|
"You get America out of Iraq and
Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism."
- Cindy Sheehan |
P I C T U R E
O F T H E D A Y |
|
©SOTT
The Signs Kitchen was in shock when members discovered the number 1690 clearly revealed on a tupperware lid. Is it a date? A lost PIN? The number of hours, days, or minutes left until Doomsday? Research continues. Stay tuned. |
By CURT ANDERSON
Associated Press
November 29, 2005
MIAMI - Miami police announced Monday they will stage random shows of force at hotels, banks and other public places to keep terrorists guessing and remind people to be vigilant.
Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez said officers might, for example, surround a bank building, check the IDs of everyone going in and out and hand out leaflets about terror threats.
"This is an in-your-face type of strategy. It's letting the terrorists know we are out there," Fernandez said.
The operations will keep terrorists off guard, Fernandez said. He said al-Qaida and other terrorist groups plot attacks by putting places under surveillance and watching for flaws and patterns in security.
Police Chief John Timoney said there was no specific, credible threat of an imminent terror attack in Miami. But he said the city has repeatedly been mentioned in intelligence reports as a potential target.
Timoney also noted that 14 of the 19 hijackers who took part in the Sept. 11 attacks lived in South Florida at various times and that other alleged terror cells have operated in the area.
Both uniformed and plainclothes police will ride buses and trains, while others will conduct longer-term surveillance operations.
"People are definitely going to notice it," Fernandez said. "We want that shock. We want that awe. But at the same time, we don't want people to feel their rights are being threatened. We need them to be our eyes and ears."
Mary Ann Viverette, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said the Miami program is similar to those used for years during the holiday season to deter criminals at busy places such as shopping malls.
"You want to make your presence known and that's a great way to do it," said Viverette, police chief in Gaithersburg, Md. "We want people to feel they can go about their normal course of business, but we want them to be aware."
|
Nov. 27, 2005
PAUL BIGIONI
Toronto Star
When people think of fascism, they imagine Rows of goose-stepping storm troopers and puffy-chested dictators. What they don't see is the economic and political process that leads to the nightmare.
Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the past 25 years.
Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in Germany and Italy by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity.
At present, we live in a constitutional democracy. The tools necessary to protect us from fascism remain in the hands of the citizen. All the same, North America is on a fascist trajectory. We must recognize this threat for what it is, and we must change course.
Before the rise of fascism, Germany and Italy were, on paper, liberal democracies. Fascism did not swoop down on these nations as if from another planet. To the contrary, fascist dictatorship was the result of political and economic changes these nations underwent while they were still democratic. In both these countries, economic power became so utterly concentrated that the bulk of all economic activity fell under the control of a handful of men. Economic power, when sufficiently vast, becomes by its very nature political power. The political power of big business supported fascism in Italy and Germany.
Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: The vast bulk of legislative activity favours the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the past 25 years.
Digging deeper into 20th century history, one finds the exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism. Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity.
These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. "Yes," he replied, "but we will call it anti-fascism."
By exploring the disturbing parallels between our own time and the era of overt fascism, we can avoid the same hideous mistakes. At present, we live in a constitutional democracy. The tools necessary to protect us from fascism remain in the hands of the citizen. All the same, North America is on a fascist trajectory. We must recognize this threat for what it is, and we must change course.
Consider the words of Thurman Arnold, head of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in 1939:
"Germany, of course, has developed within 15 years from an industrial autocracy into a dictatorship. Most people are under the impression that the power of Hitler was the result of his demagogic blandishments and appeals to the mob... Actually, Hitler holds his power through the final and inevitable development of the uncontrolled tendency to combine in restraint of trade."
Arnold made his point even more clearly in a 1939 address to the American Bar Association:
"Germany presents the logical end of the process of cartelization. From 1923 to 1935, cartelization grew in Germany until finally that nation was so organized that everyone had to belong either to a squad, a regiment or a brigade in order to survive. The names given to these squads, regiments or brigades were cartels, trade associations, unions and trusts. Such a distribution system could not adjust its prices. It needed a general with quasi-military authority who could order the workers to work and the mills to produce. Hitler named himself that general. Had it not been Hitler it would have been someone else."
I suspect that to most readers, Arnold's words are bewildering. People today are quite certain that they know what fascism is. When I ask people to define it, they typically tell me what it was, the assumption being that it no longer exists. Most people associate fascism with concentration camps and rows of storm troopers, yet they know nothing of the political and economic processes that led to these horrible end results.
Before the rise of fascism, Germany and Italy were, on paper, liberal democracies. Fascism did not swoop down on these nations as if from another planet. To the contrary, fascist dictatorship was the result of political and economic changes these nations underwent while they were still democratic. In both these countries, economic power became so utterly concentrated that the bulk of all economic activity fell under the control of a handful of men. Economic power, when sufficiently vast, becomes by its very nature political power. The political power of big business supported fascism in Italy and Germany.
Business tightened its grip on the state in both Italy and Germany by means of intricate webs of cartels and business associations. These associations exercised a high degree of control over the businesses of their members. They frequently controlled pricing, supply and the licensing of patented technology. These associations were private but were entirely legal. Neither Germany nor Italy had effective antitrust laws, and the proliferation of business associations was generally encouraged by government.
This was an era eerily like our own, insofar as economists and businessmen constantly clamoured for self-regulation in business. By the mid 1920s, however, self-regulation had become self-imposed regimentation. By means of monopoly and cartel, the businessmen had wrought for themselves a "command and control" economy that replaced the free market. The business associations of Italy and Germany at this time are perhaps history's most perfect illustration of Adam Smith's famous dictum: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
How could the German government not be influenced by Fritz Thyssen, the man who controlled most of Germany's coal production? How could it ignore the demands of the great I.G. Farben industrial trust, controlling as it did most of that nation's chemical production? Indeed, the German nation was bent to the will of these powerful industrial interests. Hitler attended to the reduction of taxes applicable to large businesses while simultaneously increasing the same taxes as they related to small business. Previous decrees establishing price ceilings were repealed such that the cost of living for the average family was increased. Hitler's economic policies hastened the destruction of Germany's middle class by decimating small business.
Ironically, Hitler pandered to the middle class, and they provided some of his most enthusiastically violent supporters. The fact that he did this while simultaneously destroying them was a terrible achievement of Nazi propaganda.
Hitler also destroyed organized labour by making strikes illegal. Notwithstanding the socialist terms in which he appealed to the masses, Hitler's labour policy was the dream come true of the industrial cartels that supported him. Nazi law gave total control over wages and working conditions to the employer.
Compulsory (slave) labour was the crowning achievement of Nazi labour relations. Along with millions of people, organized labour died in the concentration camps. The camps were not only the most depraved of all human achievements, they were a part and parcel of Nazi economic policy. Hitler's Untermenschen, largely Jews, Poles and Russians, supplied slave labour to German industry. Surely this was a capitalist bonanza. In another bitter irony, the gates over many of the camps bore a sign that read Arbeit Macht Frei — "Work shall set you free." I do not know if this was black humour or propaganda, but it is emblematic of the deception that lies at the heart of fascism.
The same economic reality existed in Italy between the two world wars. In that country, nearly all industrial activity was owned or controlled by a few corporate giants, Fiat and the Ansaldo shipping concern being the chief examples of this.
Land ownership in Italy was also highly concentrated and jealously guarded. Vast tracts of farmland were owned by a few latifundisti. The actual farming was carried out by a landless peasantry who were locked into a role essentially the same as that of the sharecropper of the U.S. Deep South.
As in Germany, the few owners of the nation's capital assets had immense influence over government. As a young man, Mussolini had been a strident socialist, and he, like Hitler, used socialist language to lure the people to fascism. Mussolini spoke of a "corporate" society wherein the energy of the people would not be wasted on class struggle. The entire economy was to be divided into industry specific corporazioni, bodies composed of both labour and management representatives. The corporazioni would resolve all labour/management disputes; if they failed to do so, the fascist state would intervene.
Unfortunately, as in Germany, there laid at the heart of this plan a swindle. The corporazioni, to the extent that they were actually put in place, were controlled by the employers. Together with Mussolini's ban on strikes, these measures reduced the Italian labourer to the status of peasant.
Mussolini, the one-time socialist, went on to abolish the inheritance tax, a measure that favoured the wealthy. He decreed a series of massive subsidies to Italy's largest industrial businesses and repeatedly ordered wage reductions. Italy's poor were forced to subsidize the wealthy. In real terms, wages and living standards for the average Italian dropped precipitously under fascism.
Antitrust laws do not just protect the marketplace, they protect democracy
Even this brief historical sketch shows how fascism did the bidding of big business. The fact that Hitler called his party the "National Socialist Party" did not change the reactionary nature of his policies. The connection between the fascist dictatorships and monopoly capital was obvious to the U.S. Department of Justice in 1939. As of 2005, however, it is all but forgotten.
It is always dangerous to forget the lessons of history. It is particularly perilous to forget about the economic origins of fascism in our modern era of deregulation. Most Western liberal democracies are currently in the thrall of what some call market fundamentalism. Few nowadays question the flawed assumption that state intervention in the marketplace is inherently bad.
As in Italy and Germany in the '20s and '30s, business associations clamour for more deregulation and deeper tax cuts. The gradual erosion of antitrust legislation, especially in the United States, has encouraged consolidation in many sectors of the economy by way of mergers and acquisitions. The North American economy has become more monopolistic than at any time in the post-WWII period.
U.S. census data from 1997 shows that the largest four companies in the food, motor vehicle and aerospace industries control 53.4, 87.3 and 55.6 per cent of their respective markets. Over 20 per cent of commercial banking in the U.S. is controlled by the four largest financial institutions, with the largest 50 controlling over 60 per cent. Even these numbers underestimate the scope of concentration, since they do not account for the myriad interconnections between firms by means of debt instruments and multiple directorships, which further reduce the extent of competition.
Actual levels of U.S. commercial concentration have been difficult to measure since the 1970s, when strong corporate opposition put an end to the Federal Trade Commission's efforts to collect the necessary information.
Fewer, larger competitors dominate all economic activity, and their political will is expressed with the millions of dollars they spend lobbying politicians and funding policy formulation in the many right-wing institutes that now limit public discourse to the question of how best to serve the interests of business.
The consolidation of the economy and the resulting perversion of public policy are themselves fascistic. I am certain, however, that former president Bill Clinton was not worried about fascism when he repealed federal antitrust laws that had been enacted in the 1930s.
The Canadian Council of Chief Executives is similarly unworried about fascism as it lobbies the Canadian government to water down proposed amendments to our federal Competition Act. (The Competition Act, last amended in 1986, regulates monopolies, among other things, and itself represents a watering down of Canada's previous antitrust laws. It was essentially rewritten by industry and handed to the Mulroney government to be enacted.)
At present, monopolies are regulated on purely economic grounds to ensure the efficient allocation of goods.
If we are to protect ourselves from the growing political influence of big business, then our antitrust laws must be reconceived in a way that recognizes the political danger of monopolistic conditions.
Antitrust laws do not just protect the marketplace, they protect democracy.
It might be argued that North America's democratic political systems are so entrenched that we needn't fear fascism's return. The democracies of Italy and Germany in the 1920s were in many respects fledgling and weak. Our systems will surely react at the first whiff of dictatorship.
Or will they? This argument denies the reality that the fascist dictatorships were preceded by years of reactionary politics, the kind of politics that are playing out today. Further, it is based on the conceit that whatever our own governments do is democracy. Canada still clings to a quaint, 19th-century "first past the post" electoral system in which a minority of the popular vote can and has resulted in majority control of Parliament.
In the U.S., millions still question the legality of the sitting president's first election victory, and the power to declare war has effectively become his personal prerogative. Assuming that we have enough democracy to protect us is exactly the kind of complacency that allows our systems to be quietly and slowly perverted. On paper, Italy and Germany had constitutional, democratic systems. What they lacked was the eternal vigilance necessary to sustain them. That vigilance is also lacking today.
Our collective forgetfulness about the economic nature of fascism is also dangerous at a philosophical level. As contradictory as it may seem, fascist dictatorship was made possible because of the flawed notion of freedom that held sway during the era of laissez-faire capitalism in the early 20th century.
It was the liberals of that era who clamoured for unfettered personal and economic freedom, no matter what the cost to society. Such untrammelled freedom is not suitable to civilized humans. It is the freedom of the jungle. In other words, the strong have more of it than the weak. It is a notion of freedom that is inherently violent, because it is enjoyed at the expense of others. Such a notion of freedom legitimizes each and every increase in the wealth and power of those who are already powerful, regardless of the misery that will be suffered by others as a result. The use of the state to limit such "freedom" was denounced by the laissez-faire liberals of the early 20th century. The use of the state to protect such "freedom" was fascism. Just as monopoly is the ruin of the free market, fascism is the ultimate degradation of liberal capitalism.
In the post-war period, this flawed notion of freedom has been perpetuated by the neo-liberal school of thought. The neo-liberals denounce any regulation of the marketplace. In so doing, they mimic the posture of big business in the pre-fascist period. Under the sway of neo-liberalism, Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney and George W. Bush have decimated labour and exalted capital. (At present, only 7.8 per cent of workers in the U.S. private sector are unionized — about the same percentage as in the early 1900s.)
Neo-liberals call relentlessly for tax cuts, which, in a previously progressive system, disproportionately favour the wealthy. Regarding the distribution of wealth, the neo-liberals have nothing to say. In the end, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. As in Weimar Germany, the function of the state is being reduced to that of a steward for the interests of the moneyed elite. All that would be required now for a more rapid descent into fascism are a few reasons for the average person to forget he is being ripped off. Hatred of Arabs, fundamentalist Christianity or an illusory sense of perpetual war may well be taking the place of Hitler's hatred for communists and Jews.
Neo-liberal intellectuals often recognize the need for violence to protect what they regard as freedom. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times has written enthusiastically that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist," and that "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15." As in pre-fascist Germany and Italy, the laissez-faire businessmen call for the state to do their bidding even as they insist that the state should stay out of the marketplace. Put plainly, neo-liberals advocate the use of the state's military force for the sake of private gain. Their view of the state's role in society is identical to that of the businessmen and intellectuals who supported Hitler and Mussolini. There is no fear of the big state here. There is only the desire to wield its power. Neo-liberalism is thus fertile soil for fascism to grow again into an outright threat to our democracy.
Having said that fascism is the result of a flawed notion of freedom, we need to re-examine what we mean when we throw around the word. We must conceive of freedom in a more enlightened way.
Indeed, it was the thinkers of the Enlightenment who imagined a balanced and civilized freedom that did not impinge upon the freedom of one's neighbour. Put in the simplest terms, my right to life means that you must give up your freedom to kill me. This may seem terribly obvious to decent people. Unfortunately, in our neo-liberal era, this civilized sense of freedom has, like the dangers of fascism, been all but forgotten.
Paul Bigioni is a lawyer practising in Markham. This article is drawn from his work on a book about the persistence of fascism.
|
by Paul Craig Roberts
lewrockwell.com
A month ago senior US commanders in Iraq said that the US-trained new Iraqi army only had 700 troops who could operate independently of US support.
Now suddenly the new Iraq has the troops to do the job and America’s soldiers can come home. What this means is that Republican pollsters have made it clear that the Republicans cannot win next year’s congressional elections if the US is still mired in Iraq.
The war, in other words, no longer serves the Republicans’ political interest and must be got rid of. So much for "staying the course."
Bush’s war against Iraq might be over, but the police state Bush built at home is still in place. The Pentagon is expanding its domestic surveillance activity and that all sorts of proposals are afoot to allow military agencies to spy on law-abiding Americans and to build secret dossiers on citizens. The demand for police state powers is said to be necessary in order to fight the "war on terror."
Terrorist attacks in America are even more rare than an honest politician.
According to news reports, at a US Naval Academy speech on Wednesday, President Bush will announce plans for withdrawing US troops from Iraq. It will be diverting to watch the propagandists at Fox "news" flip-flop with the White House line and explain that now is the time to cut and run after all.
A month ago the administration’s line was that cutting and running was the dastardly act of cowards and traitors who would abandon our troops and all they have fought for. A month ago senior US commanders in Iraq said that the US-trained new Iraqi army only had 700 troops who could operate independently of US support.
Now suddenly the new Iraq has the troops to do the job and America’s soldiers can come home. What this means is that Republican pollsters have made it clear that the Republicans cannot win next year’s congressional elections if the US is still mired in Iraq. The war is unpopular. A large majority of Americans do not believe the war was justified, and they no longer support it. Republicans have no prospect of rehabilitating Bush if he keeps the country bogged down in a pointless war.
The war, in other words, no longer serves the Republicans’ political interest and must be got rid of. So much for "staying the course."
What will happen to Iraq and the Middle East no one knows. Our concerns need to be directed at what happens here in the US. Bush’s war against Iraq might be over, but the police state Bush built at home is still in place.
On November 27 Walter Pincus reported in the Washington Post that the Pentagon is expanding its domestic surveillance activity and that all sorts of proposals are afoot to allow military agencies to spy on law-abiding Americans and to build secret dossiers on citizens. The demand for police state powers is said to be necessary in order to fight the "war on terror."
Considering the drastic gestapo-type activities for which Washington is clamoring, a person would think that America is being overwhelmed by terrorist attacks. Yet, despite an aggressive and brutal war that Bush has been waging in Iraq for going on three years, terrorist attacks in America are even more rare than an honest politician. There has not been a terror attack since September 11, 2001, more than four years ago!
The Bush administration’s hype about terrorism serves no purpose other than to build a police state that is far more dangerous to Americans than terrorists.
Ever since the "war on terror" was initiated by the Bush administration, the US has been holding large numbers of "detainees." By chance or the laws of probability, a few of these people might fit some definition of "terrorist." The vast majority, however, are innocents picked up in the equivalent of Stalin-era KGB street sweeps. Many are hapless people sold by warlords to the US in order to receive cash awards for turning in "terrorists."
Despite the large number of alleged "terrorists" or "enemy combatants" that are being held, the Bush administration simply hasn’t a shred of evidence with which to bring "detainees" to trial. If truth be known, the "detainees" are merely props for Bush’s hype about the "terrorist threat." The "detainees" were arrested in order to make Americans feel safe and at ease with the police state.
Perhaps the most famous of the alleged terrorists, a man held for more than three years, is the "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla. Padilla was the "grave threat" who was going to set off a radioactive dirty bomb in a US city.
The charge never made any sense. If al Qaeda had a dirty bomb, they certainly would not entrust it to the loud-mouthed Padilla, who was being followed around by FBI agents. Such a weapon would be kept secret and entrusted only to the most competent and proven hands. Who could possibly believe that top al Qaeda operatives would meet and plot with Jose Padilla?
The Bush administration has itself given up its Padilla fantasy. After three years of hype about this most dangerous of terrorists who allegedly intended to kill large numbers of Americans, the government’s indictment doesn’t mention dirty bombs or the murder of Americans. Instead, Padilla is indicted for conspiring "to commit at any place outside the United States acts that would constitute murder" for the purpose of advancing "violent jihad." Padilla is also charged with "conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists."
In other words, the government has no case against Padilla and is putting him on trial in the US for conspiring to kill unidentified foreigners in an effort to overthrow an unidentified foreign country. His case is lumped in with a case against four other persons, one or more of whom may have committed an actual crime that can be used to tar them all.
Both the Attorney General and President of the United States branded Padilla a "grave threat" to the lives of Americans. After three years of this propaganda, all the US government can come up with is the trumped up charge of conspiracy to kill foreigners and to provide support for terrorists.
A police state has to catch enemies in order to keep the people frightened and appreciative of the watchful eye of the police state. Now that the Padilla case has evaporated, the Bush administration has come up with a replacement. An American student of Arab descent, who was studying at a Saudi Arabian university, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiracy to assassinate President Bush. The indictment rests on the confession wrung out of the young man by torture in a Saudi prison.
Does anyone really believe that al Qaeda leaders would conspire with an American college student to assassinate President Bush? Indeed, President Bush has been Osama bin Laden’s greatest benefactor. Why would al Qaeda want to kill the man who is doing them so much good? Before Bush launched his war on terror and invaded Iraq, the vast majority of Muslims thought bin Laden was a nut case and supported the US. Today Muslims think Bush is a nut case and support bin Laden.
What kind of a country have we become when we put a citizen on trial on the basis of a confession obtained under torture by a foreign government? Is the case against this student anything other than an attempt to enlist the sympathy factor for Bush in order to repair his standing in the polls?
Americans need to understand that a police state has to produce results in order to justify its budget and its powers. It doesn’t really care who it catches. Stalin’s police state caught the wife of Stalin’s foreign minister in one of its street sweeps.
The Bush administration justifies torture and threatens to veto congressional attempts to restrain its use. The Bush administration justifies indefinite detention of American citizens without charges. It asserts the power of indefinite detention based on its subjective judgment about who is a threat. An American government that preaches "freedom and democracy" to the world claims the powers of tyrants as its own.
Americans need to wake up. The only danger to Americans in Iraq is the one Bush created by invading the country. The grave threat that Americans face is the Bush administration’s police state mentality.
November 28, 2005
Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
|
12 November 2005
Robert Fisk
Robert Fisk Unmasks American Verbal Camoflouge and Lies: American journalists now refer to "abuse laws" rather than torture laws. Yes, abuse sounds so much better, doesn't it? No screaming, no cries of agony when you're abused. No shrieks of pain. No discussion of the state of mind of the animals perpetrating this abuse on our behalf. And its as well to remember that the government of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara has decided it's quite all right to use information gleaned from this sadism. Even Jack Straw agrees with this.
So it was a relief to drive down to the US National Archives in Maryland to research America's attempts to produce an Arab democracy after the First World War, one giant modern Arab state from the Turkish border to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. US soldiers and diplomats tried to bring this about in one brief, shining moment of American history in the Middle East. Alas, President Woodrow Wilson died; America became isolationist, and the British and French victors chopped up the Middle East for their own ends and produced the tragedy with which we are confronted today. Prevail, indeed.
"Prevail" is the "in" word in America just now. We are not going to "win" in Iraq - because we did that in 2003, didn't we, when we stormed up to Baghdad and toppled Saddam? Then George Bush declared "Mission Accomplished". So now we must "prevail". That's what F J "Bing" West, ex-soldier and former assistant secretary for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration said this week. Plugging his new book - No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah - he gave a frightening outline of what lies in store for the Sunni Muslims of Iraq.
I was sitting a few feet from Bing - plugging my own book - as he explained to the great and the good of New York how General Casey was imposing curfews on the Sunni cities of Iraq,one after the other, how if the Sunnis did not accept democracy they would be "occupied" (he used that word) by Iraqi troops until they did accept democracy. He talked about the "valour" of American troops - there was no word of Iraq's monstrous suffering - and insisted that America must "prevail" because a "Jihadist" victory was unthinkable. I applied the Duke of Wellington's Waterloo remark about his soldiers to Bing. I don't know if he frightened the enemy, I told the audience, but by God Bing frightened me.
Our appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations - housed in a 58th Street townhouse of deep sofas and fearfully strong air conditioning (it was early November for God's sake) - was part of a series entitled "Iraq: The Way Forward". Forward, I asked myself? Iraq is a catastrophe. Bing might believe he was going to "prevail" over his "Jihadists" but all I could say was that the American project in Iraq was over, that it was a colossal tragedy for the Iraqis dying in Baghdad alone at the rate of 1,000 a month, that the Americans must leave if peace was to be restored and that the sooner they left the better.
Many in the audience were clearly of the same mind. One elderly gentleman quietly demolished Bing's presentation by describing the massive damage to Fallujah when it was "liberated" by the Americans for the third time last November. I gently outlined the folk that Bing's soldiers and diplomats would have to talk to if they were to disentangle themselves from this mess - I included Iraqi ex-officers who were leaders of the non-suicidal part of the insurgency and to whom would fall the task of dealing with the "Jihadists" once Bing's lads left Iraq. To get out, I said, the Americans would need the help of Iran and Syria, countries which the Bush administration is currently (and not without reason) vilifying. Silence greeted this observation.
It was a strange week to be in America. In Washington, Ahmed Chalabi, one of Iraq's three deputy prime ministers, turned up to show how clean his hands were. I had to remind myself constantly that Chalabi was convicted in absentia in Jordan of massive bank fraud. It was Chalabi who supplied New York Times reporter Judith Miller with all the false information about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. It was Chalabi's fellow defectors who persuaded the Bush administration that these weapons existed. It was Chalabi who was accused only last year of giving American intelligence secrets to Iran. It is Chalabi who is still being investigated by the FBI.
But Chalabi spoke to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute in Washington, refused to make the slightest apology to the United States, and then went on - wait for it - to meetings with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen Hadley. Vice-President Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also agreed to see him.
By contrast, Chalabi's gullible conservative dupe was subjected to a truly vicious interview in The Washington Post after she resigned from her paper over the Libby "Plame-Gate" leak. A "parade of Judys" appeared at her interview, Post reporter Lynne Duke wrote. "Outraged Judy. Saddened Judy. Charming Judy. Conspiratorial Judy. Judy, the star New York Times reporter turned beleaguered victim of the gossip-mongers ..." proclaiming her intention to make no apologies for writing about threats to the United States, Miller did so "emphatically almost frantically, her crusading eyes brimming with tears". Ouch.
I can only reflect on how strange the response of the American media has become to the folly and collapse and anarchy of Iraq. It's Judy's old mate Chalabi who should be getting this treatment but no, he's back to his old tricks of spinning and manipulating the Bush administration while the American press tears one of its reporters apart for compensation.
It's like living in a prism in New York and Washington these days. "Torture" is out. No one tortures in Iraq or Afghanistan or Guantanamo. What Americans do to their prisoners is "abuse" and there was a wonderful moment this week when Amy Goodman, who is every leftist's dream, showed a clip from Pontecorvo's wonderful 1965 movie The Battle of Algiers on her Democracy Now programme. "Colonel Mathieu" - the film is semi-fictional - was shown explaining why torture was necessary to safeguard French lives. Then up popped Mr Bush's real spokesman, Scott McClellan, to say that while he would not discuss interrogation methods, the primary aim of the administration was to safeguard American lives.
American journalists now refer to "abuse laws" rather than torture laws. Yes, abuse sounds so much better, doesn't it? No screaming, no cries of agony when you're abused. No shrieks of pain. No discussion of the state of mind of the animals perpetrating this abuse on our behalf. And its as well to remember that the government of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara has decided it's quite all right to use information gleaned from this sadism. Even Jack Straw agrees with this.
So it was a relief to drive down to the US National Archives in Maryland to research America's attempts to produce an Arab democracy after the First World War, one giant modern Arab state from the Turkish border to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. US soldiers and diplomats tried to bring this about in one brief, shining moment of American history in the Middle East. Alas, President Woodrow Wilson died; America became isolationist, and the British and French victors chopped up the Middle East for their own ends and produced the tragedy with which we are confronted today. Prevail, indeed.
|
Reuters
Mon Nov 28,11:48 AM ET
WASHINGTON - A chunk of marble fell from near the roof of the U.S. Supreme Court onto the stairs in the front of the building but no one was injured, a court spokeswoman said on Monday.
Spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said a piece marble about one-foot square, from what was thought to be dentil molding at the top of the building, fell about 9:30 a.m. (1430 GMT). There was no one on the stairs at the time, a half hour before the opening of the court's session.
The marble was above the inscription near the top of the building saying, "Equal Justice Under Law" and above the allegorical figure representing "Order," one of nine sculptured figures on the pediment.
She had no explanation why it fell, but said it was not related to the construction work occurring as part of the renovation of the building. She said no work is currently taking place on the front the building, which faces the U.S. Capitol.
The original construction on the front of the building took place about 70 years ago.
|
By Caroline Drees, Security Correspondent
Reuters
Mon Nov 28, 2:07 PM ET
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration's yardsticks for progress in its fight against terrorism are inadequate and do not show whether the United States is winning or losing, a study by a congressional think tank says.
"Although four years have gone by since September 11, government agencies have still not agreed on criteria to measure progress against terrorism, even though billions of dollars have been spent," said Raphael Perl, author of the internal report by the Congressional Research Service.
"The risk is that without these criteria, we just take action and we measure progress retrospectively against what we've done. And of course since we've done some stuff, we've made progress," he told Reuters in an interview on Monday.
Statistics often cited by U.S. officials -- such as the death or capture of more than two-thirds of top al Qaeda leaders and the seizure of over $200 million in terrorist funds -- do not show how much damage has actually been inflicted on militant groups, the report said.
A copy of Perl's study, which was made available to congressional officials on Friday when Congress was closed for the Thanksgiving holiday, was obtained by Reuters on Monday.
Administration officials were not immediately available for comment.
In the past, the administration has also pointed to developments such as the overthrow of the governments in
Afghanistan and Iraq, the death or capture of insurgents in Iraq, Libya's decision to abandon weapons of mass destruction programs and other curbs to proliferation as milestones of progress in the fight against terrorism.
The government also says it has tripled funding for homeland security since the hijacked plane attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.
GOING BEYOND THE NUMBERS
But the study said the rising costs of anti-terrorism efforts had become an increasing problem, with billions of dollars being spent on steps such as developing new technologies and beefing up security staffing without methods to check if they are cost-effective.
Perl said existing yardsticks tended to emphasize quantitative elements, while the government should "go beyond the numbers and look at the meaning of the numbers and their significance, and their significance to us (versus) to the terrorists." [...]
|
By Silla Brush
Last week's guilty plea by Abramoff's onetime partner, a former top aide to the beleaguered Rep. Tom DeLay, darkened the skies further. Michael Scanlon's admission he had conspired to bribe public officials and defrauded four Indian gaming casinos of millions in fees effectively makes him the government's star witness in a probe that threatens to ensnare officials throughout the nation's capital.
U.S. News has learned that the conduct of at least a dozen representatives and senators is now being scrutinized by a small army of federal prosecutors and FBI agents.
So far, the investigation has resulted in the resignation only of the chief procurement officer at the White House Office of Management and Budget, who was indicted on charges of lying to investigators. Still, there are suddenly lots of folks with the shivers on Capitol Hill--and it's not just because of the change in the weather.
It's been two years now since federal investigators began trying to untangle the dealings of Washington uberlobbyist Jack Abramoff. But what was once a potential scandal looming over the horizon is now looking more ominous by the day.
Last week's guilty plea by Abramoff's onetime partner, a former top aide to the beleaguered Rep. Tom DeLay, darkened the skies further. Michael Scanlon's admission he had conspired to bribe public officials and defrauded four Indian gaming casinos of millions in fees effectively makes him the government's star witness in a probe that threatens to ensnare officials throughout the nation's capital.
U.S. News has learned that the conduct of at least a dozen representatives and senators is now being scrutinized by a small army of federal prosecutors and FBI agents. According to sources familiar with the inquiry, a federal task force, which includes investigators from the Interior Department--which has authority to regulate Indian reservations--is examining the relationships between lawmakers and Scanlon and Abramoff. A key question is whether the lawmakers took official actions after receiving campaign contributions, free trips, or other gifts from the lobbyists, the sources say.
Trouble. Despite Scanlon's deal with the government, there is no indication yet that Abramoff has made such an arrangement. If he cooperates, one source said, it would spell big problems for some lawmakers and staffers on Capitol Hill. Abramoff, the source said, "arguably has bigger problems than Scanlon. The question is: What is the government willing to give up?"
Abramoff's Washington connections run wide and deep. His biggest clients were Indian tribes running casinos in several states, and he and Scanlon billed them more than $80 million. "It could be the biggest congressional scandal in modern times," says Fred Wertheimer, head of Democracy 21, a nonprofit campaign-finance reform organization.
In his plea agreement, Scanlon said that he and Abramoff, referred to as "Lobbyist A," provided travel, golf fees, entertainment, and campaign contributions to public officials "in exchange for a series of official acts and influence." At least one congressman, widely believed to be Rep. Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican, received trips to the Super Bowl in Tampa and to Scotland, meals at a restaurant owned by Abramoff, and campaign contributions.
Ney provided "official acts" to Abramoff, including helping a client secure a telephone contract for the House of Representatives and placing a statement drafted by Scanlon into the Congressional Record criticizing the owner of a casino boat company that Abramoff wanted to buy. Abramoff has also been indicted on fraud charges in connection with that failed purchase. A Ney spokesman says, "All that this plea agreement shows is that Mr. Scanlon had a deliberate . . . scheme to defraud many people, and it appears, unfortunately, that Representative Ney was one of the many people defrauded."
So far, the investigation has resulted in the resignation only of the chief procurement officer at the White House Office of Management and Budget, who was indicted on charges of lying to investigators. Still, there are suddenly lots of folks with the shivers on Capitol Hill--and it's not just because of the change in the weather.
|
2005-11-28
Trupiano held a "Take Back the House" rally last Monday in Michigan as the first event of his campaign. During a Q&A session, he was asked to name the first three pieces of legislation he would introduce if elected to Congress. The first that Trupiano named was a bill to restore value to the federal minimum wage. He never got to the third, because the second issue he named received such a huge response that the conversation took a new turn. That second issue was impeachment.
"The crowd went crazy," Trupiano said in an interview. "I mean the crowd absolutely went nuts. Some people who are consulting for the campaign said they cringed when I said impeachment, but when they saw how the crowd reacted they breathed easier. You know, we shouldn't be afraid of impeachment. Impeachment is there for a reason. If the President has not lied to us, if he is innocent of all of these charges, give us a chance to investigate. Impeachment is a non-partisan idea. It is the way to hold the government accountable."
ImpeachPAC, a political action committee launched earlier this month to support candidates in next year's congressional election who favor impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney, today announced its first endorsement.
ImpeachPAC has contributed $2,500 to Democratic congressional candidate Tony Trupiano in his bid to unseat Republican incumbent Thaddeus McCotter in Michigan's 11th District. Trupiano has already been endorsed by Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) and by the Michigan Teamsters Union Joint Council 43. Trupiano has had a national radio audience for over a decade as host of the Tony Trupiano Show.
Trupiano held a "Take Back the House" rally last Monday in Michigan as the first event of his campaign. During a Q&A session, he was asked to name the first three pieces of legislation he would introduce if elected to Congress. The first that Trupiano named was a bill to restore value to the federal minimum wage. He never got to the third, because the second issue he named received such a huge response that the conversation took a new turn. That second issue was impeachment.
"The crowd went crazy," Trupiano said in an interview. "I mean the crowd absolutely went nuts. Some people who are consulting for the campaign said they cringed when I said impeachment, but when they saw how the crowd reacted they breathed easier. You know, we shouldn't be afraid of impeachment. Impeachment is there for a reason. If the President has not lied to us, if he is innocent of all of these charges, give us a chance to investigate. Impeachment is a non-partisan idea. It is the way to hold the government accountable."
"We are thrilled to give our first endorsement to Tony Trupiano," said ImpeachPAC President Bob Fertik. "For ten years, Tony has spoken up for Mainstream America on the airwaves. Now he hopes to speak up for Mainstream America in Congress. Tony knows that Americans believe George Bush should be impeached if he lied about Iraq by a solid margin of 53%-42%. And Tony knows that Bush lied about Iraq before the war, and continues to lie now that the truth is finally coming out. Tony will win by demanding that George Bush and Dick Cheney be held accountable for the lies that cost so many precious lives."
ImpeachPAC is a Political Action Committee registered with the Federal Election Commission. Its purpose is to raise money to elect Democratic candidates for Congress who support the immediate and simultaneous impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney for their Iraq War lies.
|
AFP
November 28, 2005
WASHINGTON - Intrigue deepened over the CIA leak scandal clouding the White House, after Time magazine said special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald had demanded testimony from another of its reporters.
The magazine said Sunday that Washington correspondent Viveca Novak would testify under oath about her conversations with Robert Luskin, lawyer for White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.
The revelation seemed to indicate Fitzgerald was still aggressively probing Rove, President George W. Bush's closest political aide, a scenario sure to dent White House's hopes for a swift end to the damaging affair.
Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has already denied five counts of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements, arising from the probe into the outing of CIA spy Valerie Plame.
The probe has helped to drive Bush's approval ratings to historic lows, and focused scrutiny on his administration's rationale for war with Iraq.
Novak's testimony comes as Washington chews over the revelation that reporting legend Bob Woodward, who helped bring down President Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal, had also been sucked into the CIA leak storm.
Woodward said two weeks ago he had testified to the probe and that a "source" told him in June 2003 about Plame -- setting off a guessing game in Washington as to the secret official's identity.
Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, has claimed senior Bush administration officials blew her cover in revenge for his criticisms of their claims about Iraq's weapons programs used to justify the 2003 war.
The date of Woodward's conversation was significant, because it took place at least several days before Fitzgerald alleged Libby suggested Wilson's wife might work for the CIA to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
It was also a month before columnist Robert Novak, no relation to the Time reporter, revealed her name in his column, citing "two senior administration officials."
Wilson travelled to Niger to check out claims, later mentioned in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, that
Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellow cake uranium for nuclear weapons.
There are divergent interpretations about what he told CIA experts about the trip when he returned, but Wilson has since said the claims were wrong.
Libby's supporters charged the revelation by Woodward, who did not publish it, undercuts Fitzgerald's claim Libby was the first government official known to reveal Plame's name to a journalist.
But other legal experts say the Woodward angle is irrelevant, since Libby was not charged with outing an agent, a crime under US law, but with obstruction charges.
It is not the first time Time has been caught up in the drama.
Its White House correspondent Matthew Cooper refused to reveal his sources and took an appeal against a contempt charge right up to the Supreme Court.
He won an 11th hour reprieve from jail when his source cleared him to testify. Miller went to prison for 85 days until she also agreed to testify.
Fierce criticism greeted Woodward's revelation.
"I think none of us can really understand Bob's silence for two years about his own role in the case," David Broder, dean of Washington political reporters said about his Post colleague on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday.
"He left his editor, our editor, blindsided for two years and he went out and talked disparagingly about the significance of the investigation without disclosing his role in it."
Woodward has argued he could have been subpoenaed had he revealed his involvement in the affair, and defended the sacred journalistic creed of shielding sources -- on which he has built his career.
He made clear last week that the source was not Bush, Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The Post meanwhile reported Monday that Plame would retire from the CIA, where she has been recently working on non-covert matters, on December 9.
|
Owen Gibson, media correspondent
Tuesday November 29, 2005
The Guardian
Arab news channel al-Jazeera is to consult its lawyers in an attempt to pursue George Bush through the courts over the US president's alleged threat to bomb the broadcaster's headquarters.
The satellite broadcaster's managing director, Wadah Khanfar, who is in London to petition No 10 for a meeting with Tony Blair to discuss the leaked memo, said the incident had hardened attitudes against the US among its viewers.
"Al-Jazeera is not just a TV station. It has become something people are very attached to. People are angry," he said, adding that the broadcaster would consult lawyers to see what further action could be taken.
Mr Khanfar said that the Doha-based broadcaster, which derives the majority of its funding from a $100m grant from the emir of Qatar, would not drop its calls for the memo, in which Mr Bush is alleged to have suggested bombing the Arab station's headquarters, to be published.
"We demand to know what's happened. We need to know for the sake of history, for the sake of journalism. It has historical value," he said, adding that the broadcaster had not yet had a response from Downing Street over its request for a meeting.
Mr Bush's alleged comments about bombing al-Jazeera's building in Doha are reported to be contained in a note of a meeting with Mr Blair. The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, has warned newspapers they could be charged under the Official Secrets Act if they publish further material from the note.
Al-Jazeera staff last week held protests demanding an investigation into the reports. At the station's HQ in Doha they held pictures of Sami al-Haj, a colleague who is an inmate at Guantánamo Bay, and Tarek Ayoub, an al-Jazeera journalist killed in April 2003 when a US missile hit his office in Baghdad. The US state department said the air strike was a mistake.
In November 2002 al-Jazeera's office in Kabul, Afghanistan, was destroyed by a US missile. No staff were in the office. US officials said they believed the target was a terrorist site.
Al-Jazeera, which changed the face of Arab broadcasting when it launched in 1996 from the ashes of a BBC joint venture with a Saudi broadcaster that fell apart over government intervention, also confirmed it planned to launch its long-mooted English-language channel in March.
The broadcaster has faced trenchant criticism from the White House administration for broadcasting videos from Osama bin Laden but Mr Khanfar said that it went to great lengths to ensure it was not broadcasting propaganda or furthering al-Qaida's agenda.
And he said the prospective launch of a BBC Arabic television station was good news for al-Jazeera. "Any additional media outlets are very good news," he said, adding that the broadcaster also welcomed new entrants such as al-Arabiya.
WIthin five years he said he hoped the broadcaster would become self-funding. While advertising revenues from the Arab service are small, despite its well known brand and large audiences, Mr Khanfar said the launch of subscription spin-off channels including a sport service and a children's channel together with the international expansion would reduce its reliance on the emir.
|
29 November 2005
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has denied receiving any details of a reported US proposal to bomb Aljazeera.
The Daily Mirror newspaper reported last week that a secret British government memo said Blair had talked US President George Bush out of bombing the Arab broadcaster's Doha headquarters in April 2004.
The White House has dismissed the report as "outlandish", while Blair's office has so far refused to comment.
Blair was asked in a written question to parliament made public on Monday "what information he received on action that the United States administration proposed to take against the Aljazeera television channel?"
In a written response, Blair gave the one-word answer "none".
The question, published on the parliament website, was proposed for discussion by lawmaker Adam Price, of the Welsh party Plaid Cymru.
A spokeswoman for Blair's Downing Street office made no further comment on the prime minister's response.
Aljazeera's quest
At a London news conference late on Monday, Daily Mirror's associate editor Kevin Maguire said he did not believe the reported threat against Aljazeera was a joke.
"It is clear from the language used in the memo and its context that Tony Blair took it seriously and counselled against it. It certainly wasn't a joke," he said.
The paper quoted an unnamed government official as suggesting Bush's threat was a joke, but had another unidentified source saying the US president was serious.
Aljazeera's general manager Waddah Khanfar, who flew to London last week to seek an explanation about the memo, said he was unsure what to believe, but Aljazeera would not abandon the story until it got an answer.
"I want not to believe it," he said.
Britain's attorney-general has warned other media that they can be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act if they reveal further details of the memo.
Britain is prosecuting a civil servant and a parliamentarian's aide for leaking the secret document.
The Mirror's report was picked up by the world's media and prompted Aljazeera to demand clarification from the US and Britain.
|
Eric Schmeltzer
Huffingtonpost.com
The idea to bomb al Jazeera out of existence wasn’t an idea that had never been discussed on some level by people with influence. It had been discussed, and probably had been discussed within the Pentagon, via the prodding of Frank Gaffney.
Tuesday’s story in the Daily Mirror that detailed what was allegedly in a Top Secret British security memo got me thinking: Is this the first time someone suggested bombing al Jazeera out of existence? I had a hunch that it had been talked about, on some level, and made its way up to the President, who was probably keen on the idea, personally.
Coworkers told me I was on another planet – there is absolutely no way that the President would ever consider bombing within a friendly country. This just made me even more determined to check out my gut feeling. So I did what determined-but-lazy people do. I did a Google search.
Sure enough, a search for “bomb al Jazeera” led me to this article, written in September 2003 by Frank Gaffney, in which he recommends “taking out” al Jazeera “one way or another.”
Who is Frank Gaffney? Well, he’s a former Undersecretary of Defense for Ronald Reagan, and was a part of the Project for a New American Century with Cheney, Rumsfeld and the gang. He’s still described as a Pentagon advisor.
Of course, this proves nothing. But it does at least show that the idea to bomb al Jazeera out of existence wasn’t an idea that had never been discussed on some level by people with influence. It had been discussed, and probably had been discussed within the Pentagon, via the prodding of Frank Gaffney.
Maybe he was told he was insane and the idea was never mentioned again. But just as likely is that he called up his friend Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney and told them his thoughts, as he is free to do as a Pentagon advisor. After that? Who knows. But is it entirely implausible that Cheney or Rumsfeld then told the President, who then mentioned it to Tony Blair? Maybe the President was serious when he told Blair, maybe he mentioned it as a joke, maybe he said it faux-jokingly and hoped Tony would tell him it was a great idea.
Anyway, I’m all Googled out. But if any of you citizen journalists want to do some legwork on your own, post your findings in the thread below, and maybe together we can figure this out.
|
By LEWIS ALPER
November 26 / 27, 2005
Counterpunch
An Evangelical Christian Looks at Bush's Skull and Bones Initiation
"After this the initiate is brought before a picture of Judas Iscariot, whose name the group screams three times, and then he is led to the heart of the rite: the initiate is pushed to his knees before a human skull filled with blood placed at the foot of a human skeleton called Madame Pompadour.
The crowd "implores him to 'Drink it! Drink it! Drink it!'" and he does.
Skull and Bones is a worrisome and strange Yale secret society. On August 17, 2000 there was an interview with President George W. Bush that bestirred controversy regarding his initiation into Skull and Bones. Time Magazine asked if it troubled him that he had been initiated into the Society when he was a young man. President Bush responded, "No qualms at all. I was honored." Inevitably some people, knowing the Skull and Bones reputation of blasphemy, were surprised that the President said he was "honored." Others, particularly Christians defended him saying, in effect, "Let's put this aside. He was forgiven of that when he accepted Christ." The disturbing fact, however, is that President Bush's statement came many years after he announced he had accepted Jesus as his Lord and Saviour.
In that light, the more one learns about Skull and Bones, the more distressing the President's statement becomes. It raises vexing questions for those of us who live our life in Christ and do so as evangelicals.
I thought about this deeply because coming to Christ is very important to me and I know the depth of soul searching that is the essence of the Christian tradition when one chooses to give one's life to ones life to God. After reading the President's statement, I felt compelled to investigate the actual content of the Skull and Bones ritual that he believed so honored him, hoping by this to understand the man who is President of the United States. And so I write this as a friend of the President's soul, but also disturbed by what he has called to himself.
The fruits of my investigations revealed some details that are truly frightening that are not included even in Alexandra Robbins' very revealing book, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League and the Hidden Path to Power (Little Brown and Company, 2002) , a book that provides us with the most reliable account of the secret rites When the President was interviewed by Time he could be fairly certain that the nature of the initiation would remain a secret.
Subsequently, Mrs. Robbins was able to find and interview scores of "Bonesmen" as they are called, who were willing to describe the rituals.
After reading the book, I prayed on whether I should write about the actual meaning of this ritual, specifically the meaning of one word, well-known to students of New Testament Greek: "eulogia." ("Bonesmen" are called Knights of Eulogia.) Ultimately, I felt the message to speak of it, particularly to those of us who safekeep the Christian tradition in these dark times, because we need this information to properly evaluate other matters of great concern about the President.
I do this with a heavy heart. I can only imagine the burdens of being a President. And I certainly admit, as many of us will, to participating in activities as a young man that as an adult I regret and of which I believe I have repented. That is the way young men are. However, when I looked more deeply, I found these Skull and Bones rites to be of another nature than youthful indiscretions, and to have serious implications. Therefore I humbly offer this information so that people can think about this in their hearts.
Let me say some general things first about President Bush as a young man and about the family and times he was born into. In my quest for the truth about the meaning of the President's Skull and Bones comments, I found myself looking deeper into the nature of his background that would lead him to Skull and Bones. I learned much about the dynamic relationship between him, his father and his grandfather. I came from this inquiry believing they played an important part in his initiation--in the power he gave it, in what he made of it and in who he become since. The Lord I believe led me to see that the initiation was not just a "frat boy's spoof" for young George W. Bush but a serious rite of initiation for him with real consequences, affecting his thinking and behavior afterwards.
As we know, President Bush is the first-born son of a formidable father. He was to be his father's heir. Some of his history as a boy, as a teenager, and especially in his twenties, is familiar to all of us, and we can't help feeling affection and concern. It was in his early twenties that he began his twenty-year descent into alcoholism.
"When I was young and irresponsible, I behaved young and irresponsible," President Bush says of this time. In this remark he clearly was not including as "irresponsible" his initiation into Skull and Bones, as witness the statement of this 54-year-old Christian man who says he was honored to be initiated.
It was in 1968 that the 22-year-old was initiated into the cult--as his father and grandfather Prescott had been before him. As had been his uncles Jonathan Bush, John Walker and George Herbert Walker II, his great-uncle George Herbert Walker, Jr. and cousin Ray Walker and numerous friends. Young George was very much following in the footsteps of his kinsmen. Such a multi generational experience, one imagines, inevitably intensifies the emotion and affects of the ritual and gives it more legitimacy and power.
The initiation takes place in an environment called The Tomb where one encounters human and animal skeletons and skulls. "The death's-head logo stamps everything from crockery to painted borders on the wall." (Robbins, p. 87). In this setting "Bonesmen" return weekly after the initiation to talk about what most matters to them. While many of the 1968 initiates spoke of Vietnam, George W. Bush is witnessed to have spent most of his presentations in the tomb speaking about his father--reportedly in "at God-like terms." One of the President's 1968 classmates has said that being in Skull and Bones made young George feel even closer to the line of ancestors who had been in the secret group before him--"it just kind of crystallized his value system." (Robbins, p.178.) Skull and Bones, in this view, became important because it was sealing in young George a sense of identity with family as mutual practitioners of the Skull and Bones rituals and as adaptors of its beliefs.
We are seeing the powerful feeling that would come from being a Bush-clan member meeting up against the fragility and bravado of a 22-year-old man--an unformed young man compared to his father and the men in his family. I can imagine that the inner pressures on young George were mounting.
The reports say he was known as a "party animal" when he was accepted into Yale. Being an outsider with a Texas accent, a famous father and sparse scholarly interest, our future President showed himself as openly contemptuous of Yale snobbery and thriving on the boisterous warmth of male bonding.
I can see that at the moment of initiation into Skull and Bones, there was a coming into manhood question that had to be faced. As a young man beginning to discover himself, he carried the essential dilemma of any "chosen son"--effectively saying "I am of my father's line (and proud of it) but I am most certainly not my father."
The reports of his drinking at the time make it clear that young George was showing his independence, that he was not controlled by his father's patrician and very Yale sensibility. It was his turn to step into the stream of history but only on his own terms--or so a witness might conclude from the young man's behavior.
In this brew of father worship and simultaneous rebellion and perhaps even disdain for some aspects of his father's world, our future President entered the Tomb.
With a hood placed on his head, the text of the Robbins book reports, the initiate is "marched throughout the Tomb on a pseudo-tour, during which the knights and patriarchs shriek in high-pitched voices jokes about the initiate's girlfriend or dog, akin to benign 'yo' mama' cracks." (p.119.) Although resembling Carnival rites in many cultures, in fact the ritual soon begins to teeter dangerously toward other dark ceremonies from anti-Christian secret societies of the past.
The society has a story it claims gives historical and even religious credibility and sanction to these rites. The society's adopted myth states that the Roman goddess Eulogia ascended into heaven in 322 BC. The society's lore refers to the 'First Miracle of the origin of our Goddess' (Robbins, p.84) and to her "second coming" to Yale in 1832 to found the society. "Eulogia! Eulogia! Eulogia!" the "Bonesmen" shriek as the initiate is escorted into the inner temple before he is compelled to sign his name to an oath of secrecy.
After this the initiate is brought before a picture of Judas Iscariot, whose name the group screams three times, and then he is led to the heart of the rite: the initiate is pushed to his knees before a human skull filled with blood placed at the foot of a human skeleton called Madame Pompadour.
The crowd "implores him to 'Drink it! Drink it! Drink it!'" and he does. Then he is hurried to a man dressed as the Pope. "But not before the D whips him in the face with his tail. The initiate bends to kiss the Pope's slippered toe on the skull." (Robbins, p.120.)
This is the core of the very un-Christian and blasphemous rite that enfolded so many members of the Bush clan into the secret society, mirroring similar rites from earlier blasphemous societies and indeed even some devil-worshipping sects.
Now we must pause and consider these rites. What might they mean today? What do the initiators intend by havng young men in the rigors of modern education submit to these un-Christian rites? Whom do they hope the young men will become as a result? And what actually happens to those who undergo these rites?
I was shocked to discover that the Goddess Eulogia is a fabrication. And not a simple fabrication but one that leads us to something very specific. There never was a Roman goddess by that name.
However, students of New Testament Greek know that eulogia is one of the names given to the sacrament as in St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians: "The cup of blessing ('eulogia') which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ?"
Alarming to me and perhaps it will be to you, rather than honoring the sacrament, we see that the secret society initiation culminates in a parody of partaking of the blood of Christ. This parody is known in other contexts as the sinful Black Mass. We know Black Mass is not truly parody but blasphemy and sacrilege.
Invoking Judas, dishonoring the Pope and violating the sacrament is terrible sacrilege.
I believe I am neither exaggerating nor distorting to suggest that whatever young George's confusion as to his being father's heir, the initiation provided them with a shared secret. That secret is that both partook of the devil's sacrament, in which the chalice is a human skull, and did so within a secret order explicitly committed to the accumulation of wealth and power, as the Robbins book makes clear.
As strange and troubling as all of this is, none of it would make a difference to a man who has repented and received Christ. God is good and generous beyond measure. But, oddly enough, although the President is professed to have joined us as an Evangelical in 1985 and speaks of the wonder-working power of faith and is witnessed as a religious man with daily prayer sessions at the White House, there is nowhere in the public record any details that he repented.
Nor is there any evidence that he ever reflected on the implications of his initiation nor renounced the heart-chilling credo of wealth and power that he committed his soul to as a youth, thereby joining his lineage in this bond.
Indeed, quite the opposite seems to be the case.
As author Robbins has stated, "As president Bush has appointed fellow Bonesmen to high-level positions, such as Edward McNalley, the general council of the Office of Homeland Security and senior associate counsel on national security. Yet,although one of his first social gatherings at the White House was a Skull and Bones reunion, Bush feigned ignorance when asked recently about Bones: 'The thing is so secret that I'm not even sure it still exists,' he replied." (Robbins, USA Today 25 September 2002).
It is right that we pray for Mr. Bush and pray fervently, for his soul is profoundly endangered.
A detail about the founding of Skull and Bones might help us understand the devil's place in this ritual. As it turns out, shortly before founding the secret society, William H. Russell had spent a year in Germany.
"When William Russell took some time off from Yale to study in Germany, he could very well have been introduced to a German student club with the death's head logo, and then returned to Yale and set up a branch of that club." (Robbins, p.82.)
As it happens Russell's time in Germany coincided with the completion of Goethe's play "Faust"--the essential text that examines what it means to sell one's soul to the Devil. Goethe died within weeks of completing this play, and all of Germany was alive with the celebration of the great man's work in 1832. The first section of "Faust" had been released and had played in German theaters for years. It would be unlikely that Russell was unfamiliar with Goethe's most famous work, which mirrors somewhat the Skull and Bones ritual, most specifically the secret signing he oath and the use of blood to seal the rite:
Faust: If this will satisfy you, then I say let us agree and put this farce to odd use.
Mephistopheles: Blood is a quite peculiar juice.
Faust sold his soul to the devil for power in this temporal world.
Let us now be witness to the issue of the desire for power at all costs, and the desire for money that makes for power outside God's world, as it played its (Faustian?) hand through the men in the Bush family line who have been initiated into this rite.
I could not help but note the glaring reality that President Bush, his father George and his grandfather Prescott span three generations of profiting from war and trading with the enemy.
In 1924 Prescott Bush became manager of the United Steel Works of the Union Banking Corporation that was seized in October, 1942, by the U.S. government. Prescott was charged with "running Nazi-funded groups in the United States." He was involved in the use of slave-labor in Southern Poland, and Congressional investigators found that United Steel Works supplied 50.8 percent of the pig iron needed by the Nazi war machine.
Ten years later he was elected U.S. Senator from Connecticut.
George (Senior), in the 1980s, was involved in arming Iran in its bloody war against our then ally Iraq. (The United States, I have also painfully learned, armed Saddam Hussein against Iraq,including providing him ingredients for chemical warfare. Among other reasons there was a great deal of money to be made arming both sides of such a war by companies that were financially supporting the election campaigns of the Reagan and Bush administrations.)
Prescott Bush was involved with Union Banking, while George W. (Junior), I discovered in my researches, was involved with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, partially owned by Osama bin Laden's ber-in-law Khalid bin Malfouz . Bank of Credit was called by the U.S. Senate "one of the largest criminal enterprises in history." Before September 11, 2001, Malfouz was identified as a major supporter of bin Laden's Jihad. George W. Bush's business relations with the bin Laden's go back to the 1970s, when Mr. Malfouz arranged a sweetheart loan of $25 million to bail out of the troubles of his failing oil business.
It has been well-established that members of the bin Laden family other Saudi nationals were flown from America at a time after 9/11 when no airlines flew American skies. Former Presidential advisor Richard Clark has said he approved some Saudi departures after the general flying ban on aircraft was lifted, based on information from the FBI. But who made the decision to approve the flight that took place before the flying ban was lifted, remains a secret, as does the reasons why.
The question of who profits from war must be addressed in Iraq as it had been in World War II with President Bush's grandfather. With grieved heart, when I looked to answer this, having been led to this journey by what I learned about Skull and Bones, I found that the companies that are profiting from huge contracts are those closest to and most generous with the President's political party and closest to administration officials, including the Vice President.
And, of course, the lies and exaggerations that led to the war - the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the non- existent ties between Hussein and Al Qaeda - are now the reality of the daily news. Over 2000 American dead and 30,000 Iraqi.
In this light, let us return then to President Bush having stated he had been "honored" to become a "Bonesman" and to his hosting the secret society members in the the House. Some have asked--is he in fact a true Christian?
A few have suggested he sought to succeed as a politician after years of alcoholism and many failures in his career by drawing to himself a base of us evangelical voters.
For myself, for a long time I deeply trusted the President because I believed he trusted God. I continued to trust him until some months ago . I am now sadly reminded of the words of Christ : "The devil is the father of lies."
Soon after it became clear the President's Iraq statements were gravely amiss, I came across the President's remark about being "honored" as a member of Skull and Bones. Thus I began my quest to learn about Skull and Bones. I wondered if this could lie at the root of the contradiction between the President's behavior and his professed faith. As scripture tells us: Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me--John 14:6.
When a man or woman truly accepts this, as we know, he or she must live in Christ and be true to His way and renounce the ways of the world that are built on falsehoods and the love of power.
Finally, for me, there were the photos of torture in Iraqi prisons, and the news reports of unreleased videotape of children being tortured. This was soon followed by the Wall Street Journal's revelations of the administrations legal efforts to avoid prosecution for torture. And more recently the White House efforts to veto John McCains efforts to outlaw torture. (McCain himself was tortured in Vietnam and claims that a policy of torture endangers Americans in Iraq.) More than ever I was alerted to the danger the President's soul is in.
Is it for a moment possible that a Christian could justify torture? Is he a Christian or have we been lied to?
The ancestral pattern is clear: Trading with the enemy and profiting from war. The Skull and Bones initiation, to the degree it sets young men on a path of ruthless worldly seeking and flaunting of Christian values, was successful. Prescott Bush's legacy, it heart-renderingly appears, is alive and well and living in the White House--and if we are silent we are all implicated.
Prayer is the order of the day, for President Bush is before anything else a child of God.
"And the Devil, taking him up into a high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the Devil said unto him, 'All this power I give you and the glory of them; for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will give to if thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.'" -- The Gospel According to Luke
|
by Nat Hentoff
November 28th, 2005
U.S. Senate proves as disdainful of the Constitution as George W. Bush. Be forewarned.
These are weighty and momentous considerations that go far beyond the detainees at Guantánamo. . . .[This amendment] . . . takes away jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States. It is untenable and unthinkable and ought to be rejected.
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter , on the floor of the Senate, November 15, objecting to an amendment to the defense authorization bill by Lindsey Graham, Carl Levin, and Jon Kyl that would effectively close our federal courts to any charges of abuse, including tort ure, of Guantánamo prisoners. The amendment passed 84 to 14.
I learned long ago not to say the sky is falling when it's only raining. However, the hard rain on our fundamental liberties has been persistently increasing since the White House rammed through the Patriot Act soon after 9-11. This nation has survived grave constitutional crises before, but recent events in the U.S. Senate that further strengthen and deepen presidential powers are reason to be alarmed at what can follow under the present administration.
On November 10, with the support of Bush's Justice Department, the Senate had previously passed an amendment by the manipulatively mercurial Senator Lindsey Graham that the American Civil Liberties Union charged "would make the McCain anti-torture amendment nearly impossible to enforce at Guantánamo Bay.
"The [original] Graham amendment would strip all courts, including the Supreme Court, of jurisdiction to consider habeas [corpus] petitions or any other action challenging any aspect of the detention of foreign detainees [there], except for the narrow question of whether [Defense Department] status review boards follow their own rules."
The vote on November 10 was 49 to 42. That action by the Senate so alarmed the law school deans at Georgetown, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford—Alexander Aleinikoff, Elena Kagan, Harold Hongu Koh, and Larry Kramer—that they wrote a letter to Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, that he inserted in the November 15 Congressional Record. (Leahy, a firm constitutionalist, voted against Graham's amendment.) I haven't the space for all of the deans' letter, but I quote from page S12802 and strongly recommend you read the entire Senate debate that day, which led to the eventual 84-14 vote that disgraces the majority of the Senate—and could place the liberties of all of us, not only the Guantánamo prisoners, at risk.
Said the deans: "We cannot imagine a more inappropriate moment to remove scrutiny of Executive Branch treatment of non-citizen detainees. We are all aware of serious and disturbing reports of secret overseas prisons, extraordinary renditions [by the CIA], and the abuse of prisoners in Guantánamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
"The Graham Amendment will simply reinforce the public perception that Congress approves Executive Branch decisions to act beyond the reach of law. [Emphasis added.] As such, it undermines two core elements of the rule of law: congressionally sanctioned rules that limit and guide the exercise of Executive power, and judicial review to ensure that those rules have in fact been honored.
"When dictatorships have passed laws stripping their courts of power to review executive detention or punishment of prisoners, our government has rightly challenged such acts as fundamentally lawless.
The same standard should apply to our own government. We urge you to vote to remove the court-stripping provisions of the Graham Amendment from the pending legislation."
The majority of the Senate continue to ignore all warnings on this subversion of the separation of powers. But there was a backlash to that first Graham amendment from civil liberties and human rights organizations and members of Congress. This resulted in various amendments and counter-amendments on the Senate floor to "improve" that initial startling Graham amendment. Adding minimal due-process protections, this "improvement" nonetheless remains dangerous to the future of the Constitution and its separation of powers because it continues to deny habeas protections to Guantánamo prisoners. Making that case, I quote from a November 17 letter to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist from the justly prestigious Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Despite the attempts to perform cosmetic surgery on the original Graham amendment, said the New York City bar, the version that the Senate is sending to the House "leaves a gaping hole precisely where the Administration's policies are most troublesome, and where the world is most carefully watching—the indefinite detention of persons whose status as an enemy combatant has not been adequately examined, and the treatment of those detainees.
"The 'war on terror,' unlike other U.S. wars, has no conceivable end point. . . . Therefore, there is every reason to believe that the detainees being held at Guantánamo could spend the rest of their lives as prisoners."
The New York bar letter ends with this acutely telling point: "Just yesterday, we learned that our government expressed outrage over the torture of prisoners by Iraqi captors in an Iraqi ministry building. To have moral force, our expressions of outrage must be buttressed at home by protections that only the writ of habeas corpus can provide."
The Graham-Levin-Kyl amendment passed on November 15 by a resounding vote of 84 to 14. It does not—as the ACLU emphasizes—"allow any habeas claim for protection against government-funded torture or abuse . . . and prohibits all habeas claims if the government decides it is going to hold a person with- out ever determining their status." (Distinguished civil libertarians Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer voted for the amendment.)
The "great writ" of habeas corpus goes back to the Magna Carta in 1215 and allows a prisoner to go to a court to make the government prove that he or she is being legally held. Making it impossible for a Guantánamo prisoner to go to a court on a habeas petition concerning torture makes the McCain amendment meaningless. I've left two messages with McCain's press secretary to have the senator explain this clear inconsistency. There has been no response, in contrast with quick answers to previous queries.
I had thought John McCain was a man of principle, not just another presidential candidate in 2008.
|
Ward Sutton
November 28th, 2005
Cartoon. Click link above to chuckle.
|
By Jerry Ghinelli
Volume 1: http://www.jerryghinelli.com
“Should we return to the Middle East disguised as just plain American oil executives Bush Wayne and Dick Grayson-Cheney, so we could blend in more easily, Batman?”
“No, Dick—I mean, Robin; our mission is not about oil this time, it's about disarming the villains who want to turn smoking guns into mushroom clouds. You see, Robin, the people there are brainwashed by these villains, then reprogrammed and taught to hate America because we’re good and they’re not. We need to liberate these unfortunate people from the negative influences of dastardly villains like Osama the Riddler.”
“But the Riddler hasn’t been seen since the 2004 election, when his video helped us defeat the Flip Flopper, his Ketchup Widow and their video producer, the Fat Man Mr. Freeze Fahrenheit -32.”
“Yes, Robin. Just in the nick of time, the Riddler’s last video, on election eve, doomed the Flip Flopper and his running mate, the Breck Girl.”
“I guess there’s good in all people, even Osama the Riddler—right, Batman?”
“No, Robin, not quite. The Riddler crafts his riddles in mysterious ways. Helping us defeat the Flip Flopper and get us elected helps him to recruit more fiends who hate our freedoms, like—”
“No! You don't mean the mythical, magical, manipulator of mayhem—The Invisible Man, aBoo Zarqawi, do you?”
“Yes, Robin, I’m afraid so. That dastardly, diabolical, elusive, foreign-born phantom villain who escapes more often than Harry Houdini, has more lives than a cat, and has been wounded more times than Flip Flopper, has returned once again as the diabolical mastermind behind the evil Iraqi insurgency.
When we last left them, our heroes, Bush Wayne and his trusted companion, Dick Grayson-Cheney, were heading east to Iran to hunt for weapons of mass destruction, free the Iranian people from the axis of evil and bring American-style democracy to all the good people of the Middle East.
But tired and weary from fighting their divinely inspired wars for truth, justice, freedom and the American way, the boys took a detour and headed back to their ranch in Crawford, Texas, for a well-deserved break from their international crime-fighting spree.
Now fresh and well-rested after their year-long vacation, our valiant crusaders—oil executives by day, freedom fighters by night—return to the world stage once again as:
Batman and Robin: The Caped Crusaders in a Comic Book War
... Last seen driving north to an undisclosed location in Washington, DC, our caped crusaders stopped along the Interstate to fill up the Batmobile.
”Good grief, Batman, did you get a look at the price of gas?”
“Yes, Robin, my trusted CEO, but higher oil prices are a necessary evil in fighting wars on evil.”
“Holy Halliburton, Batman, greed is good!”
“No, Robin, greed works. Remember oil executives are a generous lot who reinvest the profits we earn to defeat those evildoers who despise the freedoms we enjoy.”
“Like the freedoms we enjoy to earn enormous profits and get tax breaks as well, Batman?”
“Precisely, Robin. We invest the windfall, which stimulates the economy, which creates more jobs and helps us build better, more sophisticated weapons that ‘shock and awe’ fiendish villains like Saddam the Joker and his coterie of evildoers, Dr Germ, Chemical Ali and the Comical Baghdad Bob—those dastardly, diabolical rogues in our deck of 52 cards.”
“Holy one-eyed Jack, Batman, you dealt the Joker a ‘Royal Flush’ and swoosh! flushed him right down the toilet!”
“I'll say, Robin, a Joker's Poker you might add, but let's not be too harsh, my friend; remember our Judeo-Christian values.”
“You’re right, Batman, we are good Christians... but holy Christ, $75 to fill up the Batmobile... can we write this off?”
“No, Robin. You see, all good Americans must share in the sacrifices necessary to succeed in this war on terror. Attendant, may I also have a ‘Freedom Isn't Free’ magnet for the bumper of my new Batmobile? The red, white and blue one is preferred, thank you. Hmm… Made in China? Oh, well. But thank you, sir, and please remember to tell all the good Americans to show off their sacrifices to other drivers, by proudly displaying these magnets on their SUVs as well. Keep the change…”
Vroom, screech, whoosh...
“Jeepers, Batman! Sorry, but I almost forgot to tell you: while we were on vacation, the wicked witch of the south, the evil diabolical daughter of the Kat Women, that princess of darkness, the fiendish—Kategory 5—Katrina, the Kat Girl, returned with fury and gave the ‘Big Easy’ quite a rough time. That femme fatale spared no one; she soaked the rich and drowned the poor, a real equal opportunity villainess.”
“No need to apologize, Robin; remember, as I always say, better late than never. Let's get ‘Brownie’ on the Bat phone and offer our assistance.”
Ring, Ring...
“Hello, this is Michael Brown. I am relaxing at the moment; please leave a brief message after the tone.”
Beep...
“Brownie, Batman and Robin here. Just got the news that New Orleans is underwater. Not to worry, though; help is on the way. The Bat Sub should arrive in about a week with some scuba gear and snorkeling masks. You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie. Stay dry!”
Batman, you’re truly a “bleeding heart” conservative, helping all those poor people down south, without… shall we say…a ‘fair complexion’.”
“Yes, but as you know, Robin, I can relate to all the people of color. Ever notice that when I don my mask, I’m black?”
“Right on, Batman.”
“And did you realize our popularity with African Americans has just doubled? From 1% to 2%!”
“A landslide! I love the new fuzzy math, Batman.”
“Precisely. I learned it at Florida State, class of 2000.”
“Holy hanging chads.”
“Holy Masquerade, my friend. But we mustn't waste any more time here in the US on domestic issues, Robin; there is work to be done abroad. We must head to the Middle East and fight the evildoers over there so we don't have to fight them over here. Hurry!”
Whiz, roar, vroom, lift-off
“Should we return to the Middle East disguised as just plain American oil executives Bush Wayne and Dick Grayson-Cheney, so we could blend in more easily, Batman?”
“No, Dick—I mean, Robin; our mission is not about oil this time, it's about disarming the villains who want to turn smoking guns into mushroom clouds. You see, Robin, the people there are brainwashed by these villains, then reprogrammed and taught to hate America because we’re good and they’re not. We need to liberate these unfortunate people from the negative influences of dastardly villains like Osama the Riddler.”
“But the Riddler hasn’t been seen since the 2004 election, when his video helped us defeat the Flip Flopper, his Ketchup Widow and their video producer, the Fat Man Mr. Freeze Fahrenheit -32.”
“Yes, Robin. Just in the nick of time, the Riddler’s last video, on election eve, doomed the Flip Flopper and his running mate, the Breck Girl.”
“I guess there’s good in all people, even Osama the Riddler—right, Batman?”
“No, Robin, not quite. The Riddler crafts his riddles in mysterious ways. Helping us defeat the Flip Flopper and get us elected helps him to recruit more fiends who hate our freedoms, like—”
“No! You don't mean the mythical, magical, manipulator of mayhem—The Invisible Man, aBoo Zarqawi, do you?”
“Yes, Robin, I’m afraid so. That dastardly, diabolical, elusive, foreign-born phantom villain who escapes more often than Harry Houdini, has more lives than a cat, and has been wounded more times than Flip Flopper, has returned once again as the diabolical mastermind behind the evil Iraqi insurgency.
“While Osama the Riddler produces videos and Saddam the Joker writes romance novels, The Invisible Man, Zarqawi, has become an Internet wizard—and part-time spammer—who communicates to his army of insurgents without electricity, phone lines or even a cable modem.
“His wizardry is so technologically sophisticated that his network cannot be traced or detected, even by our vast resources.
“Now if we could only locate his Internet Service Provider or his website...
“I got it! Robin, quick, boot up the Bat Computer! Go to Google and type in ‘The Invisible Man Zarqawi’... Click on ‘I'm Feeling Lucky’.”
“Got it, Batman! His website is called jihadists-R-us.com.”
“Great, Robin! Now go there and click ‘About Us’.”
“Bingo! We got him! It says ‘Insurgents needed, send resume (in confidence) to: Spider Hole 2, Fallujah, Iraq. Allah Akbar!’”
“Let's head to the ‘Liberated and Pacified’ Fallujah, Robin, and bring The Invisible Man to justice.”
“Should we then ‘detain’ him at Abu Ghraib, Batman?”
“No, that would be too harsh, my friend. Remember, we are compassionate conservatives. He’ll be more comfortable in a spider hole in the tropical confines of Guantanamo Bay.”
“You are truly a man of conscience, Batman.”
“Yes, Robin. There we can play tricks and harmless pranks on all these villains to gain the necessary information needed to thwart their evil intentions in our divinely inspired war on terror. This is the new American Way, and the righteous thing to do. Then, as a reward for their cooperation, we’ll send them off with a one-way first class ticket to paradise, where they can meet their seventy-two virgins.”
“Holy Geneva Conventions, Batman, does it work?”
“Of course it works, Robin, and when we eventfully capture Osama the Riddler and send him off to Paradise as well, the War on Terror will be won and our Mission Accomplished.”
“But won't other evildoers follow, Batman?”
“No, Robin. American democracy will transform the region and our Muslim brothers and sisters will shower us and our Israeli friends with candy and flowers... then we all can live happily ever after in this comic book world.
“And as for our brave soldiers fighting in this War on Terror—somewhere over the rainbow—they too can then return home, simply by tapping the heels of their combat boots together three times and saying: ‘There's no place like home, there’s no place like home’ ”
Jerry Ghinelli writes essays exclusively for Information Clearing House ( www.informationclearinghouse.info ) and contributes his time and efforts as a private citizen, with the hope of encouraging readers to think more broadly about the important issues that threaten the peace and security of the world community. He welcomes all civil feedback, whether positive or negative, which should be sent to email@jerryghinelli.com or visit http://www.jerryghinelli.com for more information.
|
26 November 2005
Robert Fisk
UK Independent
...I descended to the al-Jazeera newsroom where the Jordanian-Palestinian bureau chief, Tareq Ayoub, was trying to put together his next report. You, I told him, have the most dangerous television office in the history of the world.
I remarked how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage - seen across the Arab world - of civilian victims of the Anglo-American bombing of Iraq. "Don't worry, Robert," Tareq had replied. "We've given the Americans the exact location of our bureau so we won't get hit." Three days later, Tareq was dead....
Back in Belgrade in 1998, I had watched the Americans bomb Serbia's television headquarters, an act which, as I wrote next morning, allowed Nato to strike at targets for the words men and women said - rather than the deeds they committed. What precedent did this set for the future? I should have guessed...
On 4 April 2003, I was standing on the roof of al-Jazeera's office in Baghdad. The horizon was a towering epic of oil fires and burning buildings. Anti-aircraft guns in a public park close to the bureau were pumping shells into the sky and the howl of jets echoed across the city. I was about to start a two-way interview with al-Jazeera's head office in Qatar when an American rocket came racing up the Tigris river behind me. Its rail-train "swish" brought a cry from the Qatar technician who picked up the sound on his earphones.
"Was that what I think it was?" he asked. I fear so, I replied, as the white-painted cruise missile zipped beneath one of the Tigris's bridges and disappeared upstream. After finishing my "stand-upper" - television demands rooftop scenes from Baghdad even to this day, when most of the reporters are confined to their offices and hotels by teams of hired mercenaries - I descended to the al-Jazeera newsroom where the Jordanian-Palestinian bureau chief, Tareq Ayoub, was trying to put together his next report. You, I told him, have the most dangerous television office in the history of the world.
I remarked how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage - seen across the Arab world - of civilian victims of the Anglo-American bombing of Iraq. "Don't worry, Robert," Tareq had replied. "We've given the Americans the exact location of our bureau so we won't get hit." Three days later, Tareq was dead.
Al-Jazeera had indeed given their office's map co-ordinates to the Pentagon. In fact, the State Department's public affairs officer in Qatar - a man of Lebanese descent called Nabil Khoury - had pointedly gone to the station's management on 6 April to assure them their bureau would be spared. Then on 7 April, as Tareq Ayoub broadcast at 7.45am from the same spot on the roof on which I had been standing, an American jet flew across the Tigris and fired a single missile at al-Jazeera. Its explosion killed Tareq instantly. This was no errant attack. "The plane was so low, we thought it was going to land on the roof," Tareq's colleague Taiseer Alouni told me afterwards.
And Taiseer should know. He had been Kabul correspondent for al-Jazeera in 2001 when a cruise missile smashed into his (mercifully empty) bureau. Al-Jazeera had been broadcasting bin Laden's threats and sermons from Afghanistan and no one doubted at the time that the attack - which the Americans claimed was a mistake - was deliberate. After the killing of Tareq Ayoub in Baghdad in 2003, the Pentagon's soulless letter of explanation expressed its sorrow for Ayoub's death but did not even bother to offer an explanation for the attack. Why should it? After all, on the very same day, an American Abrams M-1 A-1 tank fired a shell into the Palestine Hotel, killing three more journalists. Small arms fire, the Americans said, had been coming from the building. It was a lie.
Nor was I surprised. Back in Belgrade in 1998, I had watched the Americans bomb Serbia's television headquarters, an act which, as I wrote next morning, allowed Nato to strike at targets for the words men and women said - rather than the deeds they committed. What precedent did this set for the future? I should have guessed.
So what was so strange about George Bush's desire to bomb al-Jazeera in 2004? That Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara - the man who supposedly persuaded the American president to desist from this latest insanity - should now threaten the British press under the Official Secrets Act lest they divulge the entire can of worms is quite in keeping with the arrogance of power which we now associate with the Bush-Blair alliance. British ministers cravenly repeated America's lies when US aircraft killed the innocent in Baghdad in 2003 and they will happily cover up Bush's continued desire to bomb his supposed enemies, however innocent they may be.
When al-Jazeera first broadcast across the Arab world, the Americans hailed its appearance as a symbol of freedom amid the dictatorships of the Middle East. The New York Times's messianic columnist Tom Friedman praised it as a beacon of freedom - always a dangerous precedent, coming from Friedman - while US officials held out the station's broadcasts as proof that Arabs wanted free speech. And there was some truth in this. When al-Jazeera broadcast a brilliant 16-part series on the Lebanese civil war - a subject scrupulously avoided by Beirut television stations - the crowded seafront Corniche in front of my Lebanese home became deserted.
Arabs wanted to see and hear truths that had been denied them by their own leaders.
But when the same al-Jazeera began broadcasting bin Laden's words, all the enthusiasm of Friedman and the State Department dried up. By 2003, US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz - that paragon of democracy who asked why Turkish generals did not have "something to say" when the democratically elected Turkish parliament prohibited US troops from using their territory for the invasion of Iraq - was fraudulently claiming that al-Jazeera was "endangering the lives of American troops". His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, told an even bigger lie: that al-Jazeera was co-operating with Iraqi insurgents. I spent days investigating these claims. All turned out to be false. Tapes of guerrilla attacks on US forces were delivered anonymously to the station's offices, not filmed by al-Jazeera's crews. But the die was cast. Iraq's newly elected government proved its democratic credentials by throwing al-Jazeera out of the country - just as Saddam had threatened to do in early 2003.
Of course, al-Jazeera is no golden child of journalism. Its discussion programmes are often weighed down with uncompromising Islamists, its dutiful presentation of bin Laden's tiresome sermons balanced by interviews with Western leaders far tougher than any questions put to al-Qa'ida's bearded leadership. But it is a free voice in the Middle East - and so was attacked by the Americans in Kabul and in Baghdad. And almost in Qatar. And thus British journalists must now be suppressed by Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara if they dare to reveal the latest revelation from the dark and bloody pit into which Messrs Blair and Bush have plunged us.
|
DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Nov 28, 2005
“There’s no shame in hitting up a lobbyist.” Stephen Brown, vice president and general counsel at Dutko Worldwide, told The Hill. “That’s why God gave you lobbyists — to buy lunch.”
Tom DeLay saw a seat in Congress as a way to live large at someone else’s expense. From the time he arrived in Washington after the 1984 elections, DeLay started working the system to line his own pockets.
“I met Delay at the reception for freshmen members of Congress,” recalls retired lobbyist Jackson Russ. “He walked up, looked at my name tag, introduced himself and asked how he could get some honorariums.
In 1984, honorariums were a quick way for members of Congress to line their own pockets. Special interest groups would invite the Congressman to a get together with executives of their company or top members of the organization and then pay that Congressman directly for the appearance.
Congress banned honorariums in 1989 but that gave DeLay five years to become one of the top earner of fees for appearances on the Hill, adding an average of $27,000 a year to his Congressional salary.
“DeLay bugged everyone for honorariums,” says Roy Abrahams, who lobbied Capitol Hill for oil interests from 1975 through 1990. “Others were subtle. He wasn’t.”
When the ban went into effect, DeLay switched his tactics to soliciting free trips from special interests and contributions to any of several political funds he controlled back in Texas where the rules are lax.
“Like most, we maxed out on Tom DeLay each cycle,” remembers Ann Wilson, who lobbied for health care before leaving Washington to get married. “That’s $10,000 for each election cycle -- $5,000 for the primary and $5,000 for the general election. But we kicked in another $50,000 or so each year to his Texas state PACs. I have no idea where that money went.”
According to Texas election records, the money went mostly to DeLay for certain “in district expenses,” including clothing, entertainment, cars and travel.” In all, DeLay received more than $100,000 a year in checks from the PACs for personal expenses.
At the same time, DeLay, his family and top aides, were jetting around the country on corporate jets and taking expensive vacations to Europe – all paid for by special interest groups.
Some of those vacations were financed by scandal-scarred lobbyist Jack Abramoff, now under investigation for widespread violations of federal election laws, conspiracy and money laundering. The investigation by the Justice Department is also focusing on DeLay and other GOP members of Congress, including Ohio Rep. Bob Ney, Montana Senator Conrad Burns and California Rep. John T. Doolittle.
“The buzzards are circling on the special interest money machines that have funded Republican policies and allowed some in their party to live large,” says former lobbyist Ron Hylton. “I had to walk away from that system because it made me sick.”
Special interest money drives both political parties. Republicans milk business and conservative ideological sources while Democrats tap the tills from unions and liberal advocacy groups.
But Capitol observers say DeLay and other members of the GOP pushed greed and the lust for money and power to new levels, turning the once-subtle game of paying for access and votes into outright blackmail and demands for money and gifts.
“I’d come back from the Hill physically ill,” Hylton says. “Finally, my wife convinced me to get out of the business. We left Washington and have never looked back.”
Those who choose to remain in the business grumble privately about the “entitlement culture” that exists with members of Congress.
Rep. Joel Hefly (R-CO) says he was told when he arrived in Washington he was told that “somebody else pays for everything” and he shouldn’t be expected to pay anything out of his own pocket.
“I’ve seen the best and worst of this institution,” Hefley said in an interview with The Hill newspaper earlier this year. “There’s always been a small percentage that has tried to bleed the system.”
Others, however, see little wrong with the system.
“There’s no shame in hitting up a lobbyist.” Stephen Brown, vice president and general counsel at Dutko Worldwide, told The Hill. “That’s why God gave you lobbyists — to buy lunch.”
|
Jamie Wilson in Washington
Monday November 28, 2005
The Guardian
With the White House under increasing pressure over its handling of the war in Iraq, senior administration figures are for the first time signalling the possibility of significant troop reductions. In a departure from previous statements the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said last week that the training of Iraqi soldiers had advanced so far that the current number of US troops in the country probably would not be needed much longer.
According to an article in the New Yorker magazine by Seymour Hersh, the possibility of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused unease in the military...
The Bush administration is considering a plan to put America's awesome airpower at the disposal of Iraqi commanders, as a way of reducing the number of US troops on the ground. The plan is causing consternation among commanders in US air force, who say it could lead to increased civilian casualties and lead to airstrikes being used as means of settling old scores.
According to an article in the New Yorker magazine by Seymour Hersh, the possibility of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused unease in the military, with air force commanders objecting to the possibility that Iraqis will eventually be responsible for target selection.
"Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame it on someone else?" a senior military planner told the magazine. "Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of al-Qaida, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?"
With the White House under increasing pressure over its handling of the war in Iraq, senior administration figures are for the first time signalling the possibility of significant troop reductions. In a departure from previous statements the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said last week that the training of Iraqi soldiers had advanced so far that the current number of US troops in the country probably would not be needed much longer.
However, there remains scepticism about the ability of Iraqi forces to take over from the 160,000 US troops in the country. Under the plans reported in the New Yorker, air power will be used to try to fill the gap left by troop reductions. But with the insurgency operating mostly within urban environments, and planes relying on laser-guided bombs directed from the ground to try to avoid collateral damage, there are fears that turning the process over the Iraqis could lead to increased civilian casualties.
"The guy with the laser is the targeteer. Not the pilot ... The people on the ground are calling in targets that the pilots can't verify. And we're going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?" a former high-level intelligence official said.
|
By Robert Verkaik
Published: 28 November 2005
UK Independent
|
By BILL STRAUB
Nov 27, 2005
64 percent of those questioned in the most recent Harris Interactive Poll believe the administration "generally misleads the public on current issues."
President Bush is engaged in an increasingly bitter exchange with critics who maintain the White House intentionally misled the public to generate support for the war in Iraq.
Evidently most people seem to believe those claims -- 64 percent of those questioned in the most recent Harris Interactive Poll believe the administration "generally misleads the public on current issues."
The administration has acknowledged that the intelligence used to advance the argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was faulty. But critics say their claims that Bush is providing misleading data is based on other declarations:
-- On Oct. 7, 2002, during a major speech in Cincinnati, the president said Iraq was involved in training al Qaeda members to make bombs and providing advice on the use of poisons and deadly gases. It subsequently was learned through declassified Defense Intelligence Agency documents that the sole source for that claim, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a top al Qaeda operative, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" when he offered that information. That report was issued in February 2002 _ long before Bush included the allegation in his speech.
-- In that same Cincinnati presentation, the president said Iraq maintained a "growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles" that could be used in missions targeting the United States. But the U.S. Air Force, in a National Intelligence Estimate released to the White House just before Bush's appearance, declared that Iraq was developing the UAVs "primarily for reconnaissance rather than delivery platforms."
-- In his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address, Bush cited intelligence sources when he declared Iraq "attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons." Three months earlier, the Office of Intelligence within the Department of Energy determined that the aluminum tubes were not intended for Iraq's nuclear program.
-- Vice President Cheney, during a Dec. 9, 2001, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," said it was "pretty well confirmed" that Mohammed Atta, the ring-leader of the 9/11 hijackers, met with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi government official, in Prague, Czech Republic, on April 8, 2001, providing evidence of a link between the terrorist group and the Baghdad government. Neither the CIA nor the FBI believes Atta left the United States that April.
Then there is the "yellow cake" controversy. In that 2003 State of the Union address, Bush noted the British government "has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Before the speech, the CIA warned the administration on three different occasions that the claim shouldn't be cited because it could not be confirmed. The State Department, in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, declared that the uranium claim was "highly dubious."
That open question led to the decision to send Ambassador Joseph Wilson to the Sudan to determine the veracity of the claim. Wilson reported it was unlikely that Iraq had made any purchase and subsequently wrote a piece for The New York Times criticizing the administration for continuing to circulate the claim.
In an apparent effort to discredit Wilson, it was revealed that his wife, Valerie, was a CIA agent. A special prosecutor was appointed to investigate the matter, leading to the indictment of Cheney's now-former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for perjury and obstruction of justice.
|
By Martin van Creveld
November 25, 2005
Foreward Magazine
A complete American withdrawal is not an option; the region, with its vast oil reserves, is simply too important for that.
First and foremost, such a presence will be needed to counter Iran, which for two decades now has seen the United States as "the Great Satan." Now that Iraq is gone, it is hard to see how anybody except the United States can keep the Gulf States, and their oil, out of the mullahs' clutches.
For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.
The number of American casualties in Iraq is now well more than 2,000, and there is no end in sight. Some two-thirds of Americans, according to the polls, believe the war to have been a mistake. And congressional elections are just around the corner.
What had to come, has come. The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon — and at what cost. In this respect, as in so many others, the obvious parallel to Iraq is Vietnam.
Confronted by a demoralized army on the battlefield and by growing opposition at home, in 1969 the Nixon administration started withdrawing most of its troops in order to facilitate what it called the "Vietnamization" of the country. The rest of America's forces were pulled out after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated a "peace settlement" with Hanoi. As the troops withdrew, they left most of their equipment to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam — which just two years later, after the fall of Saigon, lost all of it to the communists.
Clearly this is not a pleasant model to follow, but no other alternative appears in sight.
Whereas North Vietnam at least had a government with which it was possible to arrange a cease-fire, in Iraq the opponent consists of shadowy groups of terrorists with no central organization or command authority. And whereas in the early 1970s equipment was still relatively plentiful, today's armed forces are the products of a technology-driven revolution in military affairs. Whether that revolution has contributed to anything besides America's national debt is open to debate. What is beyond question, though, is that the new weapons are so few and so expensive that even the world's largest and richest power can afford only to field a relative handful of them.
Therefore, simply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option. And even if it were, the new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was. For all intents and purposes, Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal.
Handing over their bases or demolishing them if necessary, American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the military was able to carry out the operation in a single night without incurring any casualties. That, however, is not how things will happen in Iraq.
Not only are American forces perhaps 30 times larger, but so is the country they have to traverse. A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.
Having been thoroughly devastated by two wars with the United States and a decade of economic sanctions, decades will pass before Iraq can endanger its neighbors again. Yet a complete American withdrawal is not an option; the region, with its vast oil reserves, is simply too important for that. A continued military presence, made up of air, sea and a moderate number of ground forces, will be needed.
First and foremost, such a presence will be needed to counter Iran, which for two decades now has seen the United States as "the Great Satan." Tehran is certain to emerge as the biggest winner from the war — a winner that in the not too distant future is likely to add nuclear warheads to the missiles it already has. In the past, Tehran has often threatened the Gulf States. Now that Iraq is gone, it is hard to see how anybody except the United States can keep the Gulf States, and their oil, out of the mullahs' clutches.
A continued American military presence will be needed also, because a divided, chaotic, government-less Iraq is very likely to become a hornets' nest. From it, a hundred mini-Zarqawis will spread all over the Middle East, conducting acts of sabotage and seeking to overthrow governments in Allah's name.
The Gulf States apart, the most vulnerable country is Jordan, as evidenced by the recent attacks in Amman. However, Turkey, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Israel are also likely to feel the impact. Some of these countries, Jordan in particular, are going to require American assistance.
Maintaining an American security presence in the region, not to mention withdrawing forces from Iraq, will involve many complicated problems, military as well as political. Such an endeavor, one would hope, will be handled by a team different from — and more competent than — the one presently in charge of the White House and Pentagon.
For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.
Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University, is author of "Transformation of War" (Free Press, 1991). He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army's required reading list for officers.
|
Mon Nov 28, 2005
Reuters
He said Hariri had told him he was convinced Syria was behind the truck bomb that killed his father, but needed Hosam's testimony to prove it.
Hosam also accused Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh of arranging for other witnesses to testify falsely to Mehlis.
Hosam said his captors had wanted him to implicate Maher al-Assad, a brother of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and his brother-in-law, Major General Asef Shawkat, the head of military intelligence.
Hosam said he had been tortured, injected with drugs and offered $1.3 million by Lebanese Interior Minister Hassan al-Sabaa to tell the investigators he had seen the truck used in Hariri's killing in a Syrian-controlled military facility.
DAMASCUS - A man has appeared on Syrian state television saying Lebanese officials, including the son of Rafik al-Hariri, had forced him to testify falsely to a U.N. inquiry into the former Lebanese prime minister's assassination.
Hosam Taher Hosam, a Syrian who said he had worked with Syrian and Lebanese intelligence during Syria's military presence in Lebanon, said in a programme aired on Sunday that an elaborate scheme of torture, threats and bribery had forced him to testify to chief U.N. investigator Detlev Mehlis.
His appearance came after Damascus agreed to allow five Syrian officials to be questioned by Mehlis at U.N. offices in Vienna in connection with Hariri's February 14 assassination.
Hariri and other officials accused by Hosam could not immediately be reached for comment.
Hosam, who said he belonged to Syria's Kurdish minority, said followers of Hariri and other anti-Syrian officials had detained him for a while in Lebanon and had wanted him to go to Vienna to confront the Syrians to be questioned by Mehlis.
"It is all a ploy," Hosam said. "They were after Syria."
He said Hariri had told him he was convinced Syria was behind the truck bomb that killed his father, but needed Hosam's testimony to prove it.
Syria kept a tight grip on its small neighbour Lebanon for nearly three decades until a Lebanese and international outcry over Hariri's death forced it to withdraw its troops in April.
Hosam also accused Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh of arranging for other witnesses to testify falsely to Mehlis.
Hosam said his captors had wanted him to implicate Maher al-Assad, a brother of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and his brother-in-law, Major General Asef Shawkat, the head of military intelligence.
Hosam said he had been tortured, injected with drugs and offered $1.3 million by Lebanese Interior Minister Hassan al-Sabaa to tell the investigators he had seen the truck used in Hariri's killing in a Syrian-controlled military facility.
Hosam said he believed Mehlis was unaware of the alleged scheme. "I felt he had no relation to anything or knew anything," he said.
Mehlis has interviewed more than 500 people in connection with Hariri's killing, diplomatic sources say. His interim report in October did not name Hosam.
|
Barbara Ferguson
Arab News
28 Nov 2005
The study also argues that Israel’s action would persuade other Middle East countries, Egypt or Algeria, to “follow suit and mothball their own nuclear facilities,” which would lead to a regional halt to the production of fissile material that would be the most effective method to successfully isolate Iran.
“An Iran with advanced nuclear capabilities that put it close to having a bomb would likely be a more assertive Iran. Iran might well want to throw its weight around,” co-author Patrick Clawson said during a recent discussion of the study at the Washington Institute. “For example, it could claim that the fate of Jerusalem is a matter that concerns all Muslims and therefore Iran should have a say in any settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
WASHINGTON — In order to contain Iran’s nuclear development and prevent a nuclear arms race in the region, Israel must begin nuclear disarmament.
This, according to a recent report, entitled “ Getting Ready for a Nuclear— Ready Iran,” published by the US Army War College, commissioned and partially funded by the Pentagon, argues that Iran’s nuclear weapon development cannot be stopped by any current military or diplomatic options.
The report instead recommends that the United States convince Israel to “mothball” its Dimona nuclear reactor and agree to international monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, something it has refused to do.
Israel, to date, has never officially confirmed that it does not have nuclear weapons, nor denied it. Credible reports of Israel’s sizable arsenal of nuclear bombs are well-documented, as well as their stable of missiles and aircrafts to deliver them any where in the Middle East.
Israel has long-said its nuclear program has prevented conventional attacks from hostile neighbors, but some experts believe Israel’s position may have motivated other countries to develop their own nuclear options.
The study also argues that Israel’s action would persuade other Middle East countries, Egypt or Algeria, to “follow suit and mothball their own nuclear facilities,” which would lead to a regional halt to the production of fissile material that would be the most effective method to successfully isolate Iran.
“It should be made clear, however, that Israel will take the additional step of handing over control of its weapons-usable fissile material to the IAEA only when all states in the Middle East dismantle their fissile producing facilities (large research and power reactors, hexafluoride, enrichment plants, and all reprocessing capabilities) and all nuclear weapons states (including Pakistan) formally agree not to redeploy nuclear weapons onto any Middle Eastern nation’s soil in time of peace,” said the report.
Nuclear nonproliferation expert Henry Sokolski, Executive Director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, and Iran specialist Patrick Clawson, Deputy Director for Research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, edited the report, based on research and meetings with the nation’s leading experts on Iran, the Middle East, and nuclear proliferation.
India and Pakistan have already proved their nuclear capabilities, and the Middle East is close to a nuclear weapons arms race, Sokolski told reporters:
“You have a whole neighborhood of folks posed, at any time, to go nuclear.”
He said the call for Israel to suspend its nuclear development activity is “controversial,” but said: “A Middle East with yet more nuclear powers could turn into a big, big death bath.”
“An Iran with advanced nuclear capabilities that put it close to having a bomb would likely be a more assertive Iran. Iran might well want to throw its weight around,” co-author Patrick Clawson said during a recent discussion of the study at the Washington Institute. “For example, it could claim that the fate of Jerusalem is a matter that concerns all Muslims and therefore Iran should have a say in any settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Iran might become active in the many disputes in the Caucasus region, such as in Chechnya; after all, this is territory Iran lost to Russia less than two hundred years ago.”
Washington’s involvement in Mideast nuclear negotiations are essential, Clawson argued because the US and Iran may well become involved in a Cold War, which he said would only end “as the regime evolves.”
|
By Paul Taylor
Reuters
Mon Nov 28, 2:56 PM ET
BARCELONA - The European Union salvaged a face-saving agreement with Israel and its Arab neighbours on Monday on a joint code of conduct to fight terrorism, at the end of a lackluster summit from which most Arab leaders stayed away.
The 35 nations adopted a five-year work program extending a decade-old economic, political and cultural partnership into sensitive areas of security and combating illegal migration.
But the first Euro-Mediterranean summit failed to agree on a common vision statement because of differences over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that proved as intractable as at the first ministerial conference in 1995.
After two days of wrangling, leaders abandoned attempts to agree a common definition of terrorism, kicking the issue back to the United Nations, but condemned it "without qualification" and vowed to step up cooperation to fight it.
"It's as strong a statement as you can possibly have on the unified determination to fight terrorism in all its forms," British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who co-chaired the two-day summit, told a news conference. None of the 10 Mediterranean partners was on the platform.
The final compromise omitted both the EU's insistence that self-determination could not be used to justify terrorism and Arab demands to include a right to resist foreign occupation. [...]
Regional heavyweights such as Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not come. That undermined the prestige of a meeting marked by strong differences over the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Britain's decision as current EU president to invite Iraq's foreign minister as an observer revived lingering tension over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which many European and Mediterranean states opposed.
But the main focus of debate was terrorism, on which Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq al-Shara spelled out the position of most Arab states, unwilling to condemn violence by Palestinian or Lebanese militants against Israel.
"Success in confronting terrorism on the regional or international levels is contingent upon addressing its root causes and protecting the rights of peoples under foreign occupation to resistance," he told the summit.
Shara was standing in for President Bashar al-Assad who, like Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, was persuaded not to attend because they are in diplomatic quarantine over the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. [...]
|
November 28, 2005
BY SALLY BUZBEE
Chicago Sun Times
Egypt, the world's most populous Arab country, is suddenly roiling with a wide-open, combative election that seems certain to end with the country's main Islamic group, the banned Muslim Brotherhood, as a big winner.
The country's rulers, longtime American allies, are starting to show signs of panic: Police have barred voters from polls and thugs have attacked Brotherhood supporters in recent days in an apparent effort to blunt the group's growing momentum.
CAIRO, Egypt -- For months, the Bush administration has said it is serious about pushing for democracy in the Middle East. It's about to get a serious test of that resolve.
Egypt, the world's most populous Arab country, is suddenly roiling with a wide-open, combative election that seems certain to end with the country's main Islamic group, the banned Muslim Brotherhood, as a big winner.
The country's rulers, longtime American allies, are starting to show signs of panic: Police have barred voters from polls and thugs have attacked Brotherhood supporters in recent days in an apparent effort to blunt the group's growing momentum.
Even before the final round of voting Thursday, Brotherhood loyalists have increased their seats in parliament fivefold. That's not enough to unseat the ruling party, but is still seen as a slap to President Hosni Mubarak.
In some ways, despite the violence, it's going as well as President Bush could hope. A scant nine months after Mubarak took the first steps toward reform under U.S. pressure, it is indisputably clear that Egyptians hanker for choice and change.
Yet, two things about the elections could prove deeply worrisome for the West:
*One is the Brotherhood itself, and what it might do now that it has gained enough power to influence government policy.
*The second is the turmoil Egypt likely would face during any transition, as the aging Mubarak and his long-ruling elite struggle to decide whether to give up power, and if so, how much and how fast.
A chaotic Egyptian government, torn by infighting, would be bad for America.
Hostility toward Israel
So far, the Bush administration has stressed that it just wants a free and fair vote. It sees no distinction between legal candidates and those who support the Brotherhood and ''does not have a preferred outcome,'' says State Department spokesman Adam Ereli.
Still, there is American discomfort with the Brotherhood.
Brotherhood leader Mohammed Mehdi Akef said in an interview Sunday that his group would not press to reverse Egypt's peace treaty with Israel, now that it has greater influence in parliament. But he made clear it is not friendly to Israel either.
''We do not recognize Israel, but we will not fight it,'' he said.
|
Charles Glass
29 November 2005
UK Independent
Will it be illegal one day to say that the US committed war crimes in Iraq?
David Irving has stated that Hitler knew nothing of the genocide of Europe's Jews. It is a crank outburst here, but a crime in Austria, Germany, Poland and France.
The United Nations General Assembly passed by unanimous consent a resolution on 1 November that "Rejects any denial of the Holocaust as a historic event, either in full or in part". If a historian says - as the leading Holocaust historian of our time, Raul Hilberg, does say - that the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis was 5.2 million rather than the six million, will he be tried before an international tribunal for denying the orthodox version "in part"? Should historic inquiry cease, because the UN and the courts of Austria and Germany have stated their position on the Holocaust? That is no way to suppress fascism. It is fascism.
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations General Assembly Resolution, 10 December 1948.
One of my first stories as a reporter for The Observer was a student strike in 1977 at the London School of Economics. Whenever a fellow student spoke against the strikers, they chanted, "No free speech for fascists". It had never occurred to me that free speech should be denied to anyone - fascist, communist or vegetarian. That was 1977, and I have since witnessed free speech denied to both those with whom I agree and those whose views repel me. But my belief in freedom of expression requires me to defend the right of both to speak. Otherwise, what is this free speech I believe in? The freedom to agree?
So, get ready. I am about to defend the right - remember, the right, not the views - of David Irving, who today languishes in an Austrian holding cell for the crime of stating a view that most of us find disgusting. He has stated that Hitler knew nothing of the genocide of Europe's Jews. It is a crank outburst here, but a crime in Austria, Germany, Poland and France. Another anti-Semitic, and much more vicious, Holocaust denier, Ernst Zundel, awaits trial in Germany on a similar charge.
Irving is a historian of the Second World War, who has uncovered important Wehrmacht documents, but defended the Nazis. He supported Zundel in court - not his right to speak, but what Zundel actually said: that the Holocaust was a myth. This places them both beyond the realm of reasonable argument. Their errors could be demonstrated in open debate - as historians have done with Irving's work. Indeed, open debate - without fear of imprisonment and fines - helps to make an open society.
Most of us spoke out in favour of someone who affirmed another genocide. The Turkish government charged the novelist Orhan Pamuk with what can only be called "holocaust confirmation" for asserting that Turkey committed genocide against its Armenian population during and after the First World War. I think Pamuk was right, and I was among many to sign petitions for him. Turkey's citizens should not be obliged to adhere to any orthodoxy. Nor do I believe that Turkey has a right to prosecute those who accuse its armed forces of crimes against the country's Kurdish population. Outside Turkey, this is an easy (and obvious) position to assume. But within the European Community, how many in the literary and human rights worlds who rallied to Pamuk's defence have stood up for the right of two men with whom they disagree to have their say?
I have a free speech hero, a Jewish lawyer in the United States who would never dare deny that Jews were massacred in their millions by Germany. David Goldberger is a law professor at Ohio State University, but in 1977 he worked for the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU has an honourable record defending American blacks in the South and free speech throughout the country. Holocaust survivors in 1977 sought to ban a parade by American Nazis through a Chicago suburb. Goldberg represented the Nazis' right to free expression, and he was pilloried for it. But he believed in the constitutional right to express views that he found odious.
Similarly, a conservative Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Charles Evans Hughes, wrote in 1931 in the case of Near vs Ohio: "The rights of the best of men are secured only as the rights of the vilest and most abhorrent are protected."
Perhaps nothing is more vile and abhorrent than denying the genocides of our time, whether Armenian, Jewish or Rwandan. But nothing could be more fatal to our rights to speak and to write than for us to deny others the right to deny our dearest beliefs. One day, will it be illegal to assert (or deny) that the United States committed war crimes in Iraq?
The United Nations General Assembly passed by unanimous consent a resolution on 1 November that "Rejects any denial of the Holocaust as a historic event, either in full or in part". If a historian says - as the leading Holocaust historian of our time, Raul Hilberg, does say - that the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis was 5.2 million rather than the six million, will he be tried before an international tribunal for denying the orthodox version "in part"? Should historic inquiry cease, because the UN and the courts of Austria and Germany have stated their position on the Holocaust? That is no way to suppress fascism. It is fascism.
|
by Scott McLarty
November 22, 2005
Significant numbers of Democrats in Congress swallowed the Bush Administration's deceptions and brushed aside contrary evidence, voting enthusiastically in October 2002 to transfer their constitutionally mandated war power to the White House, and cheering the invasion that killed over 2,000 American servicemembers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Nearly all congressional Dems voted for the USA Patriot Act. Now they're having second thoughts. As the Iraq venture turns more and more disastrous, we may see eleventh hour conversions among warhawks like Sen. Clinton as the 2008 race heats up. Will The Nation reward such feeble demonstrations of leadership with an endorsement?
In the mid 1850s, right-thinking Americans faced a national crisis for which the existing system and prevailing political parties offered no humane resolution, and the abolitionist Republican Party was founded. A new, independent party, one that seeks to abolish corporate domination, empire, and reckless ecological policy, is no less a necessity at the beginning of the 21st century.
Can anyone still take the Democrats seriously as an opposition party after leaders like Senators Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) firmly distanced themselves from Rep. John Murtha's (D-Penn.) call on November 17 for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq?
In a recent editorial, The Nation declared that it "will not support any candidate for national office who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq a major issue of his or her campaign. We urge all voters to join us in adopting this position." (" Democrats and the War", November 9, 2005
The Nation's editors should be congratulated for taking this stand. But will The Nation and other publications that have opposed the war redirect their support towards candidates and parties that have consistently opposed the war from the beginning and called for withdrawal -- such as the Green Party?
Many publications on the left have undermined their own principles by remaining loyal to Democrats who have abandoned theirs. It's no longer acceptable to endure the accelerating retreat of Democrats, or insist that, since we live in a two-party system, we must continue to support Dems in order to keep Republicans out of power, until a third party insurgence grows strong enough to deserve attention.
Until they begin to promote such an insurgence, such publications are merely helping to maintain the political status quo. And what a dreary status quo it is: Republicans drift towards ever greater extremism, while the mainstream of the Democratic Party more and more ignores its traditional principles and goals -- Fascism Lite vs. GOP Lite.
In 2004, many progressive, antiwar, and ecologically minded voters called their votes for Mr. Kerry's deeply flawed candidacy a necessity, fretting that nothing was scarier than another four years of George W. Bush. The reelected President did not disappoint expectations. But there is something indeed scarier: another century of Bush vs. Kerry.
The Nation has consistently covered and promoted liberal and progressive Democrats, and Greens have likewise been privileged to work along side principled Democrats like Reps. John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney, Jesse Jackson, Jr., and others on everything from opposition to the Iraq War to promotion of national health insurance to the crisis of the right to vote in the wake of the 2000 and 2004 election irregularities. (Let's not forget that it was Greens and Libertarians, not Democrats, who initiated the vote recounts in Ohio and New Mexico after evidence emerged that Republican officials obstructed votes cast by African Americans and young people and manipulated computer voting outcomes.)
Even progressive Democrats have remained loyal to their corporate-funded corporate-friendly party. Witness the role progressive Dems have played in national elections during the past generation: outstanding candidates like Rev. Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown, and Mr. Kucinich ultimately support whichever pro-corporate pro-war candidate wins their party's nomination, herding those who voted for them back into the the fold of a party that has rejected their ideals.
This pattern will repeat in 2008. The Democratic nominee will not be someone who challenged the deceptions behind the decision to invade Iraq or demanded quick withdrawal. The nominee will not be a critic of international trade authorities, an advocate of single-payer national health insurance or repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, or leader of a movement for energy conservation, decreased oil drilling, and other urgently needed measures to curb global warming. He or she will have the full blessing of the CEOs who sit in the skyboxes at the Democratic convention every four years.
As David Cobb, the Green Party's 2004 presidential nominee, said during his campaign, "The Democratic Party's presidential primary is where progressive politics goes to die."
If nominated in 2008, will Hillary Clinton -- who helped her husband kill our most recent chance for single-payer in 1992; who, under pressure from credit card lobbies, voted for the Bankruptcy Bill in March, 2001; who calls for 80,000 more U.S. troops in Iraq, who now soft-pedals her earlier support for women's reproductive rights -- get widespread support among progressives? According to The Nation's editorial pledge, they should not.
But Democrats have also shown a talent for historical revisionism. Significant numbers of Democrats in Congress swallowed the Bush Administration's deceptions and brushed aside contrary evidence, voting enthusiastically in October 2002 to transfer their constitutionally mandated war power to the White House, and cheering the invasion that killed over 2,000 American servicemembers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Nearly all congressional Dems voted for the USA Patriot Act. Now they're having second thoughts. As the Iraq venture turns more and more disastrous, we may see eleventh hour conversions among warhawks like Sen. Clinton as the 2008 race heats up. Will The Nation reward such feeble demonstrations of leadership with an endorsement?
As Sam Smith, editor of The Progressive Review, has observed, progressives stuck in the Democratic groove have become like abused spouses unable to get up and leave.
The Nation's editors have not entirely written off third parties. They have occasionally promoted the Working Families Party, which emerged first in New York and is now branching out in other states. But the Working Families Party, despite some excellent candidates of its own, pursues a strategy that includes cross-endorsement of Democrats in many races and avoidance of challenges against Dems in statewide and national elections. In states like New York, which allows fusion, cross-endorsement serves immediate ballot-status goals. But the Working Families' lack of independence makes it an ancillary party to the Democratic juggernaut (a winning Democrat-Working Families candidate is recognized publicly as a Democrat) and will ultimately consign it to the same fate as the New Party (now defunct) and the late Tony Mazzocchi's Labor Party (moribund).
In the mid 1850s, right-thinking Americans faced a national crisis for which the existing system and prevailing political parties offered no humane resolution, and the abolitionist Republican Party was founded. A new, independent party, one that seeks to abolish corporate domination, empire, and reckless ecological policy, is no less a necessity at the beginning of the 21st century.
The establishment of a permanent, independent, noncorporate people's party with significant numbers of registered voters and a presence in Congress, state legislatures, and other offices in the coming decades would be a tremendous progressive victory. There are lots of obstacles, and it won't make Democrats happy.
But it is achievable.
If progressives retreat from a third party challenge, and if the direction established under President Clinton continues, we can look forward to decades of dreary Dem vs. Repub races, narrow public debate from which the ideals of progressives are absent and the interests of working people disregarded, and probable further drift to the right within both establishment parties. The Democrat Party will not overcome its addiction to corporate money.
The Nation's pledge is admirable, but it says nothing about supporting antiwar candidates. Is this a loophole, in order not to offend Democrats? Or is the pledge a serious statement that its support for Democrats can no longer be guaranteed? If the latter, we invite all who oppose the Iraq war and the bipartisan consensus to consider seriously the Green insurgency, support our candidates, and join us in making the Green Party the great political endeavor of the 21st century.
Scott McLarty serves as national media
coordinator for the Green Party of the United States . He lives in Washington, DC.
|
November 27, 2005
Byas Anand
Times of India
Within days of announcing 30,000 job-cuts in the US, automobile giant General Motors Corp will this week unveil plans to increase its workforce in India by nearly 30%.
NEW DELHI: America's loss is turning out to be India's gain. Within days of announcing 30,000 job-cuts in the US, automobile giant General Motors Corp will this week unveil plans to increase its workforce in India by nearly 30%.
The carmaker has decided to add 450 jobs at its existing plant in Halol (Gujarat) as part of plans to expand presence in India - the emerging low-cost automobile hub in the east.
"GM is going on a hiring spree in India, and it's add jobs both on the factory shop-floor as well in the executive cadre. GM will this week start the process to hire 450 additional people for its India venture," a senior head-hunter told The Times of India.
While it will increase its floor-worker force by 400, another 50 are being added in its executive cadre. "This is in line with the company's plans to expand its presence in India, which GM feels will drive future growth," the source said.
|
By LIZ SIDOTI
Associated Press Writer
November 28, 2005
TUCSON, Ariz. - President Bush said Monday he wants to crack down on those who enter the country illegally but also give out more visas to foreigners with jobs, a dual plan he hopes will appease the social conservatives and business leaders who are his core supporters.
"The American people should not have to choose between a welcoming society and a lawful society," Bush said from the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base about an hour from the Mexican border. "We can have both at the same time."
The touchy issue of immigration has divided lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said he will bring up the issue early next year. The House hopes to tackle some border security measures before adjourning for the year, but little time remains and it has other issues on its plate.
Bush also was pitching his plan in Arizona and Texas on Tuesday, two border states that are home to GOP senators who have been vocal on the need to change immigration laws but who aren't entirely sold on Bush's vision.
The idea for temporary worker visas has been especially divisive and is stalled in Congress. Bush said he does not support amnesty for illegal immigrants, but he does want to give workers a way to earn an honest living doing jobs that other Americans are unwilling to do and issue more green cards.
"Listen, there's a lot of opinions on this proposal," Bush said. "I understand that, but people in this debate must recognize that we will not be able to effectively enforce our immigration laws until we create a temporary worker program."
Bush spoke to a supportive audience that included border patrol agents and military troops. He was flanked by two black Customs and Border Protection helicopters and giant green and yellow signs that said "Protecting America's Borders."
He said he is providing border agents with cutting-edge technology like overhead surveillance drones and infrared cameras, while at the same time constructing simple physical barriers to entry.
The president's push on border security and immigration comes a month after Bush signed a $32 billion homeland security bill for 2006 that contains large increases for border protection, including 1,000 additional Border Patrol agents.
Bush has been urging Congress to act on a guest worker program for more than a year. Under his plan, undocumented immigrants would be allowed to get three-year work visas. They could extend that for an additional three years, but would then have to return to their home countries for a year to apply for a new work permit. [...]
|
By Kevin Morrison
Financial Times
November 29 2005 10:04
Gold on Tuesday broke through the key psychological level of $500, its highest level since December 1987.
Gold held above $500 for just one day in December 1987, while in February 1983 it managed a few attempts, peaking at $509, before falling to $340 by the end of that year.
Paul Merrick, vice president commodities and foreign exchange at RBC Capital, said on Monday current strong fundamentals and insatiable investor demand made a repeat of this price action unlikely in 2006.
"Today's strength has again been built on Japanese investors, keen to diversify away from stocks, bonds and currencies," he said.
Benchmark Tokyo gold futures prices hit a 15-year high of ¥1,954 a gram, up ¥31/g on the day.
Gold has risen in all significant currencies this year, as it has de-coupled from a traditional role as a negative correlation to the dollar.
|
November 29, 2005 edition
Christian Science Monitor
By Mark Clayton, Staff writer
When natural-gas prices have been high during past power crunches, some power companies have elected to sell their gas rather than burn it for electricity. Such "economic outages" occurred in 2004 during one of the sharpest New England cold snaps in years.
On the bitterly cold day of Jan. 14, as winter power demand headed toward a new record, power companies failed to heed grid operators' urgent call to get every functioning power plant in the region online immediately.
From Maine to Florida, from Virginia to Missouri, as much as half the United States confronts the possibility that harshly cold weather will lead to restrictions of natural-gas supplies. In some places - areas heavily dependent on natural gas to produce electricity - the prospect of "rolling blackouts," or controlled power outages, is much higher than in previous winters.
Any natural-gas cutoffs would primarily affect electric-power plants and factories fueled by gas, not homes, and be most likely in the Northeast.
If cold deepens for prolonged periods, the likelihood of interrupted natural-gas supplies rises to 30 percent in the Northeast and to 10 percent as far south as Florida and as far west as Missouri, according to a recent report by the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America (INGAA), a trade association representing gas pipeline companies. In a "worst-case" scenario, chances of interrupted gas rise to 40 percent for the Northeast and 25 percent across the eastern seaboard.
Though power-industry officials in New England are the most concerned, noting the region's lack of fuel diversity and propensity for intense cold, the impact could be far broader. If winter temperatures plummet for long, natural-gas supplies could be quickly depleted, leading to a power crunch in some regions and soaring prices across a wider area, experts say.
"By no stretch of the imagination is this only going to impact New England," says Richard Levitan, an energy expert who has analyzed the impact on the utility industry of this fall's natural-gas shortfall after the Gulf hurricanes. "The Southeast, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and New York, they're all going to feel this."
Even so, gas cutoffs would not automatically mean power outages to residential and commercial consumers. Regions with diversified fuel sources, such as the Midwest or Southern states that rely more on nuclear or coal for electricity, are less likely to see power outages at all. In all regions, residential customers who heat homes with natural gas are unlikely to have their supply interrupted, because gas utilities typically have "firm contracts" with distributors.
A rapid shift to natural gas
Overall, 23 percent of America's electricity-generating capacity is fueled by natural gas. In New England, however, fully 40 percent of electricity is drawn from natural-gas-fired power plants, up from just 17 percent in 1999. At least 22 natural-gas-fired plants, with a collective 10,000 megawatts of generating capacity, have been built in the region since the late 1990s - a shift that, at the time, seemed good for business and for the environment (because natural gas burns cleaner than alternatives).
That buildup has left New England's energy mix skewed toward natural gas, which now costs five times what it did three years ago and which is in short supply this winter. This is where the risk is highest for rolling blackouts - shutting off power for 20 to 30 minutes at a time - in sections of the region's grid.
"If gas supplies are disrupted and seasonal oil storage [backup fuel for generators] is drawn down, then we get into a problem where we're now short of electrical generating capacity," says James Coyne, an energy expert at Lexecon, a Boston economic consulting firm.
Such scenarios might seem a distant threat. Winter began mildly, and natural-gas storage caverns are now almost full. Still, hurricane damage continues to block about 6 percent of the nation's gas supply flowing through pipelines north from the Gulf of Mexico. The government reported last week that 32 percent of the Gulf supply remains "shut in" - a loss of 3.2 billion cubic feet per day. That's at the high end of the range the INGAA predicts will be "missing" this winter.
This missing flow of gas could be critical in mid- to late winter, when reserves are drawn down.
"This loss of supply - even if only temporary - is cause for concern," Phillip Wright of Williams Pipeline, the nation's second largest gas transporter, told Congress this month. "It cannot be emphasized enough that storage supplements, but does not replace, natural gas flowing through the interstate pipeline network."
Potential problems exist in New York, where half of the electricity-generating capacity is fueled by natural gas, and Florida, where it is 35 percent. New York's advantage is that two-thirds of its gas-fired generators are "dual-fuel" facilities that can switch to burn oil.
That's not the case in New England, where only about one-third of the gas-fired generators can burn oil as a backup. As a result, the Independent System Operators of New England, which coordinates power delivery and oversees system reliability across the region, is scrambling.
"We're talking to all the New England states about greater fuel diversity to try to develop more than 1,000 megawatts of dual-fuel capacity," says Ken McDonnell, ISO New England spokesman.
Developing new dual-fuel capability, however, takes time. And environmentalists, meanwhile, are protesting moves to lift air-pollution restrictions on dual-fuel power plants that can burn distillate fuel oil. Massachusetts environmental officials are expected to decide soon whether to allow more oil-burning.
The tale of a very cold day
In the effort to avoid blackouts, a large hurdle may have just been lowered: utilities' push for profits.
When natural-gas prices have been high during past power crunches, some power companies have elected to sell their gas rather than burn it for electricity. Such "economic outages" occurred in 2004 during one of the sharpest New England cold snaps in years.
On the bitterly cold day of Jan. 14, as winter power demand headed toward a new record, power companies failed to heed grid operators' urgent call to get every functioning power plant in the region online immediately.
As ISO New England battled to prevent blackouts from rolling across the region, nine power plants representing 2,159 megawatts of capacity sat on the sidelines, a post-mortem report on the emergency found. Some apparently were hampered by weather-related problems. But others ignored the plea. With natural-gas prices soaring to 10 times their normal levels, some found it more lucrative to sell their gas contracts than to use them to generate power, experts say.
Though blackouts were averted, the incident prompted the ISO to push for a "last resort requirement" to compel generators to make electricity in an emergency. On Nov. 17, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted the request. It won't solve the power problem. But there will be, as the ISO's lawyer wrote to FERC, "a greater opportunity to avoid load shedding that would place human life and property in jeopardy during a period of frigid cold."
|
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
The Washington Post
Nov. 29, 2005
Lobbyist, lawmakers face possible prosecutions — and ballot box uprising
WASHINGTON - For several years now, corporations and other wealthy interests have made ever-larger campaign contributions, gifts and sponsored trips part of the culture of Capitol Hill. But now, with fresh guilty pleas by a lawmaker and a public relations executive, federal prosecutors -- and perhaps average voters -- may be concluding that the commingling of money and politics has gone too far.
After years in which big-dollar dealings have come to dominate the interaction between lobbyists and lawmakers, both sides are now facing what could be a wave of prosecutions in the courts and an uprising at the ballot box. Extreme examples of the new business-as-usual are no longer tolerated.
Republicans, who control the White House and Congress, are most vulnerable to this wave. But pollsters say that voters think less of both political parties the more prominent the issue of corruption in Washington becomes, and that incumbents generally could feel the heat of citizen outrage if the two latest guilty pleas multiply in coming months.
|
27 November 2005
From New Scientist Print Edition
Rowan Hooper
The huge potential of DNA evidence is often blocked by criminal justice systems that refuse to consider it even when it could confirm innocence or guilt.
IT IS a case that is gripping the Philippines and being followed avidly in Spain. A man convicted of kidnap, rape and murder sits on death row. His lawyers argue that a simple DNA test would establish his innocence by proving that a crime was not even committed, but the courts have refused to grant their request.
The case is symptomatic of a wider problem. The huge potential of DNA evidence is often blocked by criminal justice systems that refuse to consider it even when it could confirm innocence or guilt.
Francisco Juan Larrañaga, who has Filipino and Spanish citizenship, is in Bilibid Prison, Manila. He is one of six men sentenced to death in 2004 for the kidnap, rape and murder of sisters Marijoy and Jacqueline Chiong. One of the suspects testified against the others in return for immunity from prosecution.
Conspiracy theories surround the case. A policeman who worked on the case said last week he thought Larrañaga was innocent. Only one body was found, which was identified as Marijoy's, but there are serious doubts about whether it is in fact her - even from the original trial judge. What's more, there are rumours that one or both sisters is living in Canada. A DNA test would establish whether the body is Marijoy, but the supreme court has said no. The president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, promised on Monday that she would intervene to save Larrañaga.
In the Philippines, witness testimony, especially in rape crimes, is often considered strong enough evidence to convict, says Faisal Saifee, a barrister from Fair Trials Abroad, a UK-based charity that helps European Union citizens accused of crimes abroad. This and the cost of a DNA test explains the court's reluctance, he says.
But it doesn't just happen in the Philippines. There are many examples in the US of possible miscarriages of justice that could have been overturned by a DNA test post-conviction. Perhaps the most notorious is the case of Jackie Elliot, sentenced to death in 1986 for the rape and murder of a woman in Austin, Texas.
Elliot's defence team - and all 12 jurors - wanted DNA testing of blood stains found on the shoes of a man arrested at the same time as Elliot, who had not been charged. The trial judge refused their requests and Elliot was executed in February 2003 despite mounting evidence of his innocence.
Sometimes there are happy endings, but it can require an unconventional approach. Cora de Ungria is head of the DNA Analysis Laboratory at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City. She campaigns to promote forensic DNA analysis in human rights cases in Asian countries. Her commitment is admired internationally. "Cora has been a dedicated and ground-breaking force for justice in the Philippines," says Saifee.
Her first success came in the case of Reynaldo de Villa. He was sentenced to death for raping his 12-year-old niece, Aileen Mendoza, who had subsequently given birth to a baby girl. De Villa had always maintained his innocence, but no paternity test had been carried out to establish whether or not he was the father of the child.
Because de Villa was in prison, de Ungria could not obtain a DNA sample from de Villa directly, so she enlisted the help of the prison priest. He visited de Villa carrying a sterile blade and a blood collection vial hidden in his robes.
De Ungria still needed a sample from the child he had allegedly fathered, then aged 10. De Villa's grandson, a schoolmate of Mendoza's daughter, was coached to organise a spitting competition in the playground. He collected the girl's spit in a cup, and de Ungria used it to generate a DNA profile.
The results confirmed that de Villa was not the girl's father, but the supreme court refused to consider the new evidence and so he remained on death row. De Ungria marshalled international pressure and eventually, in February this year, Macapagal Arroyo granted a pardon.
The Philippines holds the record for the number of offences that carry a mandatory or optional death penalty - 52 in all, including drug possession and theft. De Ungria has helped to draft judicial guidelines on the use of DNA evidence in Filipino courts in an attempt to catch miscarriages of justice before it is too late. She hopes the supreme court, which is considering the guidelines, will admit post-conviction DNA evidence. "Like many people, I would like to help others find justice," she told New Scientist.
|
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
17 November 2005
UK Independent
Researchers found an 18 per cent rise in blood fat and an 8 per cent rise in a protein linked with LDL cholesterol among decaffeinated coffee drinkers compared with the those who drank caffeinated coffee or none at all.
Decaffeinated coffee may be worse for drinkers' health than the caffeine-laden kind, scientists reported yesterday.
In the first randomised study of the two coffees, researchers found that the decaffeinated variety raises the level of fats and "bad" cholesterol in the blood more than caffeinated blends.
The finding was presented to a meeting of the American Heart Association after a study of 187 people by the Fuqua Heart Centre in Atlanta, Georgia.
Researchers found an 18 per cent rise in blood fat and an 8 per cent rise in a protein linked with LDL cholesterol among decaffeinated coffee drinkers compared with the those who drank caffeinated coffee or none at all.
Dr Robert Superko, who led the study, said decaffeinated coffee was less healthy because it is made from high-flavour beans that contain more oils. "The decaffeination process can extract flavenoids, so manufacturers tend to choose a bean that has a more robust flavour," he said.
|
26 November 2005
From New Scientist
James Kingsland
Thorkild Sørensen of Copenhagen University Hospital and his colleagues looked at data from the Finnish Twin Cohort Study, in which volunteers filled in questionnaires about their health and lifestyle, first in 1975 and again in 1981. These included questions about height, weight and motivation to lose weight. Even after controlling for smoking and excluding anyone with a chronic illness that could have led to weight loss, Sørensen found that overweight or obese people who intended to lose weight in 1975 and succeeded were nearly twice as likely to have died by 1999 compared with those who had no intention to lose weight and stayed about the same (Public Library of Science Medicine, vol 2, e171).
"I HAVE a great heart and great legs but the rest of me is hopeless," says Stanton Glantz cheerfully. The 59-year-old professor of medicine from the University of California, San Francisco, is just a few supersize colas away from being officially obese, but he reckons he's in tip-top condition. "I just got back from a 350-mile bike trip all over the south-west of the United States," he says. That must have burnt off a few pounds? He laughs. "I lost no weight whatsoever. I was eating like a pig I was so hungry all the time."
The received medical wisdom is that Glantz's weight puts him at risk of a slew of illnesses, from osteoarthritis and cancer to diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. But he is confident that as long as he keeps his weight stable with exercise and eats a sensible diet, the risks are not nearly as serious as they're cracked up to be. Many doctors would disagree, but the balance of scientific evidence may be tipping in Glantz's favour.
Nobody doubts that people living in developed countries are fatter on average than previous generations. But the widely repeated claim that this epidemic of flab is endangering the lives of millions of people is now mired in controversy. Some scientists claim that the most apocalyptic estimates - which put obesity on a par with smoking as a public health hazard - are grossly inflated. They also argue that most of the people who fall into the "overweight" category between normal and obese are perfectly healthy. Stranger still, there is evidence that advising these people to diet may actually put their health at greater risk than being overweight does. Is it time to rewrite the rule book on what constitutes a healthy weight?
The standard way of measuring whether someone is too heavy is to determine their body mass index or BMI (see Graphic). Calculated by dividing your weight by the square of your height, below 18.5 is defined as underweight, 18.5 to 24.9 is normal, 25 to 29.9 is overweight and 30-plus is obese. According to this yardstick, more than half of all adults in the UK are overweight and one-fifth are obese. In the US, around two-thirds of the population weigh too much and a third are obese. Worldwide, there are about a billion overweight or obese people out of a global population of 6.45 billion.
Such figures make shocking reading, but until recently it has been difficult to quantify the effect on public health. Sure, being overweight or obese has been linked with all sorts of health problems. But just how dangerous is it to be too fat?
In March last year a team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, produced a sobering answer. It reported that overweight and obesity was causing 400,000 premature deaths a year in the US alone (Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 291, p 1238), putting it second only to smoking (438,000) as a preventable cause of death. The CDC later admitted a miscalculation and revised the estimate down to 325,000, but the figure still dwarfs the 85,000 for the third most common cause of premature death, alcohol consumption.
Even as the CDC was working on these figures, however, a few experts were starting to question the consensus about the impact of obesity on public health. In May 2004 Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, published a book called The Obesity Myth in which he argued that there was no good evidence that being overweight or obese per se is a health risk (New Scientist, 1 May 2004, p 20).
Shortly afterwards a leading obesity researcher told The New York Times that the apparent explosion in obesity in the US was not what it seemed. Jeffrey Friedman of Rockefeller University in New York, who in 1994 discovered the gene for the appetite-suppressing hormone leptin, told the paper the apparent surge in obesity was caused by a large number of already overweight people edging over the arbitrary dividing line into obesity. This produced a headline figure of a 30 per cent increase in obesity, he said, but in reality all that was happening was that the already fat were getting a little bit fatter.
Then, in April this year, another group at the CDC published an alternative estimate of the number of premature deaths caused by being overweight or obese in the US. Using newer data, a team led by epidemiologist Katherine Flegal put the number of excess deaths caused by obesity at a relatively modest 112,000.
That in itself didn't change anything - the previous estimate, after all, was for obesity and overweight combined. But when Flegal's team looked at the overweight category, they found something astonishing. Being overweight correlated with a reduced risk of premature death - there were 86,094 fewer deaths a year in this category than in the normal range (see Graph). In other words, overweight and obesity combined were causing nowhere near 325,000 deaths a year. The net figure was closer to 26,000 (JAMA, vol 293, p 1861).
The research unleashed a storm. One researcher said the quality of the Flegal paper was "pitiful", while another praised its statistical rigour and told New Scientist that the original CDC paper estimating 400,000 deaths per year was "a piece of trash". Conspiracy theorists on both sides lobbed accusations that the other was in the pay of an interest group such as the food or diet industry.
In response to the controversy, the Harvard School of Public Health quickly convened a symposium on obesity and mortality. It was a triumph for the orthodox view. Speaker after speaker seized upon Flegal's counter-intuitive findings about the overweight category as a sign the results were not to be trusted. Most critics argued that the apparent protective effect of being overweight was an artefact, caused by the normal weight category being full of smokers and people with undiagnosed wasting illnesses.
Surprised by the findings
Smoking certainly promotes weight loss and is, of course, associated with numerous fatal conditions. And some serious diseases such as emphysema cause wasting and may go undiagnosed for years. So it seems reasonable to assume that smokers and the undiagnosed terminally ill could be over-represented in the normal weight category. "A lot of these people have diseases that are going to kill them," says Walter Willett, the Harvard professor of medicine who chaired the symposium.
Flegal, however, insists her team went to great lengths to eliminate biases due to smoking or illness. For example, they excluded deaths that occurred in the first three years after subjects were weighed and measured, which should account for much of the effect of undiagnosed illness. Glantz believes epidemiologists should take the findings seriously. "I teach statistics and that paper is a really fine piece of work. It's bomb-proof," he says. "I've read the Harvard criticisms and they just don't make any sense to me."
Flegal was as surprised as anyone by her findings, but when she did some digging she discovered several other studies of BMI and mortality that showed the same pattern, with people in the overweight category less likely to die than either the obese or people with a "normal" weight. One recent analysis, for example, pooled data from 26 separate studies and found that even after controlling for smoking, being overweight was linked to a small drop in the risk of death compared with normal weight (Annals of Epidemiology, vol 15, p 87). "Although people think there's all this evidence out there showing a high mortality risk associated with overweight, in fact the literature doesn't show it," says Flegal.
"If correct, all these worries about a huge fraction of the population being overweight just go out the window," says Glantz. "It's not a trivial problem, but the focus should now be on the severely overweight." He believes the evidence from Flegal and others now demands a change in the healthy BMI range. "The current definition of overweight is not like the speed of light or pi. What was considered as the normal, desirable weight is too low."
But even if Flegal's results stand up, not everyone would accept that the BMI guidelines need to change. They point out that the sole purpose of Flegal's paper was to calculate excess mortality, and that this does not tell the whole story.
One problem with mortality figures is that they do not take people's quality of life into account. "If the only thing you're looking at is mortality you're missing the big picture," says S. Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. "Overweight people may not be dying so rapidly but they still face serious health problems." There is now good evidence, for example, that medical advances such as drugs to combat hypertension and high cholesterol are keeping overweight people alive in ever-increasing numbers (JAMA, vol 293, p 1868). But that does not mean they are leading healthy, happy lives. "To imply that it's OK to be overweight because we're better at treating its complications is ridiculous," says Olshansky. "It's like saying it's OK to get HIV because we can treat it better."
Another problem with mortality figures is that they may hide the dangers that today's glut of obese and overweight youngsters face as they grow older. David Ludwig is director of an obesity programme at the Children's Hospital Boston, where he has witnessed the dangers at first hand. He says that overweight and obese kids are growing under "extraordinarily unnatural" circumstances. "The possible effects on the long-term health of this generation of children are really frightening," he says. Earlier this year, Ludwig, Olshansky and colleagues forecast that obesity and overweight would reduce average life expectancy in the US by as much as five years during this century (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 352, p 1138).
Improved medical care may be saving the lives of thousands of overweight people, but that doesn't explain why this group seems to be at lower risk of dying early than people in the normal weight category. Willett points out that there are only a handful of common conditions for which being moderately overweight is known to make you less susceptible - bone fractures in the elderly and breast cancer before the menopause. "Apart from these there's really no common disease where being overweight is beneficial, but a long list of diseases where it has an adverse effect on health," he says. Willett claims there is no plausible biological mechanism that could make being overweight a benefit. As far as he's concerned, this ought to be the final nail in the coffin for Flegal's paper.
Flegal, however, does have an explanation. Too much fat may be a bad thing, but the weight of a human body is more than just fat. There is also "lean mass" - muscle, bone, organs and connective tissue. What Flegal may be seeing is a health bonus from extra lean tissue, rather than extra fat. "I wonder whether what we're picking up is an effect of lean mass, but it's speculation at this stage," she says.
Others claim that all the study does is illustrate the shortcomings of BMI. Judged solely on BMI, Brad Pitt and the fitness enthusiast George W. Bush are both overweight. "It's a crude measure that has very well known limitations," says Howard Strickler, an epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. "Muscle weighs more than fat, so a healthy athlete will often have a high BMI even though they are actually very fit." He believes the decreased mortality seen in the overweight category may reflect the health benefits of being fit and muscular.
But even that does not provide a complete answer. Surely there are just as many fit people in the normal weight category, if not more. How come overall mortality is slightly higher in this group than in the overweight one? The answer may not be lower levels of lean mass per se, but a surprising effect on people's health when they lose it.
In June, a study by researchers in Denmark and Finland suggested that people who succeed in losing weight may increase their risk of dying prematurely. It is well known that when people lose weight by eating less, they shed lean tissue as well as fat. And there may be a cost from losing lean mass that offsets the benefits of shedding the blubber.
Thorkild Sørensen of Copenhagen University Hospital and his colleagues looked at data from the Finnish Twin Cohort Study, in which volunteers filled in questionnaires about their health and lifestyle, first in 1975 and again in 1981. These included questions about height, weight and motivation to lose weight. Even after controlling for smoking and excluding anyone with a chronic illness that could have led to weight loss, Sørensen found that overweight or obese people who intended to lose weight in 1975 and succeeded were nearly twice as likely to have died by 1999 compared with those who had no intention to lose weight and stayed about the same (Public Library of Science Medicine, vol 2, e171).
Sørensen is not sure why weight loss should carry this extra risk, but he speculates that it has something to do with loss of lean tissue. He points to several studies showing that the lower your lean mass as a proportion of total mass the greater your risk of dying. "For some reason, to have a low or declining lean body mass is pretty dangerous, but why this should be so is not clear," he says.
His study was relatively small - only 2957 subjects - and it is too early to jump to conclusions. "I wouldn't want to say on the basis of our paper that anyone should stop trying to lose weight," he says.
Fortunately, there is lots of research showing that losing weight through exercise helps to preserve or increase lean mass. And Ludwig points to early evidence from animal studies that diets that cut out refined carbohydrates such as white bread may reduce fat mass while maintaining lean mass. "There's no reason why all diets should have the same impact on lean and fat mass," he says.
All this will be music to the ears of Stanton Glantz, who gave up sugary soft drinks years ago. His BMI may say he is borderline obese, but he reckons he's got plenty of lean mass and a robust heart. "That's a lot more important than what you look like," he says. If Flegal's work is to be believed, he can look forward to a long and healthy life.
|
25 November 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Helen Phillips
“The effect of meditation seems to reverse the usual cortical thinning that occurs with age”
Early trauma seems to cause changes in the brain too. In imaging studies of the emotion centres, the response of people to positive and negative images was analysed. Those who had been through an early life trauma had a blunted response to positive stimuli and heightened reactions to the negative. There were also structural changes in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. Some of these changes have been reported in depression before, Nemeroff points out. "But I am beginning to wonder whether other findings about depression are actually about early trauma. I have no doubt that this is a totally different pathological sub-type."
On the flip side, if experiences can trigger the problem, then perhaps experiences can also treat it. In a study that would have made Sigmund Freud proud, Nemeroff compared antidepressant drug treatment with psychotherapy. His preliminary analysis showed that the techniques had roughly equal effectiveness and a slightly better outcome in combination. But looking at just those people with depression who had been through early trauma, psychotherapy was significantly more effective than drug treatment, and led to remission in 45 per cent of people, even though they had suffered the condition for as long as eight years.
OUR brains form a million new connections for every second of our lives. It is a mind-blowing statistic, and one that highlights the amazing flexibility of our most enigmatic organ. While the figure emphasises how much we still have to learn about brain structure, it also reveals the huge importance of our everyday experiences in making our brains what they are.
Anatomy, neural networks and genes are yesterday's hot topics. Today, neuroscientists are increasingly concentrating on how the way we live our lives creates profound and often long-lasting changes in the structure and connectivity of our brains. They are focusing on how influences as diverse as our emotions, environment, social interactions and even our spiritual lives help make us tick.
To reflect this shift, the Society for Neuroscience in Washington DC last week invited a leading religious figure to open its annual meeting for the first time. The Dalai Lama spoke of ethics and responsibility in scientific research, but he was ostensibly there to tell how meditation, a mainstay of Buddhist practice, could influence our minds and change the structure and activity of our brains, perhaps permanently. Buddhist traditions have developed techniques training people to think compassionately, he told thousands of assembled researchers. And these may be reflected in observable synaptic and neural changes in the brain.
Sara Lazar of Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown presented the details of one such study. Certain brain regions were thicker in experienced meditators, notably the prefrontal cortex, important in higher thought and planning, and the insula on the right side, a region that integrates emotions, thought and senses. The thickening may be caused by new connections, support cells, branches or blood vessels, she says, but whatever the cause, the effect seems to reverse the usual cortical thinning that occurs with age. "It is a real effect to do with meditation experience," says Lazar.
Nature and nurture influence each other, but there is growing interest in finding the details of exactly how our brains can be permanently altered by our experiences. In part, this resurgence has arisen with the ability to make quantitative measures, as opposed to the subjective reports of people's experiences we once relied on, says Lazar. The completion of the human genome project and the decade of the brain initiative -designated by the US Congress in the 1990s - have also made people realise the huge complexity involved in the interaction between genes and experiences.
"Experience modulates gene expression, which leads to substantial behavioural differences," says Charles Nemeroff, a psychiatrist from Emory University in Atlanta. It's quite a new idea, he says, and we are at last describing some of the mechanisms, such as epigenitics, through which environmental factors - whether birth trauma, bad parenting or toxins - can have a long-lasting effect.
His study of 681 people who had suffered major depression for an average of eight years highlighted how significant early life events could be on later mental health. "If you look at measures such as loss of a parent through death, divorce or separation; abuse, either physical or sexual; or neglect, only one-third of patients had no trauma," he reports. "Two-thirds suffered early life trauma. We have to consider this as a risk factor."
Several studies have also linked early trauma to substance abuse, personality disorders and anxiety disorders. Nemeroff suggests the origins may be physical changes in the way people respond to stress. His studies have shown women with depression who also suffered an early trauma responded differently to a stress test, such as speaking to a hostile audience, or perform a taxing serial arithmetical calculation. "It took their cortisol levels sky high," says Nemeroff. Those with depression but no trauma, however, responded normally: their levels were raised but not as high or for as long. A study in men, which is being prepared for publication, shows the same result.
Early trauma seems to cause changes in the brain too. In imaging studies of the emotion centres, the response of people to positive and negative images was analysed. Those who had been through an early life trauma had a blunted response to positive stimuli and heightened reactions to the negative. There were also structural changes in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. Some of these changes have been reported in depression before, Nemeroff points out. "But I am beginning to wonder whether other findings about depression are actually about early trauma. I have no doubt that this is a totally different pathological sub-type."
On the flip side, if experiences can trigger the problem, then perhaps experiences can also treat it. In a study that would have made Sigmund Freud proud, Nemeroff compared antidepressant drug treatment with psychotherapy. His preliminary analysis showed that the techniques had roughly equal effectiveness and a slightly better outcome in combination. But looking at just those people with depression who had been through early trauma, psychotherapy was significantly more effective than drug treatment, and led to remission in 45 per cent of people, even though they had suffered the condition for as long as eight years.
The placebo effect is another area in which we are beginning to understand the brain's response to environmental influences. Tor Wager of Columbia University in New York has shown that prefrontal brain regions, linked with expectation and reward, are active when a placebo is given, and that pain regions, by contrast, become less active. "Placebo changes how your brain processes pain while it is happening," says Wager. "Your expectations can have profound impacts on the brain and the body. The responses are neurobiologically real responses. They are not just how you say you felt." The placebo response is part of the process of getting well.
An interesting implication is that if you no longer respond to your surroundings in such a way as to create any expectation, you will not experience the placebo effect, and may need higher doses of drugs. Fabrizio Benedetti from the University of Turin Medical School in Italy showed that Alzheimer's patients, who have damage to the frontal circuits that mediate expectations, show no placebo effect for pain. "We may have to revise the therapies in mental patients to compensate for the loss in these expectation mechanisms," says Benedetti.
Changes in the brain that depend on experiences can affect many more aspects of brain function as well. Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, reported brain activity in regions that control physical pain in people who had just been left by a lover, showing how emotions can trigger real physical effects.
And diet and exercise affect our brains just as much as our bodies, with bad diets having several deleterious effects on memory, and good diets bringing benefits. A large proteomic analysis described by Fernando Gómez-Pinilla of the University of California at Los Angeles showed that many proteins associated with synaptic structures are produced in response to energy metabolism, including the growth factor BDNF and an important memory protein, CREB. Junk diets reduce the levels of these in rats, he says, while exercise restores them. "Exercise probably exerts its effect on the brain by altering energy metabolism," he says. "It's a nice example of how diet and exercise could combine in people."
"We are moving from the excitement of the human genome to a new complexity," concludes Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford and chief executive of the UK Medical Research Council. He should know: he's the one who reported how many neural connections our brains form every second.
|
24 November 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Helen Phillips
Looking at the group averages, the differences in parents of the autistic children included an unexpected increase in the size of the motor cortex and basal ganglia, areas important for movement planning and imitation. The somatosensory cortex, neighbouring the motor cortex, by contrast, was smaller than average. This region is important for understanding social information such as facial expressions - one key skill that autistic people often lack. These parents also had reductions in the cerebellum, important for coordinating movement, and in a frontal region thought to be responsible for understanding the intentions and feelings of others - the so-called theory of mind area.
SOME relatives of people with autism also display behaviours and brain differences associated with the condition, even though they themselves do not have it. This could make it easier to spot families at risk of having an autistic child. It could also help in the quest to identify the genetic and environmental triggers for the condition, though it seems these triggers might vary from country to country.
Eric Peterson of the University of Colorado in Denver had compared an MRI study of the brains of 40 parents with autistic children to that of 40 age-matched controls. And he told the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington DC that the parents who had an autistic child shared several differences in brain structure with their offspring.
Looking at the group averages, the differences in parents of the autistic children included an unexpected increase in the size of the motor cortex and basal ganglia, areas important for movement planning and imitation. The somatosensory cortex, neighbouring the motor cortex, by contrast, was smaller than average. This region is important for understanding social information such as facial expressions - one key skill that autistic people often lack. These parents also had reductions in the cerebellum, important for coordinating movement, and in a frontal region thought to be responsible for understanding the intentions and feelings of others - the so-called theory of mind area.
In another study, Brendon Nacewicz of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School and colleagues tested whether brothers of autistic children would avoid eye contact with others, a common feature of autism. While the parents seemed normal in this respect, brothers avoided eye contact just as strongly as their autistic sibling. He is now planning to test sisters too. Nacewicz also showed that the amygdala, a region important for processing emotions, particularly fear, was shrunken in the brothers too, just as it is in autistic people.
One theory laid to rest by these findings, says Nacewicz, is the idea that autism somehow falls on the far end of a shyness spectrum. The siblings showed no signs of autism or shyness, despite avoiding eye contact with others. Although gaze avoidance is accompanied by differences in the biology of the brain, he says, other brain areas must somehow compensate for the differences. Peterson agrees. This suggests that several core brain differences have to be present for someone to show the symptoms of autism, he says.
A further complexity in the underlying biology of autism was reported by Antonio Persico from the University of Rome. He found certain genetic variations linked with autism in North America were not present in autistic families in Italy. It is possible that there are regional differences in the environmental factors that interact with different genes to trigger autism, he suggests.
The differences were in a gene that makes an enzyme called paraoxonase. In North American populations, families with autistic members seemed to share a variant of the gene that makes a less active form of the enzyme. In Italian families with autism, however, that variant was no more common than in families without. One job of the enzyme is to inactivate organophosphates, which are often used in American homes as insecticides. In Italy, they are rarely found in the home. So one possible explanation, claims Persico, is that Americans with the less active enzyme use more of it to clear the pesticide, leaving less free to do another important job in helping neurons migrate to their right places during brain development.
In Italian families, the interaction between environment and genes may be different. For instance, an environmental effect may interact with the gene reelin, which also guides neurons to the right place, and has been linked to autism. "The important thing is that I am not trying to prove that organophosphates are bad," says Persico. These children may become sick anyway. The point is that there may be different genetic risk factors and different environmental interactions which lead to autism, he adds.
Dan Geschwind, an autism expert from the University of California, Los Angeles, who chaired the session on brain differences, is yet to be convinced about the claims of environmental triggers, however. "There is no evidence for one," he says, "but we can't rule it out."
|
26 November 2005
New Scientist Print Edition
Dan Jones
Philosophers have long been split into two camps: one arguing that moral judgments arise from rational thought, the other that the roots of morality are emotional. Now, as the subject of morality moves from the philosopher's armchair into the lab, the error of this dichotomy is becoming clear. Researchers looking at the psychological basis of morality are finding that reason and emotion both play a part.
A TROLLEY train comes hurtling down the line, out of control. It is heading towards five people who are stuck on the track. If you do nothing they face certain death. But you have a choice: with the flick of a switch, you can divert the trolley down another line - a line on which only one person is stuck. What do you do? Perhaps, like most people, you believe that it is right to minimise the carnage, so you do the rational thing and flick that switch.
But what if the situation was slightly different? This time you are standing on a footbridge overlooking the track. The trolley is coming. The five people are still stuck, but there's no switch, no alternative route. All you've got is a hefty guy standing in front of you. If you push him onto the line, his bulk will be enough to stop the runaway trolley. You could sacrifice his life to save the others - one for five, the same as before. What do you do now? Suddenly the dilemma is transformed. If you respond the way most people do, you won't push the hapless fellow to his fate. The thought of actively killing someone, even for the greater good, just feels all wrong.
Two logically equivalent situations, yet two different outcomes. What is going on? For decades, this thought experiment has confounded philosophers and psychologists. They have long been split into two camps: one arguing that moral judgments arise from rational thought, the other that the roots of morality are emotional. But the trolley-train dilemma just doesn't fit this black-or-white way of thinking. Now, as the subject of morality moves from the philosopher's armchair into the lab, the error of this dichotomy is becoming clear. Researchers looking at the psychological basis of morality are finding that reason and emotion both play a part.
Meanwhile, brain-imaging studies are highlighting the interplay between the two, revealing the circumstances in which each comes to the fore. And these findings have implications for the way we think about many tricky personal and public policy issues, from stem cell research and abortion to capital punishment and war. The science of morality also demonstrates how moral arguments can influence our behaviour. It may even prompt you to question your own moral values and those of the society in which you live.
The American philosopher Jerry Fodor once quipped that you can drop out of the various debates about the nature of the human mind for a few centuries, return and find that people are still discussing the same questions. Doubtless he exaggerated for effect, but in the case of morality he was not far off. In 1777, the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote: "There has been a controversy started of late...concerning the general foundation of morals; whether they be derived from reason, or from sentiment." Hume favoured the latter, and his "sentimentalist" view battled it out against the more rationalist ideas of others - most notably Immanuel Kant - for two centuries.
Then, in the 1960s the Kantian psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg of Harvard University came up with a theory that dominated for the next 30 years. Building on the work of the cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget, who emphasised the rational component of the child's mind in development, Kohlberg argued that children's capacity to make moral judgements derives from their ability to reason. As their cognitive powers increase, so too does their ability to reason in more abstract ways and hence to make more subtle moral judgements. Until a decade ago, Kohlberg's theory was still the launch point for most psychological discussions of moral decision-making.
"In the end no one found Kohlberg's theory convincing, but it was the only one we had," says Paul Bloom, a developmental psychologist at Yale University. "Things have changed radically in the past five to 10 years."
What has changed? For a start, evolutionary biologists have begun to expose the origins, purpose and biological underpinnings of morality. There is now general agreement that moral practices were somehow evolved. Elements of morality have been discovered in non-human species, particularly other primates. Some possess a sense of fairness, and many have certain codes of conduct that underlie their social interactions and almost certainly developed as adaptive strategies to help individuals cooperate and cope with conflict. This scuppers the idea that morality is entirely the product of higher reasoning.
Gut instinct
In addition, psychologists increasingly recognise the importance of fast, unconscious processes in a range of mental domains from visual perception to language comprehension. Particularly significant here is the study of heuristics - the mental rules of thumb that allow us to make effective decisions based on limited information - which emphasises the importance of emotions (New Scientist, 4 September 1999, p 32). Take disgust, for example. If you come across a piece of mouldy food or rotting flesh, you don't think, "Oh, that's probably bacterially contaminated, and therefore dangerous, so I should get away from it." You just think "Ugh!" and quickly throw it away.
These strands of research have been brought together by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. According to his "social intuitionist model", moral judgements are rarely the result of deliberation. Instead, they are primarily the product of "moral intuitions" which work in much the same way as other emotional responses that guide behaviour. But where do these intuitions come from? Haidt suggests that some, such as "murdering your child is wrong", are evolved faculties of the mind like disgust. Others, such as "capital punishment is wrong", are picked up from our culture through socialisation and may be particular to specific historical and cultural settings (Daedalus, vol 133, p 55).
Studies by Haidt and his colleagues support the idea that reflective thought plays only a limited role in many moral judgements. For example, they presented people with a scenario in which a brother and sister, holidaying in a cabin, decide to experiment by having sex with each other. Both use contraception, so there is no chance of producing a child that would pay the genetic price of inbreeding. They never repeat the experiment and continue their lives normally, with neither suffering any adverse psychological effects.
If you recoil at this, you are not alone. But many people go further - they condemn the act as morally wrong. When pushed to explain why, they often end up saying something like: "I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know it's wrong." According to Haidt, this "moral dumbfounding" suggests that moral reasoning occurs after moral decisions have been made, and is really about publicly justifying moral judgements already reached though intuitive, emotional processes. "The reasoning process is more like a lawyer defending a client than a judge or scientist seeking the truth," he says.
Haidt's theory has been widely applauded for reinstating the role of emotionality in moral judgements. "I agree, and I think many people agree, that some of our moral intuitions are not the product of any reason," says Bloom. "We just have them, either because they're innate or because we scooped them up through socialisation." But, he adds, this is surely not the whole story. Even if reason is not the major element of moral decision-making, it still has the potential to play a vital role. "The amount of time we spend having sex compared with, say, commuting to work, is pretty small, but that doesn't mean that when we write the book of human nature, sex becomes an unimportant curiosity," says Bloom.
Reason can exert its force in at least two crucial ways. Historically, moral deliberation has been a catalyst for moral change. "For example, people thought through the issues that led to the moral notions that slavery is wrong, and that men and women and different ethnic groups should have equal rights," says Bloom. "This has played a huge role in our civilisation and society." Contemplation of moral issues leads to new moral norms, which become part of the moral fabric of the societies that future generations inhabit. Wherever humans have made moral progress, critical thinking has been essential.
In addition, moral reasoning also plays a role in our day-to-day lives. "We all have to decide how to live our lives," says Bloom. "How to divide our time between work and family, what our obligations to friends and colleagues are, whether we donate to charity or make eye contact with the homeless man in the street - and there's no real way around this but to think about the problems."
The growing realisation that human morality springs from both our biology and our culture has inspired Bloom and other developmental psychologists to try to discover what moral knowledge is biologically built into humans. In one study, Bloom's team showed animations to 12-month-old infants in which a ball tries to get up a hill, while being "helped" by a square and "hindered" by a triangle. In a second pair of clips, the ball either "cosied up" to the square, while the triangle remained alone, or it "befriended" the triangle.
From the amount of time the infants spent looking at these films, it was clear that they preferred the movie in which the ball associates with the square. Bloom believes this shows that even very young children have the notion that those who help us are our friends, and those who don't are not, which is a basic building block of morality.
Developmental psychologists are not the only ones investigating what sorts of moral dilemmas evolution has equipped us to deal with. Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive scientist from Princeton University, and his colleagues are using brain-imaging techniques to get a handle on what goes on in the brain when we make moral choices. In particular, they have been looking at the trolley-train dilemma to see what the underlying difference in brain activity is when we decide to flick the switch compared with pushing the man. With the tools of modern brain imaging, Greene and co are beginning to provide an answer where philosophers have floundered.
Time to decide
Their functional magnetic resonance imaging studies suggest that the different situations elicit different brain responses. Given the choice to flick a switch, areas towards the front of the brain, associated with "executive" decision-making functions, become active, much as they do in any cost-benefit analysis. By contrast, when deciding whether or not to push a man to his death there appears to be a lot of activity in brain areas associated with rapid emotional responses. Throwing someone to their death is the sort of up-close-and-personal moral violation that the brain could well have evolved tools to deal with, explains Greene. By contrast, novel, abstract problems such as flicking a switch need a more logical analysis.
As well as using different brain areas in the footbridge scenario, people also take longer to make a decision - and longer still if they decide to push the man. There is evidence of an internal conflict as they consider taking a morally unpalatable action to promote the greater good. This shows up as increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain known to be activated in cognitive conflict. Following this, areas associated with cognitive control and the suppression of emotional responses also light up - with activity particularly marked in people who choose to push.
Greene believes this activity reflects the cognitive effort required to overcome the emotional aversion to harming others. He is currently working on variations of the trolley-train thought experiment to incorporate other moral issues, such as the role that promising not to harm a given individual might have in influencing decisions, and how this affects the underlying brain activity.
Greene and others believe their work has important implications, particularly for emotive issues that elicit reasoned justifications and condemnations in equal measure. "Understanding our moral intuitions about things such as stem-cell research, abortion and capital punishment can change the way we see the issues themselves," he says.
Take the case of human cloning. Leon Kass, a leading US bioethicist and adviser to President Bush, has famously argued that human cloning should be banned because it is disgusting, the so-called "wisdom of repugnance". "But knowing that disgust can be a profoundly irrational emotion undercuts his moral argument," says Bloom. "You don't want to take disgust seriously as a moral indicator, because it has historically been triggered by such things as homosexuality and interracial marriage, which we now don't think of as immoral."
Haidt's experiments show how easy it is for our feelings of disgust to become cross-wired with our sense of morality. For instance, a disgusting but essentially amoral act, such as having sex with an oven-ready chicken, comes to be seen, inappropriately, as morally reprehensible. And disgust is not the only emotion that can become conflated with moral issues. This fact is often exploited, whether consciously or not, by people such as Kass who are arguing for a particular moral stance. Haidt points out that appealing to someone's emotions often carries far more weight than using rational argument. To paraphrase a popular diplomatic line, it's more about winning hearts than converting minds.
The fact that we can play on people's emotions to influence the moral views of a society is alarming to some. "A number of the problems that beset the world result from yoking together certain beliefs with certain moral norms," says Stephen Stich, a philosopher at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "As we become sophisticated enough to know how to manipulate people's norms we ought to start thinking about how to regulate this."
The solution may lie in the realisation that morality is based on both emotions and rational thought. "I hope that people start thinking more seriously about where our moral intuitions come from, rather than taking them for granted," says Greene. If we can learn to question our personal moral assumptions - to see whether we can objectively defend them or whether they reflect a bias or prejudice in our culture, social group or era - that would be moral progress.
|
26 November 2005
New Scientist Print Edition
"If you could go back in a time capsule 4.4 billion years, you'd see a similar amount of continent, blue oceans, sandy beaches and blue skies."
IT'S known as the Hadean eon, from the Greek word for hell. But the early Earth probably looked much as it does today.
A study of zircons, the oldest minerals on Earth, suggests that massive amounts of continental crust were formed soon after Earth's creation 4.56 billion years ago.
Mark Harrison at the Australian National University in Canberra and his team looked at the ratio of hafnium isotopes, which change as a result of the radioactive decay of lutetium, to lutetium itself in 100 zircons dating back between 4 billion and 4.37 billion years. The minerals came from the Jack Hills in Western Australia.
Lutetium is retained in the melting Earth's mantle, whereas hafnium becomes part of the continental crust. High hafnium ratios in the ancient zircon samples indicate that, at the time they were formed, much of the mantle had melted and cooled to produce crust (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1117926). "There have to have been continents, and lots of them," says Harrison.
Earlier work suggests that the young Earth was also abundant in water, painting a very different picture of the Hadean from the traditional concept of a barren, arid world where rocks formed largely from impacts with extraterrestrial objects.
"It may have looked similar to the present day," says Harrison. "If you could go back in a time capsule 4.4 billion years, you'd see a similar amount of continent, blue oceans, sandy beaches and blue skies."
|
By Associated Press
Nov 23, 2005 - 07:33:28 am PST
Rockfall at Mount St. Helens kicked up a dust plume Tuesday that rose above the rim of the volcano's crater, drawing attention in the region.
"It's a nice sunny day and we're having the first couple of rockfalls that we've had in a while that are putting little dust plumes over the crater rim," said U.S. Geological Survey geologist Seth Moran at the agency's Cascade Volcano Observatory here, about 50 miles south of the mountain that erupted to deadly effect in May 1980.
Seismic activity has continued at low levels, Moran said.
The white plume floating above the peak was raising concerns locally.
"When rockfalls go down they kick up a dust plume and people can see it -- especially from Portland," Moran said.
Overcast weather had hidden the mountain for weeks.
"Any time you go through a pause" during which the mountain is not visible, people notice activity more when the peak comes back into view, Moran said.
Mount St. Helens rumbled back to life in September 2004 after years of quiet. In October a flow of molten rock reached the surface, marking a renewal of domebuilding activity that had stopped in 1986.
The 1980 eruption killed 57 people, flattened forests and sent a river of hot mud and ash down the Toutle River Valley.
USGS and the University of Washington continue to monitor the mountain.
|
Kate Ravilious
Tuesday November 29, 2005
The Guardian
'Pinocchio' principle used to find key region
Study could lead to treatment for anorexia
Scientists have identified the region of the brain that is responsible for the way people view their bodies. The parietal cortex generates the body image, and disruption of the region's normal functioning could play a role in conditions such as anorexia and body dysmorphic disorder, in which people grossly over- or underestimate their body size, researchers believe.
The researchers, led by Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at University College London, scanned volunteers' brains while carrying out an illusion that made them think their waists were shrinking.
Each of the 17 volunteers had a vibrating device attached to their wrist to stimulate a tendon, which created the false sensation that the wrist joint was flexing. When they placed their hand on any part of the body, the imaginary wrist movement made them think that part of the body was shrinking or growing.
"This technique is known as the Pinocchio illusion because you feel as if your nose is getting longer when you grab the tip of your nose. It is a way to trick the brain and manipulate the body image," said Dr Ehrsson.
He asked the volunteers to close their eyes and put a hand on their waist. Immediately they felt as if the waist was shrinking by more than a quarter of its original size. At the same time the scientists used a brain scanning technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure changes in the blood flow in the brain.
"We found that a specific part of the parietal cortex was very active during the experiment," said Dr Ehrsson, whose study appears in the online journal Public Library of Science Biology. Volunteers who felt the strongest shrinking sensation showed the highest activity in this area of the brain. "It supports the idea that our brains compute our body size by integrating signals from the skin, muscles and joints, as well as visual cues," he said.
Other studies have shown that damage to the parietal cortex can make people feel their shape has changed.
"People who suffer from migraine with aura can sometimes experience a phenomenon called the Alice in Wonderland syndrome, where they feel that various body parts are shrinking. This could also be linked to the same region of the brain," said Dr Ehrsson.
The scientists believe that an over- or underactive parietal cortex may be partly responsible for conditions such as anorexia and body dysmorphic disorder.
They now hope to repeat their experiment on people with those conditions to see if activity in the brain region differs from those without the condition. They also hope to experiment by stimulating this area of the brain in healthy subjects to manipulate how fat or thin people feel, potentially leading to a way of treating disorders such as anorexia.
|
28 November 2005
UK Independent
Thousands of elderly people, mostly women, are being accused of witchcraft and then murdered or maimed by vigilante groups in Tanzania. But the police and government do little to prevent the deaths, reports Oliver Duff from Mwanza
They came for Lemi Ndaki in the night. "I was sleeping when I heard a noise," explains the 70-year-old Tanzanian grandmother. "There was no security in my hut and the door was easy to open. I got up to see about the noise and someone grabbed me and chopped off my arm with a machete. I think he came to chop my neck but I raised my hand and he only took my arm."
A neighbour heard her cries and took her to the hospital in Mwanza, the nearest city, a three-hour drive away on the shore of Lake Victoria. "They couldn't put my arm back on and the scar still hurts, especially when I'm cold." That is not surprising: the open bone still pokes out from the skin below her elbow, 19 years later.
Other elderly women in her village, Mwamagigisi, haven't been so lucky. Ng'wana Budodi was shot in the head with an arrow. Kabula Lubambe and Helena Mabula were knifed to death. Ng'wana Ng'ombe was also murdered with a machete, and when her mud hut was set alight, her husband, Sami, was burnt alive.
This is the fate awaiting thousands of old people, mostly women, who are accused of witchcraft in this rural and isolated corner of east Africa. The killings are escalating in many areas, perhaps numbering more than 1,000 a year, but the Tanzanian government and police do nothing to stop them.
Although belief in witchcraft is common across much of sub-Saharan Africa, relatively few people persecute suspected sorcerers. What exists in the regions of Mwanza, Shinyanga and Tabora - predominantly Sukuma by tribe - is a localised hysteria reminiscent of the witch burnings and trials-by-ordeal of Salem or medieval Europe.
A combination of poverty, ignorance and personal jealousies leaves fearful and frustrated peasants quick to blame any adverse act of fate - a dead child, a failed crop, an inheritance settlement where a sibling receives all the land - on witchcraft. Throw into the pot malicious gossip and an often fatal bout of finger-pointing at old women, and the result is vigilante groups of professional killers moving from village to village, accepting payments to remove the "problem" by hacking, beating or burning. Four cows or $100 is said to be the going rate.
Sometimes local outrage is such that mob rule breaks out and the "witch" is openly lynched. One of the most surprising aspects is the attacks often originate from the victim's family.
"We are talking big numbers as not all cases are reported," said Simeon Mesaki, a sociologist at the University of Dar es Salaam who specialises in witch killings. "They appear to be increasing in some areas. In Shinyanga region you are talking a minimum 300 a year that we know about. Mwanza is probably the same. About 80 per cent of reported attacks are against elderly women."
In 2003 the Tanzanian government said more than 3,072 witch killings had occurred since 1970 - but a government commission said in 1989 that 3,693 had been reported to police between 1970 and 1984 alone. A regional police chief admitted they were a daily occurrence, and a leaked survey by the ministry of home affairs said 5,000 people had been lynched between 1994 and 1998. The problem is so prevalent that villages have been set up populated exclusively by accused witches forced to flee their communities. "The government figures are very low, not accurate," said one official who asked not to be named. "I know a much higher number, and even that is not the full situation."
The root cause of the killings is that village life is so hard, prompting neighbours and relatives into competition over resources that can spill into violence behind the smokescreen of witch hunts.
These are the most deprived parts of a country whose people have an annual income of $330 and a life expectancy of 46 years. There is no electricity or running water; home is a mud hut with a straw roof. Few roads are passable during the wet seasons and 60 per cent of villagers lack adequate sanitation facilities. Rainfall is low and unreliable so crops struggle. Lions and leopards from the nearby Serengeti attack cattle or people.
These conditions result in poor employment, literacy and general health, and susceptibility to superstition. The incidence of HIV/Aids - a mystery to some locals - is thought to be much higher than the countrywide average of one in 10 adults and is decimating the working 18-49 generation. Malaria, typhoid, polio and dysentery kill many more under-fives than the national mortality rate of 165 deaths per 1,000 children.
But life has always been hard here and witch killings were sporadic until the late 1960s. What prompted the explosion in murders was the breakdown of the traditional tribal system of governance. The collectivisation policies of Tanzania's popular first President, Julius Nyerere, tried to bring together 120 tribes through a common language, Swahili. The dialect policy proved successful: despite Tanzania's diversity, it is one of Africa's most harmonious societies.
The second policy, Ujamaa, proved disastrous. It demanded socialist farming collectives, bringing together distant peasants for work and access to basic facilities (many are still waiting for these). Ujamaa's idealism was suffocated by the lack of individual incentive and sowed a more murderous seed by disbanding the system of village chiefs, outlawed in 1963 and replaced by faraway officials.
The chiefs had been responsible for resolving local conflicts - not always amicably, but firmly. Into the authority vacuum stepped the unsung culprits of the witch killings that would tear apart rural harmony: traditional healers, or, as we would crudely recognise them, witch doctors.
This motley crew of diviners (fortune tellers), rain makers, herbalists, bone sitters and traditional birth attendants accumulated great power over their clients. Many enjoyed good reputations for patient care even if their scientific knowledge was poor. But a new generation of hoaxers has set up shop in villages and by highways to prey on passing motorists and pedestrians worried about their fate. These "briefcase specialists", as some locals laughingly call them, attribute undiagnosed illnesses to witchcraft, and - for a price - direct their vengeful clients to the accused sorcerer. Hence the rise in witch killings.
It is the elderly, particularly those whose families have died and so have no protection, who bare the brunt of people's frustrations and anger. Diviners spread money-spinning stories that an individual keeps hyenas and tames snakes, digs up corpses and eats the flesh, and stays up all night bewitching people - hence her bad temper, grey hair and the bags under her bloodshot eyes (actually the result of years toiling over cow dung cooking fires).
A law was passed two years ago obliging the ministry of health to set up a traditional healers' union with a code of conduct for members, but the effect has yet to be noticed.
In Mwamagigisi, the nfumu (diviner), Gamawishi Shija, said people needed to know if they had been bewitched by a neighbour so they could "stop the problem". The 44-year-old Maasai said: "When you have a disease which is unknown you can see it is witchcraft. Ancestors tell me who the witch is when I sleep. Then I tell the patient. When the person dies, [relatives] want to kill the witch. It is for security."
She breaks away from her explanation to tend to a client. The ceremonial importance of handing over money is immediately apparent. Once a coin is tossed in her basket, the diviner sets off on a 10-minute, eyes-closed medley of bell-ringing, whistling and shaking a maraca - to contact the ancestors. Her chants grow louder to drown out the sound of a patient's cough in a hut behind her. Once finished, she returns to her client: "Maybe you are suffering with your backbone, your legs?" With no easy access to dispensaries and medical advice, this is a common experience for rural Tanzanians.
The witch killings are not a problem eroded by the dribble of modernity - radios, mobile phones and cars - into villages. If anything, peasants' growing awareness of their poverty compared to the rest of the country only exacerbates tensions.
The day we passed through Magu town, Mwanza, on the way to the countryside, a old woman was murdered in nearby Busami village after relatives accused her of bewitching her terminally ill husband to an early grave.
Many murders go unreported because villagers cover up the killings to avoid police attention. If the police do receive a report, they arrive a day or two after the attack, once a 4x4 vehicle can be found to negotiate the country trails. By then the killers have fled and there is no evidence.
The best officers can do is round up the victim's neighbours and question them until they buy their way out of jail. Regardless of corruption, law enforcement officials lack the resources to solve the crime and prosecute the perpetrators.
"The government is condoning the killing," said Scolastica Jullu, the executive director of the Women's Legal Aid Centre in Dar es Salaam. "Except for cases of rape of older women, I don't find anyone taken to court. If it was a man or young woman who was killed, the police would investigate, but because it is old women they don't worry."
The government says with so few resources it can do little more than encourage NGOs interested in the problem. "This is an evil, repugnant practice", the district commissioner for Magu, Elias Maaragu, said. "But if old people have no children to protect them, it is not like it is in the UK where you house them together and give them an allowance."
Stepping into this void is a handful of NGOs targeting trouble spots with educational programmes. One charity, Maperece, is recognised as having had particular success in Magu. It gets £20,000 a year from British donors through Help the Aged's Adopt a Grandparent scheme, allowing its 12 volunteers to support elderly people in 58 villages. But such charities are the only agents likely to intervene. Until the Tanzanian government can be embarrassed into action, and until it controls less pitifully empty coffers, that will remain the case.
Readers wishing to sponsor a grandparent, which costs £12 a month, can contact Help the Aged at www.helptheaged.org.uk. Sponsors receive a photo of their grandparent and newsletters.
|
AFP
Nov 28 9:50 AM US/Eastern
The H5N1 strain of bird flu seen in human cases in China has mutated as compared with strains found in human cases in Vietnam.
Chinese labs have found that the genetic order of the H5N1 virus seen in humans infected in China is different from that found in humans in Vietnam, Xinhua news agency reported Monday. [...]
"But the mutation cannot cause human-to-human transmission of the avian flu," he noted. [...]
|
On the fourth
anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Laura Knight-Jadczyk
announced the availability of her latest book:
In the years since the 9/11 attacks, dozens of books
have sought to explore the truth behind the official
version of events that day - yet to date, none of
these publications has provided a satisfactory answer
as to WHY the attacks occurred and who was ultimately
responsible for carrying them out.
Taking a broad, millennia-long perspective, Laura
Knight-Jadczyk's 9/11:
The Ultimate Truth uncovers the true nature of
the ruling elite on our planet and presents new and
ground-breaking insights into just how the 9/11 attacks
played out.
9/11: The Ultimate
Truth makes a strong case for the idea that September
11, 2001 marked the moment when our planet entered
the final phase of a diabolical plan that has been
many, many years in the making. It is a plan developed
and nurtured by successive generations of ruthless
individuals who relentlessly exploit the negative
aspects of basic human nature to entrap humanity as
a whole in endless wars and suffering in order to
keep us confused and distracted to the reality of
the man behind the curtain.
Drawing on historical and genealogical sources, Knight-Jadczyk
eloquently links the 9/11 event to the modern-day
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She also cites the clear
evidence that our planet undergoes periodic natural
cataclysms, a cycle that has arguably brought humanity
to the brink of destruction in the present day.
For its no nonsense style in cutting to the core
of the issue and its sheer audacity in refusing to
be swayed or distracted by the morass of disinformation
that has been employed by the Powers that Be to cover
their tracks, 9/11:
The Ultimate Truth can rightly claim to be THE
definitive book on 9/11 - and what that fateful day's
true implications are for the future of mankind.
Published by Red Pill Press
Order the book today at our bookstore. |
Readers
who wish to know more about who we are and what we do may visit
our portal site Quantum
Future
Remember,
we need your help to collect information on what is going on in
your part of the world!
We also need help to keep
the Signs of the Times online.
Send
your comments and article suggestions to us
Fair Use Policy Contact Webmaster at signs-of-the-times.org Cassiopaean materials Copyright ©1994-2014 Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk. All rights reserved. "Cassiopaea, Cassiopaean, Cassiopaeans," is a registered trademark of Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk. Letters addressed to Cassiopaea, Quantum Future School, Ark or Laura, become the property of Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk Republication and re-dissemination of our copyrighted material in any manner is expressly prohibited without prior written consent.
|