The past week contained good financial news for the United States imperial economy despite storm clouds on the horizon. Oil prices are down, the dollar is gaining ground on the euro and stocks were up (though still down for the year). Could it be that the plummeting of Bush’s popularity to a new low of 37% is seen by global investors as a sign that there is some sanity in the United States? Of course the euro is not helped by the French riots, but one would think that U.S. financial indicators would have been disturbed at the revolt against neoliberal imperialism in Argentina the week before, but I guess not.

No deal in Argentina

Americas summit ends in debacle for Bush

By Bill Van Auken
7 November 2005

President Bush left Argentina Saturday after failing to achieve an agreement on reopening talks on forming a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The Fourth Summit of the Americas turned into a debacle for the US administration, with rioting in the streets of Mar del Plata, mass repudiation of Bush by the Argentine people and open defiance of US policies on the part of South America’s principal economic powers.

“I am a bit surprised,” Bush told Argentine President Néstor Kirchner as he departed the country, the Argentine daily Pagina 12 reported. “Something happened here that I hadn’t foreseen.”

US officials indicated that they were taken aback by Kirchner’s speech, which denounced the role of the International Monetary Fund and US-backed policies in provoking the catastrophic economic collapse of December 2001 from which millions of Argentines have yet to recover.

“Kirchner’s speech was very disappointing,” a US diplomat told the Argentine daily Clarín. “He kept talking to his people. The truth is his harshness surprised me.”

The “harshness” of the Argentine president, however, was a pale reflection of the mass hatred exhibited by the Argentine people towards Bush, whose presence in the country provoked not only the demonstrations and rioting in Mar del Plata, but strikes by teachers and public employees throughout the country.

…Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who voiced the most intransigent opposition to the trade pact and participated in a mass anti-Bush rally held during the summit, gloated over the US administration’s defeat. “The great loser today was George W. Bush,” Chavez told the press after Bush’s departure. “The man went away wounded. You could see defeat on his face.”

In other good news for investors to grab onto, retail sales increased in the United States. Looking deeper though there is some troubling news there as well. With growing gaps between rich and poor in the United States, there is no such thing as the average consumer, if there ever was one. We now see analysts who look at the retail sales distinguishing between rich and poor retailing:

Last week, retailers reported October same stores sales that were stronger than analysts’ estimates. The ICSC’s tally of chain store sales increased 4.4%. This was on top of a 4.1% gain last October, which was the strongest month during the second-half of 2005. With retail sales only increasing 1.8% last November, it is likely that retailers will post strong growth in November. November will benefit from Halloween falling on a Monday, since retailers generally close the monthly books on the last Sunday of each month. The ICSC also noted that total sales increased 10.8%, which is the largest increase since June this year. The average monthly gain in total sales has been 10.1% this year. This follows an average gain of 9.7% last year.

Most retailers reported that same store sales were driven mostly by average ticket size and the number of transactions increased less and declined at a few retailers. This was most evident in retailers that sell to lower-income consumers. Dollar General said that it noticed a “payroll cycle,” meaning sales were stronger on days on the days workers typically get paid. This is another indication that lower-income households continued to struggle during the month. Conversely, according to the ICSC survey, luxury retailers were one of the best performing categories, along with wholesales clubs and footwear.

As we can see with the retail data, the rich in the United States are doing very well. Why should they worry if the U.S. consumer market dies if the end game has been reached and a relative few can control everything in a high-tech feudalism? Can it be that retail sales in the United States can remain strong with a wave of bankruptcies and asset deflation on the horizon? Can the rich pick up the consuming slack from the poor and formerly middle-class? We may be entering a period of reverse Fordism. Once again the workers will not be able to afford what they produce and the rich will overconsume all over the place.

Wall Street bonuses expected to soar again in 2005

As jobs and wages decline

By Joseph Kay
10 November 2005

Bonuses on Wall Street are expected to soar this year according to two reports released this week. These bonuses make up the bulk of compensation for top executives and managers of banks and brokerages and are rising as a result of frenzied activity in the hedge funds and mergers and acquisitions markets, as well as sharp increases in energy prices.

An article in the Wall Street Journal on November 8 reported that Wall Street executives are expecting a “bonus bonanza” this year. According to the Journal, citing data from a report to be released by the executive search firm Options Group, compensation is expected to increase by 20 percent, with some bankers and traders expecting even higher windfalls.

The Journal reported, “Investment bankers, who arrange mergers and stock offerings for corporations... are expected to be among the Street’s biggest winners this year, with compensation rising 20% to 25% on average, according to the study. For an investment banker at the managing director level, a senior post on Wall Street, that will translate into an average pay package of between $2.2 million to $3.3 million this year. A global head of investment banking could pull in on average anywhere between $7 million and $10 million.”

Fueled by a surfeit of cash in corporate coffers and relatively low interest rates worldwide, global merger and acquisition volume surged to $2.3 trillion by the beginning of November. This is the most active merger and acquisition market since 2000, at the peak of the US stock market bubble when such activity reached record highs. Mergers and acquisitions are often accompanied by cuts in labor costs, including layoffs, for which executives reward themselves as well as their advisors and bankers on Wall Street.

Another factor behind the surge in Wall Street bonuses is the sharp increase in energy prices, which has hurt consumers but has translated into gains for commodity traders as well as the energy companies themselves. The Journal reported that bonuses for commodity traders could increase by an average of 30 percent over 2004. It quotes Options Group co-founder Michael Karp as noting, “There was lots of volatility in this area and a lot of people made a lot of money here.”

Citing a report put out by Johnson Associates Inc., a compensation consulting firm, the New York Times reported November 8 a somewhat lower increase for investment bankers, of between 10 and 20 percent.

The Times noted, however, “The big winners could be traders involved in commodities and energy, in particular, proprietary traders who deal in those two high-octane growth areas. They could receive pay increases of 40 percent to 50 percent,” the newspaper wrote, “with some walking away with $15 million to $20 million each, according to one investment banking executive who is prohibited by his firm from commenting on compensation issues.”

Big gains are also expected among those who are engaged in the booming hedge fund trading sector. Hedge funds have become a principal tool for wealthy investors, with assets of about $1 trillion. The funds have seen increases in asset value of about 17 percent annually in recent years. They are a highly speculative branch of the securities trading market, usually employing computer models to extract profits from temporary fluctuations in the stock and derivatives markets.

…Living standards for a tiny section comprising the Wall Street elite are booming. Julian Niccolini, managing partner of the Four Season’s Restaurant in New York, explained to the Journal the impact of the Wall Street bonanza from his own perspective: “It’s white-truffle season and people are paying as much as $180 for a main course. The economy seems to be going in the right direction and I think this is the most money people have ever had.”

Well, the most money that some people have ever had. Indeed compensation on Wall Street has seen a substantial recovery since declines in 2001 and 2002, though average compensation has not yet reached the peaks of the stock market boom of the late 1990s and 2000. However, the much-touted economic recovery of the past two years has not led to gains for the broad majority of the population.

There has been no substantial improvement in the jobs market over the past two years. The remaining sectors of the economy that have had relatively high-paying and secure jobs—such as the auto and the airline industries—are seeing a sustained assault on wages and benefits.

According to a US Census Bureau report released on August 30, the number of Americans living in poverty increased in 2004 by 1.1 million. The poverty rate, now 12.7 percent of the population (37 million people), has increased for four consecutive years from 2000 to 2004. Even this figure understates the level of poverty in the US, as the official poverty level is much lower than the income required to meet basic needs.

Other figures also document the precarious financial position of growing number of Americans: rising debt levels, persistent unemployment and underemployment, rising requests for emergency food assistance and increased homelessness.

Real income has declined over the past year for most workers, who have seen stagnating or declining nominal wages together with a sharp growth in consumer prices, especially for energy. The situation is expected to get much worse as the winter months produce home heating bills that are up to 50 percent more than the already steep prices of last year.

The huge profits reported by energy companies in the past quarter—including a record $9.9 billion pulled in by ExxonMobil alone—have come directly out of the pockets of ordinary consumers who have faced mounting prices for gasoline and natural gas.

Note that high gains and high compensation are in the areas showing the most volatility, especially the hedge funds For an easily understandable explanation of hedge funds and derivatives, non-linear financial entities if there ever were one, see this article by Michael Panzner. These are vulnerable to, and contributors to, a growing volatility. As Kay wrote, they also profit, at least for a while, from that volatility. As Panzner and many others have warned, eventually the volatility overwhelms the system, causing panic and crash.

Panzner compares the situation with hedge funds now to New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina, in that in both cases disasters had been predicted for a long time, but the longer the disaster did not strike, the more complacency set in. What he ignores, however, is evidence in both cases that the disaster was no accident and that there are some who will benefit by it. In fact, as the above article by Joseph Kay shows, hedge funds have helped push along the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Al Martin wrote about both things last week:

Hedge Funds In Trouble, MacroEconomics of Global Collapse & Forced Population Reduction

This is an invisible cloud and it very well may be the so-called derivative time bomb that people have been talking about for the last 10 years. So this is an attempt at the most macro-economic view possible, what’s creating this global economic malaise, as can be seen in investor confidence indices globally.

It should be noted that in many countries– Germany, Britain, Italy, some of the Asian market countries–investor confidence has reached levels frankly not seen since the Great Depression.

The macro-economic phenomenon that is creating this is a long-term cycle, which started immediately after the Second World War, when the entire planet began to consume more than it produced through debt financing.

In order to pick up the global economies after the war and continue to accommodate an unrestricted population growth policy, all governments, including the United States, began to encourage the massive accumulation of debt by government, by business and industry, and by the people. After the Second World War, all governments began to encourage a massive accumulation of debt in order to push up GDP in all the nations.

So where are we? We are at the end of a very long cycle, which can no longer be sustained. And what is the implication? The end result is global economic collapse.

…But to get back to the cascading collapse of hedge funds and the money of these hedge funds which has been liquidated. The losers are a combination of high-net-worth individuals and institutional clients.

And here’s the forecast. The intermediate-term implication is an increased volatility in global equity debt and commodities markets. We can expect the current volatility to increase, not to decrease. Increased volatility is a sign of stress. Expect volatility to continue to increase, particularly over the next 3 or 4 years.

Ultimately, as volatility increases, liquidity is reduced because those who make markets, those who fund those markets, as well as the governments that back those who fund those that make the markets become nervous. That is what caused the whole Refco unraveling. Planetary economic liquidity is gradually drying up.

What central banks around the planet have been doing is covering up the huge hits that were taken in the late 1990s (from 1997 to 2002). Now look at the number of hedge fund debacles. These were multi-billion-dollar hedge fund debacles, starting with LTC (Long Term Capital), including Julian Robertson’s Tiger funds, and including Enron because Enron became a de facto hedge fund. It was no longer an energy company; it was a de facto hedge fund. And what central banks have done is provided the liquidity to hide these losses.

…Simply put, we are seeing the signs of the so-called end times. And when people say, What can be done to put us back on track? I say: Look. We’re beyond that point. So what could put us back on track? Turn the clock back 50 years and do things differently.

As we have stated before, there is no scenario now in which the planet can generate sufficient gross domestic product after 2011- 2013. After that time frame, there is no scenario under which the planet can generate sufficient gross domestic product to service the total global debt. It simply cannot be done. Even if you monetize global debt with a huge round of inflation, eventually that very inflation makes markets illiquid and no longer functioning.

…The post-World War II problem was: how to rebuild societies, how to maintain an extraordinarily high level of economic growth, how to make consumption a larger portion of each nation-state’s GDP, which we certainly have in this country. Personal consumption as a percentage of GDP is twice what it was at the end of the Second World War. The fraction is approximately the same in all other countries.

This “solution” however makes economies more subject to boom-bust cycles. That’s why we have these endless series of recessions -- booms, recessions, booms, recessions -- because you make the global economy much more tied to consumer spending than business spending. You effectively weaken the global economy because individuals are never in the position to repay ever-increasing sums of debt the way business and industry or government can. Individuals do not have the unlimited ability to borrow money.

We now add a new post-war component in the United States, and that is an organized right-wing cabal committed to fraud and committed to sapping the global capital machine, as it were. This then represents yet a further drag on the global economy.

But there are reasons behind this. I’ve been asked this question on shows before: “Why do Bushes commit frauds endlessly? Why does the Cabal exist? Why was there a military industrial complex formed after the Second World War? And why did it spawn a right-wing political cabal that consistently acts to defraud in order to consolidate wealth and power?”

There is a reason. And that is to consolidate wealth and power. They understood that post-war economics was a losing proposition, and that, in fact, eventually the planet would suffer a global economic collapse. At that point, it would be necessary to have as much of the planet’s wealth concentrated into as few hands as possible and have those few hands control whatever government, military, industrial power remains in the post-economically collapsed environment in order to begin a secondary rebuilding process.

The end result of this policy would necessitate a Global Command and Control Economy. There would be no other choice.

An economically collapsed planet would force some hard solutions onto the problems of overpopulation. That is, after all, the root problem since it is the root decision that was made after the war, since it was politically impossible in all nation-states to tell the people the truth, that you’ve got to start now controlling population growth because the planet’s resources are diminishing.

The planet’s future industrial economic infrastructure, based on the remaining non-renewable and semi-renewable resources that the planet can produce, this fraction doesn’t work after you get much above 5 billion people on the planet.

This gets back to the “useless eaters” solution. How do you deal with “excess” population? In a post-economically collapsed environment, a government is not really going to be able to provide any help. Like Africa, there will be mass starvation, but it will not be only in Africa anymore, but across the entire planet. Particularly in First World countries.

And this is where conspiracy reality meets conspiracy theory. What further augments my contention about this plan: global agreements, led by the United States, were made in the mid-1970s, to use low-yield thermonuclear and other so-called containable non-conventional weapons systems for the purposes of forced population reduction in a post-economically collapsed world. In other words, even in the mid-1970s, there was a political and military recognition of reality.

The “ultimate solution” was that the economic policy set forth across the planet in a post-war environment would lead to economic collapse because it did not contain one key component: global population growth control, particularly in the industrialized nations, which consume 10, or 20, or 50 times more non-renewable resources than do citizens in Third World countries. Therefore, in the 1970s, governments became increasingly alarmed.

…How common was this understanding? It was very common at the Department of Defense. They were the ones who drew up a lot of plans for it. The State Department also was aware of it. It wasn’t any secret.

In 1975, when this all came together, the then-new Gerald Ford Regime was a little disorganized in the beginning, but there really wasn’t any effort to hide this at the time.

…That’s why the Department of Defense had set up… the infamous National Programs Office… in 1975: to plan for the logistical operation targeting the mobile launch sites, etc., necessary for the use of throwing low-yield non-conventional containable munitions against high-density population targets.

And who were the prominent players in the Gerald Ford administration? Well there was Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, for example, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Not to mention Chief of Staff Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. While I don’t agree with these assumptions: that we have to reduce population, that this is reality and we have no choice, as Martin is peddling, there is a lot of evidence that those in charge are going to act as if that is the case. See David McGowan and Laura Knight-Jadczyk for more on population reduction.

I've mentioned some already, and here are some more:

1. Pictures of the damage appear to show evidence of bombs placed in the ceiling. Since this would be inconsistent with the Official Story that the bombing was done by visitors from Iraq, who presumably had no privileged access to plant the bombs (how much do you tip the bellboy when he carries your explosives into the hotel, and how much does the concierge get when he sends out to find you the detonators you forgot back at your 'safe house'?), the Official Story had to be changed to deny that there were ceiling bombs. If it was a suicide bomb, why would the ceiling twelve feet above the floor be extensively damaged, but the wall directly adjacent to where the bomb is supposed to have gone off be completely unmarked?


2. The Jordanians have supposedly found a witness, the wife of one of the suicide bombers. Unfortunately, the story as told by the Associated Press is incoherent (Muasher is Jordanian deputy premier Marwan Muasher):

   "Al-Rishawi was shown on state television wearing a white head scarf, a buttoned, body-length dark denim dress, and belts packed with TNT and ball bearings. Muasher told CNN the belts were captured with her.
   
   Al-Rishawi said she and her husband, Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari, 35, were wearing explosive-laden belts when they strolled into a Radisson ballroom where hundreds of guests, including children, were attending a Jordanian-Palestinian wedding reception.
   
   'My husband wore a belt and put one on me. He taught me how to use it, how to pull the (primer cord) and operate it,' she said, wringing her hands.
   
   'My husband detonated (his bomb). I tried to explode (my belt) but it wouldn't. I left, people fled running and I left running with them.'
   
   Muasher said al-Rishawi's husband noticed her struggle and pushed her out of the ballroom in order not to attract attention before blowing himself up."

   
   Pushing her out of the ballroom wouldn't attract attention? If she was already outside, how then did she run out with the people running from the bomb? Here is the same story from Aljazeera, quoting the wife:

   "'We went into the hotel. He [my husband] took a corner and I took another. There was a wedding in the hotel. There were women and children,' she said.
   'My husband detonated [his bomb] and I tried to explode my belt, but it wouldn't. People fled running and I left running with them.'"

   
   Did he push her out before he set off his bomb, or not? Why would he bother to do so? Why not just set off his bomb? Was he suddenly afraid that his wife might be killed in the explosion (that would be ironic, don't you think?).


3. The Jordanian story of how they found her doesn't make sense either (from the same Associated Press story):

   "Al-Rishawi was arrested Sunday morning at a 'safe house' in the same Amman suburb where her husband and the other two bombers rented a furnished apartment, a top Jordanian security official said.
   
   Jordanian security was tipped off to her presence by al-Qaida in Iraq's claim of a female bomber, the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists. The group apparently assumed she was killed in the blasts."

   
   How did the claim that there was a female bomber possibly provide enough information for them to find her in her 'safe house' unless they already knew where the 'safe house' was?


4. Why would insurgents fighting the American occupation of Iraq decide to take a busman's %% holiday and blow themselves up in Jordan? Didn't they have enough to do in Iraq? Wouldn't their meager resources of available suicide bombers be better put to use in Iraq?


5. Why would Sunni insurgents in Iraq head immediately to blow up a Sunni wedding reception in the hotel? Weren't there much better targets around? Speaking of better targets, how lucky do you have to be to kill a number of Palestinian officials, including the head of Palestinian intelligence, and take out the Chinese defense officials the Palestinians may have been planning to meet? For a bunch of bombers just arrived in town, they sure seemed to know where specific targets were located.

The witness, paraded theatrically with her supposed suicide belt, appears to represent a fear in Jordanian officials that no one was buying the Official Story. Flubbing the obvious cover-up is probably just going to make suspicions worse.

The original story that the Israelis received warnings has been whitewashed, and the link replaced by a denial. There is, however, reported confirmation of advance warning from Amos N. Guiora, a former senior Israeli counter-terrorism official. You have to wonder why the Israelis chose not to share their wonderful intelligence with the Jordanians (in much the same way that you might wonder why they didn't go into more detail in their warnings to the United States on 9-11, particularly as their intelligence was apparently good enough and specific enough to be able to send Israeli agents to film the attack on the WTC, not to mention cheer it on). The attack did manage to kill the head of the Palestinian intelligence services (not to mention a Palestinian banker and a Palestinian commercial attache), and members

of a delegation from China's University of National Defense, with whom the Palestinians might be assumed to be meeting (or at least the Israelis might have so assumed; see Kurt Nimmo on the Chinese connection). Since at least one of the bombs was pre-planted in a ceiling of the hotel, it would be very interesting to know who owned the hotel and could give access to bomb planters. The Jordanian reaction, to blame it all on the same dead man the Americans use as the scapegoat in Iraq, is probably a reflection of the extremely close ties between the CIA and Jordan's General Intelligence Directorate. I think we can probably chalk this one up to the continuing battle between the Israelis and the Palestinians over who gets to be protected by China after the American Empire collapses under the weight of trying to build the Israeli Empire.

[Presenter Vladimir Averin] Hullo there. Live now on Mayak is "Panorama". Vladimir Averin at the microphone.

The blasts in Jordan, the Jordanian capital, Amman, have shaken that country and the region as a whole, and it seems that the repercussions have gone round the world. [Passage omitted] Our guests are Shamil Sultanov, member of the State Duma International Affairs Committee. [Passage omitted] And Vladimir Akhmedov, assistant professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations [MGIMO] and Middle East expert. [Passage omitted]

There are already a large number of commentaries in the press today. Various theories are being advanced. From your point of view, which of them is closest to the truth, Shamil Zagitovoch?

Israeli connection in Amman blasts

[Sultanov] [Passage omitted] If you consider these blasts, there are two key points, from my point of view. First, Jordan is a key player here for the Americans. The stance of the new king, Abdallah II, who, by the way is half-English, is fairly complex because contradictions have arisen between the old Jordanian team and the king in the last six months, even the last year. And in principle what has just happened is a very good opportunity for Abdallah II to make certain changes, to put it mildly, to his team and to strengthen his personal authority, and so on.

And the second theory I adhere to is the Israeli connection. Abu-Mazin [Mahmud Abbas], the leader of the Palestinian National Authority, is seriously ill. And many believe that his Fatah party may not win with such a leader, that it will definitely not win the parliamentary elections scheduled to take place in the next few months. So for a very large number of players - for the Americans, for Israel, for Sharon, for the Egyptians - [Palestinian Minister of Civilian Affairs Muhammad] Dahlan would be the optimal player and politician to replace Abu-Mazin. In that sense, these explosions, and in particular the murder, as a result of one of the blasts, of Bashir Nafi, the Palestinian National Authority's military intelligence chief in the West Bank, is, from my point of view, a clearing of the way for Dahlan. [Passage omitted]

Change of elites

[Akhmedov] It is absolutely true that a very difficult and complex process of replacement of ruling elites is taking place in the Middle East. It is made particularly complicated by the pressure that the Near East experiences from the West on issues of democratization, reforms and liberalization, because the former ruling elites are naturally afraid of the possible consequences of their departure from the mechanisms of financial control that they command today, and the international community has not yet formulated a more or less intelligible mechanism for the departure of these former ruling elites.

Meanwhile, the process of the replacement of the ruling elites is gathering pace, and the USA is interfering in this process both diplomatically and, as we can see in the case of Iraq, by force. Thus the military-civilian balance of relations in each of these states and in the Middle East as a whole is being disturbed.

And Jordan is paying a very, very high price for its policy in the Middle East, a policy that is dictated in large measure by the purely geostrategic position of the country, which is surrounded by very powerful neighbours like Israel, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia. [Passage omitted]

USA said behind al-Hariri murder

[Akhmedov] In what I would describe as his really epoch-making speech, his statement, Syrian President Bashar al-Asad demonstrated clearly that Syria's fundamental strategy, as it has been in the past 50 years, despite enormous pressure over the past four years on the part of Europe and the Americans, will remain. [Passage omitted]

He said that the murder of [former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq] al-Hariri was an element of pressure on Syria. Syrians had nothing to do with the murder. Believe me: I'm a Middle East expert. If the Syrians had wanted to exert some sort of pressure or influence on al-Hariri, they would have had a great number of other methods. Then, in al-Sham [Greater Syria], people know each other well. They know that you are an enemy today, but tomorrow you may be a friend, and so on. And they never opt for such drastic measures, and so on.

My personal view is that Hariri was got rid of by the Americans. And there were even two targets. The first was [Syrian President] Bashar al-Asad, and the second was [French President Jacques] Chirac. It's because Hariri was a very close friend of Chirac, very close. Hardly a month passed without a meeting between the two. He was a very close friend. People who know about politics should know what very close friend means.

And so they wanted to catch them out and spoil relations between Chirac and the Arab world. And they did succeed. They did succeed. But they did not succeed on the second point. They did not force the Syrians to capitulate. [Passage omitted]

“After first claiming responsibility for the Wednesday attacks on three hotels popular with Israelis and Westerners, al-Qaida in Iraq later issued a second Internet statement that appeared to acknowledge that its tactics may have backfired and undermined any support the group enjoyed among the Jordanian population,” writes Greenberg. In other words, the intelligence ops who issue these “internet statements” for the dead al-Zarqawi’s P2OG false flag terrorist group decided their initial story didn’t hold water, so they are sending out a clarification via one of their secured servers.

“The group said the attacks were launched only after its leaders became ‘confident that (the hotels) are centers for launching war on Islam and support the crusaders’ presence in Iraq and the Arab peninsula and the presence of the Jews on the land of Palestine,’” Greenberg continues. “They also were, the group asserted, ‘a secure place for the filthy Israeli and Western tourists to spread corruption and adultery at the expense and suffering of the Muslims.’” No mention here of the now scrubbed fact the “filthy Israelis” were tipped off and evacuated the hotel before the black op unit attacked. Moreover, as usual, the blasts killed not only innocent Arabs, but in this instance also “the commander of the Palestinian Special Forces, Bashir Nafeh, Jihad Fatouh, the commercial attaché at the Palestinian Embassy in Cairo, and Mosab Khorma, deputy Chairman of Cairo-Amman Bank in the Palestinian territories and Col. Abed Allun, another high-ranking Preventive Security forces official, were also killed in the three nearly simultaneous suicide bombings on American-owned hotels,” according to Rumor Mill News. It sure is odd how al-Zarqawi kills important Palestinians for the Likudites.

But not only did the dead al-Zarqawi kill innocent Jordanians and important Palestinians, he also managed to kill a few Chinese. It is common knowledge the Chinese government is nurturing a relationship with the Palestinians and no doubt the Likudites hate this idea since they want the Palestinians to suffer in isolation in their Bantustan ghettoes the same way the Polish Jews suffered in the walled-up Warsaw ghetto. Back in May, Abbas went to China and met with Chinese leaders including President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao, and State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan. “The consensus reached by the two sides includes further developing mutually-beneficial and friendly cooperative relations, making joint efforts to push forward the Middle-East peace process, and so on. As far as I know, China and Palestinian side signed five documents of cooperation during this visit, including China-Palestine agreement of economic and technological cooperation, agreement of economic, trade and technological cooperation. China agreed to offer 50 million-worth economic aids and gratis, some aids in kind such as medical equipment, mobile houses and cultural and sports utilities,” according to a statement released by Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Kong Quan. Of course, this would put to waste the years of destruction inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israeli state and the IDF. Best send in the black op al-Zarqawi team to kill a few Chinese along with the important Palestinians.

It really does not take a rocket scientist to see what is going on here or to notice the al-Zarqawi black op team is obviously working for the Israelis, the British, and the Americans. It was only a month ago U.S. spooks made public a supposed letter from Ayman al-Zawahiri to Musab al-Zarqawi (thus putting a new spin on the term “dead letter”) warning al-Zarqawi to be “careful about attacking civilians because they might turn against the insurgency and harm the long-term al-Qaeda aim of imposing its medieval version of Islamic rule on the region,” according to USA Today. Now we are told by corporate media stenographers that al-Zarqawi did not heed this warning and as “if to validate that warning, large crowds have turned out in Jordan to protest three horrific bombings there Wednesday for which Zarqawi’s group has claimed responsibility.”

I bet Abu is in Dutch with Osama these days.

Anyway, all of this is simply becoming too transparent and surrealistic. If Americans buy into this crap in significant numbers it is once again more than ample proof George Hull, standing in for P. T. Barnum, was absolutely spot on: there is a sucker born every minute.

The reader of the mainstream media is confronted today by an awkward dilemma. Was the bombing of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman, Jordan, on the evening of November 9, 2005, the work of a suicide bomber, as most reports maintain - or were the explosives actually placed in the ceiling above, as was reported by two sources, Reuters and Mary Fitzgerald, a former reporter for the Belfast Telegraph?

It may seem too early to make a firm determination; yet, as Fintan Dunne points out, the photographic evidence supports the ceiling theory.

It is perhaps because the evidence so obviously favours the ceiling theory - a theory which is incompatible with the theory that the explosives had been concealed on the person of a suicide bomber - that for the very first time 'al-Qaeda' (to be more precise, a website claiming to represent al-Qaeda) has chimed in almost immediately with confirmation that suicide bombers had been responsible. Yes, al-Qaeda explains obligingly, the attacks on the three Amman hotels (including the Radisson) were carried out by Iraqi suicide bombers, including a husband-and-wife team. (SOURCE)

What seems to be happening here is that, in the face of mounting scepticism about the official explanations for recent bombings like those in London and Bali, more effort is being made to reinforce unconvincing official conclusions by means of revelations from the hitherto secretive al-Qaeda. Indeed, this increasingly garrulous organization has already released three communiques on the bombing in as many days - which makes three times as many as it released in relation to 9-11. Of course, there is nothing to information emanating from 'al-Qaeda' other than websites that could be being run by conceivably anyone. (That such websites are allowed to operate with impunity is clear evidence that they are not what they purport to be. In any case, who has actually seen the webpages in question? I haven't seen anywhere a single link to the website on which al-Qaeda supposedly issued its communiques.) But the alleged al-Qaeda websites are now in the convenient position of being able to confirm everything that the authorities have been saying. This would seem to be a godsend not for 'al-Qaeda' but for the authorities 'investigating' the atrocities, authorities who are no doubt under great pressure at the moment to reach politically acceptable conclusions.

Al-Qaeda's sudden co-operativeness in helping the investigation speed towards a predetermined conclusion is as deeply suspicious as its solicitude for the Israeli Jews staying at the Radisson, who were escorted to safety several hours before the attacks.* (Interestingly, the only Israeli citizen who remained behind was an Israeli Arab.) Who can seriously believe that attacks on three hotels - of which two (including the Radisson) are owned by Palestinians - in an Arab country that killed 'two high-ranking Palestinian security officials, a senior Palestinian banker and the commercial attache at the Palestinian embassy in Cairo' while Israeli Jews were allowed to escape could be anything other than an Israeli terror operation? Especially when the Israeli authorities who evacuated the Israeli hotel guests did not share their concerns with Jordanian or hotel security?

The fact that few (if any) Israeli Jews have been killed in any of the major terror incidents which have occurred in recent years - despite the fact that the alleged perpetrators are anti-Zionist - is indirect evidence that the bombings are actually being carried out by an Israeli agency, be it the Mossad or some other top secret entity charged with black ops of this nature. Similarly, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the 'al-Qaeda' websites currently being cited in news reports are anything other than undertakings of Israeli intelligence intended to help allay suspicions that the bombings were actually sophisticated operations involving explosives planted inside the hotels. What Israel wants us all to believe, of course, is that the bombings were carried out by suicidal Muslims because Israel wants us to believe that suicidal Muslims constitute the fundamental threat to western civilization at this time. Every major bombing which has taken place since September 11, 2001, has, with the exception of the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, been attributed to Muslim suicide bombers.

Unfortunately, many of us have fallen for the hoax, proving what the Israelis probably suspect, which is that most of us are just stupid goyim. Within the space of a few short years millions of seemingly rational people have suddenly come to think of suicide bombing not as a strange and unusual aberration, but something which dozens of people scattered all over the world are willing to engage in at virtually the drop of a hat - provided, of course, that they are Muslims. In other words, thanks to the war on terror millions of minds have been 'zionised.'

To this still unzionised mind, the reasons behind Israel's faked suicide bombings is all too obvious. The Israeli-propelled war on terror aspires to foster identification with the sufferings of the Israeli people by replicating suicide bombing (which was previously an extremely localized phenomenon) at the global level. The more people all over the world who live in constant fear of suicide bombers, the more public opinion is likely to sympathise with the Israelis against the Palestinians.

This time, however, the Israelis have clearly overplayed their hand. Although the attacks were obviously staged in order to kill a number of Palestinian leaders, the Israelis could not resist masking the multiple assassination as suicide bombings. Without the suicide bomber scenario, it would be immediately apparent to the slowest imbecile that Israel had been behind the bombings. The Israelis decided that they could best conceal their hand in the assassinations by grafting a suicide bombing scenario on top. This way, it looks as though the Palestinian deaths were the accidental results of terror attacks which, we are supposed to assume, would have occurred whether or not the men had been present.

But, thanks to the revelations about the evacuated Israeli hotel guests and the early information that the bomb had been placed in the ceiling, the Israelis have been exposed in record time. You really don't need to be a seasoned investigator of false flag operations like Ralph Schoenman to figure this one out - Amman is just another Israeli black op. It's time we goyim got it.

They got a woman to confess to participating in the bombings in Annan last week, but it doesn't prove anything as far as I'm concerned. The confession could easily be coerced; her children could be being held captive for instance: a mother could be made to say anything to protect her children. It would be a brutal thing to do but then look at that part of the world. Look at the Israelis and what they do to Arabs all of the time. Look at what the stakes are. Israel can't afford to get busted for staging another terrorist attack, so when it became clear that it was all falling apart, extreme measures were thought to be warranted.

Do I know that for certain? Of course not. But it makes a helluva lot more sense than what we're now being told. Zarqawi has his hands full with the American military in Iraq right now. His spending such a valuable asset as a suicide bombing team in such a faraway place when a war is raging outside his front door simply isn't believable. And why risk alienating other Muslims in the process, Muslims upon whose support you are counting on?

Likewise, why would any of these suicide bombers — all Iraqis, we are told — choose to participate in an attack on Jordan when their own country is currently suffering under a military occupation?

What does Zarqawi gets out this? Nothing. Less than nothing in fact. This hurts Zarqawi.

What does Israel get? Division amongst Arabs and the continued destabilization of the region, of course, but even more important, it's an opportunity for a paper like The New York Times to villify Muslims and paint them all as terrorists. Zarqawi's actions in Iraq — as they've been related to us at least — don't really fit into the category of terrorism. The resistance they're putting up can be easily seen as patriots defending their homeland against marauding invaders.

But blowing up a hotel in another country entirely, and where that country has in no way provoked your own and where civilians are targetted with no military justification, passes the test of terrorism. This was a terrorist attack.

So now The New York Times gets to call Zarqawi a terrorist. Of course, they've done that before, but before it never passed the smell test.

And what a great time to be able to call Zarqawi a terrorist! Increasing numbers of Americans are coming to the realization that they've been lied to and that this war is a criminal act. No WMD. No link between Iraq and terrorism.

Until now.

I think Israel would do anything to prevent us from withdrawing from the region. And I think The New York Times and most of the rest of the media are only too happy to assist them.

And I don't think either give a damn about all the blood that's being spilt as a consequence, whether it be Arab blood or American blood.

AMMAN, Jordan

An Iraqi woman confessed on state television Sunday to trying to detonate explosives strapped around her waist while she was in one of three Amman hotels bombed by al-Qaida in Iraq.

"My husband wore an (explosives-packed) belt and put one on me. He taught me how to use it," said Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, 35, who appeared on television wearing a white head scarf, black gown and the disabled bomb belt tied around her waist.

Jordanian security forces on Sunday arrested the woman, whose husband is suspected of blowing up the Radisson SAS hotel, after being tipped off by an al-Qaida claim that a husband-and-wife team participated in Wednesday's attacks at three hotels that killed 57 other people.

Looking nervous and wringing her hands, al-Rishawi described the attack on the Radisson. The Grand Hyatt and Days Inn hotels also were bombed.

"My husband detonated (his bomb) and I tried to explode my belt but it wouldn't," she said. "People fled running and I left running with them."

Her husband, Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari, 35, was identified Sunday as one of three Iraqi men who carried out the bombings.

As more details about the Amman bombings emerge, the corporate media has gone into heavy-duty spin mode to shape events to the liking of the Bushcons and the Israelis. For instance, on the day of the bombing (November 9), Reuters reported that the bombs at the Radisson were “placed in a false ceiling,” a rather difficult operation in a busy hotel and demonstrating the fact the bombers, who we are now told are Iraqi resistance fighters brainwashed by the dead cretin al-Zarqawi, would have obviously required serious cover of the sort enjoyed by a state intelligence service working in tandem with Jordanian intelligence (since Jordan is “a police state with a democratic façade,” according to a former cabinet minister, sneaking explosives into a hotel that caters to affluent foreigners would have been, to say the least, difficult without government complicity and all but impossible for rag-tag Iraqi resistance fighters). In an effort to tighten the story and make it sound more plausible for the al-Zarqawi suicide angle, “police sources” (most likely Jordanian police spokesman Captain Bashir al-Da’jeh) dismissed the ceiling story and introduced the more acceptable suicide bomber explanation later in the day on November 9. Now we are told the ceiling simply “caved in” as a result of “al-Qaeda in Iraq” suicide bombers.

Suddenly everybody was on message. On November 10, the mythical al-Zarqawi, via the internet, claimed responsibility for the bombings in the “moderate Arab nation” that “has fought a long-running battle against Islamic extremists opposed to its 1994 peace deal with Israel,” according to the Bush Ministry of Disinformation, Associated Press division. Of course, in a monarchial police state run by Hashemites, accustomed to wielding dictatorial power through hereditary emirs, there is no such thing as moderate rule, but never mind. On the same day, thousands “of Jordanians rallied in the capital and other cities shouting ‘Burn in hell, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi!’” and the corporate media imparts the impression these “protests” were spontaneous when in fact—again in a monarchial police state—such independent action is impossible and is in fact organized by the government (thus the display of “Jordanian flags and posters of King Abdullah II” by citizens we are expected to believe love their corrupt king and his freedom-hating retinue). It is nearly vomit-inducing to witness the length the corporate media has gone to portray average Jordanians as kowtowing citizens of a “moderate” Arab country when in fact they are oppressed subjects ruled under a “semi-constitutional” monarchy installed by British invaders in 1921 as they went about carving up the Middle East after defeating the Ottomans. But then tribal and chieftain-based monarchy (especially the Hashemite version) is precisely what Israel and the United States have in mind for the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East, so this compliant behavior by the corporate media is to be more or less expected.

Now, with the ceiling story far behind us—and the evacuation of the Israelis prior to the attack story all but extinguished—we are told these al-Zarqawi suicide bombers included a “husband and wife team” and the terrorists “carried out the Amman attacks with explosive belts after carefully staking out the hotels for a month,” according to the Associated Press. Once again, all of this is absurd on its face—Iraqis staking out hotels in a police state as if they were casually walking around Cleveland, Ohio, staking out the local Red Roof Inn—and no doubt the “husband and wife team” bit was thrown in for shock value, a gruesome stick-to-the-wall detail that tells us the Iraqi resistance (under the sway of the dead cretin al-Zarqawi) is brutal, cold-hearted, and above all nihilistic. “It was believed to be the first time a married couple has carried out a suicide attack. The couple bombed the Days Inn after the woman ‘chose to accompany her husband to his martyrdom,’ the statement said.” Of course, we can expect more married couples—soon followed by fraternal and identical twins—to engage in such horrific violence against “filthy Jews” (according to the deceased al-Zarqawi) who are evacuated, leaving behind not only innocent Arabs attending a wedding party but also a number of important Palestinians and Chinese business partners.

“In its latest statement, Al-Qaida said the bombings were carried out in response to ‘the conspiracy against the Sunnis,’ referring to the Muslim Arab group favored under Saddam Hussein’s regime and now believed to form the core of the Iraqi insurgency.” Of course, this makes absolutely no sense—Sunni Muslims comprise a full 92 percent of Jordanians and it makes less than no sense to attack them to defend the honor of Sunnis in Iraq. But then we are expected to believe al-Zarqawi the black op team attacks Shia Muslims in Iraq because it is more important to kill heretics than defeat the American occupation.

Obviously, the attack in Amman was carried out by seasoned experts—almost certainly Mossad (the attacks fit their modus operandi)—with the complicity of Jordanian and U.S. military intelligence. It was engineered to reverse the support of average Sunni Jordanians for the Sunni-led resistance in Iraq, kill important Palestinians (and send a message to the Chinese, who support the Palestinians), and also dovetail with Bush’s desperate speech in western Pennsylvania earlier today. “We must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war against the terrorists,” said Bush. No doubt Bush and his neocon handlers believe the images from Amman of blown up hotels—very westernized hotels and thus striking a cord with mostly somnolent Americans—add the appropriate spin to his speech, which is in fact a act of desperation as the Bushcons circle the wagons to fend off growing criticism of the obvious fact Bush lied as he prepared to attack a sovereign and defenseless nation.

Copyright Kurt Nimmo

James Wolfensohn, the former chairman of the World Bank, warned yesterday that Gaza was in danger of becoming a "giant prison" after Israeli withdrawal unless there was swift agreement on freeing the passage of goods and people through border crossings.

Although the word "prison" has been frequently used by Palestinians impatient for better access to the outside world for Gaza's imports and exports, Mr Wolfensohn's resort to the metaphor reflects frustration at the lack of progress in talks between the two sides, particularly on the Karni crossing between Gaza and Israel.

Mr Wolfensohn, the West's special envoy on post-disengagement Gaza, is to leave the region on Wednesday and is reportedly hoping that the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who arrived here last night, will inject new momentum into talks between Israel and the Palestinians on the border issue.

Mr Wolfensohn, who warned the next 72 hours were crucial, was reportedly critical of Israelis and Palestinians, saying he had heard reports of explosive devices being taken across Karni in lorries.

Former US President, Bill Clinton, who is here with his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, for the commemoration of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination praised disengagement from Gaza but urged the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to pursue dialogue with Palestinians.

AL-QAEDA has threatened the Queen by naming her as “one of the severest enemies of Islam” in a video message to justify the July bombings in London.

The warning has been passed by MI5 to the Queen’s protection team after it obtained the unexpurgated version of a video issued by Al-Qaeda after the 7/7 attacks. Parts of it were broadcast on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite channel.

In the video, Ayman al- Zawahiri, second-in-command to Osama Bin Laden, targets the Queen as ultimately responsible for Britain’s “crusader laws” and denounces her as an enemy of Muslims.

A senior Whitehall official said: “MI5 is aware that there are some pieces of that video that have not been aired. They are aware of the bit of al- Zawahiri talking about the Queen and they have notified the relevant authorities.”

The Sunday Times has obtained the full 27-minute video, which is circulating on secure jihadist websites in the Middle East used to recruit and inflame prospective terrorists. In Britain it has been posted by Muhammad al-Massari, the London-based Saudi extremist, on his website Tajdeed.

It also contains inflammatory material from Mohammad Sidique Khan, ringleader of the London bombings which killed 52 commuters. He is urging Muslims to take part in jihad and seek martyrdom.

Khan, 30, incites British Muslims to ignore the moderate Islamic leaders who want integration with British society.

“Our so-called scholars of today,” he said, “are content with their Toyotas and semi- detached houses” in their desire for integration. The message is believed to be the first of its kind in which a British suicide bomber calls on fellow UK Muslims to follow his example.

The attack by al-Zawahiri prompted intelligence officers to alert Buckingham Palace that the Queen had become a specific target of Al-Qaeda. Her security had already been upgraded after September 11, 2001.

In the video al-Zawahiri not only labels the Queen as one of Islam’s “severest enemies” but also sends a warning shot to British Islamic leaders who “work for the pleasure of Elizabeth, the head of the Church of England”.

He said those who followed her were saying: “We are British citizens, subject to Britain’s crusader laws, and we are proud of our submission . . . to Elizabeth, head of the Church of England.”

In a possible reference to the role of the Muslim Council of Britain, which had issued instructions to mosques to inform on potential terrorists, he criticised “those who issue fatwas, according to the school of thought of the head of the Church of England”.

In the previously unseen footage, Khan, from Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, said: “It is very clear, brothers and sisters, that the path of jihad and the desire for martyrdom is embedded in the holy prophet and his beloved companions.

“By preparing ourselves for this kind of work, we are guaranteeing ourselves for paradise and gaining the pleasure of Allah.

“And by turning our back on this work, we are guaranteeing ourselves humiliation and the anger of Allah. Jihad is an obligation on every single one of us, men and women.”

Khan’s message was condemned by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the Muslim Council’s secretary-general, as a “perverse interpretation of Islam”.

“The victims of Sidique Khan were innocent people . . . It’s clearly inciteful. It’s trying to incite people to commit murder,” he said.

LONDON -- Prince Charles will try to convince President Bush of the merits of Islam this week because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11, 2001.

The prince, who leaves tomorrow for an eight-day tour of the United States, has voiced private concerns over Washington's "confrontational" approach to Muslim countries and its failure to appreciate what he regards as Islam's strengths.

The prince raised his concerns when he met senior Muslims in London in November 2001. The gathering took place two months after the attacks on New York and Washington.

"I find the language and rhetoric coming from America too confrontational," the prince said, according to one leader at the meeting.

It is understood that Prince Charles did not -- and does not -- believe that the actions of 19 hijackers should tarnish the reputation of hundreds of millions of law-abiding Muslims around the world.

"His criticism of America was a general one of the Americans not having the appreciation we have for Islam and its culture," said Khalid Mahmood, a Labor Party member of Parliament who attended the meeting.

Mr. Mahmood and other Muslims stressed that Prince Charles did not criticize the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. More recently, he has been careful not to express his views on Iraq.

The prince also spoke of his sympathy for the United States after the terrorist attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 persons. He said he wanted to promote better relations among the religions of the world.

Those present at the meeting in 2001 included Sir Iqbal Sacrani, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, and Hashir Faruqi, the chief editor of Impact International, a respected Islamic affairs magazine.

Prince Charles, who is about to embark on his first official foreign tour since his marriage to the Duchess of Cornwall, wants Americans -- including Mr. Bush -- to share his fondness for Islam. He has agreed to attend a seminar on religions at Georgetown University on Thursday, the only event where he will not be accompanied by the duchess.

"The seminar will look at how faith groups can alleviate social problems in their community," a royal aide said.

The prince and duchess will attend a lunch and dinner with President Bush and his wife, Laura, at the White House on Wednesday.

Now we find them popping up in Trinidad & Tobago, which is prosperous due to oil and gas production and processing.

It is also used by the Israeli Mafia for transshipping drugs.

We are beginning to see bombings occur and authorities have arrested Dahtangmik Agaronov.

The drug operation is run by Sergey Mikhail and Yuri Robolaevich ... their organization includes 5,000 criminals in Colombia, Moscow and Trinidad & Tobago who not only move cocaine and marijuana, but weapons as well.

They smuggle many items and engage in extortion.

Our sources tell us they are about to establish, on behalf of George and the neocons and Israel, a base for “revolutionaries,” that is mercenaries, against Venezuela and its President Hugo Chavez Frias ... we’ll keep you updated.

We hope Venezuelan intelligence is on top of this.

Dear Jon Stewart,

I phoned ABC and left a comment for The Daily Show. I hope you got it.

I'm glad you're against torture. I just wish you were also against torture by Israel. I was pretty astounded to hear you chatting with John McCain last night, nodding along as AIPAC-buddy McCain explained that the US should emulate Israel, "which doesn't torture people."

Whew!

Jon, you're a really smart guy. Is it possible that you don't know that there are 8,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons right now, and that many of them have been tortured, some of them at this very minute?

Is it possible that you didn't read the article about Mustafa Dirani testifying in an Israeli court for ten hours about his gruesome torture by Israeli interrogators?

Is it possible you've never ever talked to Palestinians, even Palestinian-Americans, and heard their graphic descriptions of the Israeli prison experience?

Jon, I know you're not dumb, and I'd like to think you're not hypocritical, so maybe you just really have missed the boat on this one. Therefore, in thanks for all the great laughs you've given us, I'd like to help you out a bit and invite you to join us on our next trip to the West Bank and Gaza. That way you can learn about things. The trip's on us, and the humus is great.

Sure, Israeli forces may kill or injure us, like they did Rachel Corrie, James Miller, Tom Hurndall, Brian Avery, and thousands upon thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children but, hey, they probably won't.

Cordially,

Alison Weir

P.S. Below is a news report that I think you missed, Jon, but it wasn't really your fault. Although this article can be discovered on some websites, almost no American news media actually printed it.


Militant Says He Was Abused by Israel

By PETER ENAV
Associated Press

TEL AVIV, Israel - A Lebanese guerrilla leader about to be freed in a prisoner swap testified Tuesday that Israeli interrogators raped him, sodomized him with a club and kept him naked for weeks in a round-the-clock effort to extract information on a missing Israeli aviator.

State prosecutor Shamai Becker said interrogators never touched Mustafa Dirani. The prosecutor said Dirani "sang like a bird" and made up allegations of abuse to explain why he gave Israel information.

Human rights groups have accused Israel of routinely mistreating Arab prisoners, but rarely to the extremes Dirani alleged to a Tel Aviv court in his $1.3 million lawsuit against the Israeli government.

Dirani is one of hundreds of Arab prisoners to be released Thursday in exchange for an Israeli businessman and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers - all kidnapped by the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah in October 2000.

The prisoners to be freed by Israel include 400 Palestinians, 34 people from Arab countries and a German convicted of spying for Hezbollah.

On Tuesday, a white bus filled with prisoners drove into the Sharon Prison in central Israel under heavy guard. Prisoners peeked from tiny wire mesh-covered windows, and some tried unsuccessfully to spread their fingers in V-for-victory signs.

The German-mediated swap is to take place Thursday. Security officials said the prisoners from Arab countries and the German would be flown Wednesday to Germany. Israel will release the Palestinians into the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and will hand over 59 bodies of Lebanese militants killed in clashes with Israeli troops.

All the Palestinians had less than three years to serve and were not involved in wounding or killing Israelis, according to a list released Tuesday. About two-thirds were scheduled to be released this year.

Some Palestinians greeted the list with disappointment, noting Israel has often freed prisoners convicted of nonviolent offenses on Muslim holidays or as part of peace talks.

"I look at this like a routine release," said Issa Karake, head of the Palestinian Prisoners' Association.

Dirani is among the most prominent of the prisoners named. Israeli forces burst into his home in Lebanon in 1994, kidnapped him and held him without charges for a decade, yet allowed him access to its court system to sue the government for torture.

On Tuesday, Dirani testified that interrogators kept him naked and shackled in a secret facility for a month as six men tortured him, splashing him with hot and freezing water, shaking him until he fainted and sexually assaulting him as they demanded information about missing airman Ron Arad.

Israel accuses Dirani of helping capture Arad, who was caught alive after ejecting from his plane over Lebanon in 1986.

Israeli and international human rights groups say Israel has mistreated Arab security detainees during interrogation by depriving them of sleep, tying them in painful positions and forcing them to wear hoods.

In 1999, Israel's Supreme Court banned the blanket use of such practices, saying they could be used only in specific instances. Human rights activists said abuse fell off after the ruling but has become more frequent in the past three years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting.

Dirani's accusations of torture - which he said took place before the court ruling - were far more severe than those usually reported, said Yael Stein, research director at B'tselem, an Israeli human rights group.

"Accusations of rape are not common," she said. "If it is true, it is very severe."

Dirani, 53, limped badly and walked with a cane when he entered the courtroom. He had to be coaxed into giving details.

Dirani said he was interrogated around the clock for a month by six people, including a man known only as George, who threatened him, cursed him and repeatedly squeezed his testicles "until I felt I would die," Dirani said.

One day a uniformed soldier nicknamed "Kojak" came into the room and dropped his pants, and George told Dirani the soldier would sodomize him if he did not talk, Dirani said.

Days later, Dirani was shackled and pushed down onto a bench, he said. "I couldn't see or resist ... I was raped by the soldier. He said he would rape me, and he did," he told the court.

"Two or three days later they started raping me with a police baton," he said. "It's impossible to describe the pain. I yelled to high heaven."

The interrogators took him to a doctor to stop the bleeding, he said. They also forced him to drink castor oil, which made him incontinent, and gave him large diapers as his only clothing.

Israel's Channel Two TV broadcast an interview with a person, his face in shadows, identified as the interrogator named George. He denied abusing Dirani, but said interrogation is a competition between questioners and detainees.

"You must be innovative," he said, "and you can't always run and get permission in advance."

Becker, the prosecutor, denied Dirani's accusations.

"All the interrogators said you sang like a bird and there was no reason to touch a hair on your head," Becker said as he cross-examined Dirani.

"What's all this about? You are going back to Lebanon. People will ask how could you give out this and that information. You'll answer that you are a heterosexual Muslim. This wouldn't have happened if they hadn't tortured and thus forced you to talk," Becker said.

Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew. She can be reached at: alisonweir@yahoo.com

Clinton, a New York Democrat and former first lady who is embarking on a re-election campaign, was scheduled to meet with Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and top Israeli defense officials, commemorate the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and visit the Israeli separation barrier that runs through the West Bank, The New York Times reported.

No visits to Palestinian territories or meetings with Palestinian leaders are on Clinton's public schedule.

In 1999, Clinton traveled to the West Bank as first lady and was acclaimed there as a champion of Palestinian nationhood because of comments she had made in 1998 that seemed to express support for a Palestinian state. The comments, criticized by some American Jewish groups, were disavowed by the White House, the newspaper said.

In her 2000 Senate race, Clinton staked out a number of positions that appealed to Jewish voters, declaring, for example, that Jerusalem should be the "eternal and indivisible capital of Israel."

Washington, D.C.--No sooner had President Bush told reporters on his stop in Panama that “[w]e do not torture" than the army announced it would prosecute five of its Rangers on charges of abusing detainees in Iraq, according to ABC News.

In Panama, President Bush said that he was fighting enemies who aimed to harm the U.S., but that he would carry on the fight “under the law.” He was responding to articles--the lead one appearing in last week’s Washington Post--that charged the CIA is running secret torture prisons in Eastern Europe.

Now ABC says the five members of the 75th Ranger regiment were charged Saturday for a September 7 incident "in which three detainees were allegedly punched and kicked while awaiting movement to a detention facility."

So maybe some of us do torture, but the rest of us will prosecute--and the plan is for everyone to benefit, suggested administration critic Larry Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to former secretary of state Colin Powell. In a remarkable November 3 interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, Wilkerson had this to say:

[I]t was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms--I’ll give you that--that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We’re not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence, and, oh, by the way, here’s some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.

The issue now dogs Bush wherever he goes. In Washington, the challenge is straightforward, contained in a lawsuit the Supreme Court will soon decide. The court, with new chief justice John Roberts sitting at its head, will hear a case dealing with the question of whether a former driver of Osama bin Laden, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, can be tried for war crimes before a military tribunal at Guantánamo. Oral arguments in the case are expected in March or April of next year. Reports the Christian Science Monitor:

"There are people who have been kept in Guantánamo so long that the situation just cries out for review," says Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University and general counsel for the National Institute of Military Justice. "The world wants to know whether our judiciary thinks these things matter, and taking this case says it matters."

On Monday, the Washington Post said Vice President Dick Cheney has kept right on pushing for a free hand in dealing with detainees, even as the UN is asking European officials to look into the secret holding facilities. The paper revealed:

Just last week, Cheney showed up at a Republican senatorial luncheon to lobby lawmakers for a CIA exemption to an amendment by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The exemption would cover the CIA's covert "black sites" in several Eastern European democracies and other countries where key al Qaeda captives are being kept.

Cheney spokesman Steve Schmidt declined to comment on the vice president's interventions or to elaborate on his positions. "The vice president's views are certainly reflected in the administration's policy," he said.

McCain has announced that he will continue adding a ban on torture by U.S. forces to big bills until he gets the measure through. “If necessary--and I sincerely hope it is not --I and the co-sponsors of this amendment will seek to add it to every piece of important legislation voted on in the Senate until the will of a substantial bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress prevails. Let no one doubt our determination,” McCain told the Senate.

"We had a discussion in (the State Department's Office of) Policy Planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields of the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of UN trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly." -- Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson.

"American and British [soldiers] are dying so that this coming December, Iraqis can go out and vote for Iran influenced clerics to knock us back a good four hundred years. What happened to the dream of a democratic Iraq?" -- Riverbend's Blog, November 8, 2005.

"They arrested me in my house in front of my family, covered my eyes, and tied my hands to the back on October 5, 2005 . . . They occupied the hospital for 8 days and made it their office. The first day they beat me on my eyes, nose, back, hands, legs . . ." -- Doctor Walid Al-Obeidi, Director of Haditha General Hospital, quoted in Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches, November 7, 2005.

Few people in the world trust anything George Bush says on any subject. But there are still some True Believers in the US who would applaud him and emit animal squeals and hoots of approval were he to declare he was the embodiment of the Second Coming of Christ.

His credibility is zero among thinking people, but the domestic and international damage he can still do is immense. This third rate fellow and his vile cohorts are now circling their wagons, and some of us remember with despair what happened in the Nixon administration when it had a similar siege obsession, because what little moral sense had obtained in that sleazy empire vanished entirely and the White House became even more remote and detached from the world. The announcement that members of Bush's staff are to be counseled in ethics is not funny (so please stop laughing : stop at once, I beg . . .), but it is indicative of the last-ditch mentality -- because the stinking crumbling bunker must be defended at all costs.

Bush cannot deny what was revealed about oil-planning by Colonel Wilkerson, and it is little wonder that the content of Cheney's Energy Task Force discussions have been declared a national secret, not to be disclosed on any account. Because as sure as fate the record would show that Wilkerson was only touching the surface when he recounted the lunatic (and criminal) scheme to "take the oilfields in the Middle East".

Which brings us to Riverbend's wise observation that Bush and his zealots have succeeded in bringing Iraq ever closer to becoming a theocratic regime closely allied with Iran -- Bush Washington's worst enemy on the planet apart, possibly, from North Korea. And when the oil weapon becomes serious, there won't be a drop for America from two of the world's biggest producers, because Bush has destroyed the trust and admiration for his country that so many people in the region used to have.

Think about that, Cheney, you nauseating blot, because this is where your malevolent scheming has led your country.

In the course of pushing Iraq towards a government of extremist Islamists who will delight in denying oil to the US should the fancy take them, Bush's occupying troops have discarded even a pretence of humanity, as their disgusting treatment of Doctor Walid demonstrates. This is but one of thousands of instances of hideous brutality against Iraqis by ill-disciplined and vengeance-seeking soldiery whose vicious excesses have created hatred of their country that will last for generations.

But to Bush, this is nothing. It is not important. Because everything is going to plan, according to the White House.

You doubt he really thinks this? But reflect : you are of sound mind and aware of what is happening in the world. He receives no real news of what is happening outside his fortress. Both domestic and international news is filtered through morally-challenged zealots who cannot, will not, and -- we are told, now -- dare not, present unpleasant facts to this bullying coward.

One of the most theatrical and deceitfully misleading political speeches ever delivered by George W Bush, the patron and patsy of the neocons, was staged in Virginia October 28.

His address was entirely political in intent and content. So it is sad that in the audience, mindlessly mooing 'Hooo-ahhhh', were dozens of gung-ho veterans of past wars and a bunch of senior military officers who sat there and reinforced the conviction of the draft-dodging Bush that he is a macho 'War Commander'.

These senior officers were worshipping at the feet of their Commander-in-Chief. They were mentally prostrating themselves at the decayed and festering trotters of a porcine prat who has sent men to die for nothing.

Bush announced "I want to thank the military commanders who are here, Lieutenant General Anthony Jones and Lieutenant General Mark Curran, Lieutenant General Bob Wagner, Major General Jim Solligan. Thank you all for being here. John McCarthy -- Major General McCarthy of the Marine Corps, Rear Admiral John Acton, Rear Admiral Steve Turcott. I'm honored you all took time to come."

This was despicable and tawdry stuff. His naming of these pathetic puppets was aimed quite flagrantly at the patriotism nerve of America, which is a very sensitive fiber. These military officers attended a Republican Party political gathering of their own free will. Even given the limited savoir faire of many senior US officers, they must have known what they were letting themselves in for, which was a requirement to demonstrate enthusiastic approval of a man whose orders have caused the deaths of over 2000 of their comrades and the hideous maiming in body and mind of thousands of others.

The presence of senior officers at an entirely Republican cheer-fest was bizarre. They may be Republicans -- and they have every right to be, should they choose -- but to publicly support a rabidly Republican political jamboree was bizarre. The example they set to thousands of soldiers, sailors and marines is that supporting the Republican party is Good. Perhaps they think that this is what they are paid for. Well ; happy promotions, guys. Don't you just love the medals?

And after his sword-brandishing patriotic beginning Bush gave the predictable and mandatory lead-in about 9/11, like a desperate dog drawn back to its cold and congealing vomit.

He repeated the mantra of his faltering, last-gasp, faux patriotic neocons by declaring :

"On the morning of September the 11th, 2001, we saw the destruction that the terrorists intend for this nation. We know they want to strike again. Our nation has made a clear choice. We will confront this mortal danger to our humanity, and we will not tire and we will not rest until the war on terror is won. (Applause.) In the four years since September the 11th, the evil that reached our shores has reappeared on other days, in other places, in Mombassa and Casablanca . . . and Baghdad and elsewhere."

Yes indeed ; there have been many atrocities round the world. But the only reason there are atrocities in Iraq, and especially Baghdad, is because Bush invaded that country, which had done America no harm and posed no threat whatever to the US or its people.

It is forgotten that for three years before the Bush War dozens of US and British strike aircraft scoured two thirds of Iraq every day, photographing every square inch and trying to provoke reaction from the Iraqis in order to provide justification for them to attack. Each time an Iraqi radar was switched on, they obliterated it, to make things easier for the forthcoming war that Bush had already ordered. They killed only a few goat herders and suchlike nonentities in their live-fire yippee excursions. What the hell? --- they were only ragheads. They had wives and children, maybe ; who knows? And who gives a damn, anyway? What's a human life to a jet-jockey who is given open slather to unleash a radar-seeking missile whose effectiveness the crazed scientists want to analyze?

For years there was 24/7 surveillance of Iraq by US technical means that can hear an ant fart from fifty paces and see a bee pee at five hundred.

The US electronic interception capability is mind-blowing in what it scoops up and records. You want to know the precise place on a map of a Mongolian Army postal section? Or what the officer commanding the 503rd Mobile Bath and Laundry Unit in the Third Military District of Kyrgyzstan said to the colonel of the 871st Death's Head Regiment on the phone at 0933 hours on Saturday July 9? ---- It's all there. And lots more. And we are expected to believe, after all that surveillance of Iraq, over years and years of recording Saddam's conversations (and millions of others) which produced absolutely nothing about any sort of weapons, never mind the Cheney-Rice 'Mushroom Clouds', that the neocons' interpretation of national intelligence was more accurate than that of expert analysts. But Bush cannot admit that his cronies were wrong in every statement they gave him to spout to justify his war on Iraq.

In similar fashion, in no speech his speechwriters give him to deliver can Bush admit that hundreds of atrocities in Iraq have been committed by the troops who so blindly follow him. (Hooo-Ahhhh.) The fact that an enemy who had nothing to do with Iraq carried out an atrocity against America on 9/11 does not make it mandatory for American troops to beat up doctors or kill other civilians in Iraq, although the attitude of thousands of soldiers is that the lives of Iraqis don't matter and that their slaughter is justified by "9/11". Back to the Bush dog vomit.

The Big Lie has worked, and thousands of ingenuous GIs have been made to believe that they are at war in Iraq to avenge the Twin Towers. To be sure, they are of limited intelligence ; but what about the "military commanders" who Bush so publicly welcomed to his war-justifying tirade in patriotic, freedom-loving Virginia? Are they stupid, as well?

The president who made the choice for war is now disapproved of by 60 per cent of the citizens of his country. Fifty-five per cent of Americans say "the Bush administration intentionally misled the public in making its case for war [on Iraq]". 68 percent state that their country is on the "wrong track".

Millions of Americans and many outsiders have known that Bush is on the wrong track for years. He entered that track when he obeyed the neocons and chose to confront the world by ordering every nation to follow Washington or be deemed an enemy.

Some of his closest supporters are being charged with gross financial irregularities, lying on oath, and other squalid crimes. His vice president is pressuring Congress to approve laws permitting torture by a cabalistic crew of clandestine cowboys. His secret agencies are out of control, are subject to no laws, and have interrogation camps around the world that would have been admired by the semi-human inquisitors who worshipped and followed Stalin and Hitler.

In May this year the White House scorned an observation by the head of Amnesty International that the US was operating "the Gulag of our time". The foolish spokesman for Bush, the incompetent liar Scott McClellan, declared that Amnesty's statements were "ridiculous and unsupported by the facts." But now we realize the CIA gulag is not only extensive but a suppurating sore on the body of America's democracy.

The soldiers of Bush have committed and continue to commit appalling atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. They burn, kill and destroy without fear of judicial proceedings, and their jamborees of torture and murder, when they cannot be disguised, are met with derisory lenience. They try to disguise their excesses by lying. Then they try to cover up the facts once their lies are revealed for what they are, which is dishonorable practice by the very people who should live by a spotless code of honor, and in whom there should be ultimate trust by their country and indeed the world. But they, in turn and as a result of their savagery, are subjected to ferocious retributive attacks by equally barbaric resistance forces on a scale that beggars description, which is kept from the public by the Pentagon's knaves of spin and fabrication and their allies in the media.

The entire Bush administration is rotten. It is vile, stinking and corrupt to the depths of its malevolent inner being. It is ever-ready to attack, smear and destroy anyone who does not agree with every one of its vicious policies. It relishes and encourages sleaze, deceit and torture. It has alienated most of America's formerly closest allies.

But all true friends of the United States hope that the American public will vote in the 2006 mid-terms to restrain, fetter and curb this evil regime.

Brian Cloughley writes on military and political affairs. He can be reached through his website www.briancloughley.com

In more than 50 years of reporting on the national scene, I have seldom seen a more furious attack on a hugely influential public official than a lead editorial, "Vice President for Torture," in the October 26 Washington Post:

"Vice President Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. . . . He will be remembered as the vice president who campaigned for torture."

On October 20, Dick Cheney and CIA head Porter Goss tried to bully Republican senator John McCain to at least soften his amendments to the defense appropriations bill that would prohibit the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of anyone in American custody anywhere in the world. That amendment would establish the Army Field Manual as the standard for interrogation of all "detainees" held by the Defense Department.

Startlingly, the McCain amendment won 90 votes in the Senate, including those of 46 Republicans. The House defense appropriations bill has no counterpart to McCain's amendment because the House leadership strongly opposes it. As of this writing, the two versions are in a congressional conference committee. Even if the McCain amendment is stricken from the final bill, McCain has pledged to attach it to forthcoming legislation. (Bush has threatened to veto any such language that comes before him.)

With the 90 Senate votes forbidding abuses, including torture, of American prisoners in mind, Cheney is determined to kill McCain's attempt to force the president to adhere to international treaties against torture the U.S. has signed—and our own anti-torture statute. As Scott Horton reminded us on Amy Goodman's syndicated program, Democracy Now!, the vice president, back in 2002, "was making the rounds of the talk shows and talking about the need to use 'the dark arts.' He was clearly advocating torture, and he was advocating it within the CIA and later the Defense Department."

On this October 20, when Cheney called on John McCain, with Porter Goss in tow, he gave a proposal to the former tortured prisoner of war in Vietnam: Keep your amendment, but with one exception—that the prohibition of inhumane treatment shall not apply to our covert counterterrorism operations abroad—or to operations involving " an element of the United States government" that is not part of the Defense Department. (Emphasis added.) This means that agents of the CIA would, as usual, have their own "special powers" above our laws.

As Charlie Savage, The Boston Globe's first-class Washington reporter, made clear: "If Congress passes an anti-abuse law that exempts the CIA, the law would constitute, for the first time, clear authorization to engage in abusive interrogations to protect national security."

What would the president pay? On October 25, when asked about Cheney's trying to apply his "dark arts" to bypass McCain, Bush's press secretary, Scott McClellan, turned on his internal tape recording: "We do not condone torture, nor would [President Bush] ever authorize the use of torture. We have an obligation to abide by our laws and our treaty obligations, and that's what we do." (Play it again, Scott.)

McCain's blunt reaction to Cheney's proposed legislation, as reported by Charlie Savage: "I don't see how you could possibly agree to legitimizing an agent of the government engaging in torture. No amendment at all would be better than that."

Cheney's urgent need to circumvent McCain's stubborn heresy was accentuated by Dana Priest in a front-page Washington Post story on November 2: "CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons." Priest had been exposing CIA lawlessness since her exclusive December 2002 story of prisoners (and of torture) at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

Her newest bursts of acusatory sunlight—which will probably again not win her a Pulitzer— note that this CIA system of possibly Saddam Hussein–like interrogation centers is kept secret not only from us lowly Americans but also from "nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions. . . . Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long."

A New York Times October 23 corollary story to Dana Priest's by Douglas Jehl and Tim Golden is headed: "CIA Is Likely to Avoid Charges in Most Prisoner Deaths" during CIA interrogations that we know about, not counting whatever is happening to prisoners in the CIA's deeply secret torture chambers as you are reading this column.

Prophetically dissenting in a 1948 Supreme Court decision, Ahrens v. Clark, civil libertarian Justice Wiley Blount Rutledge wrote: "[There] may be instances arising in the future where persons are wrongfully detained in places unknown to those who would apply for habeas corpus in their behalf [so a U.S. court can determine if they're legally held] . . .

"These dangers may seem unreal in the United States. But the experience of less fortunate countries should serve as a warning."

That warning has not been heard. As Dana Priest emphasizes, these CIA "black sites," as they're called "in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department, and congressional documents, are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country"—our allies aspiring to become democracies.

How is it possible that in this constitutional democracy—where Dana Priest and others vigorously exercise freedom of the press—no one is held accountable for these terrifying CIA practices? No one. Not Dick Cheney and not even George W. Bush, who continues to authorize these "black sites" in our war to spread democracy and our other moral values around the world. There are serious penalties for violating international treaties and our own laws. Where—ho! ho! ho!—is our Justice Department?

As someone who has spent decades representing clients who have been tortured under dictatorships, in dirty wars and by lawless governments around the world, I'm having a rough week here at home. My friend Sister Dianna Ortiz, an Ursuline nun whom I represented after she'd been abducted, raped and tortured by security forces in Guatemala, told me she was having a hard time too. "Torture destroys trust," she said. "Since my torture, 16 years ago, I've tried to rebuild that trust, but now my government has shattered it yet again. Fear returns..."

For Sister Dianna and other victims of torture, this moment represents what she calls "a choice between courage and cowardice, human decency and depravity." Inside the Pentagon, officials are arguing with Vice President Dick Cheney and some of his aides about a whether a new set of Defense Department guidelines for interrogating suspected terrorists should prohibit the "cruel, humiliating, and degrading" treatment of prisoners. In the Congress, Sen. John McCain, with support from 89 colleagues, is pushing a separate measure to ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of any detainee in U.S. custody -- against veto threats from the White House and fierce opposition from Cheney and his new chief of staff, David Addington, who are maneuvering to exempt clandestine CIA activities from oversight. And reporters have uncovered a network of "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere -- secret detention camps run by the CIA, where suspects are being held and brutally interrogated.

The idea that torture could be so publicly defensible -- and the news that the United States is maintaining secret facilities in former Soviet-era prisons for torturing nameless and disappeared people -- fills me with shame and horror. And while it's encouraging that John McCain, who was himself tortured as a prisoner of war, wants to make it illegal to strap naked prisoners to boards and hold them under water, electrocute them or mock-execute them, it's profoundly depressing that the discourse about torture has come to this point.

Cruelty in war may be universal: but an international code acknowledging limits on cruelty has been, until now, a fundamental part of civilization. The Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1949, put it plainly: Even in war, all persons are to be treated "humanely"; "cruel treatment and torture and outrages upon personal dignity" are prohibited. The United States and countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, 192 in all, have agreed that freedom from torture, degradation, and cruel or inhuman treatment is one of the most basic of human rights, transcending national boundaries. As Judge Irving Kaufman of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1980 -- in a landmark case we at the Center for Constitutional Rights brought in a U.S. court against the Paraguayan general who tortured Joel Filartiga to death -- "for purposes of civil liability, the torturer has become like the pirate and slave trader before him hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind."

Changes since 9/11

The Filartiga case set a precedent that torturers anywhere in the world can be held accountable for their crimes. With the Center for Constitutional Rights and lawyers for other human rights organizations, I have represented victims of torture from Bosnia to Algeria, from East Timor to Tiananmen Square: their stories still haunt me and bring me to tears. I'm unable to forget a terrorized Kanjobal Indian boy from Guatemala, who was just 8 when army troops came to his village and rounded up all the men, shackling and hooding them. The boy told me how he'd been forced to watch as his father was hanged from a tree and cut apart alive. The principle that all people should be safe from torture -- that there are universal laws that make us human -- has been at the very heart of our work.

Since 9/11, I've found myself swept up in defending basic human rights and the rule of law against a relentless onslaught by the Bush administration. We've brought suit on behalf of 500 nameless "John Doe" prisoners held at Guantánamo in defiance of the Geneva Conventions; we've fought the indefinite detention of American citizens; we're challenging the Defense Department and private contractors over the horrendous abuses at Abu Ghraib. We've uncovered terrible stories about cruelty and torture carried out by our country, like that of Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian citizen kidnapped and "rendered" to Syria by American forces, who was kept an underground cell for over 10 months and beaten for weeks on end with a thick cable. I represented three young men from England who were released from Guantánamo when it was finally proved they'd made false confessions -- after being stripped, hooded, isolated, chained to the floor for 12 hours at stifling temperatures and threatened by snarling dogs.

Yet despite victories in court, and rising political outrage from Republicans as well as Democrats, military lawyers and State Department officials as well as human-rights activists, it now seems that administration hard-liners are digging in.

How did we get to this point? Because the United States is bound by the Geneva Convention governing prisoners of war, and by the 1987 Convention Against Torture with its prohibitions against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, McCain's legislation should not even be necessary.

But after 9/11, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (at that time White House counsel to the president) and others gave their legal opinion that prohibitions on "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" didn't apply to noncitizens being held by the United States outside the United States. Then, because torture, even outside the United States, remains a crime, they redefined "torture" so narrowly that almost all violent and coercive methods of interrogation were excluded. Then, because of the U.S. criminal statute making violations of the Geneva Conventions a crime, they insisted that the conventions did not apply to anyone they termed a suspected al-Qaida member.

Legal cover

These opinions were an attempt to provide legal cover so that U.S. personnel and contractors could engage in coercive interrogations without fear of criminal prosecution. They were an attempt to show that the United States did not really engage in torture and was not really violating conventions governing cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Once the abuse scandals broke, and the reality of what was being done to prisoners emerged, officials began to talk about lack of clarity in the opinions, or a "failure of supervision" that led to "excesses."

But this administration is now openly and baldly saying that it claims the right to torture, at its discretion. All the fictions that sustained the war on terror -- that abuses were one-time mistakes by low-level grunts; that the rules about human rights weren't clear; that soldiers didn't understand the parameters when they beat and humiliated and tortured prisoners -- have been replaced by a clear declaration: The United States is going to torture people as it sees fit, to subject them to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment wherever and whenever it decides to.

Human rights activists around the world who live under repressive regimes have long looked to this country for leadership; our government, flawed as it is, has launched crusades against human rights abusers abroad and helped prevent terrible suffering by demanding that torture stop. Now we are facing a new world: one in which the most powerful country on the planet publicly declares itself above the laws that have protected individuals everywhere from disappearance, torture and murder. It is a sad and dark moment, in which the hostis humani generis, the enemy of all humankind, speaks with the voice of the United States government.

How the public relations industry sold the Gulf War to the US, the mother of all clients

Hill and Knowlton produced dozens of video news releases (VNRs) at a cost of well over half a million dollars, but it was money well spent, resulting in tens of millions of dollars worth of "free" air time. The VNRs were shown by eager TV news directors around the world who rarely (if ever) identified Kuwait's public relations (PR) firm as the source of the footage and stories. TV stations and networks simply fed the carefully-crafted propaganda to unwitting viewers, who assumed they were watching "real" journalism. After the war Arthur Rowse asked Hill & Knowlton to show him some of the VNRs, but the PR company refused. Obviously the phony TV news reports had served their purpose and it would do H&K no good to help a reporter reveal the extent of deception. In Unreliable Sources, authors Martin Lee and Norman Solomon noted that "when a research team from the communications department of the University of Massachusetts surveyed public opinion and correlated it with knowledge of basic facts about U.S. policy in the region, they drew some sobering conclusions. The more television people watched, the fewer facts they knew; and the less people knew in terms of basic facts, the more likely they were to back the Bush administration.1

Throughout the campaign, the Wirthlin Group conducted daily opinion polls to help Hill & Knowlton take the emotional pulse of key constituencies so it could identify the themes and slogans that would be most effective in promoting support for U.S. military action. After the war ended. the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced an Emmy award-winning TV documentary on the PR campaign titled "To Sell a War." The show featured an interview with Wirthlin executive Dee Alsop in which Alsop bragged of his work and demonstrated how audience surveys were even used to physically adapt the clothing and hairstyle of the Kuwait ambassador so he would seem more likeable to TV audiences. Wirthlin's job, Alsop explained, was "to identify the messages that really resonate emotionally with the American people." The theme that struck the deepest emotional chord, they discovered, was "the fact that Saddam Hussein was a madman who had committed atrocities even against his own people, and had tremendous power to do further damage, and he needed to be stopped."2

Every big media event needs what journalist and flacks alike refer to as "the hook." An ideal hook becomes the central element of a story that makes it newsworthy, evokes a strong emotional response, and sticks in the memory. In the case of the Gulf War, the "hook" was invented by Hill & Knowlton. In style, substance and mode of delivery, it bore an uncanny resemblance to England's World War I hearings that accused German soldiers of killing babies.

On October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill which provided the first opportunity for formal presentations of Iraqi human rights violations. Outwardly, the hearing resembled an official congressional proceeding, but appearances were deceiving. In reality, the Human Rights Caucus, chaired by California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, was simply an association of politicians. Lantos and Porter were co-chairs of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a legally separate entity that occupied free office space valued at $3,000 a year in Hill & Knowlton's Washington, DC office. Notwithstanding its congressional trappings, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus served as another Hill & Knowlton front group, which -- like all front groups -- used a noble-sounding name to disguise its true purpose.3

Only a few astute observers noticed the hypocrisy in Hill & Knowlton's use of the term "human rights." One of those observers was John MacArthur, author of The Second Front, which remains the best book written about the manipulation of the news media during the Gulf War. In the fall of 1990, MacArthur reported, Hill & Knowlton's Washington switchboard was simultaneously fielding calls for the Human Rights Foundation and for "government representatives of Indonesia, another H&K client. Like H&K client Turkey, Indonesia is a practitioner of naked aggression, having seized . . . the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975. Since the annexation of East Timor, the Indonesian government was killed, by conservative estimate, about 100,000 inhabitants of the region.4

MacArthur also noticed another telling detail about the October 1990 hearings. "The Human Rights Caucus is not a committee of congress, and therefore it is unencumbered by the legal accouterments that would make a witness hesitate before he or she lied . . . Lying under oath in front of a congressional committee is a crime; lying from under the cover of anonymity to a caucus is merely public relations.5

In fact, the most emotionally moving testimony on October 10 came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah. According to the Caucus, Nayirah's full name was being kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in occupied Kuwait. Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her written testimony was passed out in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."6

from http://www.io.com/~patrik/gulfwar2.htm
see also http://www.io.com/~patrik/gulfwar1.htm

A YOUNG woman screams in pain and falls from the open door of her SUV onto the tarmac. Seconds earlier, a Florida traffic cop had fired his Taser stun gun at her, delivering a 50,000-volt shock and leaving her convulsing in agony on the roadside.

Her crime? After being pulled over for speeding, she had insisted on making a cellphone call instead of getting out of the car when told to do so.

Video footage of this event shocked many delegates at Jane's Less-Lethal Weapons Conference in Leeds, UK, last month. But the footage soon got even worse. A minute later, with the 22-year-old still stunned on the tarmac, the officer orders her to lie on her stomach and put her hands behind her back. She can't do so, and says so. His response is to pull the trigger and send another 50,000-volt shock into the Taser darts still lodged in her arm. View a recording of the Tasing, taken by the police officer’s in-car video camera, (QuickTime format).

The use of such apparently disproportionate force to arrest a non-violent person seems a clear-cut infringement of civil liberties. But the officer's bosses at the Boynton Beach Police Department decided his actions were an appropriate way to apprehend someone non-violently resisting arrest, as she may have had a concealed weapon in the car. "But even if it is a lawful action, it is absolutely awful," says Colin Burrows, a former assistant chief constable in Northern Ireland and chairman of the LLW conference.

Critics say the incident is an example of the way the use of Tasers is escalating in countries where police are armed with this less-lethal weapon. "Tasers are suffering from mission creep," says Nick Lewer, who studies conflict resolution at the University of Bradford in the UK. "From being an alternative to lethal firearms they are now becoming an indiscriminate compliance tool."

Lewer's research shows Tasers are being used against people who pose no risk, and on people who are already restrained. For instance, in a study in Pueblo, Colorado, one-third of the 112 Taser incidents that Lewer studied were against handcuffed people. What's more, some people are being shocked more than once in a bid to incapacitate them.

Each shock lasts 5 seconds and induces excruciating muscular spasms. Epidemiologist Viktor Bovbjerg of the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville studied Taser use in the Los Angeles area from 1995 to 2004, with colleagues John Kenny and Bosseau Murray from Penn State University. They found that 46 per cent of people complied with police commands after one shock, 34 per cent after two shocks, 14 per cent after three shocks and 6 per cent after four shocks or more.

Graham Cooper, head of the UK's Defence Sub-committee on the Medical Implications of Less-Lethal Weapons (DOMILL), which approved the Taser for UK police in specialist firearms teams, says officers should avoid multiple shocks. "If they have to shock somebody five or six times, there is something fundamentally wrong with their approach and it's plainly not working," Cooper told New Scientist.

It is a criticism that police authorities are well aware of. Police sources in both the UK and US say they fear that abuse of Tasers could see the weapon withdrawn, depriving them of this new-found tactical advantage. By giving officers an alternative to drawing a gun against a knife wielder, for instance, the weapon can save lives. Steve Ward, a vice-president of Taser International based in Scottsdale, Arizona, claims the Taser option has helped save around 8000 lives so far.

In its tests, DOMILL found that Taser pulses were not sufficient to trigger extra heartbeats or chaotic contraction (ventricular fibrillation) in beating guinea pig hearts in vitro. And human hearts are much more resistant to such interference, says Cooper. Yet some doubts remain about the safety of Tasers. On 26 October, Taser announced that its quarterly profits had fallen 95 per cent on the back of a sales slump, possibly fuelled by incidents in which people had died soon after Taser strikes.

In many cases, people had a drug and alcohol-induced condition called "excited delirium" (ED) when they were struck. There is speculation that people with this condition are more likely to suffer a fatal cardiac arrhythmia when Tasered than others.

DOMILL ran tests on sheep tissue in which they steeped the cardiac fibres, the heart's electrical conductors, in seven recreational drugs in turn (European Journal of Pharmacology, vol 518, p 123). They found that "angel dust" (phencyclidine) and ecstasy seriously interfered with the heart's electrical timing signals, and that these drugs on their own can induce fatal cardiac arrhythmias. So drugs alone could have been responsible for the deaths.

But "Tasing" people with ED could still be inadvisable, says Mike Massine of the Canadian Police Research Centre in Victoria, British Columbia. He says police should avoid using a Taser on such people if they can. Massine trawled 4600 Taser incident records from the US, UK, Canada and Afghanistan and analysed those incidents in which the person Tasered was suffering from ED, to produce a training pack for officers. He found around a thousand such cases. By making officers and emergency call operators aware of ED symptoms, Massine hopes to encourage them to try calming strategies before resorting to Taser use.

The symptoms include profuse sweating, a very high body temperature (causing people to shed clothing), a wide-eyed stare, high pain tolerance, self-harm such as head-butting windows, unintelligible speech and urgent attempts to escape. Psychologists suggest officers keep their distance, speak slowly and quietly, keep hands visible, keep the person talking and even lower the lighting if possible. Such measures, especially repeating the person's name, can bring them back from delirium, says Massine.

Although Taser has seen off five lawsuits for wrongful death or injury, there is still uncertainty about the safety of Tasers. What does seem certain however is that their use will escalate. UK police now hope to use Tasers outside specialist firearms units, for instance. Smuggling of Tasers is rife, and they are often advertised on eBay, though the company forbids their resale. And pirated versions are now beginning to appear in China.

Add to this the fact that there is a raft of less-lethal weapons in development and it is clear that strict safeguards are needed to cover the whole class of weapons.

"The big concern now is that these new weapons may be deployed without their health effects being understood or even investigated," says David Webb, an engineer who studies less-lethal technology at Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. "Governments and the UN must now get involved to control and certify these systems as safe."

Less-lethal weapons in development include microwave beams, acoustic blasts and knockout drugs, but there is no independent, peer-reviewed research on their health effects.

The Pentagon has designed the microwave and acoustic weapons, which it plans to use to disperse crowds. The Area Denial System shines a broad microwave beam into a crowd, painfully heating people's skin and making them flee (New Scientist, 23 July, p 26). But calculations by physicist Jurgen Altmann at the University of Dortmund in Germany suggest the system will have a beam width of up to 5 metres. "In an invisible beam that wide, which way will you flee?" he asks. A Pentagon source says it has researched the health effects, but its results are classified.

The Long Range Acoustic Device is an ear-jarring noise generator. It produces a highly directional sound beam far more intense than the loudest noise permitted by US workplace safety laws. At 1 metre from the device, the intensity can be 151 decibels. "This is enough to produce ear pain and endanger hearing," Altmann told the conference.

Knockout drug pellets, delivered by weapons not unlike a paintball gun, are also on the way. Anaesthetist Jitka Schreiberova of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, is experimenting with different mixtures of surgical anaesthetics to make a fast-acting immobiliser. Based on benzodiazepines, ketamine and alpha-2 agonists - substances that activate alpha-2 receptors within the central nervous system, causing sedation - Schreiberova says she has so far immobilised macaque monkeys and human volunteers in 2 to 4 minutes.

"Some people might say this also contravenes the Chemical Weapons Treaty," says Andrew Mazzara of the Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies at Penn State University.

Perfidy loves company. George W. Bush instructed his British puppet, Prime Minister Tony Blair, to get moving on the detention issue so that he, Bush, would have company when he attacked the Constitution’s guarantee of habeas corpus.

Habeas corpus prevents authorities from detaining a person indefinitely without charges; the guarantee of habeas corpus ensures that no one can imprison you without a trial.

The Bush administration wants the power to detain indefinitely anyone it declares to be an enemy combatant or a terrorist without presenting the detainee in court with charges. In England the power to arrest people and to hold them indefinitely without charges was taken away from kings centuries ago. Bush apparently thinks he is the reincarnation of an absolute monarch.

The puppet Blair set to work. He soon discovered that at most he could try to pass a law that permitted the British government to hold a detainee for 90 days, a far cry from Bush’s desire for indefinite detention. Blair took what he called his "anti-terror" legislation to Parliament and was handed his first-ever defeat as Prime Minister.

The British Parliament knew enough history to realize that Blair’s "anti-terror" legislation was in fact the opposite. Parliamentarians perceived Blair’s proposal as a police state trick that could be used by an unscrupulous government to terrorize Her Majesty’s subjects by the use of imprisonment without charges. The British Parliament refused to put up with such injustice. Eleven of Blair’s former cabinet ministers joined in voting down the legislation.

That happened on Wednesday November 9.

On Thursday November 10, the Republican-controlled US Senate voted 49 to 42 to overturn the US Supreme Court’s 2004 ruling that permits Guantanamo detainees to challenge their detentions. How dare the US Supreme Court defend the US Constitution and the civil liberties of Americans when we have terrorists to fight, argued the Republican senators. What are civil liberties, the Republicans asked rhetorically, but legal tricks that allow criminals and terrorists to escape.

The Labour Party–dominated British Parliament will not allow 90 days detention without charges, but the Republican-controlled US Congress favors indefinite detention without charges of whomever Bush wants to detain.

Nothing more effectively undercuts the image that Bush paints of America as the land of freedom, liberty and democracy than the Republican Party’s destruction of habeas corpus.

Habeas corpus is essential to political opposition and the rise and maintenance of democracy. Without habeas corpus, a government can simply detain its opponents. Nothing is more conducive to one party rule than the suspension of habeas corpus.

It is heartbreaking to watch the Republican Party overthrow the very foundation of democracy in the name of democracy. The name of Lindsey O. Graham, Republican senator from South Carolina, the sponsor of this evil legislation, will go down in infamy in the book of tyrants.

The next time Bush declares that "they (Muslims) hate us for our freedom and democracy," someone should ask him how there can be freedom and democracy without habeas corpus.

The Bush administration has also resurrected that second great feature of tyranny – torture. We have the right to torture say President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Attorney General Gonzales.

What a hypocritical spectacle the Bush administration and the Republican Party have made of America. They boast of "freedom and democracy" while they destroy habeas corpus and practice torture.

Americans must recognize the Bush administration and the Republican Party for what they are. They are tyrants. They are bringing evil to the world and tyranny to America.

According to the Washington Post (Nov. 11), there are 750 detainees at Guantanamo. These people have been held for 3 or 4 years. If the Bush administration had any evidence against them, it would be a simple matter to file charges.

But the Bush administration does not have any evidence against them. Most of the detainees are innocent travelers and Arab businessmen who who captured by warlords and armed gangs and sold to the Americans who offered payments for "terrorists."

The reason so many of them have been tortured is that the Bush administration has no evidence against them and is relying on pain and the hopelessness of indefinite detention to induce self-incrimination. The Bush administration is desperate to produce some "terrorists."

What has become of the American people that they permit the despicable practices of tyrants to be practiced in their name? The Bush administration is in violation of the US Constitution, the rule of law, the Geneva Convention, the Nuremberg Standard, and basic humanity. It is a gang of criminals. The Republican Party is so terrified of losing power that it supports a tyrannical administration that has brought shame not just to the Republican name but to all Americans.

When a Republican next campaigns, all he can say is "vote for me because I want power to lock you up and torture you."

PROMINENT US senator John McCain has called on the Bush administration to send more troops to Iraq, warning that the stakes for the US are higher than they were in Vietnam.

Republican Senator McCain, a former Vietnam War prisoner, attacked proposals by top Democrats to start bringing troops home, and urged President George W. Bush to adopt a new anti-insurgency strategy.

"We must get Iraq right ... I would submit that the stakes are higher than they were in Vietnam," Senator McCain said in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, an influential conservative think tank.

"Instead of drawing down, we should be ramping up."

Senator McCain's unequivocal comments came as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise visit to Iraq, stopping in the mostly Sunni Arab town of Mosul, 500km north of the capital, to call for all Iraqis to participate in coming elections.

While Dr Rice flew the flag for the US mission in Iraq, Senator McCain said in Washington that bowing to calls by anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan and Democratic senator John Kerry respectively for an immediate or gradual withdrawal from Iraq would be a "fatal mistake" for the US.

He said the result would be civil war in Iraq, which would become a haven for terrorist groups to size up the US for future attacks in the vein of the September 11 strikes.

Senator McCain urged the Bush administration to make "significant policy changes" in the Iraq conflict, which has never been more unpopular in the US, according to opinion polls, and has cost more than 2000 American combat deaths. He urged the Pentagon to adopt a classic anti-insurgency strategy by slowly restoring security to designated areas where reconstruction and normal life could flourish, rather than trying to subdue the whole country at once.

Senator McCain also added his voice to those experts who believe that Washington never had enough troops to secure Iraq after the invasion, saying there was still a need for more boots on the ground.

"Our decisions about troop levels should be tied to the success or failure of our mission in Iraq, not to the number of Iraqi troops trained and equipped," he said.

Mr Bush has said US troops would stand down as the Iraqi armed forces were trained. But hardly any of the more than 100 battalions of Iraqi troops that have been trained are so far able to fight unaided by US troops.

Senator McCain, beaten by Mr Bush to the Republican nomination in the 2000 US election, also faulted the administration for its frequent claims of great progress on Iraq, saying the public did not understand why US troops were still dying daily if things were really going so well.

Also speaking in Washington, Iraqi Vice-President Adel Abdul Mahdi advocated a timetable for training Iraqis to assume the country's security duties but not for the departure of US and other foreign forces.

Mr Mahdi said that by approving a new Iraqi constitution, Iraqis had "voted no to terrorism" and proved their fledgling democracy was making real advances.

"Terrorism" in Iraq is abetted by a "whole regional environment ... including in Egypt" where activities in mosques and even "official propaganda help to mobilise, to recruit, to finance, to give cover to all terrorist acts", he said at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

AMHERST, Mass. --Peace activist Cindy Sheehan told University of Massachusetts students in a Veteran's Day speech Friday that government officials who don't have family serving in the Iraq war "have nothing at stake."
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"So it is no problem for them to say we need to wait for the next election, for a better time..." to end the war, said Sheehan, whose 24-year old son, Casey, died in Iraq last year.

Sheehan spoke as part of the University's "Week on the War" program, organized by student groups and the American Friends Service Committee.

She received a standing ovation from an over-capacity crowd of several hundred as others watched on her television in a neighboring room.

Sheehan kept the tone light but continued her criticism of President Bush.

"When Bush first opened his mouth and lied to us he immediately lost his right to lead us," she said.

She also spoke about her usage of profanity in prior speeches: "Sometimes I use bad words, I know. I am sorry for offending you but when Bush's war killed my oldest son it offended me."

Sheehan brought attention to the anti-war effort last summer by camping outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas.

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- The federal government should strengthen the health care system for veterans, retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar said Saturday in the Democratic Party's weekly radio address.

Speaking on the Veterans Day weekend, the former U.S. military commander in the Middle East said "President Bush has consistently refused to provide enough" money for veterans' health care.

"Earlier this year, his administration admitted that they were $1 billion short in funding for critical health care services," he said. "They also repeatedly tried to increase the cost of prescription drugs and health care services for veterans nationwide."

The Veterans Affairs Department acknowledged in April that it had underestimated medical care costs. Congress reacted by approving an additional $1.5 billion in emergency funds for the current budget year.

Hoar also said, "Thousands of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan will require mental health care, yet the Bush administration has not taken action to deal with this emerging problem."

In contrast, Democrats are working to improve the current health care system and strengthen mental health care services, he said.

"As a veteran and a former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, I have seen first hand the kind of sacrifices they are making for us. It's a debt we will never be able to repay," he said. "But we have a special duty to make sure our veterans receive the benefits they have earned and deserve when they return home."

"The Iraqi security officials on Monday variously accused two Britons they detained of shooting at Iraqi forces or TRYING TO PLANT EXPLOSIVES." Washington Post, Ellen Knickmeyer, 9-20-05; "British Smash into Jail to Free Two Detained Soldiers"

In more than two years since the United States initiated hostilities against Iraq, there has never been a positive identification of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Never.

That doesn't mean that he doesn't exist; it simply suggests that prudent people will challenge the official version until his whereabouts and significance in the conflict can be verified.

At present, much of the rationale for maintaining the occupation depends on this elusive and, perhaps, illusory figure. It's odd how Al-Zarqawi appears at the precise coordinates of America's bombing-raids, and then, miraculously vanishes unscathed from the scene of the wreckage. This would be a remarkable feat for anyone, but especially for someone who only has one leg.

Al-Zarqawi may simply be a fantasy dreamed up by Pentagon planners to put a threatening face on the Iraqi resistance. The Defense Dept has been aggressive in its effort to shape information in a way that serves the overall objectives of the occupation. The primary aim of the Pentagon's "Strategic Information" program is to distort the truth in a way that controls the storyline created by the media. Al-Zarqawi fits perfectly within this paradigm of intentional deception.

The manipulation of information factors heavily in the steady increase of Iraqi casualties, too. Although the military refuses "to do body counts"; many people take considerable interest in the daily death toll.

Last week, over 200 civilians were killed in seemingly random acts of violence purportedly caused by al-Zarqawi. But, were they?

Were these massive attacks the work of al-Zarqawi as the western media reports or some other "more shadowy" force?

One member of the Iraqi National Assembly. Fatah al-Sheikh, stated, "It seems that the American forces are trying to escalate the situation in order to make the Iraqi people suffer.. There is a huge campaign for the agents of the foreign occupation to enter and plant hatred between the sons of the Iraqi people, and spread rumors in order to scare the one from the other. The occupiers are trying to start religious incitement and if it does not happen, then they will try to start an internal Shiite incitement."

Al-Sheikh's feelings are shared by a great many Iraqis. They can see that everything the US has done, from the forming a government made up predominantly of Shi'ites and Kurds, to creating a constitution that allows the breaking up to the country (federalism), to using the Peshmerga and Badr militia in their attacks on Sunni cities, to building an Interior Ministry entirely comprised of Shi'ites, suggests that the Pentagon's strategy is to fuel the sectarian divisions that will lead to civil war. Al-Zarqawi is an integral facet of this broader plan. Rumsfeld has cast the Jordanian as the agent-provocateur; the driving force behind religious partition and antagonism.

But, al-Zarqawi has nothing to gain by killing innocent civilians, and everything to lose. If he does actually operate in Iraq, he needs logistical supporting all his movements; including help with safe-houses, assistants, and the assurance of invisibility in the community. ("The ocean in which he swims") These would disappear instantly if he recklessly killed and maimed innocent women and children.

Last week the Imam of Baghdad's al-Kazimeya mosque, Jawad al-Kalesi said, that "al-Zarqawi is dead but Washington continues to use him as a bogeyman to justify a prolonged military occupation..He's simply an invention by the occupiers to divide the people." Al-Kalesi added that al-Zarqawi was killed in the beginning of the war in the Kurdish north and that "His family in Jordan even held a ceremony after his death." (AFP)

Most Iraqis probably agree with al-Kalesi, but that hasn't deterred the Pentagon from continuing with the charade. This is understandable given that al-Zarqawi is the last tattered justification for the initial invasion. It's doubtful that the Pentagon will ditch their final threadbare apology for the war. But the reality is vastly different from the spin coming from the military. In fact, foreign fighters play a very small role in Iraq with or without al-Zarqawi. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies
(CSIS) revealed this week in their report, "Analysts and government officials in the US and Iraq overstated the size of the foreign element in the Iraqi insurgency.. Iraqi fighters made up less than 10% of the armed groups' ranks, perhaps, even half of that." The report poignantly notes that most of the foreign fighters were not previously militants at all, but were motivated by, "revulsion at the idea of an Arab land being occupied by a non-Arab country."

The report concludes that the invasion of Iraq has added thousands of "fresh recruits to Osama bin Laden's network;" a fact that is no longer in dispute among those who have studied the data on the topic.

The al-Zarqawi phantasm is a particularly weak-link in the Pentagon's muddled narrative. The facts neither support the allegations of his participation nor prove that foreigners are a major contributor to the ongoing violence. Instead, the information points to a Defense establishment that cannot be trusted in anything it says and that may be directly involved in the terrorist-bombings that have killed countless thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Regrettably, that is prospect that can't be ignored. After all, no one else benefits from the slaughter.

(Note: Since this article was written, the Washington Post has added to our suspicions. In an Ellen Knickmeyer article "British Smash into Iraqi Jail to free 2 detained Soldiers" 9-20-05, Knickmeyer chronicles the fighting between British forces and Iraqi police who were detaining 2 British commandos. "THE IRAQI SECURITY OFFICIALS ON MONDAY VARIOUSLY ACCUSED THE TWO BRITONS THEY DETAINED OF SHOOTING AT IRAQI FORCES or TRYING TO PLANT EXPLOSIVES."

Is this why the British army was ordered to "burst through the walls of an Iraqi jail Monday in the southern city of Basra".followed by "British armored vehicles backed by helicopter gun-ships" ending in "hours of gun battles and rioting in Basra's streets"? (Washington Post)

Reuters reported that "half a dozen armored vehicles had smashed into the jail" and the provincial governor, Mohammed Walli, told news agencies that the British assault was "barbaric, savage and irresponsible."

So, why were the British so afraid to go through the normal channels to get their men released?

Could it be that the two commandos were "trying to plant explosives" as the article suggests?

An interview on Syrian TV last night also alleges that the British commandos "were planting explosives in one of the Basra streets".

"Al-Munajjid] In fact, Nidal, this incident gave answers to questions and suspicions that were lacking evidence about the participation of the occupation in some armed operations in Iraq. Many analysts and observers here had suspicions that the occupation was involved in some armed operations against civilians and places of worship and in the killing of scientists. But those were only suspicions that lacked proof. The proof came today through the arrest of the two British soldiers while they were planting explosives in one of the Basra streets. This proves, according to observers, that the occupation is not far from many operations that seek to sow sedition and maintain disorder, as this would give the occupation the justification to stay in Iraq for a longer period.

[Zaghbur] Ziyad al-Munajjaid in Baghdad, thank you very much. Copyright Syrian Arab TV and BBC Monitoring, 2005"

And then there was this on Al-Jazeera TV, Doha, 9-19-05; Interview with Fattah al-Shaykh, member of the National Assembly and deputy for Basra.

."the sons of Basra caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market. However, the sons of the city of Basra arrested them. They [the two non-Iraqis] then fired at the people there and killed some of them. The two arrested persons are now at the Intelligence Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime."

Copyright Al Jazeera TV and BBC Monitoring, 2005 (Thanks to Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research for the quotes from Al Jazeera and Syrian TV)

Does this solve the al-Zarqawi mystery? Are the bombs that are killing so many Iraqi civilians are being planted by British and American Intelligence?

We'll have to see if this damning story can be corroborated by other sources.

During my childhood, November 11th was called Armistice Day -- to commemorate the day that the Armistice was signed that ended the World War, The Great War, The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, The War to End All Wars. Since then we have been through so many wars that the day’s name has been changed to Veterans Day.

Understandably, all the attention on this day has been on those who were killed, with no notice taken of the killers and why they started the War. Understandably because no one in public life or among the veterans knows, or has even thought about it. That sad ignorance and indifference will be compensated for here now, albeit all too briefly.

The minds that manned the guns of August that blew open the 1914 Epoch began arming during the century that followed The Congress of Vienna, 1814-15, which sought to restore Europe following the Napoleonic Wars. British Viscount Castlereagh and Austrian Prince Metternich are standardly credited with having engineered there a balance of power that ushered in and maintained the so-called Hundred Year Peace, which has served as a model for balance-of-power politics in the 20th Century. Rubbish. Monumental Muddleheadedness. In reality that period constituted the Hundred Year Cauldron of War. In that cauldron were forged the ideology of Communism, the scourge of the 20th Century, and Reichism II, the ideological foundation of the Second Reich and the fundamental engine of the First World War.

One may say that The 1914 Epoch began in 1862, when Bismarck became Prime Minister of Prussia. Building on the warlike spirit that had been indelibly impressed on the Prussian people and Army by the 18th Century Prussian King Frederick The Great -- a spirit we will call Reichism I, after Frederick’s First Reich -- Bismarck concocted a modern warlike spirit. From the philosophies of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, and a distorted sense of Christian mission, he and the Junkers forged the prototype of modern aggressive, religio-secular national ideologies. It legitimated Bismarck’s famous program of ‘Blood and Iron’ and diplomatic deceit, and unified and motivated Prussia and the Hohenzollern dynasty behind it. The growing momentum and intensity of those ideas permeated Wilhelmian Germany, especially the Court, the General Staff, and ultimately the Kaiser himself.

The partially divine, partially secular right and duty of the German people to dominate the world by force and a special morality was called for by Natural Law, Historic and Cosmic Necessity, Racial Superiority, the Dictates of the Absolute, and the “positive freedom” of the Moral Law of the “World Spirit,” of which the German State was the instrument and highest expression, and into which the Individual was to dissolve, freed from “private” moral restraints. It was a comprehensive ideology of the Individual, the State, Violence and Morality.

By the Spring of 1914 the German General Staff fervently sought war, albeit a brief one. The assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, at Sarajevo on June 28 by a member of a secret society of Serbian nationalists provided the chance. The Kaiser and the German government spurned the mediating counsels of Austria with the cry “Now or Never!”, and spurred Austria to declare war on Serbia immediately, giving it the Kaiser’s famous “blank check.” Events then moved swiftly.

On July 28th Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. On July 31 Germany declared war on Russia. On August 1 Germany declared war on France. The Continental War was on. At 11pm on August 4, the expiration of Britain’s ultimatum to Germany to withdraw from Belgium, Great Britain entered -- and World War I began. On August 23 Japan declared war on Germany. On October 29 Turkish warships of the Ottoman Empire bombarded Russian ports on the Black Sea, and Russia responded with a declaration of war. On November 5 Great Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Within approximately three months the First World War exploded and engulfed Serbia, Montenegro, Austria-Hungary, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, France, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Japan and Belgium -- spanning five of the planet’s six continents.

It ended with the Armistice of November 11th, 1918. But in a larger sense that was merely a pause, as the Second World War, which was closely related to the First, then built, rumbled, evolved and exploded. The two together comprised the 20th Century Thirty-Years War.

The epochal convulsion comprising the First World War was the inevitable, direct consequence of sanctified, spiritualized, rationalized, glorified, idolized WAR: the ideology of the Second Reich: Reichism II.

My childhood impressions of that War were limited to pictures of my father in uniform, and to the very big book of black and white photos of its carnage. Now I can remember clearly only the photo of about five men in cushioned baskets set out on a table -- in baskets because their arms and legs had been amputated at the shoulders and thighs. ‘Basket cases’ they were called. They were smiling. I asked my father why. He didn’t know. I wished I could have asked them. I wished I could have spoken to so many of the anguished, destitute, bloodied men, women and children in the ruins of what had been their towns. In my simple childish way I thought, to the extent that a child can really think, in fact, maybe I just felt, that war was absolutely awful. I often went back to that book. Its impact was augmented by what I could make out of the news on the radio that my parents listened to and talked about, and their visiting friends talked about, which I could sense was about rumblings of a new war. I had no idea, and neither did my parents, that there, already in childhood, my destiny had been set.

The Columbia History of the World (1972) concludes its chapter on World War I as follows:

More than 10 million Europeans had died in battle--as well as 115,000 Americans. At least twice that number had been wounded, many of them to live out their lives as cripples. Thereafter, millions of mutilated men walked the streets of Europe as reminders of the ravages of war. France lost half of its men between the ages of twenty and thirty-two--and others suffered almost as much…Among the dead was the promise and flower of Europe’s youth. The potential leaders of the 1920s and 1930s had been decimated, as thousands of men of recognized talent died alongside others whose talents and genius would remain undiscovered forever. In those futile charges across no man’s land, junior officers and volunteers were mowed down first…Even Europe, with its historic abundance of talent could not suffer such loses without greatly impoverishing its future.

…that earlier world had been thoroughly discredited. It had been discredited by the bloody bungling of incompetence, by the failure of leadership, by the greed of war aims, and by the hollow claims of church and state. The rough ‘deference’ for church, fatherland and social superiors that still existed in 1914 was hopelessly compromised four years later. Superiors had been proven inferior, and the old notion that there was… a social order that made sense, this too had been broken down. What was to take its place? What faith could claim the disillusioned?…

…Everywhere, in Europe and elsewhere, in Russia, the United States, the great Asian powers, the end of war did not bring peace

Also in childhood, I would learn first-hand the special factor that leads to and is required by war: Hate. Every Sunday I was dragged across the Avenue in mid Manhattan, New York City, up the big stone steps to the big doors, and into Saint Ignatius Loyola Church. After Mass, as we descended those same steps, we were all harangued by fierce priests handing out copies of some publication. Eventually my mother explained that they were Father Coughlinites down from Canada, that the publication was called Social Justice, and that they were propagating a hate doctrine called ’anti-Semitism,’ which we will have nothing to do with. At some later Sunday I told my mother that I didn’t want to go there anymore. She agreed. In my parents’ view, a child should not be pressed into, but only exposed to, a religion, which he should choose when he has become older and capable of truly choosing.

In the course of growing up I realized that wars were predominantly about and required ideas to drive and legitimate them. So in Columbia College and University I majored in Physics and Philosophy as fundamental to dealing with the validity of ideas and hence of various political philosophies. I hadn’t yet learned the word ‘ideology.’ And I was focusing on Marxism-Leninism, which I foresaw as driving us into a World War III with the Soviet Union after World War II.

It was the worst of times. The world was going up in flames of hate, driven by the whirlwinds of bigotry, racism, and other malignant ideologies. It was the Era of the Thrd Reich, of Naziism in the heart of Christendom, of Stalin’s Terror savaging the Soviet Union, of Fascism in Italy driving its aggressions in Africa, of Fascism in Spain driving brutal civil war, of Shinto-Tanakaism driving Japan as it slashed, slaughtered and raped its way through Asia, of pandemic bigotry, racism, cross-burnings and lynching in the United States, and of a Second World War.

A few weeks after my 18th birthday, I was in the Army. My dogtags were stamped 'NR' for No Religion. Training in those days was especially rough. Guys were killed and maimed. After all of that I ended up in non-combat duty. It got to me. That is, the killed and wounded guys that were transited past me got to me. I couldn’t take it anymore. So I volunteered for combat. That’s the way it was then. Everyone served. No one shirked. My orders came through. A few days before I was to head on I was called into a rickety wood shack in which a Major sat behind a rickety wood desk on a rickety chair. “At ease, Corporal,” he said as we pointed to a rickety wood chair in front of his ‘desk.’ “What I have to do is better done in person than by a piece of paper. I’m informing you that your combat orders have been cancelled.” I was livid with fury. He expected that, and explained.

“We’ve learned that you were in a lot of fights back in Fort Sill [Oklahoma]. We feel that you may be unstably hot-headed, may decide to open fire or charge on your own, and give away positions and an imminent action, thus jeopardizing the action and the lives of many men. We cannot risk that.”

I was furious, and raged, “I never started a single fight. I simply defended a small Jewish soldier in our unit against the repeated harassments by Rucki, Wasnieski and Rocky Roth, two tough Brooklyn Polacks and a punk from Little Rock Arkansas. This busted thumb is from Rocky wrenching it out of its socket during one of those fights. And furthermore, millions of guys in combat and civilians back home would be furious to learn that a soldier had been blocked from combat because he had a record of fighting!”

He expected a fight, and moved to Plan B. He pulled a handful of papers out from a noisy drawer in that table, and waved them at me, but would not let me see them. “We have more information on you, soldier. We know the books you had on your barracks shelf, in your footlocker, and lug around in your duffle bag. And we know that and why you went to Boston, to Cambridge, to a Harvard bookstore, on your leaves. We know that you are working on a wholly new sort of defense system that attacks an adversary’s ideas, political philosophy, and that you focus on what you see as the next war, the one with the Soviet Union. You have talked about those things. We officers agree with all of that. And we are determined to save your ass from this war so you can fight the next one, and work on your system for the rest of your life. If you fight this, too, we are prepared to frame you with a court martial and jail time or a dishonorable discharge. Either way you’ll be alive and driven to continue working on what you have been working on. We also know that you got into a helluva fight with sailors in Paradise Café in Scollay Square in Boston and had to be rescued by the SPs [Shore Patrol], and that had nothing to do with defending any one”

He had hit a real nerve. I grew quiet. Thoughtful. He explained further, I guess to encourage me. The brass were offering a pact: They would save my life now in exchange for my committing to devote the rest of my life to my special work, this mission. Combined with the threats, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I accepted.

“Your commanding officer knows that your orders have been cancelled, but not why. You are not to tell him. You are not to discuss this meeting with anyone. Do you understand?” “Yes, sir.” “Dismissed.” I stood up; he stood up, too, and held out his hand. I shook it. “Good luck, soldier.” “Thank you, sir.” I saluted smartly, aboot-faced, and left.

That commitment has threaded throughout my life since then, sometimes involving devastating personal and career decisions and consequences, and has led inexorably to this essay on this day. Allow me a bit of fantasy to say that It almost seems as if a Great Architect has chosen me for this Mission. But if so, why choose such an ordinary mortal, whose inadequacies have delayed its progress. Nevertheless, readers, this essay and its companion essay, noted below, will hopefully enlighten and enlist you.

Early in 1992 there was an extraordinary television series produced by Maryland Public Television and written and presented by British historian Michael Wood, called LEGACY. During the course of each evening it presented two different civilizations. The last presented was called THE BARBARIAN WEST. At the beginning it showed a film of an annual ceremony in memory of the most savage and slaughterous battle in history, the Battle of Verdun during the Great War. It was supposed to have been a quick and decisive attack, but instead it raged from February to December 1916, and cost over a million men killed, wounded and missiing. Wood’s voice over the ceremony commented:

It’s a freezing February midnight in northern France. Former enemies, French and German, meet to commemorate the bloodiest battle in history which began on this night seventy-five years ago. Verdun.
…But in history only the West waged war all over the globe, from the conquests of the fifteenth century to the world wars of our own time.
...Under the flags of past battles the old familiar rituals of Christian sacrifice take place. Only a lifetime ago, three quarters of a million people died here for a couple of square miles of ground, where the heirs to the culture of Voltaire were bled white by the heirs of Goethe and Beethoven. The pointlessness of it all passes belief today, but the history of the West more than any other has swung between savagery and idealism. A contradiction apparently deeply rooted in our character and history.

Earlier Wood had summarized the problem as follows:

We Westerners of the late 20th century -- for all our modernity -- are still a Bronze Age people.

In 1997, during the course of the six years of researching and writing Principia Ideologica: A Treatise on Combatting Human Malignance, I spoke with Dr Bruce Manning Metzger, Professor Emeritus of Princeton Theological Seminary. Professor Metzger had been Chairman of the Standard Bible Translation Committee, which is affiliated with the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and which developed the New Revised Standard Version. During our conversation I remarked that in developing Principia Ideologica I had found it necessary to assume the burden of attacking the savagery of Western Civilization at what I perceived to be its roots in the savage Bronze Age literature of Judaeo-Christian mythology and ethos as expressed in the Bible, and asked if that would offend him. “Oh, no…no…not at all,” he replied.

WAR, PEACE AND ARMS CONTROL IN THE BRONZE AGE

Many folks accept, some with a sense of high probability, that the US will suffer a terrorist attack, perhaps of horrific proportions. If that happens, as General Tommy Franks and others have suggested, democracy could well fail and the US Constitution could be brought down and replaced by martial law. An attack would leave a terrified US populace, many of them so desperate for a sense of order, so lustful for revenge against the terrorists (to be identified by the War Machine, of course) that they will follow the US Government in lockstep. Nuke Iran and Syria immediately (as neocons have wanted to do for quite some time)? No problem. Arrest and intimidate anyone who dares speak out against the government? Hey, national security is at stake. Vigilantism waged against dissident “traitors”? We’re fighting for the survival of Western civilization, for God’s sake.

But that can’t happen here!

Well it can happen here. Consider the moral character of those in the White House and consider the demonstrated failure of Congress to stop them on their long march to disaster. Americans would be wise to adopt the attitude toward government leaders held by their ancestors. In 1787, citizens harbored disdainfully little trust in government. After viewing the original version of the US Constitution, they found no explicit enumerations of a citizen’s right to bear arms, to speak freely, to get a fair trial, etc. Show it to us in writing, demanded the patriots and thus, two years later, was born the Bill of Rights. They assumed, and so should we, that government leaders, unchecked, have limitless potential for harm toward the citizenry.

This is the government, after all, that runs a gulag network of CIA prison camps. These facilities were “black” (so secret that they didn’t ostensibly exist) until being outed, anonymously, to the Washington Post. One camp, fittingly, is in a former Soviet compound in Eastern Europe. Who the prisoners are, how they are interrogated or even how many make it out alive is unknown. While Dick Cheney fights tooth and nail to prevent any reining in of American brutality in the questioning of prisoners overseas, President Bush threatens to veto the John McCain anti-torture bill that passed in the Senate 90-9. If we, the people, allow government leaders to commit unnamed, unaccounted-for tortures upon those we hold in far-flung gulags – in “support” of a war that these leaders can’t explain to the American people or the world – it won’t be surprising when, in the event of domestic chaos at home, they visit like horrors upon their own citizens.

Senator Joe Lieberman, Honorary Co-Chairman of the hawkish, right-wing Committee on the Present Danger and a firm supporter of the war in Iraq, has this to say: "The fear...of federal military usurping state and local authority and, in the worst case, martial law imposed by a president has to give way to the reality of lives on the line." Senator John Warner expressed similar sentiments in a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Both men were speaking in the context of natural disasters, after the post-Katrina government rescue debacle. Since Katrina, the mention of martial law is trendy in government circles and in the media. The trouble is: it’s a short conceptual leap from the pushing of a recalcitrant homeowner out of a hurricane zone at the end of a federal bayonet, to the violent dispersal of angry crowds gathered to voice disapproval of a fascist state.

How would the neocon think tanks view martial law? Michael Ledeen, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, and close and trusted White House adviser, has this to say on p. 173 of his book Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are As Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago: “Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader – a dictator – willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures,' which few know how, or are willing, to employ."

According to the Boston Globe, Ledeen in a 2003 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, asserted our nation’s insatiable lust for war by claiming that "All the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war. . .What we hate is not casualties but losing." Did anyone in the media ever challenge an administration spokesman to defend Ledeen’s staggeringly wrongheaded, anti-American values? Did any of the (self-described) scholars at AEI that day ask why the GD fool would say such a thing? President Bush, for his part has personally offered these congratulations to the AEI: “At the American Enterprise Institute, some of the finest minds in our nation are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds.”

The leaders of the War Machine – with their gulags, their lies, their senseless, immoral war – do not treat enemies and purported enemies terribly well. In the event of martial law, it would be naïve indeed to suspect that they would treat Americans any better. Patriots – left, right and center – should unite under the American flag to stop the War Machine today while they still can. The impeachment of Bush and Cheney is the obvious place to start. We, the people, should demand it of the US Congress, just as statesmen and citizens of their time demanded the Bill of Rights. Congress should be ordered, as well, to act responsibly and responsively and in the best interest of the sovereign Republic of the United States of America, not in the interest of neocon warmongers.

The trial of I Lewis “Scooter” Libby will also be the trial of Dick Cheney. Throughout his long public career in four Republican administrations, starting as an aide in the White House of Richard Nixon, Cheney has operated in the background and through back-channels. But eventually the vice-president will be called to the stand, perhaps as a witness for both the prosecution and the defence.

Cheney may request a sealed courtroom, ask for a redacted transcript of the proceedings or assert executive privilege. But established legal precedent argues against a claim of executive privilege. The only basis on which he could refuse to testify would be to take the fifth amendment, protecting himself against self-incrimination. Of course, that would be political suicide because it would be perceived as a virtual admission of guilt. Indeed, Cheney has already waived that fifth-amendment right, having submitted to an interview with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. And his testimony in the Libby trial opens a perjury trap if he contradicts anything he has previously said to the prosecutor.

In the trial, the prosecutor will attempt to penetrate Libby's cover-up, his obstruction of justice, which Fitzgerald has analogised to throwing dirt in the eyes of an umpire. He will call a slew of White House aides, including a number of Cheney's, to break through Libby's bodyguard of lies. The truth about Cheney is to be found beyond the cover-up.

Since his indictment on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, Libby the loyalist, Cheney's Cheney, has moved swiftly to disabuse the notion that he will fall on his sword. The surest way for him to protect Cheney would have been to have pleaded guilty to the charges, admitted nothing and gone directly to jail. But Libby passed up his chance to plead in negotiations with the prosecutor before the indictment. He has hired a team of lawyers from three different firms who are making preparations for an aggressive defence. He has also begun raising money for his legal defence from Republican Party donors whose names will be kept secret. To coordinate this fund and his public relations, he has hired Barbara Comstock, a longtime Republican Party operative and former communications director for attorney-general John Ashcroft.

Libby is not a man in a hurry. His first legal manoeuvre was to waive his rights under the Speedy Trial Act, which requires a trial within 120 days. The presiding federal judge, Reggie Walton of the US district court of the district of Columbia, has not scheduled a status hearing until February 2006. This interregnum means that the trial may not take place until the spring or even the fall, rising to a rolling boil close to the mid-term elections and even beyond.

A political exposure

From the beginning, the White House has acted as though the Plame affair were a minor irritation that could be contained. Libby's elaborate stories to the grand jury of how he was told Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a covert CIA operative by journalists suggested supreme confidence that the journalists would not disclose their actual conversations with him. But only Judith Miller acted to shield him as a "source"; she was sentenced to prison for eighty-five days before she agreed to testify. The others cited in the indictment, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Tim Russert of NBC News, had earlier undercut Libby's various accounts.

President Bush's insistence that he wanted to get to the bottom of the incident and that he would fire anyone involved in the leak was followed by studied inactivity. When the prosecutor revealed Libby and Rove as culpable for the leak, Bush made no gesture to fulfil his pledge. The Libby indictment, moreover, states that Libby learned of Plame's job from Cheney, though Cheney had publicly denied any knowledge or involvement. Yet Bush has taken no action and made no statement about his vice-president's alleged deception.

Fitzgerald declared in his 28 October press conference announcing the Libby indictment that he was "not done". Regardless of whether there are future indictments of Bush administration officials, the Libby trial itself will be a spectacle subjecting Republican candidates to vulnerability during the campaign season. A poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press published on 8 November shows that 79% believe that Libby's indictment is a matter of national importance. Cheney's legal exposure is also the Republicans' political exposure.

Questions for Dick Cheney

The prosecutor's cross-examination of Cheney need not be limited to the bits of information about him that are sprinkled in the Libby indictment. Cheney cannot expect that he knows what the prosecutor has learned. He cannot, therefore, fully anticipate what he will be asked. He might be presented with surprises that test his veracity and challenge his poise. Fitzgerald may also have testimony that contradicts what Cheney might say on the stand, and may not necessarily reveal it to him.

Certainly, Cheney should expect to answer a series of questions similar to these:

* Mr Vice-President, you shared with Mr Libby the information that Valerie Plame was a CIA employee, didn't you?
* You believed that revealing Plame's supposed involvement in her husband Joseph Wilson's mission to Africa would discredit him, isn't that true?
* What was your reaction when you learned of Robert Novak's column divulging the identity of Valerie Plame? You spoke to people about Mr Novak's column after it appeared, didn't you? Please name them and describe those conversations.
* Did you know the identity of the two senior administration sources cited in his column after you read it? If not, what efforts did you make to determine the identities of these individuals?
* When White House press secretary Scott McClellan told the press corps in a briefing that neither Karl Rove nor Scooter Libby was involved in leaking Plame's identity, you knew that was false, but you never took any steps to inform McClellan or, more importantly, the president and the American people, did you?
* What conversations did you have with Karl Rove or others on the White House staff about Joseph Wilson or Valerie Plame? You were present at meetings discussing Wilson's objections to the false Niger claims, weren't you? Did you discuss Plame with the president?
* What other critics of the administration did you ever discuss in meetings? Who else was present? Please tell us about those conversations. What conversations did you have about Valerie Plame or Joseph Wilson with the president?
* Mr Vice-President, you knew from talking to Mr Libby that he didn't obtain the information about Plame's identity from the press, didn't you? You knew Mr Libby spoke with Tim Russert, Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper, isn't that true? And you knew that he provided information about Plame to them, not them to him, didn't you? You were his source, not them, isn't that true?

Mr Vice-President, you are under oath.

A former top official in the Bush administration is suggesting that a White House memo outlining the need for hundreds of thousands of troops for the Iraq invasion was kept from the president. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to then-secretary of state Colin Powell during President Bush's first term, said in a November 7 speech that the National Security Council had prepared a pre-war memo recommending that hundreds of thousands of troops and other security personnel were needed. “I don't know if the president saw it,” Wilkerson told the audience of military officers and international lawyers, who had gathered at the military for a conference on on international humanitarian law.

In response to a follow-up question after his speech, Wilkerson, a retired U.S. army colonel, said he believed that then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice or her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had blocked the memo, but he acknowledged that he had no clear evidence. In the end, about 135,000 U.S. troops were sent - a decision that critics said has hurt America's ability to defeat the insurgency in Iraq and has led to increased American casualties.

In July 2003, USA Today reported the existence of the NSC memo, which examined the level of troops in peacekeeping operations and concluded that some 500,000 troops would need to be deployed to Iraq. USA Today raised doubts as to whether the president saw the memo. However, Wilkerson's assertion seemed to take the matter a step further, suggesting that aides who supported the war intentionally kept the president in the dark. Wilkerson drew national attention last month, when, during a speech at the Washington-based New America Foundation, he accused Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of forming a “cabal” to hijack American foreign policy. “This was not a 'troop estimate,'” Wilkerson said of the alleged NSC memo, in an e-mail to the Forward. “It was a comprehensive analysis - succinct to be sure - of the potential post-war situation, which incidentally, as one would expect, included estimates of security, engineer, police, and other forces DOD might have to provide, as well as those of other agencies/departments (at least that's my memory of the preliminary stuff).” Wilkerson added, “The reason I suspect it got stopped is simply that they knew [Cheney] and [Rumsfeld] dissented strongly and did not want to reopen that box of worms.” The NSC declined to comment.

An administration official referred to a quote given by the NSC to USA Today in 2003, saying, “The NSC staff does not make recommendations or provide estimates to the president on the number of troops needed for any mission.” When told of this response, Wilkerson said, “If the NSC was not doing such papers, it was grievously remiss in my humble opinion.” In his speech this week at West Point, Wilkerson said that officials in the Pentagon and in Cheney's office “really pushed the envelope” on permitting harsh interrogations and treatment of prisoners. Wilkerson recounted how military lawyers who opposed a series of guidelines allowing harsh interrogation techniques were silenced, and how he found out instances of two detainees who died in American facilities in Afghanistan as early as December 2002. The deaths, he said, were only confirmed by the Pentagon earlier this year. “We have some 25,000 prisoners and among them maybe 100 real terrorists and we decided to apply those guidelines,” he said, arguing that torture was morally wrong, eroding America's image and providing little intelligence.

Wilkerson told the audience that while he disagreed with many of the administration's foreign policy moves, what most “got [his] attention” and made him “very anxious” was the treatment of detainees advocated by other officials. Just before the infamous pictures from Abu Ghraib were made public, Wilkerson recounted, he was ordered by Powell to assemble a comprehensive paper trail because “this would be big.” Wilkerson said that when the president outlined in a memorandum that prisoners should be treated humanely in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva conventions and in conformity with U.S. values, he and others in government and the military took it to mean that U.S. troops were told to treat detainees in a decent manner. “But this is not what I saw in the paper trail with regards to the office of the vice president and the Pentagon,” Wilkerson said, adding that he had returned the documents to the State Department upon his retirement earlier this year. “They really pushed the envelope.”

Turning to Iraq, he blamed Bush, for whom he voted twice, for failing to assert himself in the intra-cabinet feuding over the preparations for the war. “We went in with a plan that was so inept that it was impossible for me to believe [the president] had been briefed about it and approved it,” he said, expressing his conviction that the decisions were made by the top officials at the Pentagon and by Cheney, whom he described as “the most powerful vice president” in history. “If you want to change my opinion, Mr. President, please come out and say you took the decision yourself,” Wilkerson said. Wilkerson praised his former boss at the State Department, but acknowledged that his recent criticisms had estranged him from Powell, who is known for preferring to work behind the scenes. In the spring of 2004, Wilkerson said, he was writing resignation letters “twice a week” but, out of loyalty to Powell, decided to stayed on. “Some nights, I wish I had [resigned],” he added. Of Powell, Wilkerson said, “The way they treated him in the end was humiliating, I think he wanted to leave.”

In mid-July, senior American intelligence officials called the leaders of the international atomic inspection agency to the top of a skyscraper overlooking the Danube in Vienna and unveiled the contents of what they said was a stolen Iranian laptop computer.

The Americans flashed on a screen and spread over a conference table selections from more than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments, saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead, according to a half-dozen European and American participants in the meeting.

The documents, the Americans acknowledged from the start, do not prove that Iran has an atomic bomb. They presented them as the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran's insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East.

The briefing for officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, including its director Mohamed ElBaradei, was a secret part of an American campaign to increase international pressure on Iran. But while the intelligence has sold well among countries like Britain, France and Germany, which reviewed the documents as long as a year ago, it has been a tougher sell with countries outside the inner circle.

The computer contained studies for crucial features of a nuclear warhead, said European and American officials who had examined the material, including a telltale sphere of detonators to trigger an atomic explosion. The documents specified a blast roughly 2,000 feet above a target - considered a prime altitude for a nuclear detonation.

Nonetheless, doubts about the intelligence persist among some foreign analysts. In part, that is because American officials, citing the need to protect their source, have largely refused to provide details of the origins of the laptop computer beyond saying that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a longtime contact in Iran. Moreover, this chapter in the confrontation with Iran is infused with the memory of the faulty intelligence on Iraq's unconventional arms. In this atmosphere, though few countries are willing to believe Iran's denials about nuclear arms, few are willing to accept the United States' weapons intelligence without question.

"I can fabricate that data," a senior European diplomat said of the documents. "It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt."

Robert G. Joseph, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, who led the July briefing, declined to discuss any classified material from the session but acknowledged the existence of the warhead intelligence. He called it one of many indicators "that together lead to the conclusion Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons capability."

Even if the documents accurately reflect Iran's advances in designing a nuclear warhead, Western arms experts say that Iran is still far away from producing the radioactive bomb fuel that would form the warhead's heart. American intelligence agencies recently estimated that Iran would have a working nuclear weapon no sooner than the early years of the next decade.

Still, nuclear analysts at the international atomic agency studied the laptop documents and found them to be credible evidence of Iranian strides, European diplomats said. A dozen officials and nuclear weapons experts in Europe and the United States with detailed knowledge of the intelligence said in interviews that they believed it reflected a concerted effort to develop a warhead. "They've worked problems that you don't do unless you're very serious," said a European arms official. "This stuff is deadly serious."

In fact, some nations that were skeptical of the intelligence on Iraq - including France and Germany - are deeply concerned about what the warhead discovery could portend, according to several officials. But the Bush administration, seeming to understand the depth of its credibility problem, is only talking about the laptop computer and its contents in secret briefings, more than a dozen so far. And even while President Bush is defending his pronouncements before the war about Iraq's unconventional weapons, he has never publicly referred to the Iran documents.

R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, who has coordinated the Iran issue with the Europeans, also declined to discuss the intelligence, but insisted that the Bush administration's approach was one of "careful, quiet diplomacy designed to increase international pressure on Iran to do one thing: abandon its nuclear weapons designs and return to negotiations with European countries."

Until now, there has been only one official reference to them: a year ago in a conversation with reporters, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, briefly referred to new, missile-related intelligence on Iran. Since then, reports in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and other publications have revealed some details of the intelligence, including that the United States has obtained thousands of pages of Iranian documents on warhead development.

In interviews in recent weeks, analysts and officials from six countries in Europe and Asia revealed a more extensive picture of the intelligence briefings. In turn, several American officials confirmed the intelligence. All who spoke did so on the condition of anonymity, saying they had pledged to keep the intelligence secret, though it is being discussed by an array of senior government officials and International Atomic Energy Agency board members.

Officials said scientists at the American weapons labs, as well as foreign analysts, had examined the documents for signs of fraud. It was a particular concern given the fake documents that emerged several years ago purporting to show that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from Niger. Officials said they found the warhead documents, written in Persian, convincing because of their consistency and technical accuracy and because they showed a progression of developmental work from 2001 to early 2004.

Within the United States government, "the nature and the history of the source has left everyone pretty confident that this is the real thing," said a former senior American intelligence official who was briefed on the laptop.

But one nongovernment expert cautioned that the intelligence could simply represent the work of a faction in Iran. "What we don't know is whether this is the uncoordinated effort of a particularly ambitious sector of the rocket program or is it, as some allege, a step-by-step effort to field a nuclear weapon within this decade," said Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who said he had not seen the secret documents.

The Iranians themselves deny any knowledge of the warhead plans. "We are sure that there are no such documents in Iran," Ali A. Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and the country's chief nuclear negotiator, said in an interview in Tehran. "I have no idea what they have or what they claim to have. We just hear the claims."

As a measure of the skepticism the Bush administration faces, officials said the American ambassador to the international atomic agency, Gregory L. Schulte, was urging other countries to consult with his French counterpart. "On Iraq we disagreed, and on Iran we completely agree," a senior State Department official said. "That gets attention."

Inspectors and Secret Sites

For years, American intelligence agencies argued that Iran was hiding a range of nuclear facilities. Then, in February 2003, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency went to Iran and confirmed reports of two secret sites under construction that could make concentrated uranium and plutonium, standard fuels for nuclear arms. At Natanz, in central Iran, they found preparations for more than 50,000 whirling centrifuges meant to purify uranium. At Arak, to the west, they found construction of a heavy-water plant and reactor meant to make plutonium.

Iran insisted the sites were for conducting peaceful research and making fuel for nuclear power, and were kept secret to evade American-led penalties on sales of atomic technology to Iran.

Over time, a string of revelations challenged that explanation, even as inspectors eventually uncovered at least seven secret nuclear sites.

In August 2003, agency inspectors discovered traces of uranium concentrated to the high levels necessary for a bomb, rather than the low levels for a power-producing reactor. Some of the uranium was shown to have arrived in Iran on nuclear equipment purchased from Pakistan, but a European diplomat disclosed that the origin of the rest was still a mystery.

Then there were questions about what Iran had obtained from the atomic black market run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani rogue nuclear engineer. Iran has acknowledged buying from Dr. Khan, but the extent of those dealings is still under investigation.

By late 2003, many government and nongovernment experts agreed that Iran was rapidly progressing. "Most people," said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington, "believed that they had mastered the essential capabilities and had the potential to develop what they needed to make a bomb."

Diplomacy aimed at defusing Iran moved haltingly. Tehran agreed to suspend the enrichment of uranium as it negotiated with the West over the fate of its atom program, but months later began making uranium hexafluoride, the raw material for enrichment.

If Iran hid parts of its atomic program, it boldly displayed its missiles. And in August 2004, it conducted a test that deepened suspicions that it was at work on a nuclear warhead.

Tehran test-fired an upgraded version of the Shahab - shooting star in Persian - in a flight that featured the first appearance of an advanced nose cone made up of three distinct shapes. Missile experts noted that such triconic nose cones have great range, accuracy and stability in flight, but less payload space. Therefore, experts say, they have typically been used to carry nuclear arms.

Iran insists it is pursuing only peaceful energy, and notes that nations like Japan, South Korea and Brazil have advanced civilian nuclear programs and sophisticated missiles, but have been aided by the West in building their programs rather than being accused of trying to make atomic warheads.

"Second-class countries are allowed to produce only tomato paste," said Mr. Larijani, Iran's nuclear negotiator. "The problem is that Iran has come out of its shell and is trying to have advanced technology."

A Laptop's Contents

American officials have said little in their briefings about the origins of the laptop, other than that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a source in Iran who they said had received it from a second person, now believed to be dead. Foreign officials who have reviewed the intelligence speculate that the laptop was used by someone who worked in the Iranian nuclear program or stole information from it. One senior arms expert said the material was so voluminous that it appeared to be the work of a team of engineers.

Without revealing the source of the computer, American intelligence officials insisted that it had not come from any Iranian resistance groups, whose claims about Iran's nuclear program have had a mixed record for accuracy.

In July, as the Bush administration began stepping up the pressure on the United Nations to take punitive action against Tehran, it decided to brief Dr. ElBaradei on the contents of the laptop. The session on July 18 on the top floor of the American mission in Vienna was a meeting of former rivals. Before the Iraq war, Dr. ElBaradei had attracted the wrath of the Bush administration by declaring that his agency had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear program. And the administration had tried to oust Dr. ElBaradei, an Egyptian, from his post, partly because they found him insufficiently tough on Iran.

The briefing primarily revealed computer simulations and studies of various warhead configurations rather than laboratory work or reports on test flights, according to officials in Europe and the United States. But one American official said notations indicated that the Iranians had performed experiments. "This wasn't just some theoretical exercise," he said.

In an interview, Dr. ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in October, declined to discuss the secret briefing.

Assessing just how far the Iranians have gone from plan to product is difficult. "It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that beautiful pictures represent reality," a senior intelligence official said. "But that may not be the case."

One major revelation was work done on a sphere of detonators meant to ignite conventional explosives that, in turn, compress the radioactive fuel to start the nuclear chain reaction. The documents also wrestled with how to position a heavy ball - presumably of nuclear fuel - inside the warhead to ensure stability and accuracy during the fiery plunge toward a target. And a bomb exploding at a height of about 2,000 feet, as envisioned by the documents, suggests a nuclear weapon, analysts said, since that altitude is unsuitable for conventional, chemical or biological arms.

After more than a year of analysis, questions remain about the trove's authenticity. "Even with the best intelligence, you always ask yourself, 'Was this prepared for my eyes?' " one American official said. Several intelligence experts said that a sophisticated Western spy agency could, in theory, have produced the contents of the laptop. But American officials insisted there was no evidence of such fraud.

Gary Samore, the head of nonproliferation at the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, who recently directed a report on Iran that drew on interviews with government officials in many nations, said, "The most convincing evidence that the material is genuine is that the technical work is so detailed that it would be difficult to fabricate."

An Unclassified Briefing

In August and September, as the United States was preparing for a showdown vote at the International Atomic Energy Agency on whether to recommend action by the United Nations Security Council against Iran, the Bush administration stepped up its campaign.

The United States rarely shares raw intelligence outside a small circle of close allies. But it decided to disseminate a shortened version of the secret warhead briefing. Mr. Joseph and his colleagues presented it to the president of Ghana and to officials from Argentina, Sri Lanka, Tunisia and Nigeria, among other nations.

But the administration felt uncomfortable sharing any classified intelligence with another ring of countries. For them, it developed the equivalent of the white paper on Iraq that Britain and the United States published before the Iraq war. The 43-page unclassified briefing includes no reference to the warhead documents, but uses commercial satellite photos and economic analysis to argue that Iran has no need for nuclear power and has long hidden its true ambitions.

Analysts from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory wrote the briefing paper for the State Department, which distributed it widely. In graphic detail, the paper offers a tour of the previously hidden sites, saying, for instance, that a "dummy" building at the centrifuge plant in Natanz hides a secret entrance ramp to an underground factory.

The briefing asserted that Iran did not have enough proven uranium reserves to fuel its nuclear power program beyond 2010. But it does have enough uranium, the report added, "to give Iran a significant number of nuclear weapons."

The briefing landed with something of a thud. Some officials found its arguments superficial and inconclusive. "Yeah, so what?" said one European expert who heard the briefing. "How do you know what you're shown on a slide is true given past experience?"

Even so, the American campaign helped produce a consensus among International Atomic Energy Agency board members, although a fragile one. On Sept. 24, the board passed the resolution against Iran by a vote of 22 to 1, with 12 countries abstaining, including China and Russia.

It cited Iran for "a long history of concealment and deception" and repeated failure to live up to its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which it signed in 1970. The resolution said Iran's failings had set it up for consideration by the Security Council for possible punishment with economic penalties, though it left the timing of the referral to a future meeting.

Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran's foreign minister, denounced the resolution as "illegal and illogical" and the result of a "planned scenario determined by the United States."

Debating the Next Step

On Thanksgiving, Nov. 24, the board of the international atomic agency plans to meet again to confront the Iranian nuclear question - and decide whether to take the next step and send the issue to the Security Council.

The Bush administration is confident in its evidence. "There is not a single country we deal with that does not believe Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon," said Mr. Burns, the under secretary of state.

The Iranians have taken steps to forestall any penalties. After months of delays, they have allowed inspectors into a secret military site, shared more information about the history of their program, and signaled a willingness to reopen negotiations, even while vowing to continue turning raw uranium into a gas that can be enriched. Those steps may convince some atomic agency board members. And at least two countries rotating onto the board for the next meeting - Cuba and Syria - are almost certain to defy Washington. (In September, only Venezuela voted with Tehran.)

Given those politics, the fresh intelligence that the United States says proves Iran's true intentions may not be pivotal in the long confrontation with Tehran. One reason is that the United States has so far refused to declassify the warhead information, making it impossible to seek a detailed explanation from the Iranians.

Dr. ElBaradei said his agency was bound to "follow due process, which means I need to establish the veracity, consistency and authenticity of any intelligence, and share it with the country of concern." In this case, he added, "That has not happened."

European nations and the international atomic agency are now working out details of a new proposal that offers Tehran the chance to conduct very limited nuclear activities in Iran, but move any enrichment of uranium to Russia - part of the effort to keep the country from obtaining the nuclear fuel that could go atop the Shahab missile.

Some European diplomats are concerned that confronting the Iranians with strong evidence of the warhead studies could cause Tehran to abandon negotiations with the West, expel international inspectors and move forward with its plans, whatever they may be.

"It's a card that will explode the system in place, so the question becomes when and how you play it," a senior European diplomat said. "If there is information that can serve to make progress with the Iranians, without blowing up the system, that's better."

Yesterday I wrote that it was an obvious point of honor that a leader should resign if he takes a country to war for what turns out to have been a mistake - or a lie.

Bush went to war on a claim that Iraq was about to attack us with WMD. When it became clear there were no WMD the honorable thing to do would be to resign. War is serious business, and there is no room for mistakes - or lies. If you go to war over WMD and there aren't WMD the right thing to do is step aside and let someome else take your place. Simple as that.

But what happened with Iraq is far worse than that.

Watching Bush's speech yesterday I thought about something I wrote more than two years ago:

When the President of the United States tells you that there is a serious and imminent threat you don't really have a choice. You just have to go along. Our LIVES depend on believing him. Even if you can't see the threat it's the President's JOB to be looking out for it. ... Maybe he knows something he can't tell you. You don't have a choice. And, most important, no president has ever betrayed that trust before and it is hard to imagine one so corrupt that he would.

But BEFORE, we had no choice, really, because we HAVE TO trust that when the President says there is a threat to our lives, he is telling the truth!

. . . Now that it's over and we can look back and see what Bush did, it is absolutely essential for our own protection that we get Bush out of there. We can't trust and believe him next time, and next time there might actually BE a threat!

Once a President abuses that essential trust, everything about our country and our "compact" with our government changes. It's just like what happened with Katrina - these people really don't care and really are not interested in protecting the public. That is not how they intend to use the power they have been given by us. I think that's where we are today.

Look how Bush and the Right treat us. We are fellow Americans, but they view us as the enemy just as surely as the terrorists who attacked the country are the enemy. During his campaign Bush said "I am a uniter, not a divider." But division is Bush's trademark. It is his tool.

Before the Iraq war Bush went to the Congress and asked them to stand with him against an imminent threat. And they supported him. Now, in his Veterans Day speech he used that support to further divide us. The speech was supposed to be a non-partisan American event, not a Republican Party rally. But the President used this setting to lash out at half the country, calling us traitors for questioning why we are "at war" in Iraq. Yes, his surrogates call us traitors - and now he does too. From the speech:

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges. (Applause.) These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them. (Applause.) Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. (Applause.) And our troops deserve to know that whatever our differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for nothing less than victory. (Applause.)"

We are only starting to understand the significance and consequences of Bush's betrayal. We cannot trust Bush again, and many here and around the world will never be able to trust the United States again. This is especially serious because there still are countries and people who might really be preparing to attack with these weapons. Because of what Bush has done America can no longer sound the alarm. Who would believe? Who could be sure it isn't just another mistake - or trick? This is a dangerous situation.

Watch your backs.

The device, a hovering robot carrying video cameras and other sensors, is being created and tested at HONEYWELL's Albuquerque, NM plant.

The first round of testing on the drone [MICRO AIR VEHICLE] has been completed, reports Bob Martin of CBS affiliate KRQE.

The battery powered craft can stay in the air for 50-60 minutes at a time, and moves around at up to 55 kilometers an hour.

The Micro Air Vehicle has flown more than 200 successful flights, including flying in a representative urban environment.

"If there is an emergency, you could provide "eyes" on whatever the emergency is, for police or Homeland Security," explains Vaughn Fulton of HONEYWELL.

In the meantime, the U.S. Army has prepared a promotional video showing the craft zooming over war-zone streets.

Drones have been given to the military to test during training exercises.

"It has the same system most fighter jets would have," explains Fulton.

The vehicle, nicknamed "Dragon Eye," will be used for reconnaissance, security and target acquisition operations in open, rolling, complex and urban terrain; it will be equipped with Global Positioning Satellite.

HONEYWELL and government officials are meeting to discuss the status of the project.

Troops in Iraq could get the craft in a year or two.

The spy drone would be deployed for domestic use shortly thereafter.

David Brooks, in his August 11, 2005 New York Times op-ed piece, wrote "while global economies are converging, cultures are diverging, and widening cultural differences are leading us into [an unprecedented] period of conflict, inequality and segmentation". In my writing, I have called this deteriorating situation an "increasing fragmentation of species consciousness", where self-segregating cultures become even more isolated and use modern media technologies to further circumscribe their own members' minds.

Obvious examples are the virulent religious antagonisms fueling 21st century terrorism and the equally powerful, although presently less violent, divergences in America and other societies. Wealthy elites and sectarian cults have gone beyond traditional class barriers to separate themselves from the "unwashed" and "unsaved". They build fortress neighborhoods and use divisive social policies to insure they aren't "contaminated" by those who are different. In an ironic twist of the democratic principles of free enterprise and private property, the founder of Domino's Pizza is constructing an entire city in Florida where the university, businesses, and homes are reserved only for conservative Catholics.

Psychologists should be on the forefront of research into the existential basis of this phenomenon. Something more than superficial lifestyle choices are at work here. The human species appears to be engaged in a profound "re-tribalization" process, at a time when the weapons for defending one's culture and territory far exceed the destructive power of rocks and clubs. The inability of such a fragmented species to reach consensus may threaten its very survival.

At a recent meeting of psychologists in California, several presenters gave talks that either explicitly or implicitly dealt with the role of worldviews with regard to individual development or societal trends. While no one attempted to give a "one-serves-all" definition of worldview, a number of participants talked about the need for a better understanding of the role of personal worldviews in shaping human emotional and behavioral responses to issues or events.

The notion of something that might be studied and/or used in education, therapy, and even broader social interventions under the rubric worldview is sort of like the U.S. Supreme Court's definition of pornography: "You know it when you see it". A still nebulous definition notwithstanding, attempting to look at worldviews may be a step toward dealing with the profound breakdown of comity now threatening modern society. In their most fundamental form, different worldviews explain why we must answer "No" to the second question below:

Aren't you curious why we don't agree on certain issues? If two people have the same facts about an issue, then - if they both are logical - would they not draw the same conclusions?

These questions were raised by a doctrinaire writer with whom I had an e-mail exchange on the causes and possible remedies for terrorism. Despite an external reality that a Martian observer might see, when two humans discuss an issue, they likely to do so through two different - even mutually exclusive - a priori sets of assumptions or beliefs about the nature of reality and the human place in it. For all perceptual, emotional, and behavioral purposes, they live in two different realities. With such species dissociation, different groups are psychologically unable to draw compatible conclusions from the same fact.

Worldviews are an element of consciousness and impose a personal order on the data coming through our physical and subtle senses. Such a mechanism is essential to human functioning. Without this core set of assumptions, the psyche would break up from the centrifugal force of internally inconsistent beliefs.

Worldviews deal with the most basic questions in life. What is the design and purpose of nature? Why do things work as they do? One's worldview serves as his or her “lens” for interpreting self, others, and external events. It asserts answers like the following to the most fundamental of questions:

Yahweh created me. Mind rules. God/Allah decides all. Nature is neutral. Allah/God is just. The universe is an accident.

Because worldview assumptions derive from history and cultural practices, they are mutable through experience or new learning. We can change these worldviews through a rational transformation of specific beliefs. Sometimes such transformations are stimulated by a powerful subjective experience. In either case the person considers and tests alternatives (based on new inner or external evidence) to his or her ingrained worldview. However, such change is not easy and requires several steps of conscious reevaluation and change (see other Perspective articles).

The first step is the most simple, yet the most difficult: Recognition that my perception of reality is based on assumptions that may be true or may not be true. If this first step does not stir up strong emotional reactions in the individual, it is likely that one is not yet dealing with worldviews as defined in this article. An intellectual discussion of worldviews that does not touch on the deeper and most strongly held beliefs remains a superficial exercise.

When I cannot find evidence that one who does not share my worldview will agree that it tends to support my assumption, I must conclude that I am taking it on faith. It is this “taking on faith of one’s own or one’s group’s assumptions” as the absolute truth that leads to fragmentation of societal consciousness.

In the context of religious and spiritual worldviews, the United States of America is in effect a "polytheistic" society. Let me explain. An individual is not usually polytheistic, i.e., "worships more than one god". Any social unit can call itself polytheistic and provide for the worship of different gods. However, the American society does not do that. Most people assume everyone worships the same god, just under different guises. However, a comprehensive analysis of worldviews would, I believe, reveal that this nation is actually "polytheistic". All people do not believe in or worship the same ineffable origins of our universe. They worship their own worldview's assumptions about it.

Thus, where the definitions of their god are mutually incompatible, groups actually believe and behave in a "polytheistic" way. Although they may use the same word - God, their definitions are so widely different that they, for all practical purposes, live under and worship different gods. To the extent groups believe their concept of “god,” by whatever name, and their “god’s word" (as interpreted by them) is The Truth, they set themselves apart from all others with no less certainty than Babylonians who worshipped Ba'al and Hebrews who worshipped Yahweh 3,000 years ago. No wonder the Quran, from the newest of the large supernatural religions, describes polytheism as a path to Hell.

Because each group's assumptions are taken on faith, based on a priest/rabbi/imam’s inspirations (likely to be infinite in number), over time the diverging worldviews result in deeper fragmentation of human consciousness. Resulting divergent religions (caused by worldviews that shape the way people actually experience life) always increase the potential for political and physical conflicts.

However, to understand the depth and complexity, and the threat to human survival, of the current maelstrom of worldviews that socially and politically rend today's world, we must look deeper than the traditional labels (the names groups use for their alleged divine beings and give to their unique religions). Such an analysis is necessary to understand how to cope with members of any group that would impose their theocratic views on the policies of governments.

Given their deist perspective (belief in an unnamed creator or supreme power, but not in the anthropomorphic god of 18th-century religions) and actions, it appears that America's Founders Fathers had an intuitive understanding of the competition for power that could arise among competing religious worldviews. They recognized that some groups in a "polytheistic society" (my term) with fundamentally different concepts of reality would attempt to impose their assumptions on others through the political process. They foresaw a struggle to impose laws that would regulate what should be private matters in each religion. Thus, they established secular U. S. institutions with constitutional barriers to prevent one religion imposing its worldview on the rest of society.

This problem is not limited to religious worldviews. Scientific theories and philosophical schools are also based on assumptions and beliefs founded on partial evidence, always subject to revision based on experience. When groups holding them also consider their worldviews as The Truth, and dismiss other ways of knowing, they are in effect worshipping their own divergent “realities.”

Until we find a way to transcend the hardened worldviews that now divide the species, we will not be able to "put Humpty Dumpty (the fragmentation of human consciousness) back together again". To help pierce the defensive shields of superficial labels and symbols described here, we must look honestly at the non-self-evident assumptions that underly conflicting worldviews. The first and essential step requires each of us to admit the part of our own worldview assumptions that are taken on faith, a faith that we cannot expect some one else to accept just because we believe it. The second step requires a recognition that when it comes to blind faith, anyone's sight is as good as another's.

[Paul Von Ward, a psychologist and interdisciplinary cosomologist, is the author of Gods, Genes, & Consciousness and Our Solarian Legacy: Multidimensional Humans in a Self-Learning Universe. He may be contacted via email at paul@vonward.com. His website is www.vonward.com.]

When he announced the indictment of Scooter Libby, vice president Cheney's chief of staff, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald included a homily on the importance of truth. And in truth it sounded a bit quaint, like someone trying to recite the Sermon on the Mount on the floor of the New York stock exchange. But of course Fitzgerald was right. When lying becomes the accepted currency, you haven't got the rule of law but a criminal conspiracy.

All governments lie, but Reagan and his crew truly raised the bar. From about 1978 on, when the drive to put Reagan in the White House gathered speed, lying was the standard mode for Reagan, his handlers and a press quite happy to retail all the bilge, from the Soviet Union's supposed military superiority to the millionaire welfare queens on the South Side of Chicago.

The press went along with it. Year after year, on the campaign trail and then in the White House, the press corps reported Reagan's news conferences without remarking that the commander in chief dwelt mostly in a twilit world of comic-book fables and old movie clips. They were still maintaining this fiction even when Reagan's staff was discussing whether to invoke the 25th amendment and have the old dotard hauled off to the nursing home.

Lying about Reagan's frail grip on reality was only part of the journalistic surrender. For those who see Judith Miller's complicity in the lying sprees of the Neocons as a signal of the decline of the New York Times from some previous plateau of objectivity and competence I suggest a review of its sometime defense correspondent Richard Burt in the late Carter years, as Al Haig's agent in place. Burt relayed truckloads of threat-inflating nonsense about the military balance in the Cold War, particularly in the European theater, most of them on a level of fantasy matching the lies Miller got from Chalabi's disinformers and trundled in print.

When the Reaganites seized power in 1981, Burt promptly threw down his press badge and went to work

In the State Department as Director of Politico-Military Affairs a post previously held by another former Times man, Leslie Gelb, no garden rose but not a two-timer on the order of Burt. At least Miller didn't go and officially work for Cheney.

Many of the associates of Libby and of his boss, now threatened by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, are veterans of that Reagan culture and hardened survivors of the crisis that ultimately threatened several of them with legal sanction and lengthy terms in prison. That crisis was the Iran-contra affair which burst upon the nation on October 6, 1986, the day Eugene Hasenfus successfully parachuted from a CIA-piloted plane illegally shuttling arms to the contras.

Special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, a former US prosecutor and judge from Oklahoma City, a life-long Republican, began his investigation. In the probe that stretched through the rest of Reagan-time and the entire presidency of G.H.W Bush,

Walsh made his most effective headway by bringing charges for lying to Congress. This is how he nailed Elliott Abrams, Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, Alan Fiers, Clair George and Robert McFarlane . They all either pleaded guilty to what Libby was just indicted for, obstruction of justice and making false statements, or were convicted of same or, in the cases of Weinberger and Clarridge, were awaiting trial.

As Walsh plowed forward, those trying to protect Reagan and Bush included Stephen Hadley, a long-time Cheney sidekick now possibly in Fitzgerald's line of fire as the current president's national security advisor. In the Iran contra era Hadley was Counsel to the Special Review Board, known as the Tower Commission, established by President Reagan to enquire into U.S. arms sales to Iran, which headed off any unwelcome focus on Reagan or Bush's complicity in the scandal. Meanwhile in the House, Rep Richard Cheney was the ranking Republican on a House committee also investigating Iran-contra. He played a major role in stopping the probe from staining Bush or Reagan. (Libby himself had been working in the Pentagon ifrom 1982-85 as director of Special Projects.)

By the fall of 1992 Walsh was finally closing in on Bush for his role in contra-gate as Reagan's vice president. Days before the 1992 election Walsh reindicted Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's defense secretary, for lying to Congress. The trial was scheduled for January of 1993. Walsh was expected to grill Weinberger about notes that implicated Bush. In the line of fire here too was Colin Powell, who had been Weinberger's assistant in the crucial year of 1985. Walsh was also planning to question Bush his failure to turn over a diary he'd kept in the mid-1980s. We could have seen a former president indicted for obstruction of justice and making false statements.

The press was mostly against Walsh. There were plenty of nasty articles about the cost and duration of his probe. Bush felt politically safe covering his own ass and that of his co-conspirators by issuing pardons, which he duly did, on Christmas Eve, 1992. Off Walsh's hook slipped Weinberger, Abrams, Clarridge, St George, Fiers, and McFarlane. Walsh said furiously that "the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed."

Will history come close to repeating itself? John Dean, White House counsel in Nixon time and knowledgeable about executive cover-ups, argues that Fitzgerald has Cheney in his sights, and may b ed planning to charging him under the Espionage Act for revealing Plame's name. Cheney's survival depends on Libby keeping his mouth shut, and of taking the fall until Christmas Eve, 2008, when Bush Jr.issues the necessary pardon or pardons.

Already in the wake of Libby's indictment the air has been thick with talk of pardons, as though it's now become a predictable ritual for incumbent presidents to clear their subordinates of indictments or convictions for crimes committed during government service. Fitzgerald should say that anyone seriously urging pardons may risk indictment for conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Such pardons go hand in hand with the lying which Fitzgerald denounced. If officials violating the law and then lying about it knows with certainty that they are going to escape legal sanction, then we no longer have a government. We have a sequence of criminal conspiracies. There have been scandalous pardons down the decades, but as with lying the Reagan years raised the bar.. It should become a major political issue. A model here could be Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life in 1987 for spying for Israel. Bush Sr and Clinton were under huge pressure to pardon him but declined to buckle because the Armed Services simply said No, we won't stand for it. To the prospect of any pardon for Libby and others the popular message should be the same. Otherwise Fitzgerald will be wasting his time and the people's money.



Judy Miller Hits the Road

Her lawyers cut a deal with the New York Times and now Miller is set for freelancing, and a memoir on her years at the New York Times and her days in prison. I saw her on Larry King on Thursday night and she did well, declining all opportunities to kick sand in Maureen Dowd's face. It was the right choice. I have to speak in a whisper here because my coeditor is a Dowd fan whereas I've always thought there's something tinny about Dowd's columns.

In retrospect the Beat Up on Judy day at the New York Times when Dowd's nasty column followed on the heels of Keller's "internal memo" looks like a carefully calculated one-two. (I seem to remember reading that Keller and Dowd were an item, though maybe it was Dowd and Howell Raines. Dowd's and Miller's in-house love lives blend in my memory like a daquiri left out in the sun.) At the time I wrote here that Keller's memo was disgusting and now he's confirmed my initial judgment, apologizing for having insinuated in his chickenshit memo that Miller and Libby were "entangled" in all the paroxysms that that word implies, also that she had "misled" her editor, Philip Taubman. Keller now concedes that Taubman had never complained of being misled by Miller.

I hold no brief for Miller who wrote terrible stories for many years, but the people at the New York Times who should get the axe are publisher, Sulzberger, and Editor Keller. They've made a terrible hash of things and the Board should make them walk the plank.

Larry King asked Miller if she'd be listening to Chalabi's lecture at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and she said she'd be giving her own talk in DC. Chalabi's popping up everywhere. Kris Lofgren attended Ahmed Chalabi's lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in midweek, and reports a starry-eyed Hitchens claiming on the way out after the lecture that Chalabi could have broken American intelligence codes himself, because "he is a mathematical genius" and "his expertise is cryptology". This is silly says CounterPuncher Assaf Kfoury who got a PhD from MIT, 1972, and overlapped with Chalabi's years there. "Chalabi was not a mathematical genius. Basically MIT, which awarded him a Master's degree, didn't want to keep him for a PhD. And Chalabi didn't do his thesis in anything remotely connected to cryptology. His at the University of Chicago was on the theory of knots."

He certainly tied up Judy.

In London during the Blitz, amid the mass jubilation of VE Day, the image of Winston Churchill is unmissable. Far easier to overlook in the same photographs is a keen-eyed, set-lipped face beneath a trilby. It belonged to Churchill's 'faithful vigilant guardian', who repeatedly saved him from assassins, flying bombs and his own reckless lust for adventure.

Detective Inspector Walter Thompson was Churchill's personal bodyguard for 18 years. He accompanied him over 200,000 miles across Europe, America and the Middle East and witnessed some of the defining moments of the 20th century. 'From the outbreak of war in 1939 until May 1945, except for a short period when I had a breakdown, owing to the long hours of work, I saw more of Winston than any other human being,' he wrote.

The discovery in a farmhouse attic of the original typescript of his memoir means his story can be told in full for the first time. It reveals how narrowly and how often he escaped death, and how only the quick-witted Thompson's willingness to take a bullet prevented the loss of Britain's war leader.

'Churchill had 20 brushes with death, seven of which were direct attempts on his life where Walter personally intervened in some shape or form,' said Philip Nugus, a producer who has adapted the memoir for a 13-part television series. 'Talk about a charmed life.'

Among the threats to his life were from an Indian nationalist who tried to kill him in America, a German sniper team in Antibes, a loner with a loaded revolver as Churchill was about to board a flying boat, a sewer bomb in Athens planted by Greek communists, a German attempt to target his plane, and a navigational mix-up which could have seen the British Prime Minister shot down by the RAF.

On one occasion, according to the memoir, the pro-Nazi French countess Hélène de Portes lunged at Churchill's throat while concealing a knife but was thwarted by Thompson. On another, Churchill insisted on standing on the roof of 10 Downing Street to witness the Blitz, and it was only by throwing himself on top of the Prime Minister that Thompson saved him from shrapnel. In North Africa, Churchill fell ill and stopped breathing; Thompson nursed him and, his family believe, gave him the kiss of life. Even on VE Day, he saved Churchill from crushing crowds, inadvertently breaking a woman's arm.

Churchill's disregard for his safety was a bodyguard's nightmare. Confronted by IRA hitmen as they drove through Hyde Park, he growled: 'If they want trouble, they can have it.' But Thompson decided it was 'not part of my duty to pander to his desire for a hand-to-hand scrap in Hyde Park'. He drew his gun, forced Churchill down and told the chauffeur to hit the accelerator. Churchill bellowed: 'Don't ever do that again!'

The former Post Office messenger's East End background could not have been further removed from that of Churchill, but they developed mutual respect and admiration. This was strained when Thompson wrote his memoir in 1945 but was prevented from publishing it by Churchill and the authorities, who threatened his pension. He was allowed to put out a heavily censored version, I Was Churchill's Shadow, in the early Fifties. The full 360,000-word manuscript was believed lost. But half a century later Thompson's great-niece, Linda Stoker, tracked it to a suitcase in a Somerset farmhouse loft. 'My jaw dropped,' she said. 'This is a story written from the heart. It's the relationship between two mates, one who's prepared to run the country and one who's prepared to die for it.'

Thompson, who died nearly 20 years ago, records the moment Churchill learnt Hitler was dead: 'He went to a window and looked out, remaining there for some time... I asked if he thought Hitler had committed suicide. Quite quietly he replied: "That is the way I should have expected him to have died." Later he added: "That is what I should have done under the same circumstances".' Such was Thompson's devotion to duty, and Churchill, that it cost him his first marriage. His second wife was the war leader's secretary. But Thompson's mission was accomplished, as Churchill eventually died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 90.

· Nugus/ Martin Productions' 'Churchill's Bodyguard' premieres on UKTV History at 9pm daily from Monday, 21 November

The French government was to meet on whether to extend a state of emergency in a number of places to tackle more than two weeks of urban unrest as the number of attacks was dropping nationwide.

An overnight curfew was still in force in 40 municipalities and authorities in the southeastern city of Lyon banned public gatherings in order to head off a repeat of clashes in the historic centre.

Police said no incident was reported in France's third-largest city Sunday afternoon but 15 cars were set ablaze during the day and three people who were carrying gasoline (petrol) were detained for questioning.

By 4:00 am (0300 GMT) Monday 271 vehicles had gone up in flames and 112 people had been detained for questioning across France, according to figures released by the police, compared to 315 torched vehicles and 161 arrests the previous night.

Five police officers were wounded during the 18th night of unrest, against two overnight Saturday.

Since the start of the unrest 2,764 arrests have been made and 375 people have been sent to prison.

The European Union pledged to release 50 million euros (58 million dollars) for urban programmes to improve conditions in France's riot-hit areas, the EU executive president Jose Manuel Barroso said before a meeting with French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin late Sunday.

National police chief Michel Gaudin said there was "a major easing-off.

"Things should begin to get rapidly back to normal," he added.

According to figures compiled before the riots by the police intelligence service RG, some 28,000 cars were burned in the first 10 months of the year -- making an average of 650 a week, most of which were destroyed at weekends.

The centre of Paris remained calm after the authorities banned public meetings there on Saturday, fearing an influx of youth gangs from the suburbs. In the end there was no sign of trouble, and the capital's outskirts were also relatively quiet.

A government official also spoke of cautious optimism.

"We were expecting a hot night, but it was not as busy as feared. We feared problems in Paris but there were none. The slowdown is now established, and things should be easier to control," the senior official said.

The assembly bans in Paris and Lyon were imposed under emergency legislation activated by the government of President Jacques Chirac on Tuesday in response to the worst outbreak of urban violence in France since the student uprising of May 1968.

The same emergency law was used to impose overnight curfews in seven regions Saturday night, including Lyon, Nice on the Riviera and Rouen in Normandy. Under the orders all unaccompanied children under 16 are banned from leaving their homes after 10:00 pm (2100 GMT).

The violence in France's delapidated out-of-town tenement estates was sparked by the accidental deaths of two teenagers who hid in an electricity sub-station in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after an encounter with police.

More than 8,000 cars have been burned since and numerous businesses and public buildings gutted by gangs of youths who are mainly from the country's Arab and black minorities.

Far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in an interview on the private radio station RTL1 on Sunday blamed the rioting on "uncontrolled immigration from the Third World" and, while endorsing the use of curfews, he described the government response as insufficient.

Le Pen, 77, was to speak at a rally of France's National Front party in central Paris Monday evening.

On Monday, two French colleagues and I were talking at a chi-chi café in Paris when we saw a group of police officers in battle regalia boarding a bus just outside our window. "I think we can guess where they're going," one of my friends remarked. Sharp inhalations all around, followed by raised eyebrows.

Our awkward and nervous reaction to those policemen initially struck me as somewhat pitiful—a stinging example of the French bourgeoisie's intellectual detachment from the riots in the city suburbs. Why were we sitting in this café? Why didn't we march to Clichy-Sous-Bois, or La Courneuve, or Aulnay-Sous-Bois, where some of the most violent protests were taking place?

But now, with the riots finally winding down, the café culture's reluctance to engage the riots—its choice of distance (or what the French call recul) seems the right response to the events of the past two weeks. As the cars stop burning and some semblance of order returns to the most troubled areas (albeit with the help of draconian curfew measures), now is as good a time as any to ask: Just what the hell happened? (And how did the American media paint such a distorted picture?)

To answer these questions, we have to first figure out what didn't happen. Contrary to the breathless dispatches from the American press, Paris was most certainly not burning. Those of us ensconced in the central part of the city could hardly tell anything was going on. ("This is not exactly the second French Revolution," another journalist colleague told me.) American media hyperbole served to heighten the distancing effect. Expounding on French social inequalities from their suites at the George V, the dashing reporters of CNN et al., their infographics a-blazin', created a sensationalized image of an entire country under siege.

Another thing the French riots were not: New Orleans on the Seine. It'd be easy to draw parallels between our countries' race-related woes (and indeed there are many), but to do so would belittle both tragedies. The New Orleans death toll was close to 1,000; the French riots produced fewer than ten. New Orleans was a localized event; the French riots touched many major metropolitan areas, including the suburbs of Nice, Lille, Toulouse, Lyon, and Rennes, in addition to spreading to Belgium and Germany.

Ultimately, New Orleans took the U.S. government by surprise; the French riots, meanwhile, were the not-totally-unexpected culmination of a contentious year between banlieue residents and hard-line right-wing Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who called project youths "scum" (racaille) just days before the riots began.

There is also the question of the French government's response to the rioting, which, unlike Bush's response to New Orleans, doesn't qualify as totally incompetent. "The government can't totally crack down on the rioters because it would be accused of being too harsh," a friend told me. "At the same time, it can't be too lenient. It has to show that it's doing something but it can't go too far either way." Give credit where it's due: The French government has minimized casualties and bloodshed. It has also restored state subsidies to impoverished neighborhoods and has lowered the apprenticeship age to 14 to help combat unemployment (which stands at almost 30 percent in certain cites).

On the other hand, France has resurrected long-dead military measures (like the curfew, which had its origins in the Algerian war for independence) and has stepped up arrests (close to 1,000 so far). Most recently, Sarkozy has promised to deport any non-citizen convicted of riot-related crimes, even if the person is in France legally
.

To say that all of the French suburbs are hotbeds of radicalized passion (which TV images imply) is also an overstatement. In fact, reaction from banlieue residents to the riots ranges from angry to cynical to oddly hopeful. As one youth said on France 2 television, "The curfews are just a political maneuver. In reality, it's not going to keep kids at home." Another youth called the curfews "overdramatized" while another described them as "warlike and hostile."

Sorting out the details of the past two weeks is a crucial step in figuring out what went wrong in France. Herewith, a timeline of events starting with the death of two youths in the Clichy-Sous-Bois suburb of Paris that catalyzed the riots.

October 27 In the Clichy-Sous-Bois suburb in northern Paris, two adolescent boys, Ziad Bemma (age 17) and Banou Traore (age 15), are electrocuted in a power generator station as they were fleeing police who had caught them in an alleged act of burglary. A third person (age 21) is seriously injured.

Bemma and Traore were French-born citizens of Arab and African descent, respectively.

The same night, about 200 youths protest in Clichy-Sous-Bois, setting cars on fire and engaging in widespread vandalism.

October 28-29 Violence rises in Clichy-Sous-Bois, with altercations between rioters and police.

Residents of the neighborhood hold a peaceful rally in honor of Bemma and Traore.

October 30 A tear-gas bomb explodes in a mosque in Clichy-Sous-Bois. Residents say the police fired the bomb at the mosque while government officials deny responsibility.

October 31 Parents of the dead adolescents refuse to meet French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, demanding to speak directly with French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

Meanwhile, violence spreads beyond Clichy-Sous-Bois to other areas of the Seine-Saint-Denis region. Riots are especially destructive in the Parisian suburbs of La Courneuve and Aulnay-Sous-Bois.

November 2 A handicapped woman, aged 56, is seriously burned when rioters attack the bus she was riding in the town of Sevran, northern Paris. The rioters had demanded all passengers to get off the bus before setting it on fire, but the victim didn't have enough time to disembark.

November 3-5 Violence spreads beyond the Paris region to 274 cities and towns throughout France.

November 6 Most violent night so far, with close to 1,500 cars burned and hundreds of arrests.

November 7 First fatality of the riots reported when Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, age 61, a resident of Stains (Seine-Saint-Denis) dies from injuries received in an assault three days earlier.

In Toulouse, rioters seize a public bus and set it on fire. Though no one was hurt, city bus drivers walk off the job the following day in protest.

Violence spreads to suburbs in Belgium and Germany, in apparent imitation of the French riots.

November 8 French President Jacques Chirac declares a state of emergency and revives curfew laws dating from the Algerian war for independence.

November 9 Violence begins to taper off as select cities put the curfew into effect. So far, 6,000 cars have been burned and 173 people have been convicted of riot-related crimes.

Sarkozy vows to deport any non-citizen convicted of crimes, even if the person is a legal French resident.

November 10 Police report "a significant ebb" in violence throughout France, particularly in the Paris region. A total of 482 vehicles were burned today, versus the record high of more than 1,400 three days ago, according to the French national police department.

It would be premature to conclude that we are approaching the end of Tony Blair's premiership. There is still no obvious mechanism for forcing him out; and if Mr Blair decides to hang on, he could be around for some time. But to what purpose? In one respect, last week was terminal. The PM's authority cannot recover. For the rest of his time in No 10, as Norman Lamont said of John Major, he will be in office, not in power.

Unlike Mr Major, Mr Blair deserves his fate, which is now upon him even though he has enjoyed much more luck than Mr Major did: not hard. In 2005, Tony Blair beat the Tories by 3 percentage points and won an overall majority of 66. In 1992, John Major beat Labour by 8 per cent, for a majority of 21. Given the fractious state of the Tory party, that was never going to be enough. Richard Ryder, the then Tory Chief Whip, said: "Twenty one? I could field two XIs of loonies on any topic you care to mention." So it proved.

Thus far, Mr Blair's loonies are still thinking in terms of rescuing the Government from Blairism. They are not yet playing with matches in the dynamite factory, as several Tory backbenchers did between 1992 and 1997. This is partly due to Gordon Brown: an important tranquilising influence. He does not wish to inherit a party ravaged by civil war, while some of the Labour dissidents have persuaded themselves that if he became PM, everything which they most disliked about the past eight years would miraculously vanish. The Iraq war would unhappen; market mechanisms would disappear from the NHS; parental choice from education.

What does Mr Brown think of all this? We have no way of knowing. At present, the Chancellor is a cross between a tabula rasa, Old Man River and a Trappist monk. Content to be the repository of other people's political fantasies - with their votes to follow - he merely gives saccharine interviews and makes preposterous claims.

He now tells us that the Government "must connect more successfully. We must listen to people". Gordon Brown listen? Though it would be unfair to describe him as the worst listener in British politics since the war, he is up there with George Brown after lunch, Anthony Eden after his stomach operation went wrong - and Margaret Thatcher in all seasons.

Listen? Most of Gordon Brown's cabinet colleagues find it hard to receive a hearing. This government has often economised with the truth, but the idea of Mr Brown going into the highways and byways in order to listen takes the Pulitzer Prize for porkies. He must be trying to convince us that he is Tony Blair's rightful successor.

Yet the Chancellor has a point, at least as regards his cabinet colleagues. Anyone interested in politics will rush to read Christopher Meyer's DC Confidential; the text is as riveting as the ethics are dubious. It is noteworthy that Sir Christopher's judgements so often concur with those in Lance Price's The Spin Doctor's Diary; Mr Price was Alastair Campbell's fagio (see below). In both books, there is the overwhelming impression that most of Mr Blair's ministers were mediocrities; in the case of John Prescott, a combustible mediocrity.

These characters occupied great offices of State. Among their predecessors are some of the most distinguished names in British politics. Yet these New Labour ministers hardly ever expressed an independent opinion. Throughout the past eight years, most Cabinet Ministers fell into one of two groups: cowed pygmies or sullen pygmies (Mr Prescott again).

Jack Straw was no exception. No wonder Chris Meyer's book has made him so angry. It contains a portrayal, half-affectionate, half-patronising, of Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs as a contented pygmy: a mere fagio.

On Wednesday night, there was an altercation in the Commons between Bob Marshall-Andrews, a gifted Labour troublemaker, and Jim Dowd, a Blairite loyalist. Mr Dowd lost his temper because he thought that Mr Marshall-Andrews had accused him of being a faggot: that would have been an absurd charge. The word used was fagio, which comes from Mafia argot and means gopher. Had Jim Dowd understood this, he night have taken it as a compliment; fagiotry is the height of his ambition.

That should never be true of a Foreign Secretary. Yet with this one, it is, according to Chris Meyer. As the Iraq war approached, Jack Straw knew that many senior people in the office which he nominally commanded were profoundly unhappy with government policy. He sometimes tried to soothe their anxieties by half-hints that he was really on their side.

This was worse than useless. A strong Foreign Secretary would have taken two steps. First, he should have bluntly informed his diplomats that there was no point in further bellyaching. The decision had been taken; that was that. Second, he should have realised that the Foreign Office contained an immense amount of expertise. Even if many of his officials were against the war, they could still have helped to win the peace.

If Mr Blair had been briefed along those lines, he might well have been able to persuade Mr Bush to give the British a much bigger role in nation building. Christopher Meyer was exasperated by the PM's reluctance to ask Mr Bush for more, even though there is no reason to suppose that the President would have been unwilling to reward a staunch ally who was only asking for a bigger role in the common cause.

It may be that such a British request would have caused problems with Don Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. But neither of them was temperamentally suited to the task of nation building. Chris Meyer realised that unless there was follow-through, the gains of the battle field could easily be dissipated. If there had been a Foreign Secretary rather than a fagio, the Prime Minister might have been induced to concur.

The two memoirs did not bring about Mr Blair's defeat in the Commons. But they are contributing to the loss of authority. Though they may not grasp the details, a lot of voters are aware that crucial events have been mishandled, and that they have not been told the truth. Confidence in the Prime Minister is ebbing away, which emboldened so many of his own MPs to vote against him. As a result, he could not convince the House of Commons to share his assessment of national security needs. Even in his most embattled moments, that never happened to John Major.

A Prime Minister who is unable to command respect for his views on crucial security questions is incapable of discharging his most important duty. Far from being the guardian of national security, he has become a threat to national security.

That is the bleak position in which Mr Blair finds himself: a fagio without a capo, a gopher with nowhere to go. He should go.

Cui Jian, the father of Chinese rock music, doesn't create much of a stir when he walks into a bar in Beijing on a cold Wednesday night. A few heads turn as he walks by with his trademark white baseball cap with red star pulled low over his face, but no one rushes over for a word with the man who's been described as a cross between Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Kurt Cobain.

Until recently, Cui Jian (pronounced "Sway Jen") didn't exist as far as the authorities were concerned. Ever since his song "Nothing To My Name" became the unofficial anthem of the tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters who gathered in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, Cui, the only genuine rock star to have emerged from China, has been regarded as a dissident in all but name.

Whether tweaking the noses of the government by going on stage with a red blindfold over his eyes, putting out albums with titles like Balls Under The Red Flag (which has a far more derogatory meaning in Chinese), or using his lyrics to offer pointed social commentary on the state of his homeland, Cui has been an uncomfortable reminder to the authorities of the power that popular figures can wield. Sixteen years after Tiananmen, he's as forthright as ever.

"What I say is that in China now it is good weather, but it's not a good climate," he says. "They'll let you make more money, they'll give you good food and let you have all the things you have in the West while still controlling things. It's like, 'do whatever you want but don't talk about democracy'. They don't believe Western democracy will enable China to get better smoothly. I understand why foreigners don't trust that and I'd agree with them."

It's hard to overestimate the effect that Cui's ballad "Nothing To My Name" had when people first heard it in 1986. "Back then, people were used to hearing the old revolutionary songs and nothing else, so when they heard me singing about what I wanted as an individual they picked up on it. When they sang the song, it was as if they were expressing what they felt."

Students all over China started playing their own versions and it's still Cui's most famous song. "I know I have to sing it when I play live," he says, smiling. "It made me feel good, but I didn't really think it was my song when they sang it. Some people thought it was a political song, some thought it was a song about sex - it doesn't matter. People added their own meaning."

By the time Cui played in Tiananmen Square in May 1989, he had become the figurehead of China's fledgling rock scene just when it seemed the Communist Party's iron grip on power really was loosening. "If you were there, it felt like a big party. There was no fear. It was nothing like it was shown on CNN and the BBC," he recalls.

But when China's President Deng Xiaoping sent in the tanks and troops on 4 June, the festival-like atmosphere gave way to repression on a scale that shocked the world. No one knows exactly how many demonstrators died that day; hundreds certainly, possibly thousands. Many more were rounded up and sent to labour camps for re-education, or given prison sentences. Others fled into exile.

"You can't rewind, you can't go back. I think maybe some of the government feel guilty about what happened. I don't think they want to see the same thing happen again," says Cui. "I think Tiananmen changed the whole world. The Berlin Wall went, the USSR and all those countries in eastern Europe changed after it. That's because those governments knew that if they kept control, more people would die. They didn't want that, so their only choice was to change. Maybe what happened on 4 June was the only thing that could make change happen."

For Cui, it was the beginning of the end of a brief period when he had the freedom to play where he wanted. Until Tiananmen, he had even been allowed to play abroad. "I played the Royal Albert Hall in early 1989. It was my first-ever foreign show. But it was a mostly Chinese audience, so I felt like I was playing in Hong Kong rather than England." It was the only time he's played in the UK.

His career playing big venues came to an abrupt end in 1990 when he started taking to the stage in peasant clothes and with a red blindfold over his eyes. The symbolism was obvious - and it wasn't lost on the authorities, who reacted by restricting where he could play. It wasn't until this September, when he played before 10,000 adoring fans in the Workers Stadium Gymnasium, that Cui was able to play anywhere bigger than a bar in Beijing. "Some people thought that because Beijing is where the government is, they didn't want me playing there, but there was never anything written down on paper that said 'Cui Jian can't play in Beijing'. It's like a game and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. In September, I think I won," he says.

He claims he never feared being detained. "I never believed I would because the government has humans working for it and a lot of them love music." His rehabilitation was supposed to have happened in 2003, when he was booked to open for the Rolling Stones on the Beijing leg of their "Forty Licks" tour, but the gig was cancelled after the outbreak of Sars.

It's perhaps fortunate that Cui is a calm character, because few musicians in the West have had to cope with what he's faced. "I've always been pretty balanced. I don't feel bad if I can't play," shrugs Cui. "I know it's not the end and tomorrow will be different." The fact that the Tiananmen generation is now middle-aged - Cui is 44 - and no longer perceived as a threat by the government has enabled Cui to step out of the shadows. He's still prepared to say what he thinks, though. "I think the biggest enemy of the government now is corruption. The enemy isn't America or the west or Tibet; it's themselves. If they understand that, then they'll see that democracy isn't their biggest enemy."

He is resigned about the way so many Chinese have thrown themselves into the pursuit of Western-style materialism. "They believe in money more than ideas now. My generation made a lot of noise back then and now they want to see something in their hands that can really change their lives. They want to make good money, so they can buy a new house and give their kids a good education. I understand that, but we've lost something doing that."

China's music business, which has embraced the "Pop Idol" model of manufactured pop stars, depresses him even more. "For a lot of people in China, music is just an industry. In most of China, people don't really have a musical education, so they don't know what real music is. Maybe it's because I'm old, but a lot of modern music seems to be about pretty girl, pretty boy, pretty video, make lots of money. I like some of the hip-hop, some of the electronic music. But people don't want music with a message in it now. Pop music is just about counting the money."

Having sold more than 10 million CDs around the world, Cui has prospered despite his troubles with the authorities. He's composed movie soundtracks, organised festivals, and tours outside Beijing frequently. His music is a sometimes bewildering mix of styles that reflects his two biggest influences, Miles Davis and The Clash, and his classical background.

Born to ethnic Korean parents, he was playing trumpet with the Beijing Philharmonic Orchestra when he was just 20. By the mid-80s, he had formed his own band, playing covers of Western rock and pop, and had been asked to leave the orchestra. "For me, there are only two kinds of music in the world: good music and bad music. I still like the energy of classical music, but rock music appealed to me more because I could see myself in it more than in other kinds of music and I felt closer to the outside world." His 1987 debut album was entitled Rock and Roll on The New Long March and, given the vagaries of his career, it was a harbinger of things to come.

"When I used the title, it was to say that Chinese rock and roll wasn't an easy thing to do," says Cui. "Then from the lyrics, people could see it's actually about searching for yourself. It's a personal Long March."

Cultural 'class enemies'

* BA JIN

When the novelist and essayist Ba Jin died in Shanghai on 17 October at the age of 100, he was hailed by the news agency Xinhua as one of China's most influential post-revolution writers. But the former anarchist, best known for his 1947 novel Cold Nights, was labelled a "class enemy" during the Cultural Revolution, banned from writing and forced to clean drains until he was rehabilitated in 1977.

* COCO LEE

Born in Hong Kong, raised in America and resident in Taiwan, Lee has been described as Asia's answer to Mariah Carey. Her second album, Exposed, was number one in Hong Kong earlier this year, but it is banned in the mainland.

* GAO XINGJIAN

The 65-year- old playwright and novelist became the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. However, Gao spent the Cultural Revolution doing forced labour on a farm and after his 1986 play The Other Shore was banned, he went into exile in Paris. Now a French citizen, he remains persona non grata in his homeland.

* WEI HU

When she published her debut novel Shanghai Baby in 2000 at the age of 27, she was described by some Chinese critics as a "decadent and debauched slave of foreign culture". Her book, a racy account of the romantic life of a single woman in Shanghai's nightclub scene, was burnt and banned, but became an international bestseller and an underground hit in China.

* ZHANG YIMOU

China's most famous film director has won two Baftas, as well as prizes at the Cannes and Venice film festivals, but his most acclaimed films, Ju Dou, Raise The Red Lantern and To Live, have all been banned. When Ju Dou became the first Chinese film to be nominated for an Oscar in 1991, Zhang wasn't allowed to attend the ceremony in Los Angeles.

The Emperor and Empress of Japan have ceremonially waved goodbye to their only daughter, who has chosen to renounce her title for love.

Princess Sayako, the daughter of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, officially bade farewell to her parents on Saturday during complex and traditional rituals ahead of her wedding to a commoner. Tomorrow, she is to marry Yoshiki Kuroda, 40, a Tokyo town planner. The couple are old friends who became romantically involved after a party hosted by Princess Sayako's older brother two years ago.

Princess Sayako, dressed in a 12-layered junihitoe traditional kimono, visited three shrines in the Imperial Palace grounds that are dedicated to legendary Japanese gods and emperors of the past.

Television footage showed the Princess slowly ambling along a wooden balcony wearing her flowing kimono of purple, red and green.

During the ceremonial farewell to her family, the Empress urged her daughter to be a good citizen and to cherish her family.

"I hope that, even in your new life, you will continue to be a good member of society while looking after your household," Empress Michiko said to her departing daughter.

Both mother and daughter are known to be close and Princess Sayako will wear one of her mother's kimonos at her wedding reception. But her decision to marry a lowly town planner has forced her to leave the royal household, which does not allow marriages to commoners. Her children will not be eligible to inherit the throne.

Empress Michiko paid tribute last month to her daughter, who she nicknamed "Our Miss Never Mind", and said that she would miss Princess Sayako's support when she leaves the royal household.

"Sayako was a child who would come over to me serenely and say 'never mind' whenever I was disappointed about a mistake I made or about something that happened unexpectedly," the Empress said in a written statement.

"How fondly we will remember and miss this tender and heartwarming 'never mind' in the days to come," she said.

Princess Sayako, known informally as Nori, is the last of the Emperor's three children to get married.

Her departure from the royal household has contributed to a succession crisis which has cast a shadow over the dynasty, which claims an unbroken lineage of 2,600 years. The royal family has been desperate to produce a male successor to Emperor Akihito because, although there have been eight temporary empresses since the 8th century, current succession rules state that only a man can occupy the throne.

No one from the family has produced a son since 1965. Last month, a panel led by the Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said the rules should be changed to allow a female to occupy the throne. That would pave the way for the only child of Prince Naruhito, three-year-old princess Aiko, to one day ascend the throne.

Dark days are ahead for American newspapers, as sales tumble, a warp-speed news culture leaves lumbering dailies behind and scandals over flawed reporting taint heavyweight titles.

US papers are battling an explosion in online information, a news agenda powered by bloggers and 24-hour cable news, and they can't seem to connect with young readers.

Credibility questions hang over several papers and journalists are under more scrutiny than ever in the highly polarised US political climate.

Doomsayers say changes in modern lifestyles mean the days when American homeowners open their front door every morning and haul in a thick multi-section paper may be numbered.

Latest figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations found a 2.6 percent drop in circulation for 786 newspapers across the country in the six months to September -- meaning that 1.2 million people deserted their paper.

Several US newspaper giants suffered heavy circulation drops -- figures which mirror the declining readership across the globe.

The San Francisco Chronicle saw circulation fall 17 percent for its Wednesday to Saturday editions, while another big beast of the newspaper jungle, the Boston Globe, slumped 8.2 percent to a weekday average of 414,225.

Bucking the trend, two papers -- USA Today and the New York Times, the closest to national dailies in the United States -- gained readership of just under one percent.

The Columbia Journalism Review, in a recent editorial titled "The American Newspaper at a Crossroads," outlined a vicious circle, where falling circulation figures prompt further cost cutting.

"This can work for a while, but at some point it has to erode the quality of the product, which further erodes readership, because who needs a paper when the reporters producing it are too rushed to get beneath the surface," CJR said.

Some big-budget papers like the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun and the Boston Globe have cut jobs in the newsroom or the advertising department.

Meanwhile, a generation gap is widening, and unless younger Americans quickly get into the habit of reading a daily paper, circulation figures seem sure to dip even lower.

In a survey last year, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found only 23 percent of people under 30 read a daily newspaper, compared with 60 percent of older people.

The number of people going online for news, or getting their fix from cable television, was growing, the survey found, a trend that was also hitting traditional television network news.

Executives at a World Association of Newspapers meeting in Madrid on Thursday were told that the traditional newspaper has no future without online editions.

With that in mind, many US papers are trying new ways to chase fast-moving readers, expanding online content and offering portable "commuter" papers.

Some are also experimenting with design and considering a tabloid rather than a broadsheet format, in a tactic tried by several top papers in Britain.

That has been a sea change in an industry where great papers are typically dryer, more traditional and wordy and less irreverent than counterparts, for instance, in Britain or Australia -- more Neue Zurcher Zeitung or Le Monde than the London Times or the Sydney Morning Herald.

But predictions of doom are "completely premature," said Randy Bennett, vice president of the Association of American Newspapers.

"I think some people have a very narrow view and look at decline in circulation numbers and see the end is near," he said. "But it is a very incomplete story if you are not looking at how newspapers reach people across a variety of media platforms."

Some readers already get their newspaper exclusively online, in an easy commuter version, or even have favourite sections e-mailed to them.

Though there is much talk of bloggers and websites superseding "mainstream media," most offer links to established sources with the resources to chase down the news.

"People point to the success of Yahoo News and Google News. If you look at the stories they are pointing to, they are from local newspapers which still have the greatest editorial capacity (of) any other media," said Bennett.

Kansas City, MO - President Jimmy Carter says President Bush's policies conflict with American values.

More than a thousand people packed into Unity Temple on the Plaza for the former president to sign a copy of his new book "Our Endangered Values." Reviews call the book biting political commentary, despite the fact that there's an unwritten rule in American politics that former presidents do not criticize current ones.

Carter says he wrote this book reluctantly, but did so because he just couldn't stay silent anymore. "In the last 5 years there's been a dramatic and disturbing and radical change in the values of this country," Carter said. For example, he says peace is an American value, not pre-emptive war: "we don't wait until our country is threatened," Carter said, "we publicly announced our new policy is to attack a county, invade a country, bomb a county." He says another American value is human rights. For decades the US has supported the Geneva convention saying we won't torture prisoners, but he says now "our senators are voting to keep torture. It's inconceivable this would happen in the United States of America."

Carter also says American politics is being infused with what he calls "fundamentalist" religion. Carter, who is a born again Christian, says blurring the line between church and state is dangerous.

Carter says he's not in politics anymore, and his new book is not partisan. He criticizes Democrats for being out of touch on the abortion issue. "I don't think the Democratic party ought to identify itself with freedom of choice, with abortion," he said, "it's a litmus test for many people and I have a problem with abortion."

Carter hopes his book helps Americans debate these issues and decide on election day what America's future will look like. Carter's own presidency was controversial, but since then his humanitarian efforts in the world earned him a Nobel Peace Prize.

U.S. President George W. Bush's approval rating fell to a record low of 36 percent from 40 percent at the end of September, a survey released today by Newsweek magazine showed.

Bush's previous record low was 38 percent in the days after Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29. Newsweek said Bush's approval rating equals the low of Bill Clinton's presidency in May 1993, when the Democratic president also hit 36 percent. Bush's father, President George H. W. Bush, recorded a 32 percent approval rating in a Gallup poll taken in July 1992 before Clinton defeated him.

A total of 58 percent of those surveyed by today's Newsweek poll said they disapprove of how Bush is handling his job, following the indictment of I. Lewis Libby, former chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice and the withdrawal of the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

Fifty-six percent of Americans told the poll the president ``won't be able to get much done'' during his last three years in office, and 68 percent said they are dissatisfied with the direction the country is going at the moment compared with 61 percent in the last Newsweek poll, the magazine said.

Of the 1,002 adults polled by telephone Nov. 10-11, 60 percent disapprove of the way Bush is managing the economy and 73 percent disapprove of his handling of the price of oil, the magazine said. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

When asked if Bush ``is honest and ethical,'' 50 percent of the respondents disagreed and 42 percent agreed. When asked if the phrase described Cheney, 55 percent disagreed and 29 percent agreed, Newsweek said.

A total of 54 percent of those polled said they believed that someone in the Bush administration acted unethically during a probe into who revealed the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to reporters in July 2003. The disclosure came after Plame's husband publicly criticized the Iraq war. Libby on Nov. 3 pleaded not guilty to charges against him in the case.

About 171 cows died in past 10 days, for unknown medical reasons, in Rayan Talavdi village in Ajwa taluka. Cattle owners and veterinary doctors fear the deaths could have taken place due to spread of a dangerous epidemic in the village.

A large number of families, mostly shepherds, are involved in milk producing business in this village that has around 960 cows and buffaloes. "Surprisingly, a cattle has been perishing one by one in the last 10 days. On the first day about five cows died. The cows first vomited blood then fainted and died," informed Vijay Bharwad, president of Rayan Talavdi milk production committee, which supplies milk to Baroda Dairy. On Wednesday, four more cows were reported dead.

This apart, three camels and four buffaloes have also died in the village. "Since the number of death among the cattle is so huge, it is very difficult to discharge their bodies. Stray dogs have also died after eating the dead cattle. Maybe some dangerous epidemic has struck the village," informed Mr. Bharwad.The veterinary doctors from Baroda Dairy have also failed to ascertain the reason behind the deaths.

When asked about the delay in informing the government and municipal authorities about the incident, cattle owners failed to give any concrete answer. Meanwhile, Baroda district development officer M. Thennarson informed that three teams of doctors were sent to the village on Wednesday evening to look into the matter. They will try to diagnose the possible cause. "We will provide all possible help to the villagers. The report will be forwarded to higher authorities in Gandhinagar also, as the number of deaths is too high," said Mr. Thennarson.

Dr. Mark Carlotto recently made public an excellent report and scientific analysis on the several anomalies that appear in the videos of space shuttle STS-48 and STS-80 missions. (See Anomalous Phenomena In Space Shuttle Mission Sts-80 Video in Dr. Carlotto's 'New Frontiers in Science' web page - newfrontiersinscience.com).

Something that called our attention more specifically in that report was the event he identifies as F-1 in the STS-80 mission video, that originates, according to Dr. Carlotto's findings, in an area located to the east of Puerto Rico, specifically in a zone south of the island of Vieques.

The 'anomaly' consists of a large luminous object that seemed to come out from the sea at a point located in the south of the island of Vieques, and ascends to space, all the while being registered by the shuttle's camera. As it approaches the space shuttle, the object veers to its left and disappears from sight.

In our latest book in the English language, Vieques: Caribbean UFO Cover-Up of the Third Kind, I report on many UFO/ alien related incidents that have occurred in that same area. We believe Dr. Carlotto's findings pertaining to event F-1 are very important because it CONFIRMS the situation we have been reporting for five years now: Many of the unidentified objects and luminous anomalous phenomena described in the book originate precisely in that same zone, coming out from or entering the sea.

There have been many such important incidents reported by both Puerto Rico State policemen as well as Vieques Municipal policemen, US Navy security personnel, Vieques Municipal government employees and officials, fishermen, pilots, civilian pacifist protestors and many residents.

President Clinton's Secret Special Order

After the arrests of many civilian protestors on Vieques on May 4, 2000, other events took place, some of which surprised even the political leaders of Puerto Rico. One such event was the blockade made around Vieques by US Coast Guard ships, not allowing Vieques fishermen to go out to sea and earn their daily sustenance.

A popular radio program in Puerto Rico, "Fuego Cruzado" (Crossfire), which analyzes political and social subjects, questioned the action taken by the Coast Guard. During the program, panelist Carlos Gallis‡, a pro-Independence analyst, asked under what orders the US Coast Guard acted in such a manner, as normally they would not be authorized to put up a blockade.

Soon it became known that the Coast Guard was acting under a classified order issued by President William Clinton, who declared the zone of Vieques as "...one in state of rebellion." Why would acts of peaceful civil disobedience be considered acts of rebellion?, asked the panelists.

The so-called secret, special order had been issued by President Clinton under the provisions of the US National Security Act, and it stated that the situation taking place in Vieques dangerously affected the relations of the United States with another nation, a foreign power, and emphasized that this was very dangerous to the national security interest of the United States.

The panel on the radio program asked which nation this was, as such a justifying statement to issue the order "...did not make any sense." Without knowing it, the panel touched a nerve on the subject of Vieques; it was something never discussed, having major implications and which worried US national security strategists.

The truth is that none of the nations which participated in bombing exercises with the US Navy and experimented with new weapons around Vieques represented any danger to the United States. So, to what nation or "foreign power" was President Clinton referring when he issued this classified order, and why was it classified?

The answer to this could very well be that the "foreign power" President Clinton was speaking of was an alien civilization represented by beings who seem to live underground in the areas of the El Yunque Rain Forest, in the east region of Puerto Rico, and under the sea around the area of Vieques, several miles off the west coast of Puerto Rico.

Examples of such a presence in the area are triangle-shaped UFOs suspended over a US Navy Airstrip and UFOs rising from the sea. We interviewed the Director of the Vieques Municipal Police, Officer Wilfredo Feliciano, who informed us of a series of important observations.

Triangular UFO

The first sighting took place during the summer of 1997 (around 9 p.m.) when Feliciano was driving his car on Route 997, which runs from Esperanza sector to Isabel II. At the intersection of a place known as Marta's Alley, he became aware of an intense yellow light hanging motionless in the sky some distance away. Intrigued, he parked the car at the left edge of the road to observe the light more carefully

"It was a real big triangular object," he stated, "completely engulfed in a bright yellow light ... It seemed to be at an altitude of about 500 feet above the ground, over property belonging to Camp Garc’a. I figured the altitude based on the height of some trees in the area. What intrigued me the most was that the thing was suspended right over the area where the US Navy has an airstrip or runway for their planes to land and take off ... And that it was an unidentified flying object.

"There were no military exercises at the time, so what was that object, that triangle of light, doing there over the runway? Thinking that I was observing something I shouldn't be seeing, I left the site at once. But from that moment on, I realized something very strange is taking place on the lands controlled by the US Navy.

"Some days later, my wife told me that she saw a similar object, also at night, suspended over the exact same place I had seen the object, over Camp Garc’a's runway. The next weekend, as we were driving to her mother's home, we saw another one of those triangles. This time our sons were with us in the car; they saw it too."

Feliciano and his family observed the object from a distance of two miles, and even from that distance, they described its size to be three to four feet in length, which indicates the object was very large. He also told us that, as part of his duties with the municipal police, he had to patrol the land west of Vieques, until then still under US Navy control, and on many occasions he witnessed brightly lit UFOs emerging from the sea in Punta Arenas sector and flying away at great speed in the night sky. Often the objects would make several fast turns before leaving the area.

"This has happened on many occasions, sometimes between 9 and 11 p.m., and sometimes around 2 or 3 in the morning. They come out from the sea at a spot right in the middle between Punta Arenas and Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Ceiba."

Large Saucer Craft Absorbs Water from the Sea
Witness Carlos Zen—n is a Viequense fisherman and one of the leaders involved in the movement to remove the US Navy from the island. Both he and his sons suffered periods of incarceration in the US federal prison in Puerto Rico because of their commitment to this cause.

Once certain of the seriousness of our investigation, Mr. Zen—n gave us his testimony on some impressive situations he personally witnessed, commenting on possible involvement by the US Navy with the UFO / alien incidents experienced by the people of Vieques. He stated:

"These sort of events have been occurring here (in Vieques) for some time. It is not something new. On one occasion in 1996, I was fishing with some other fishermen out at sea. We were a couple of miles south of La Esperanza. It was about 9:00 PM when we suddenly saw something unexpected. We saw several very bright spheres of light come out from the top of Cerro Ventana (mountain located in the south of Vieques).

"These globes of light were of a blue-white hue and seemed to come right out from the top of the hill. They circled the hill and flew out to sea to the south, flying right over us. They made several quick circles and angle turns. You could hear a slight hissing or whistling sound, almost inaudible, which seemed to come from them.

"After that, they returned to Playa Grande and Cerro Ventana, areas controlled by the US Navy, and disappeared inside the mountain. It was as if they had merged with the side of the mountain.

"The most impressive event was when we encountered a huge object at night while out at sea fishing. I was with An’bal Corcino and his father, and we had just come out from La Esperanza.

"I wasn't aware of the object at first because I was the captain and in charge of the rudder at the time. An’bal and his father saw it and yelled, 'Carlos, look at that!' I looked back and saw this huge ... a sort of craft. It came out from the sea near the Playa Grande lagoon, in the south, where the Navy's (Raytheon) ROTHR radar system is installed. It rose from its position and started moving closer to us.

"It was an extraordinary huge craft, immense, with many lights all around it. It was a flying saucer, a round disc-like craft, but really huge in size. It was at some distance from us, but clearly visible due to its size and the lights it had all over it, yellow, blue, and red lights.

"The peculiar thing about all this was that the object, that saucer, was taking in water from the sea. The water at the sea's surface was swirling in a circle, and jumping, as if boiling. It was like a whirlpool. It seemed to be going up into the saucer in a column of water.

"We were all very impressed. It was the first time in my life that I have seen anything like this craft. From where we were, it looked to be about 40 to 50 feet in diameter, and we were about a mile and a half away from it. That can give you some idea of the size.

"But what impressed me the most was that it was sucking water from the sea, and the water was swirling like in a blender. A column of bright green light, similar to that of a powerful spotlight, was coming out from under the object. There was a hole there and the beam came out downwards, vertically. The water went up into the saucer through the beam of light. After that, the object flew away to the west at a fantastic speed and disappeared in a matter of seconds.

"Many other people have seen these type of crafts, so called flying saucers, in both the western and eastern parts of Vieques. If we analyze this situation more deeply, we can see that these areas are controlled by the US Navy, and the Navy has never denounced this situation. They must have some knowledge of what is taking place. They just don't seem to care about the presence of these objects.

"Because of this we must ask ourselves if there is some sort of communication or collaboration between these crafts' occupants and people from the US Navy. But this is difficult to ascertain. It is a complex situation. We must ask ourselves what is going on because the Navy never denounces this and they (the Navy) have been here for 62 years.

"All this makes us wonder if there may be hidden reasons why the Navy forced the inhabitants of Vieques out from their land to live in a small piece of land in the center of the island. The Navy controls both the eastern and western portions of Vieques on which there are large extensions of uninhabited and restricted areas, also containing hills and beaches which no one has access to.

"If these things are happening in these areas and the US Navy is somehow involved, it would be very convenient for them to have this take place in these areas because no one would see and know what they are doing there. It very well could be also that the US Government and people from the Navy are secretly studying this advanced type of technology, possibly of alien origin, in the area of Vieques.

"Who knows? Maybe the things we have seen here are related to new aircraft prototypes that are secretly being developed and tested. They could be in contact, communicating with the crew of these crafts, the OVNIs (UFOs), and they simply don't want the public to know.

"This situation is very serious. I kept silent all this time because people can doubt what you say about this type of thing. Not everyone has had the opportunity to see one of these crafts, especially one as big as the one we saw.

"My sons and I have been jailed, imprisoned, only because we protested against what they were doing in Vieques. I'm aware that US government agencies have manipulated public opinion, the people who have never witnessed any of this. They try to make them think that none of this (the UFO / alien reality) is happening, and it is not real. They would probably begin a ridicule campaign against us and at the same time use it to discredit the struggle of the people of Vieques to achieve the ending of the Navy's bombing exercises. For this reason, I restrained from making any comments until now.

"But the people from our country, especially from Vieques, know me, and they know that everything I do is based on my convictions and my principles. They know that I'm not publicity oriented or someone who would invent this kind of thing because of my concern that doing such a thing would hurt our seriousness and therefore our efforts to get the Navy out. That is our main goal. We have endured many personal sacrifices because of our cause.

"The moment has come to discuss this matter. The Navy used chemical and biological weapons in Vieques, an inhabited island. The use of such weapons is prohibited near populated areas. They denied it until recently, when it was verified by documents from the Pentagon.

"They also used live ammo with depleted uranium, and denied it until it was also proven. That is why, due to everything we have seen here, they can be using Vieques to make contact with these crafts and their crew, and keep it secret. Maybe, if a group of disciplined individuals such as yourself investigates and discloses everything, the US Navy would feel forced to reveal it is happening. But something is definitely going on, and the US Navy is somehow involved, and won't say what it is."

Other Anomalous Events

There are many more events reported in my book, including:

1. Landings of UFOs, humanoid beings in the US NAVY/Raytheon Corporation's R.O.T.H.R. radar system.
2. Shocking disclosures by US Navy's security personnel on the UFO/alien presence in Vieques.
3. A joint US military/alien activity?
4. Clashes between UFOs and US jetfighters.
5. An apparent covert US NAVY UFO/Alien contact program and an advanced alien technology testing program in Vieques.

Author Note

The US Navy has stopped its bombing and military maneuvers in Vieques, but except for a sector of land in the western region of Vieques all other lands previously controlled and restricted by that military agency were passed on to the US Department of the Interior. This department subsequently placed it under the control of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The US Fish and Wildlife Agency has converted the areas (Camp Garc’a, the bombing site and the Playa Grande sector where the ROTHR radar system is located, as well as Kian’ lagoon) to a wildlife refuge.

Access to these areas is now even more restricted to the public than it was during the US Navy's control. What else could be happening that is being kept from the people of Puerto Rico and the rest of the world?

Jorge Martin is the Editor of ENIGMAS del Milenio Magazine in Puerto Rico. He may be reached at: jmartin@prcinternet (Tel. (787) 758-0692)

For information on his book, Vieques: Caribbean UFO Cover-Up of the Third Kind, please call or write to: P.O. Box 30054, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00929-1054.

One of the most remarkable confrontations ever between man and beast is the subject of the first television drama from the BBC's natural history unit.

The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, on air next month, is set in the summer of 1926, when the hunter Jim Corbett set out to track and kill a rogue leopard that was to eat 126 people. His legendary jungle guile and ultimate success made him a hero in India to this day.

The saga has its origins in the flu pandemic that swept the world in the wake of the first world war. When the outbreak reached the North Indian Himalaya region of Gharwal, a 500-square mile area of rocky gorges, low-lying jungle and mountain villages, corpses were consigned to plague pits. It is believed that feeding on these gave the leopard a taste for human flesh.

The first report of a villager missing from Rudra-prayag, an ancient town in the foothills of the Himalayas, was in 1918. What proved to be an eight-year reign of terror had begun, the leopard getting bolder with every passing year. For the last three years the victims were taken from inside their homes. The man-eater learned to silently push down bamboo doors and climb through windows before escaping into the night.

A bounty of 10,000 rupees, more than £1,000, a great deal of money at that time, was offered, and hunters flocked in, but all attempts to kill the animal failed. Questions were asked in Parliament. The area was in a state of terror.

When Corbett arrived in Rudraprayag he was already a hunter with a hard-won reputation for physical bravery, skill and marksmanship. The son of a postmaster, he was born at the hill station of Nainital in the Kumaon hills of North India in 1875. Of British descent, he was educated locally and was, to all intents and purposes, Indian. He hunted from the age of eight and spent summers alone in the jungle, where he trained his hearing and eyesight, learned to move silently and developed the "jungle sense" that warned him of predators. His imitations of jungle animals were so convincing, they would draw predators and other hunters.

Corbett always refused money for killing man-eaters, and made no exception at Rudraprayag. Although he had risked his life many times tracking rogue animals, he felt only pity for his prey; many tigers and leopards had turned man-eater because they had been wounded but not finished off by trophy-hunters. Corbett's only stipulation was that all other hunters left the area.

Hetracked the leopard for months, but it pulled the bait out of traps and ate without any ill-effect the corpses that Corbett and poisoned with cyanide. The animal had a sixth sense as uncanny as the man hunting it, and would avoid eating goats left as bait if he sensed the hunter's presence. Corbett once waited for three weeks in a tower that overlooked a wooden bridge normally favoured by the leopard. The day after he gave up, the man-eater crossed the bridge again and killed villagers. Corbett began to feel that he was now the prey, finding paw prints that showed the animal had been tracking him.

The leopard became more cunning still, once silently taking a man in the time it took his friend to stoop for a dropped pipe.

The months-long battle of wits came to an end when Corbett camped for 10 nights in a mango tree. The hunter heard a terrified goat's bell jangling, shone his torch and saw the leopard. The torch failed immediately but the split second of illumination was enough: Corbett shot it dead. He felt no elation, he later wrote; the leopard had committed crimes "not against the laws of nature, but against the laws of man."

By the time of his death in 1957, Corbett dispatched 12 big cats who had killed at least 1,500 people. In 1959, a national park was dedicated to him, and in 1968, one of five subspecies of tigers was dubbed panthera tigris corbetti in his honour.

ARE you right or left-handed? Chances are you know which camp you belong to, and the chances are also good that, like 90 per cent of the human population, you consider yourself to be right-handed. But while our "handedness" is one of the few things about ourselves we feel we can be sure of, the issue is anything but clear-cut, scientifically speaking. In fact, despite an almost 200-year search for clear biological or psychological differences between left and right-handers, the one thing that most studies have in common is their inconclusiveness.

Psychologist Stephen Christman at the University of Toledo in Ohio thinks he knows why: we have been looking at handedness in the wrong way. He says it is not being left-handed or right-handed that matters, but the strength of your preference for one hand over the other. According to his controversial idea, people are not either left-handed or right-handed, but "strong-handed" or "mixed-handed". When you classify people in this way, he insists, measurable differences between the two groups start to emerge. Even more controversially, Christman believes that those differences can be explained by variations in the size of a particular part of the brain and are linked to other tangible differences in cognition and behaviour.

There is no doubt, of course, that almost everyone has some preference for one hand or the other. How this handedness arises remains uncertain, but the most popular theory is that its origin is genetic. Humans are not alone in having some degree of handedness: most other animals have an equivalent pawedness, hoofedness or clawedness. Strangely though, for most species the left-right split is roughly 50:50, but for humans there is a dramatic skew to the right, with only 10 to 12 per cent being left-handed.

In 1972, Marian Annett of the University of Leicester, UK, suggested that this difference was caused by a gene or set of genes she dubbed the "right-shift factor". At some point in our evolution, she says, this shifted major processing tasks like speech function to the brain's left hemisphere, and somehow conferred bias to the right hand in the process. Although it has been tweaked here and there, this theory of the origin of handedness is still widely accepted.

That leaves the question of what makes some people left-handed, and the short answer is that we don't know for sure. Annett's answer is that by chance some people have lateral bias set so far to the left that, even after the influence of the right-shift factor, they remain left-leaning. Another idea is that left-handedness is an abnormality resulting from slight cerebral damage at birth or exposure to unusual concentrations of hormones in the womb. Once popular, this theory still has lingering support: in September this year a study published in the British Medical Journal (DOI: 10.1136/bmj.38572.440359.AE) found that left-handed women were twice as likely as non-lefties to develop pre-menopausal breast cancer, and tentatively linked this to hormone exposure in the womb.

In Christman's view, whatever gene or other factors cause handedness, the result is not, as most people believe, a population that is 90 per cent right-handers and 10 per cent left-handers. Instead, the population is more evenly split between strong and mixed-handers, although strong right-handers still predominate. "We've been carving up the handedness pie completely wrong," he says.

According to this "degree, not direction" model, people who exclusively use one hand for tasks like writing, eating, brushing teeth and throwing a ball make up one distinct population, the strong-handers. Mixed-handed people, in contrast, may favour one hand for primary functions such as writing and eating, but demonstrate mixed preferences for other tasks. That much is well established, but Christman takes the concept of strong and mixed-handedness much further.

His starting point was a 1985 paper by neuroscientist Sandra Witelson of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, who conducted post-mortem examinations of the brains of people whose handedness had been recorded while they were alive. Witelson's results seemed to suggest that left-handed people have a larger corpus callosum - the cable-like bundle of nerves that links the two hemispheres of the brain - than right-handers. If Witelson was correct, handedness was a proxy for the size of the corpus callosum.

In the early 1990s, Christman was also interested in the corpus callosum, particularly the idea that differences in its size might predispose people to be better at playing certain musical instruments. And so he designed a study to test the idea.

He recruited musicians who played either string, percussion or keyboard instruments. Then he measured their handedness using a survey tool known as the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (see figure). Based on Witelson's results, he expected that left-handers would be over-represented among string players - who need tight communication between their left and right hands - because a larger corpus callosum ought to enhance communication between the hemispheres. Conversely, people playing drums or piano, with the left and right hands often following independent lines of music, ought to find it beneficial to have a smaller corpus callosum, as this would minimise interference between the two hemispheres. This group, he guessed, would be mostly right-handed.

The results turned out to be an absolute mess. "The data were telling me there's no handedness difference between these groups," Christman recalls. Meanwhile, the waters were becoming even more muddied by a dozen or so studies that attempted to replicate Witelson's findings: some indicated that left-handers had a larger corpus callosum than right-handers, while others found no difference.

When Christman took a closer look at the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory responses of his musicians, things suddenly came together in a way that seemed to explain both his own results and the shakiness of Witelson's findings. He noticed that out of his 170 subjects, only two could truly be considered strong left-handers. Both were keyboard players. Soon afterwards, he was marvelling at a drummer friend's ability to play two different rhythms simultaneously - a friend who he knew to be strongly right-handed. "That's when it hit me: maybe it's not right versus left, but strong versus mixed."

The third way

Decades of Edinburgh Handedness Inventory surveys have shown that many people who think of themselves as righties or lefties are mixed-handed to some degree. Strong left-handedness, for example, shows up in only 2 to 3 per cent of the population. When Christman reanalysed the musicians' data to compare strong versus mixed-handers and their chosen instruments, a pattern emerged to match his predictions: string instruments for mixed-handers, keyboards and drums for strong-handers. Christman now believes that handedness can indeed be used as a measurement of corpus callosum size, but only if you use the strong-versus-mixed distinction instead of left versus right.

When he started mulling over what he knew would be a contentious theory, Christman consulted a former mentor, psychologist Joseph Hellige of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. "Over a drink, I said I understood the logic, but that I thought it was really a long shot," Hellige recalls. The idea was so simple, and simple theories about the dazzlingly complex human brain should be viewed with suspicion, Hellige says. But Christman has since refined his hypothesis and accumulated a collection of published studies documenting a variety of cognitive differences between strong and mixed-handers that can be explained as arising from differences in their corpus callosum. "You can't ignore it," Hellige says. "I can't think of a better explanation for the results he's getting."

Christman's findings suggest that strong and mixed-handers should show differences in areas such as belief in improbable events, memory and accident-proneness. "The common thread is that for cognitive tasks requiring activity in both hemispheres, mixed-handers perform better," Christman says. The same should be true when strong-handers perform tasks requiring more shielding between the hemispheres.

Take, for example, the well-known "Stroop task", in which subjects are asked to name the colour of lettering on a card. The task is made less than straightforward by making the letters spell out colour names: the word "yellow" written in green, for example. Reading is generally considered to be a left-hemisphere function, whereas colour recognition is a right-hemisphere task. Christman found that mixed-handed subjects scored lower on these tests, presumably because they found it harder to prevent the automatic reading action of the left hemisphere from interfering with the right hemisphere's effort to identify the colour.

Similar differences between strong and mixed-handers should be found in memory, because memory also works in a cross-hemispheric manner. Encoding of memories takes place in the left hemisphere, while recall happens in the right. Christman had subjects keep a daily journal for two weeks. When asked afterwards to recollect - without looking at their diaries - what they had done on each day, mixed-handers performed better. Likewise, he found that mixed-handers' childhood memories date back further than those of strong-handers. This, Christman says, is consistent with the theory that mixed-handers - again, thanks to that larger corpus callosum - do better at tasks that require interplay between the two sides of the brain.

Other researchers have found similar effects. Walter Daniel and Ronald Yeo at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque went back to a study that originally suggested that left-handers were more prone to have car accidents. After reassessing the numbers to reflect handedness degree instead of direction, they found that it is mixed-handers who are statistically more at risk. This seems consistent with the inter-hemispheric model: imagine someone talking on a mobile phone (a left-hemisphere task) while driving with the left hand (a right-hemisphere task).

Buoyed by the evidence so far, Christman is revisiting older studies of left versus right-handers and recalibrating them to compare mixed versus strong-handers. He is also designing new projects to further explore cognitive differences between people who have a larger versus a smaller corpus callosum.

Scan snobs

But there is still a long way to go before more experts are persuaded by this idea that handedness is a window onto brain function. First off, there is the not-so-small issue of proving that handedness really is an accurate predictor of corpus callosum size. Much of modern neurology and neuropsychology is rooted in imaging technology, and Hellige suspects that this has led to "a sort of technological snobbery" that tends to lead people to dismiss ideas about the brain's structure and function that are not built on empirical data. He hopes, however, that Christman's work may entice imaging specialists to get involved with research that looks at inter-hemispheric communication and its possible connection to corpus callosum size. In the meantime, says Hellige, strength of handedness is, at the very least, a valuable indirect measure.

But if handedness can be linked to corpus callosum size and noticeable variation in the way different people's brains operate, just how reliable is it as a predictor of thought patterns or abilities? Christman readily admits that his research focuses on effects that are undetectable unless they are magnified in the lab. And he is keen to point out that he is not on any kind of quest to show one brain configuration to be superior to another. Besides, he says, the influences of other factors - biological, social and cultural - are far too significant for anyone in their right mind to conclude that a large corpus callosum necessarily predestines a person for cello-playing stardom, or that a small corpus callosum is a recipe for amnesia.

Nevertheless, one of Christman's protégés, Chris Niebauer, who now teaches at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, claims that handedness is correlated in a more general way to people's attitudes. Niebauer has collected results that he says suggest that mixed-handers are less likely to believe in creationism or be homophobic and more likely to be hypochondriac. He explains this by drawing on renowned neurologist V.S. Ramachandran's view that the left hemisphere controls rational thought, while the right is the world-view challenger, updating beliefs when contradictory information becomes overwhelming. Niebauer argues that in mixed-handers, a larger corpus callosum helps the right hemisphere revise its beliefs more frequently, updating the person's overall belief system and washing away entrenched ideas: in the case of hypochondriacs, for instance, reacting to every little bump or scrape as if it were a first sign of catastrophic injury.

Logical left-brainers

"The danger, of course, is that ideas about laterality often get extrapolated well beyond the data," says psychologist Michael Corballis at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. They can easily become enshrined in folklore, as has happened with the popular - and faulty - idea that people can be classified as either "logical" left-brainers or "creative" right-brain types. But he doesn't dismiss Christman's work out of hand. "I think we need imaginative theory, and Christman is putting the stuff together in an interesting way."

Whether or not these ideas pan out, it is clear that study of the brain's laterality is moving away from interest in left versus right and towards the question of brain symmetry versus asymmetry. Corpus callosum size may play an increasingly important role in this emerging area.

Meanwhile, Christman's theory has an Achilles' heel that has yet to be resolved. It predicts that strong left-handers' brains and cognition patterns should be similar to those of strong right-handers. But in practice, it is hard to verify this because strong left-handers are so few and far between. And in a handful of studies where strong lefties have been included, they sometimes show differences not only from mixed-handers but from strong right-handers too. "My thinking is that they are like strong right-handers, but I'm willing to admit that they could be a third unique group," Christman says. "Deep down, I still think direction matters," he says.

Whatever the answer, when it comes to the workings of our brains and our interactions with the world, the question of handedness seems to be less one-sided than we thought.

Stranded American astronaut Bill McArthur may finally be able to return home from the International Space Station after US policymakers agreed to change a law preventing NASA from purchasing rides on Russian spacecraft.

In 2000, the US passed the Iran Nonproliferation Act (INA), which was designed to prevent the spread of nuclear technologies from Russia to Iran. One clause makes it illegal for the US to pay for rides to the ISS unless the White House is satisfied that Russia is not selling nuclear technologies to Iran.

Since then, a pact between NASA and the Russian Space Agency, made before the INA was passed, has permitted Russia to provide 11 Soyuz spacecraft for astronauts and cosmonauts to reach the station. But the last of those was launched in September, with McArthur on board. It is due to return to Earth in April, but possibly without McArthur.

With the shuttles grounded, McArthur's predicament has forced a rethink. Revoking the INA completely was not an option, says congressman Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the House Committee on Science: "The puzzle we had to solve was how to enable the US to continue to man the ISS without reducing our vigilance with regard to non-proliferation." On 26 October, the US House of Representatives decided to change the act to allow further Soyuz flights.

But if the details are not ironed out in time, McArthur may still have to wait for the next space shuttle, currently expected to launch no earlier than May.

A COURT in Texas has rejected an appeal from Thomas Butler, the microbiologist jailed after reporting that plague bacilli were missing from his laboratory in 2003. Police accused him of making a false report, but Butler was eventually sentenced to two years in prison for unrelated financial irregularities and for shipping bacilli without the proper paperwork.

Some researchers believe the US government has used the case to frighten scientists into obeying tough new laws for research on microbes considered to be potential bioweapons (New Scientist, 8 November 2003, p 6). "I know dozens of people who deplore what happened to Tom but are afraid to speak out," says Stanley Falkow of Stanford University in California.

Butler's lawyers plan to appeal further, while colleagues are trying to find him a job for when he is released, possibly in January. Butler lost his faculty position and medical licence after his conviction and owes more than $1 million in legal fees.

Most vessels escaped, but one was commandeered, bringing to seven the number of vessels now being held captive along with their crews by pirates plundering the failed state's coastline, the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) said.

"Insecurity off the Somali coast has escalated sharply - it is very worrying," Andrew Mwangura, program coordinator at the Kenyan Seafarers' Association, told Reuters. He said nine ships, including two Arabian dhows, had been seized.

Mwangura said five vessels were attacked in the past week alone including the attempt last Saturday to board the Bahamas-registered Seabourn Spirit, which was carrying 151 Western tourists.

Rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles were fired at the US-owned Spirit by gunmen in two small speedboats, but the ship's captain, Norwegian Sven Erik Pedersen, managed to change course and speed away.

At least 500,000 earthquake survivors in Pakistan still have no shelter with the fierce Himalayan winter just days away, international relief agencies have warned. Aid workers are scrambling to get tents to survivors in high mountain areas where snow may arrive any day, but the international relief effort is failing.

The problem is a severe lack of funds. Relief agencies warn that if they do not get adequate shelters to survivors before snow falls, thousands will die.

A desperate plea made to The Independent on Sunday, from a village in the mountains above the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, illustrated the scale of the crisis.

"Please tell the British government to help us. Please tell anyone," Mohammed Idris said by telephone. "We have no tents and it is so cold at night. If we do not have tents soon the children will die."

Mr Idris said he was one of 4,000 villagers in Rajmerra with only 20 tents between them. On some nights, he added, temperatures already dip below freezing and water turns to ice. On other nights survivors are pelted with torrential rain, havenothing to sleep under and sit awake all night, shivering.

"We can see the snow on the hills and it will be here any day now," Mr Idris added. "I went to the Pakistan army today to ask for tents but they say they cannot help, as they don't have any. Please tell people we need tents, food and blankets." Rajmerra lies in Battamori district, near Battagaram. Time for them is running out fast.

Much the same situation can be seen throughout northern Pakistan. In the village of Maira, in the hills above Bagh, we found a two-month-old baby named Ariba, sleeping with her mother under a thin sheet of tarpaulin that did not even cover the rope-bed, which jutted out into the rain. At 4,500ft above sea level, temperatures plunge once darkness falls and the snow will be here soon, too.

"If it starts to snow we'll have to try to build a new house," Ariba's father, Abdul Rauf, said. But the family has no money and no building materials.

In the same village we found Mohammed Haleem salvaging wood from his ruined home to use as winter fuel, including beams, doors and even the roof thatch. He was dismembering the house to keep his family alive. "It burns my heart to do this but I have no choice," he said.

Of an estimated three million people made homeless by the earthquake, only 10,000 are in official relief camps. Most remain in their often remote mountain villages, where aid is still struggling to get through. The charity World Vision last week said around 250,000 survivors had received no aid at all.

Aid agencies say they are doing what they can but governments have not put up enough money. The United Nations has received only $133m (£76m) towards an emergency appeal for $550m. It urgently needs $42m just to keep the current aid effort going.

Pakistan says that out of the $2bn pledged by foreign governments, it has received only $9.5m. The charity Oxfam says Britain has contributed only 24 per cent of what it says would be its "fair share", based on the size of its economy.

Even when survivors do have tents, they are often inadequate for the needs of a fierce Himalayan winter. In Maira, where the Pakistan army finally dropped some tents - though not enough to go around - they were lightweight summer tents that are not even waterproof.

All over the quake-affected area, there is the smell of rotting bodies. No one has had time to dig out the corpses, such is the struggle to stay alive.

Even in a city that enjoys easy access, such as Muzaffarabad, the state of the relief camps is terrible. In one camp, we found 3,000 people sharing 12 toilets. These camps have already suffered outbreaks of diarrhoea and doctors fear cholera may follow.

Pakistani troops evicted quake survivors from one informal relief camp in the city as the sanitation and overcrowding were so poor that they feared for people's lives.

Some survivors said the Pakistan authorities had inadvertently added to their woes. In Maira, they said the authorities thwarted their attempts to draw on their savings to rebuild their homes by freezing their accounts for three months.

The move was apparently made to prevent villagers who drew out all their money from being robbed, but it left them defenceless against the elements.

With such a dire shortage of tents, many men are giving up their spaces to the women and children and sleeping outside. Among those who have to sleep outside are boys as young as 10.

Another problem is that villagers are reluctant to move down to the valleys. The Pakistani government has called on homeless quake survivors in villages where snow is imminent to go down. But often they don't want to go. "Where will we put our farm animals?" Raja Moidnaiz, of Maira, asked. "Even if we go down there, there are no tents for us."

He added: "The government is talking about villages where the snow is 10ft deep. Here, the snowfall is light - it's only 4ft deep."

That, however, is still deep enough to kill anyone without a proper shelter.

According to official figures, about 73,000 people died in the quake itself. Without urgent action in the coming weeks, that figure will grow by several thousand - victims of an additional disaster that was entirely avoidable.

AL GORE, the man who five years ago won the popular vote but lost the US presidential elections by a few hanging chads, has a stark warning for all investors.

"Capitalism is at a critical juncture," he says, arguing that the focus on short-term results is undermining issues such as the long-term sustainability of profits, how a company relates to the community and its employees, and the environment.

Australia's politicians might prefer to quietly retire after securing lucrative business consultancy deals, but Gore is out to make a noise as co-founder and chairman of British-based sustainable investing company Generation Investment.

"If in the process of proving our business case that it is just good common sense to take these matters into consideration when making investment decisions, we can encourage other investors to do the same and have an impact on the behaviour of the market, then that's all for the good," he says.

Generation was formed when Gore met former Goldman Sachs chief executive David Blood and they began mulling over how to combine conventional equity market analysis with longer-term judgements about sustainability.

In an interview with The Age on the eve of the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia conference, which he addressed in Melbourne last week, Gore says the payment structure for asset managers must reflect shareholders' long-term interest.

Generation is only paid after three years of returns, and then only if it beats the benchmark.

Retail investors are clamouring for a change to long-term sustainable goals, he says, with consumers pushing for lower carbon emissions as global warming awareness grows.

The refusal of the US and Australia to sign the Kyoto pact that Gore helped draft clearly annoys the former US vice-president. He draws parallels between those who dispute global warming, and its investment implications, with Neville Chamberlain and others who wanted to appease the Nazis before World War II.

Winston Churchill warned in the 1930s that a storm was gathering and democratic nations would be forced to "sip from the bitter cup" until they reasserted their moral authority.

"The time of half-measure has passed. We are entering a period of consequences," says Gore, quoting Churchill.

"What changed in the US with hurricane Katrina was a feeling that we have entered a period of consequences and that bitter cup will be offered to us again and again until we exert our moral authority and respond appropriately," he says. "I don't want to diminish the threat of terrorism at all, it is extremely serious, but on a long-term global basis, global warming is the most serious problem we are facing."

To be sure, holding a "feel-good" investment may appeal to the heart, but it's of no real use if it doesn't produce a healthy financial return.

Gore's partner David Blood (their other partners ruled out calling the company Blood and Gore for obvious reasons) says Generation doesn't ban entire sectors from its portfolio for purely ethical reasons. "Sustainable investing isn't something that's separate from traditional fundamental stock picking. It's an integral part. There are long-term issues that affect a company's ability to generate revenues and protect its competitive advantage," Blood says.

Industries such as tobacco, aren't excluded purely because the product slowly kills, but due to the litigation risk and what that means for future profit.

Gore says investing in uranium mining also comes down to sustainability. Although concerned about nuclear waste and the possibility of spent fuel rods falling into the wrong hands, he says he is not "reflexively against" nuclear energy. While only investing in about 40 stocks, Generation is willing to own up to 70 per cent of companies on the Morgan Stanley Capital International world index "based on hard economics", Blood says.

Australia is having its hottest year on record and experts blame global warming for the trend, the government weather bureau reported.

The Bureau of Meteorology said average temperatures for the first 10 months of the year were 1.03 degrees centigrade above the 30-year mean and the warmest since monthly records began in 1950.

With forecasts for continued warmer-than-average temperatures in November and December, Australia is on its way to recording its hottest year since annual records began in 1910, it said.

The head of the bureau's National Climate Center, Michael Coughlan, said the rising temperatures were linked to global warming.

"It certainly sends a message that's consistent with what we've seen in the last few years -- that climate over Australia and indeed over the world as a whole is getting warmer," Coughlan said on ABC radio.

"Given that most of the world has been showing this increase, Australia has been going up with most of the rest of the world and there's certainly evidence that human activities are causing part of that warming, so there probably is some component of human activities in this warming that we're seeing," he said.

U.S. electricity rates are 46 percent higher than a year ago, an industry group said Friday.

U.S. wholesale day-ahead power prices in early November averaged $81.21 per megawatt hour compared to $55.72 per megawatt hour in early November 2004, said Platts National Daily Power Index.

The year-to-year increase, driven largely by much higher natural gas prices, was even greater before day-ahead wholesale electricity prices fell 21 percent, or $21.06, from early October, when the Platts National Daily Power Index stood at $102.27.

Natural gas prices have come down somewhat from their post-hurricane highs, and that means lower power prices, said Mike Wilczek, electric power market specialist for Platts.

The usual 'shoulder season' price declines came late this year with hurricane damage driving up fuel costs for generation. Still, when you look at how much prices have risen since last year, it's quite dramatic.

As the season of sneezing and grabbing tissues begins with the autumn's first frosts, medical researchers have found that "granny's nostrums" to fend off colds may be scientifically proven.

Ninety volunteers who spent 20 minutes with their feet in bowls of iced water have provided evidence that failing to wrap up warmly is directly linked to falling prey to sore throats and a bunged-up nose.

Although apparently common sense, straightforward connections between chilling and viral infection have been hard to prove, according to the common cold centre at Cardiff University - the world's only centre dedicated to researching and testing new medicines for the treatment of flu and the common cold.

But the latest experiment reinforces theories that existing, latent infection can be activated when parts of the body, particularly the feet and nose, get wet and cold.

Claire Johnson and Ron Eccles from the centre found that 29% of the volunteers developed cold symptoms within five days, compared to 9% of a control group who dangled their feet in empty bowls.

All participants took off their shoes and socks and temperatures were monitored throughout the experiment.

"When colds are circulating, many people are mildly infected but show no symptoms," said Professor Eccles, whose findings are published in today's issue of Family Practice magazine.

"But if they become chilled, this causes a pronounced constriction of the blood vessels in the nose and shuts off the warm blood that supplies the white cells that fight infection.

"Although the chilled subject believes they have 'caught a cold', what has in fact happened is that the dormant infection has taken hold."

But they also suggested that another explanation could be that our noses are colder in the winter. Prof Eccles said: "A cold nose may be one of the major factors that causes common colds to be seasonal.

"When the cold weather comes we wrap ourselves up in winter coats to keep warm but our nose is directly exposed to the cold air.

"Cooling of the nose slows down clearance of viruses from the nose and slows down the white cells that fight infection."

Parents should feel confident in telling children to wrap up warmly this winter, the researchers say - though a nose-protecting garment, possibly like the one worn by Harry Potter, would be a useful fashion accessory.

A man who claims to be the first in the world whose immune system has been able to beat the HIV virus was facing mounting pressure yesterday to submit to further vital medical tests. Health experts, Aids campaigners and gay rights activists urged Andrew Stimpson to come forward following claims that he has been able to rid his body of the virus after taking little more than vitamins.

Activists say that if the claims are true, the phenomenon could potentially bring countless benefits to millions of people infected with HIV. There are more than 53,000 in the UK alone.

Mr Stimpson, 25, twice tested positive at the Victoria Clinic for Sexual Health in west London in August 2002. A test 14 months later appeared to be negative. But the heath trust concerned, Chelsea and Westminster, yesterday said Mr Stimpson had so far "declined" to undergo further tests. It is understood that he was first asked to do so immediately after last year's negative test result.

A spokeswoman said: "I can confirm that he has a positive and a negative test. I can't confirm that he's shaken it off, that he's been cured. We urge him, for the sake of himself and the HIV community, to come in and get tested.

Though Mr Stimpson insists he will "do anything I can", associates said yesterday that he had gone away to rest and escape the media spotlight.

Campaigners are annoyed that having not yet undergone the vital tests, Mr Stimpson nevertheless signed contracts with the News of The World and the Mail on Sunday, both of which published his claims yesterday.

They also sounded a note of caution, noting that disclosures in his case arose not from medical research or peer review but from legal correspondence relating to an action Mr Stimpson was pursuing against the health trust. He had feared the positive results might have been wrong and had sought compensation. The trust's contention that both sets of blood tests were accurate emerged as it tried to defend itself from litigation.

Mr Stimpson, who lives in London with his partner, who is HIV positive, said: "There are 34.9 million people with HIV globally and I am just one person who managed to control it, to survive from it and to get rid of it from my body. For me that is unbelievable - it is a miracle. I think I'm one of the luckiest people alive.

"I was just taking daily supplements to keep myself as healthy as possible so as not to get full-blown Aids."

But Annabel Kanabus, director of the Aids charity, Avert, said he must match words with deeds. "He must come forward. Organisations such as ours will be inundated this week. There is enough confusion surrounding the issue of HIV. We don't need any more."

She said the sequence of events is troubling. "He was told in October that he would not be paid by the trust so he goes to the newspapers. I think he should have gone straight to his doctors."

Peter Tatchell, of the campaign group Outrage, said Mr Stimpson must "cooperate with the medical authorities for the greater benefit of everyone who has HIV".

Deborah Jack, chief executive of the National Aids Trust, added: "Without further tests it is impossible to draw any conclusions for people living with HIV. The virus is extremely complex and there are many unknowns about how it operates and how people's bodies react to it."

Mr Stimpson, who works in a sandwich bar, moved to London four years ago from Largs in Ayrshire. He took as confirmation of his cure a letter from the NHS Litigation Authority. Edwina Azimi, the authority's case manager, is reported to have denied any false diagnosis, hailing the results as "exceptional and medically remarkable". She said: "You have recovered from a positive antibody result to a negative result." She said there is "particular interest in these rare circumstances".

Whether doctors formally referred the matter to the Health Protection Agency, which monitors the spread of infection throughout the UK, is unclear. Such a referral would be expected to take place in a case of such apparent significance.

Experts stress the potential benefits a genuine case could have for the development of treatments and vaccines. But they also warned that the complexities of HIV make any one of a number of scenarios possible in this case. Tests usually indicate antibodies rather than the virus. They are usually accurate but one of the number of tests he has undergone may have been wrong. In any event a test for the virus itself is more conclusive.

Dr Patrick Dixon, founder of the international Aids agency ASET said a few people have immune systems capable of preventing HIV from becoming established. "It would not be surprising if we find a tiny number of people who have the capability to destroy the infection. It is possible this individual has something special about his genetic code." But he added: "The answer may turn out to be very complex. We must not jump to conclusions."

A culture of violence in Britain is to blame for an epidemic of school bullying that is devastating the lives of millions of children, according to a devastating attack by one of the country's leading experts on young people.

In his first major interview as the new Children's Commissioner for England, Al Aynsley-Green said nearly every child was affected by the problem: 'I have no doubt that children are being brought up in a society where violence is the norm in many ways. I include in this the violence on television, in the workplace and in the home.

'I have had hundreds of in-depth conversations with children since accepting this post and I can tell you that the one thing every child I have met has been affected by, with virtually no exceptions, is bullying,' said the former head of the Department of Health children's task force and ex-professor of child health at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and University College, London.

Appointed last July, he is the most influential, independent voice for England's 11.8 million children and young people. Each year he will report to Parliament, highlighting issues he believes require greater focus. The government has assured him that his findings will play a large part in influencing national policies on children's rights.

The commissioner's comments come after a week in which 15-year-old Natashia Jackman was stabbed five times by a gang in her school canteen at Camberley in Surrey. In a separate incident, 19-year-old Tommy Kimpton was jailed for two years at Truro in Cornwall for killing a schoolmate who had bullied him for many years.

Bullying in schools is getting worse, says the charity Childline, which claims it has received thousands more calls about the issue in the year to October than in the whole of 2004.

But, as Aynsley-Green points out, behaviour that is not curbed in childhood is likely to be replicated in later life, a claim supported by a TUC report last week showing that two million people were bullied at work in the past six months, mostly by managers and supervisors.

'My first plea in my new post is for adults to look in the mirror before they start castigating children,' said Aynsley-Green. 'Nobody will challenge an adult for bullying colleagues if they are successful in achieving their work targets but the long-term pain for victims is incalculable.

'I want to see the treatment of bullying mainstreamed in schools so that by the time the children become adults, they know how to cope with it and defeat it.'

He has told The Observer he will use the launch of England's Anti-Bullying Week next week to ask the government to compel all schools to present every pupil in England with a termly questionnaire on bullying.

'I want to pay tribute to much of the extremely good work going on in schools [concerning bullying] but from what children are telling me, there is still a lot of denial about the existence, severity and effect of bullying,' Aynsley-Green said. 'It has to be everyone's business.'

In comments that will further stoke the debate on violence, Rod Morgan, head of the Youth Justice Board, has said adults had to earn the respect of teenagers as well as the other way round.

Morgan called for a greater emphasis on helping younger children at risk before they begin offending - and criticised the setting of targets to increase the number of anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos) issued by courts.

His comments are pointedly at odds with the more draconian ideas being canvassed for the government's high-profile 'respect campaign' to crack down on anti-social behaviour. This has included suggestions of Asbos for the under-10s and 'sin bins' where problem families would be monitored round the clock.

'You don't coerce people into respecting you. Respect is a product of legitimate authority and it has to be earned,' he said

Morgan will use this week's annual conference of the Youth Justice Board to emphasise promising results gained from its early intervention programmes, which target children as young as eight who are identified as at risk of future offending because of factors such as playing truanting or a disrupted family background.

The policing minister, Hazel Blears, who will this week outline plans for community policing designed to bring the police closer to the public they serve, announced extra funding last week for the projects, which have reduced arrest rates for teenagers who took part. Research suggests those who have not committed a crime by the age of 14 are unlikely ever to do so.

Ministers have been pushing for increased use of Asbos. However Morgan said they did not necessarily solve the problem. 'We have one of the longest hours cultures in the world,' he said. 'We have an adult population besotted with watching television, who possibly aren't listening to or spending enough time with their children.'

Morgan added that youth offending has fallen since 2000 but the public's perceptions of it were affected by their anxiety about low-level incivility and street behaviour.

The story of what really happened inside the Iraq Museum when thousands of valuable antiquities were stolen in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 US invasion has been revealed in a new book.

Written by the chief investigator, it says there were three separate thefts, at least one of which was an inside job, another the work of professionals, and a third where fleeing Iraq military had left open a door which let in the looters. At least 13,864 objects were stolen, making it the biggest museum theft in history.

But the book reveals that, with an estimated 500,000 objects in the museum and thieves having the run of the place for 36 hours, the wonder is the loss was not far closer to the original, inaccurate, reports of 170,000 items. And the efforts of Iraqi, US and Italian officials, plus police and customs worldwide, have so far led to the recovery of 5,400 items, nearly 700 from inside the US and Britain.

All this - as well as the remarkable tale of the reclaiming of the fabulous Treasure of Nimrud - is told in Thieves of Baghdad, available only in the US, and written by Matthew Bogdanos who has been described, with only a minimum of hyperbole, as a real-life Indiana Jones.

He was born in New York, as a boy worked in his family's Greek restaurant, became a marine, a reservist, a lawyer in the city's district attorney's office, lost his home in the 9/11 attacks, and had to use all his marine training to fight through crowds and emergency service workers to rescue his family from an flat whose windows were blown in and contents covered in two inches of ash. Weeks later, he was in uniform as a marine Lt-Colonel, on operations in Afghanistan, and thence, by 2003, to southern Iraq.

It was here, on 18 April in Basra, he heard the Iraq Museum has been plundered. Bogdanos - a keen amateur classicist - requested permission to investigate, put a team together, and hurried north to Baghdad. He arrived at the museum compound on 20 April. It was not a pretty sight. It had been used as a fighting position, Iraq army uniforms were scattered all around, as were expended RPGs. In a courtyard smoldered the remains of hundreds of Ba'ath party cards and files. And, above the centre door to the main building, was a large handwritten sign 'Death to all Americans and Zionist pigs'.

Saddam's forces had abandoned the museum sometime on 10 April. Two days later senior curators returned, chasing off the last of the looters that had numbered 300-400 at their height. It was in this window of 36 hours that the thefts occurred.

The first area the US team entered was the administrative offices where the destruction was "wanton and absolute". Everyone of the 120 offices had been ransacked, every piece of furniture broken. But, in the public galleries, the damage was far lighter. Of 451 display cases, only 28 were damaged, but nearly all were empty. To his relief, Bogdanos learnt their contents had been removed by staff ahead of the invasion to a "secret place" within the museum known only to the five most senior officials. Where that was, no one was then saying. But 40 antiquities - including some of the best, like the Sacred Vase of Warka, the Mask of Warka, Bassetki Statue and the eighth century BC ivory 'Lioness Attacking a Nubian' - were stolen. The thieves, says Bogdanos, were "organised and selective".

The above-ground storage rooms told a different story. Here was where looters had struck, getting in via a door left open by Iraqi soldiers who, even as they fled, discarded their uniforms in a trail of clothing. The looters has swept entire shelves of items into bags, and the result was 3,138 missing items, such as jars, vessels and shards.

On 2 May [check], Bogdanos and companion crept down a dark hidden stairwell towards the basement storage area. They saw its great metal door was wide open with no sign of a forced entry. Someone in the know had got there first. "The chaos," wrote Bogdanos, "was shocking: 103 fishing tackle-sized plastic boxes, originally containing thousands of cylinder seals, beads, amulets and jewellery were randomly thrown in all directions Amid the devastation, hundreds of surrounding larger, but empty, boxes had been untouched. It was immediately clear that these thieves knew what they were looking for and where to look." The investigators feared the worst. But they discovered that 30 cabinets containing part of the world's finest collection of cylinder seals and tens of thousands of gold and silver coins were untouched.

What Bogdanos later surmised was that the thieves had the relevant keys, but had dropped them and, in the unlit basement and lacking torches, had been unable to find them again. What, however, had been taken was 4,795 cylinder seals, 5,542 coins, glass bottles, beads, amulets, and jewellery. As Bogdanos wrote: "It is simply inconceivable that this area had been found, breached and entered by anyone who did not have an intimate insider's knowledge of the museum." Bogdanos fingerprinted all 23 staff who returned after the invasion and were known to have access to storage rooms. But many staff did not return, including Jassim Muhamed, the museum's former head of security. Yet the biggest obstacle to the investigators' work was the poor state of the under-funded museum's records. The storage rooms, for instance, contained thousands of unlogged excavated items. A full inventory did not exist, and, Bogdanos estimated, would take years to compile. Recovery of missing items had to take priority.

An amnesty started within two days. Word was put out to immams, newspapers and television, and on the street that anyone returning an item would be asked only one question: "Would you like a cup of tea?". An Arabic-speaking member of Bogdanos's team was posted on the gate to solicit returns, and the team walked the streets, drank endless cups of tea in cafes, and played backgammon with anyone who looked as if they might know something. In one, Bogdanos, still a keen amateur boxer at 45, staged an impromptu sparring match with a local champion to provide a diversion while a colleague quizzed an informant.

The response was almost immediate. Bags containing an item would be dropped off, items allegedly taken for 'safe-keeping' were brought in by hand, some antiquities were left at mosques, others simply handed to a patrolling US soldier. The Sacred Vase of Warka, after two weeks of negotiation, was returned in June in a car boot, along with 95 other artifacts. Bogdanos was even contacted when on leave and handed a 4,000 year old Akkadian piece in a brown envelope as he sat in a Manhattan coffee shop. All but 101 of the 3,138 items stolen from the storage rooms have been recovered, yet at least 8,500 pieces are still missing, the most significant being the Lioness ivory.

Just over 2,000 recoveries were the result of raids, the biggest being at a farmhouse on 23 September. Under a foot and a half of dirt in the backyard was the Mask of Warka. In November, two raids on the same day produced the Nimrud brazier, used to warm the throne room of King Shalmaneser III in the ninth century BC, plus 76 pieces stolen from the basement, including the Bassetki Statue, which had been covered in grease and hidden in a cesspit.

Bogdanos says one of their best sources of information was the now discredited Dr Ahmed Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress forces stopped a truck bound for Iran and found on it no fewer than 465 items. Meanwhile, with publicity and photographs of some missing items circulated to Interpol and customs, more of the stolen items started to be seized abroad - 1,395 of them by the end of 2003. Some 669 were seized in 2003 when four FedEx boxes, addressed to a New York art dealer, were impounded by US customs at Newark airport.

But what of the fabulous Treasure of Nimrud, 1,000 pieces of gold, crowns, necklaces, rosettes, bracelets and precious stones from the eighth century BC? One of the great archaeological discoveries of the last hundred years, it had been seen in public only once, briefly, in 1989. A year later, it was moved by the Hussein regime to the Central Bank. It had not been seen since, and, shortly before the battle for Baghdad, Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, had emptied that bank's vaults of much of their contents.

On 26 May, the investigators showed up at the bank's vaults, and found them flooded with 20ft of water. A National Geographic film crew agreed to pay for them to be pumped out, in return for an exclusive. On 4 and 5 June the team returned, and found in the vaults a collection of wooden boxes (plus the body of a would-be robber). One by one they were opened, revealing the burial goods from the royal tombs of Ur, until one box remained. At 1.43pm, its lid was prised open and there was every Hollywood film's idea of ancient treasure - gold crowns, bracelets, necklaces and anklets.

And Bogdanos? Early next year he will be back at the DA's office, conductinginvestigation into worldwide antiquities trade. All his royalties from his book are being donated to the Iraq Museum.

In the time of Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly at CBS TV, the other television networks also had penetrating documentary units; but now only public television's Frontline equals Murrow and Friendly at their factually unsparing best. A formidable case in point was the October 18 airing of "The Torture Question," produced, directed, and written by Michael Kirk. It should be shown to the members and staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, with Donald Rumsfeld as an invited guest—but it won't be. (He refused to be interviewed by Frontline.)

Like Rumsfeld, George W. Bush echoes the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, in assuring us that the riveting photographs in the cell blocks at Abu Ghraib did not reflect "a widespread problem"—just them bad apples. But "The Torture Question" declares—and proves—that:

"A close examination of the evidence behind 12 official investigations . . . FBI internal e-mails . . . and dozens of interviews by Frontline tells a fuller story of what happened at Abu Ghraib and of policies, practices, and patterns that bring the torture question to the highest levels of the American government."

Donald Rumsfeld and the White House, determined to get "actionable intelligence" from the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and our other detention legal holes, "wanted 'Geneva' [the Geneva Conventions] out of the way."

Early in the program, Frontline illuminates the repellent complicity of the "small circle of lawyers who surrounded the president" and "together would create a legal theory that would permit the United States to act unilaterally in defining the "rules of war"—and justifying the unprecedented powers to be given to George W. Bush—including the authorization of torture.

These lawyers have themselves not been brought to justice or to any formal inquiry into their culpability. As I've noted in previous columns, John Yoo, then in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, often on television and lecturing at other campuses.

Another participant in the famous "torture memos," Jay S. Bybee, then an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, has been elevated to a federal judgeship at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And Jack Goldsmith, formerly of the Office of Legal Counsel, has become a law professor at Harvard.

Above them in the circle around the president were lawyers highlighted by Frontlin e: Alberto Gonzales, then the president's chief legal counsel; David Addington, the vice president's top lawyer and now chief of staff; and Wil liam Haynes, Rumsfeld's civilian counsel at the Pentagon and later nominated by the president to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

"The Torture Question" points to one of many results of these lawyers' providing the president with the power to bypass both international and our own laws. The testimony is from an FBI agent at Guantánamo:

"I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more." This, of course, was on Donald Rumsfeld's watch.

The American Civil Liberties Union has released copies of e-mails to FBI director Robert Mueller from appalled FBI agents protesting the unlawful, inhumane interrogations they had witnessed. Director Mueller himself has never joined their protests nor acknowledged any acts of torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, or any of our other "detention" facilities.

In The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge University Press), edited by Karen J. Greenberg, director of NYU law school's Center of Law and Security, NYU law professor Burt Neuborne asks: "Is there something that we are not doing in American law schools that is allowing the best and the brightest of our profession to drift into a situation where they think that all they have to do is find an argument that will justify their client's goal?"

There are all kinds of symposia and conferences at American law schools, and I wonder if there have been any focused on this circle of highly skilled lawyers around the president who provided such encouragement to Donald Rumsfeld and his generals (and lesser officers in the field) to get "actionable intelligence" from prisoners by any means necessary.

Has the American Bar Association, which vigorously criticized some of Rumsfeld's and the president's twisting of the rule of law, looked into the legal ethics of this so far charmed circle of alumni attorneys of the Justice and Defense departments?

The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the nation's premier bar association—and Scott Horton, the chair of its Committee of International Law—certainly have. Maybe they can offer their services to the ABA.

Frontline has given the nation much to think about. For further instance, from a soldier on the ground: "Most of the abuses around Iraq are not photographed . . . so they'll never get any outrage out of it. And this makes it even harsher, because around Iraq, in the back of a Humvee or in a shipping container . . . there's no one looking over your shoulder, so you can do anything you want."

And, from former Army interrogator Anthony Lagouranis: "Now it's all over Iraq . . . the infantry units are torturing people in their homes. They were using things like burns. They would smash people's feet with the back of an ax head. They would break bones, ribs, you know . . . that was serious stuff."

As John McCain said, speaking of the terrorist enemy, "This isn't about who they are. This is about who we are." Hail to the chief!

Having failed to refocus his administration away from Plamegate to such loftier pursuits as putting Samuel Alito on the bench or announcing the nation's plans for fighting a bird flu pandemic, George W. Bush got out of town. First he went to South America, where thousands of protesters greeted him, and soon he'll be off to Asia.

The White House hoped to draw attention away from the indictment of Scooter Libby by setting up what Utah senator Orrin Hatch refers to as "Armageddon" over Alito. But so far the likelihood of such a knock-down-drag-out over this unassuming and uninspiring judge seems far from certain. And anyhow, it will be decided at still-distant January hearings. As for the flu threat, not only does it appear to be overhyped, but the attacks on the president's plans to fight it come from the left for being too little and too late, and from conservatives who fear that health emergencies can be the vehicles for extending the reach of the federal government into uncharted areas.

Bush himself looks like a lost soul, out of touch with reality, and appearing worse off to some than Reagan in his early stages of Alzheimer's. Offices within the White House reportedly are like bunkers, with staff hunkering in fear that the president may lash out at them. "This is not some manager at McDonald's chewing out the help," a source with close ties to the White House told the Daily News. "This is the president of the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight."

Although a prosecutorial target, Karl Rove remains in place as the president's brain. Without him, aides say, Bush would be lost. Chief of Staff Andrew Card has tried to jump in, answering questions when Bush drifts off. Every so often the president is said to come alive. Cruel observers wonder aloud whether Bush Jr. is back on the bottle.

Meter's running on the Libby case

As details of Scooter Libby's defense surface little by little, it appears that Vice President Dick Cheney's former right-hand man will be dragged along through a lengthy (and very expensive) legal process, one that from his point of view can best be concluded after the 2006 midterm election with a pardon. The alternative is being proven guilty by a jury and sent away for a couple of years.

The defense, led by two attorneys from prestigious law firms, will be pricey. Theodore V. Wells Jr., a partner in Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, has represented such well-heeled clients as Philip Morris and such politicians as former labor secretary Raymond Donovan and Clinton agriculture secretary Mike Espy. William Jeffress Jr., out of the storied Houston oil law firm of Baker Botts, comes highly recommended as the man who got public officials off on such charges as money laundering and vote buying. It doesn't hurt that Jeffress works for a law firm whose senior partner is James Baker, the Bush family confidant who handled the 2000 Florida vote count case that won Bush the presidency, and who had served the elder Bush as secretary of state. More than any other person, Baker is responsible for propelling the family into the limelight with his handling of the elder Bush's GOP primary campaign in 1980. Although Bush lost to Reagan in that contest, it won him the vice presidency.

Lawyers outside the Libby case say his lead attorneys easily could get upwards of $600 an hour, not including the cost of support personnel. The investigation in its first 15 months cost the government $723,000, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Some attorneys speculate that the strategy will be aimed at avoiding a trial, instead dragging things out through endless courtroom tussles with lawyers over reporters' testimony. In the end, Libby will receive a pardon to "clear his name," as he currently seeks to do.

Libby was formerly a lawyer in private practice who defended such clients as Marc Rich, the fugitive financier pardoned by Bill Clinton in 2001. But Libby is not generally thought of as a wealthy person. His defense funds will have to be raised, presumably from Bush campaign funders.

His situation is not enviable. Patrick Fitzgerald's indictment is rock solid.

Michael J. Madigan, a well-known criminal defense lawyer who is a former prosecutor, told The Washington Post last week that Libby's two white-collar-crime attorneys are great but will have "one hand tied behind their back." They are taking on a case, noted Madigan, "with Libby having given two different statements to the FBI and testifying twice to the grand jury, in which he contradicts three reporters and four or five of his friends in the administration. If I was entering the case, I would not be really happy to have that situation."

Footnote: A Greek newspaper reports that Philip Agee, a former CIA officer who sought to out undercover CIA employees in the 1970s and whose actions led to the passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, says he now opposes such activities and specifically opposes the outing of Valerie Plame. Agee has been quoted as explaining, "I had my reasons for revealing the identities of agents, and the White House had different ones. However, I am now categorically opposed to making their names public."

Carter points out fundamental differences

At long last, moderate political leaders of a religious stripe are beginning to fight back against the Christian right. John Danforth, the former Missouri senator who is an Episcopal priest, repeated earlier attacks on the fundamentalists at a talk in Little Rock. And Jimmy Carter went after the right-wing Christians on Larry King last Wednesday. "I'm a devout Christian," Carter said in the interview, where he was plugging his new book. "Ordinarily, most of us, whether we are Christians or Catholics or Protestants, whether we are Jews or whether we might be Muslims, we basically agree on justice, on service to others, on humility, on truthfulness, on peace . . . on forgiveness, and on compassion. So, there are a lot of things that bind us together."

And a fundamentalist, says Carter, "is a very strong male religious leader, always a man, who believes that he is completely wedded to God, has a special privilege and relationship to God above others. And therefore, since he speaks basically, in his opinion, for God, anyone who disagrees with him at all is inherently and by definition wrong and therefore inferior. And one of the first things that a male fundamentalist wants to do is to subjugate women to make them subservient and to subjugate others that don't believe as he does.

"The other thing they do . . . is that they don't believe that it's right to negotiate or to compromise with people who disagree with them because any deviation from their absolute beliefs is a derogation of their own faith."

But what happens when Carter runs into someone who doesn't believe what he believes, King asks.

Carter replies: "I don't condemn them and I communicate with them, and I openly try to let them know what I believe and listen to what they believe and live in peace with them. It's not a matter of domination or subjugation of others. It's a matter of humility and trying to serve others, yes."

MONTGOMERY, Minn. - For better or worse, Coleen Rowley the candidate for Congress sounds a lot like Coleen Rowley the
FBI whistleblower.

The former FBI agent who scathingly exposed the bureau's failure to uncover the Sept. 11 plot is running for a House seat in Minnesota in 2006 as a Democrat, and she is employing her fearlessly blunt style on the campaign trail.

"This was a lied-into war that is a quagmire now," the 50-year-old Rowley recently told a group of rural Democrats in a garage in this small town south of the Twin Cities. "It could be worse than Vietnam. The truth is we can't win, and there's still an ongoing deception."

Whether that kind of talk is smart politics is another matter.

The Democrats nationally are struggling with how to oppose the war without looking weak on national security, and some of them see Rowley's head-on attacks — as well as her trip to Texas in August to lend support to Cindy Sheehan's anti-war protest at President Bush's ranch — as especially risky in the Republican-leaning 2nd Congressional District.

"If you become known as a single-issue candidate against the war in a conservative district, I don't see how that gets you many votes," said Steven Schier, a political science professor at Northfield's Carleton College, in the 2nd District. "So far it seems like some of the moves she's made are counterproductive."

One Democratic state legislator in the district, Rep. Joe Atkins, said he gets calls every week urging him to run against Rowley for the party's nomination, but he said he has not given it serious thought.

"The key issues in our area are education, education and education," Atkins said. "I would hope and expect any congressional candidate would come to focus on those issues — focus on the things your constituents are concerned about."

It is a bind for Rowley as a candidate, since it was her candor that brought her to national attention in the first place.

As the legal counsel in the FBI's Minneapolis office in 2001, she helped agents investigating Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested in Minnesota before Sept. 11 after he raised suspicions at a flight school.

Minneapolis agents felt that FBI bureaucrats in Washington impeded the investigation, prompting Rowley a few months later to write a blistering memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller.

In a second letter to Mueller a few months later, Rowley criticized the intelligence cited by the Bush administration in its decision to invade Iraq. Many of her colleagues were displeased, and Rowley was forced out as legal counsel a few months before she officially retired.

Her opponent in the House race is GOP Rep. John Kline, a former Marine officer who served as a military aide to Presidents Carter and Reagan and, for a time, was responsible for carrying the nuclear "football," the satchel containing the missile launch codes. He has been an outspoken supporter of the Iraq war and the administration's foreign policy.

Kline's camp has had little to say about Rowley so far. "We are not in campaign mode yet," said spokeswoman Angelyn Shapiro.

In the most recent fund-raising period, Rowley raised just $80,000 to Kline's $230,000. On the stump, Rowley sometimes strays off topic and takes her listeners on long detours, and her campaign so far has something of a homemade feel, as she lugs hand-printed yard signs to campaign events.

"We're still early here, but I think among Democrats it's fair to say they're disappointed that the campaign hasn't created more momentum," said Blois Olson, a Democratic consultant and co-publisher of the newsletter Politics in Minnesota. "I think there's some naivete about the process."