." [...] |
An earthquake measuring
5.5 points on the Richter scale occurred in the northeastern
part of Taiwan on Wednesday, the Chinese main seismological
agency said.
The quake epicenter was located in the marine zone off
the coastline of the Hualien county.
There was no immediate information about damage or casualties.
Taiwan is one of the most seismically dangerous areas
in East Asia.
Taiwan's worst earthquake, measuring 7.6 on the Richter
scale, occurred in September 1999 and claimed the lives
of more than 2,000 people. |
MEXICO CITY - Colima volcano erupted
explosively overnight, prompting the evacuation of a
nearby town, Juan Barragan, civil defense authorities
said Tuesday.
Forty-five residents moved voluntarily away from Colima,
500 kilometers (300 miles) west of Mexico City, Civil
Protection said in a statement.
Other towns are far enough away to be safe from the
volcano, known to be active for 500 years.
The volcano exploded twice in 48 hours, officials
said, once sending an enormous plume some 4,500 meters
(15,000 feet) into the air.
The blast set an all-time record in strength and altitude
for Colima. |
Sofia Mayor Stefan Sofianski has
announced a state of emergency as of Tuesday noon because
of the heavy rains and floods soaking the capital city
for the last few days.
After many towns and cities to the north of Bulgaria
were plunged under water for the whole last week, the
bad weather has creeped to the south making many rivers
spilling over their banks.
Thousands of houses and farmland were engulfed by
the mass inundations that have reached the outskirts
of Sofia city as well. [...] |
Lisbon - More than 200 firefighters
backed by a water-dropping helicopter and nearly 60
vehicles were on Tuesday battling a large wind-fueled
wildfire in drought-hit Portugal, emergency services
workers said. [...]
Portugal, which is suffering though its worst drought
in decades, is currently sweltering through a heatwave.
The national weather office has issued a heat warning
for eight of the country's 18 regions because of forecasts
that temperatures there would hover near 40 degrees
Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) over the next few days. |
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