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"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 |
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©2005 Pierre-Paul Feyte |
AFP
Wed Nov 16, 2:16 PM ET
CAIRO - Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood said it had won 34 seats in the first phase of legislative elections, in a breakthrough for the banned but tolerated Islamist group.
Its candidates, campaigning under the banner "Islam is the solution" in the three-phase election, are aiming for an overall tally of between 50 and 70 seats in the 454-seat parliament.
Spokesman Hassan el-Eryan said the movement had already doubled its representation in parliament, winning 20 percent of the seats being contested in the first round, following a run-off election on Tuesday.
The figure was confirmed by the state news agency MENA.
The Brotherhood held a total of 15 seats from the previous poll in 2000, while two more phases of this election have yet to be held.
Brotherhood candidates, who form the major opposition in Egypt, stand as independents to circumvent the problem of illegal status although this excludes the movement from figuring officially in the results.
"It's a great victory for the Muslim Brothers," said Mohammed al-Sayyed Said, deputy president of Al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies, attributing their advance to "a regime that had no credibility and ... authorised corruption".
George Ishak, spokesman of the opposition movement Kefaya, said the result was a setback for Egypt. "The nation is ill. All we have are confessional slogans and corruption," he told AFP.
The voting on Tuesday in Cairo and seven other regions was for a total of 164 seats. It was marked by violence, corruption and claims of vote-rigging by President Hosni Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party (NDP).
NDP candidates won nearly 70 seats, with between 45 and 50 so-called independents, who do not officially represent the party, expected to rally to it in parliament.
In the 2000 election, more "independents" than NDP official candidates won seats, but eventually gave the party control of 404 seats out of the 444 contested. A further 10 seats are directly filled by Mubarak appointees.
Overnight Tuesday, some 50 supporters of independent candidates set ablaze the local NDP headquarters in Imbaba, a poor district of Cairo, police said, adding that no one was hurt.
"Irregularities occurred in several constituencies," said Egypt's Human Rights Organisation, singling out in particular acts of violence and intimidation by supporters of NDP candidates.
The Brotherhood, the Arab world's oldest Islamist movement, puts itself forward as a moderate organisation seeking the establishment of an Islamic state.
Despite its charges of vote-rigging by Mubarak's party, the Brotherhood in this election has encountered fewer obstacles that in any previous one since its creation by Hassan el-Banna in 1928.
Its gains have come from an aggressive, well organised and carefully-crafted welfare-oriented campaign.
Coptic Christian figures said Wednesday that it was time for the Brotherhood to spell out its political agenda.
"Now that they have a high score, it is time for them to clarify their position towards the Copts of Egypt, something which they have not done to date," said Ishak.
Munir Fakhri Abdel Nour, an official of the liberal party Al-Wafd, said the Brotherhood "must now accept the democratic rules of the game and accept that the state is not founded on religion".
Abdel Nour said the result was a "protest vote" by the Egyptian electorate.
Tuesday's first round run-off followed Egypt's first ever contested presidential election in September which saw Mubarak returned to office in a landslide.
While the presidential election triggered an unprecedented national debate on reform, the legislative polls are a very local and personalised affair where votes are lost and won with promises for micro-projects, jobs and bribes.
The second round, which includes the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, is due to start on November 20. Voting wraps up on December 7.
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By Henry Makow Ph.D.
November 25, 2002
The headquarters of Islamic terrorism is London, England, where the Anglo-American Establishment sponsors the radical "Muslim Brotherhood" in order to advance its long-term goal of plutocratic global dictatorship. [...]
"Osama bin Laden is not, nor has he ever been, the leader of the international Islamist movement which is directed by the International Muslim Brotherhood."
Goodgame continues: "Osama bin Laden has been used effectively as a figurehead for the Brotherhood's militant branch to take responsibility for its atrocities, but he is not the mastermind... By the same token, the Muslim Brotherhood is a tool by the British-based Globalists whose main objective is to overthrow the established world order and create a new one-world system of global governance."
Goodgame cites former British Intelligence Officer, Dr. John Coleman, who says the Muslim Brotherhood is a secret freemason order set up by the great names of British Middle East Intelligence, T.E. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and St. John Philby to "keep the Middle East backward so its natural resource, oil, could continue to be looted."
The Muslim Brotherhood has been used to check nationalist movements led by such figures as Nasser (Egypt), Bhutto (India) and the Shah of Iran who tried to develop their countries. Without the British, "radical Islam would have remained the illegitimate, repressive minority movement that it has always been, and the Middle East would have remained stable and prosperous," Goodgame says.
The Muslim Brotherhood is now a powerful faction in the global oligarchy. Goodgame cites Robert Drefuss, author of "Hostage to Khomeini" (1980):
" The real Muslim Brothers are ... the secretive bankers and financiers who stand behind the curtain, the members of the old Arab, Turkish, or Persian families whose genealogy places them in the oligarchic elite, with smooth business and intelligence associations to the European black nobility and, especially, to the British oligarchy.
And the Muslim Brotherhood is money. Together, the Brotherhood probably controls several tens of billions of dollars in immediate liquid assets, and controls billions more in ...everything from oil trade and banking to drug-running, illegal arms merchandising, and gold and diamond smuggling. By allying with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Anglo-Americans are not merely buying into a terrorists-for-hire racket; they are partners in a powerful and worldwide financial empire..."
By fabricating a bogus war between Islamic fundamentalism and the West, the globalists are able to attack their real enemy, humanity. Pulling the strings, they will ensure that both Western and Muslim states are degraded and finally completely subjugated to their odious rule.
The globalists have long been using wars to subvert, demoralize and destroy Western civilization. They backed the Nazis and the Soviets in World War Two. They created the Punch and Judy show that was the Cold War. They tied U.S. hands while backing Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. [...]
Zionism is supposed to represent the "West" in this sham war with Islam. Americans are being groomed to become like Israelis, victims of daily acts of "Muslim terror."
According to Swiss journalist Richard Labeviere ("Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam" 2000) radical Islam is an essential "complementary enemy" to Zionism, which also seeks regional hegemony. According to the "Yinon Memorandum" (1982) Israel intends to splinter the Arab countries into several small cantons along ethnic lines. None of these will be able to challenge Israel, which, like the US is a disposable implement of the globalist agenda. (207)
The Palestinian terrorist "Hamas" movement is a product of the Muslim Brotherhood. According to Labeviere, it serves the interests of the Israeli right wing, and has received secret financial support from the Israeli "Shin Beth." (203-205). Thus, Palestinian suicide bombers play straight into Ariel Sharon's hand.
Meanwhile, back in the USA, "Muslim terrorist attacks" are an excuse to lay the foundations of a police state. These attacks, which could become nuclear or biological, might serve as a pretext to declare martial law, suspend elections and round up dissidents, i.e. anyone who is not buying the lie.
This may seem incomprehensible to Americans now when the economy is still being propped up. Once the US has done the globalist's dirty work, interest rates could rise and debt ridden Americans could be stripped of their assets, as they were in the Depression.
The Homeland Security Act is designed to control all US law enforcement agencies so that elements in the CIA and Mossad can target Americans with impunity, like they did on Sept. 11. [...]
In conclusion, mankind is in the clutches of a diabolical multi generational conspiracy. A Satanic, criminal cartel has subverted all social institutions and is slowly crafting a brutal global dictatorship. Our political and cultural leaders are witting and unwitting pawns. They are fabricating a phony war between Islam and the West in order to accomplish the degradation of both.
I realize this vision seems incredibly bleak. The mass media holds us in a powerful illusion of normalcy. However, expecting the worst means you will never be disappointed. If you are wrong, you are relieved. If you are right, you are prepared.
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www.chinaview.cn
2005-11-17 22:11:17
GAZA, Nov. 17 (Xinhuanet) -- Thousands of al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, armed wing of the dominant Fatah movement, demonstrated in the Gaza City on Thursday, calling on the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to carry out investigations into the death of the late leader Yasser Arafat.
Demonstrators flooded the Gaza streets, waving yellow flags of the Fatah youth group and the red-black-white-green flags of the PNA.
The al-Aqsa group said it was far from being enough to hold commemorations of Arafat through conferences and meetings, demanding a thorough probe into Arafat's death.
The rally came one day after a senior Palestinian official told the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper that Arafat was poisoned by Israel.
"Arafat was poisoned in his ear before he fell sick on Sept. 25, 2003. He was afflicted with a disease that lasted for 16 days. The illness resulted in a 13-km reduction in his weight. No doctor was able to diagnose his illness at that time," Ahmad Abdul Rahman said.
According to Rahman, a close aide of Arafat who is also a member of the elite Fatah Revolutionary Council, the poison was put into Arafat's ear when the leader was embracing and hugging people.
Last Friday, the Palestinians commemorated the first anniversary of Arafat's death.
The long-time Palestinian leader passed away in a French military hospital on Nov. 11, 2004. The cause for his death has remained unclear.
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Last Updated: Thursday, 17 November 2005, 08:31 GMT
BBC
US Vice-President Dick Cheney has launched a vitriolic attack on politicians accusing the White House of misusing intelligence to invade Iraq.
Opposition Democrats were guilty of spreading "cynical and pernicious falsehoods", he said.
As a principal architect of the war, the vice-president has come in for a good deal of personal criticism.
The Democrats' John Kerry later said it was hard to name a Bush official with "less credibility on Iraq".
Another senior Democrat, Senior Harry Reid, dismissed the vice-president's "tired rhetoric".
"Political attacks do nothing to get the job done in Iraq," he said.
'No sitting back'
Mr Cheney resorted to language far stronger than any used before by the Bush administration, the BBC's Justin Webb reports.
The vice-president called the Democrats "opportunists" who were peddling "cynical and pernicious falsehoods" to gain political advantage while US soldiers died in Iraq.
"The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory or their backbone - but we're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," he said.
A claim that the administration had misled Americans before the war - was one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in Washington, the vice-president continued.
Nobody will be surprised that he is fighting back after rumours he has lost the trust of the president and might be forced to resign but the tone of his comments caused some raised eyebrows within minutes of their delivery at a Washington dinner, our correspondent adds.
President Bush last week suggested politicians were making "false charges" about the reasons for going to war.
Amid new questions in Congress about the intelligence used to justify the invasion, he said it was "irresponsible to rewrite history".
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Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday November 17, 2005
The Guardian
Bush's White House is dismissive of history, yet increasingly desperate to rewrite it.
One year ago, after his re-election, President Bush brashly asserted: "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style." Twelve months later, Republicans were thrashed in elections for the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey. In St Paul, Minnesota, the Democratic mayor who endorsed Bush for re-election a year ago was defeated by another Democrat by 70% to 30%. Then the Republicans in the Congress split and failed to pass Bush's budget. That was followed by the Senate's rejection of Bush's torture and detainee policy by a 98-to-0 vote and by the overwhelming passage of a resolution stipulating that the president must submit a strategy on the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.
The turn against him in public opinion has been slowly considered and is therefore also firm. A majority believe his administration manipulated prewar intelligence to lead the country into the Iraq war, and two-thirds disapprove of his policy on the war. His political capital already appears spent, and he has retreated from the ruins of his grandiose agenda into a defence of his past.
In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war, Bush was the man of action who never looked back, openly dismissive of history. "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead." But his obsessive interest in the subject is not posthumous. The Senate's decision to launch an investigation into prewar disinformation has provoked a furious reaction.
On Veterans' Day (November 11), Bush addressed troops at an army base: "It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." He accused "some Democrats and anti-war critics" of lying in stating that "we manipulated the intelligence".
Later, Bush spoke before troops at an air force base, where he stated that the Democrats "now rewriting the past" are "sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy". The soldiers "deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them into war continue to stand behind them". Unless "our will is strong", disunity will threaten "victory". While the "ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life" besieges us from without, the most insidious undermining comes from within. Thus an American president has updated the "stab in the back" theory of General Erich Ludendorff, who stated in February 1919 that "the political leadership disarmed the unconquered army and delivered over Germany to the destructive will of the enemy".
The former Republican speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, always notable for his visions, has compared George Bush in his travails to Abraham Lincoln before Gettysburg. Gingrich, who has recently written a series of counterfactual novels depicting a southern triumph in the civil war, communicated his latest flight of fancy to a longtime former diplomat. "We are at war," insisted Gingrich. "With whom?" he was asked. "The Democrats," he apparently replied without hesitation. For Gingrich, ever the Republican guru, history is a plaything of the partisan present.
Bush's adoption of the Ludendorff strategy of blaming weak politicians for military failure and exalting "will" sets him at odds with liberal democracy. His understanding of history also clashes with the conservative tradition that acknowledges human fallibility and respects the past. Bush's presidency is an effort to defy history, not only in America, writing on the world as a blank slate. Now he wants to erase memory of his actual record, substituting a counterfactual history. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Lincoln. Never mind.
· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars
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By Conn Hallinan
Asia Times
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
In wake of a United Nations investigation implicating a number of Syrian and Lebanese officials in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, the Bush administration is calling for international sanctions and leaking dark hints of war.
But the United States is already unofficially at war with Syria. For the past six months, US Army Rangers and the Special Operations Delta Force have been crossing the border into Syria, supposedly to "interdict" terrorists coming into Iraq. Several Syrian soldiers have been killed.
The analogy the administration is using for this invasion?
Cambodia, which the Richard Nixon administration accused of harboring North Vietnamese troops during the war in Southeast Asia. On April 30, 1970, American and South Vietnamese army units stormed across the border, igniting one of the great disasters of all time. The invasion was not only a military debacle; it led to the rise of Pol Pot, who systematically butchered some 2 million Cambodians.
As in Vietnam, the American and British line in Iraq is that the war is fueled by foreign fanatics infiltrating from Syria and Iran. In an October talk to the National Endowment for Democracy, President George W Bush told the audience that "Iran and Syria" have allied themselves with Islamic terrorist groups; he warned that the "United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them."
According to the Financial Times newspaper, the Bush administration is already discussing who should replace Syrian President Bashar Assad, with the White House leaning toward sponsoring an internal military coup. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley - the fellow who brought us the Niger-Iraq uranium fairy tale - is in charge of the operation.
Flynt Leverett of the Brookings Institution says the cross-border raids are aimed at encouraging the Syrian military to "dump" Assad. A military coup was how the US helped put Saddam Hussein in power so he could liquidate the Iraqi left.
The White House, in fact, knows that foreign fighters have very little to do with the insurgency in Iraq. The conservative London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that the number of foreign fighters is "well below 10%, and may be closer to 4 or 6%". American intelligence estimates that 95% of the insurgents are Iraqi.
The Bush administration has long had its sights on Iran, which Bush calls "the world's primary state sponsor of terrorism". These are sentiments recently echoed in London, where Prime Minister Tony Blair accused Tehran of smuggling weapons and explosives into Iraq to attack British troops in Basra. In one of history's great irony-challenged moments, Blair said, "There is no justification for Iran or any country interfering in Iraq."
Provocations
The US has been provocatively sending unmanned Predator aircraft into Iran, supposedly looking for nuclear weapons, but most likely mapping Iranian radar systems, information the US would need before launching an attack. According to Irish journalist Gordon Thomas, the US has already targeted missiles at Iranian power plants at Natanz and Arak.
Some 4,000 fighters of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), an armed organization that seeks to overthrow the current regime in Tehran, have a base north of Baghdad near the Iranian border. The US has thrown a protective umbrella over the MEK's soldiers and equipment, although the State Department classifies the organization as "terrorist".
Most of the information on Iran's nuclear weapons programs comes from the MEK, which has an uneven track record for accuracy. In any case, there is a disturbing parallel between the role the MEK is playing in developing information on Iran's weapons of mass destruction and the pre-war intelligence on Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction programs cooked up by Ahmad Chalabi and the group of Iraqi expatriates gathered around the Pentagon.
A major player in all this is Israel, where the Likud and its US supporters have long lobbied for a US attack on Iran and Syria. In a speech in May to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Richard Perle, a Likud adviser and former Bush official, said the US should attack Iran if it is "on the verge of [developing] a nuclear weapon". Along with David Frum of the Weekly Standard, Perle co-authored An End to Evil, which calls for the overthrow of "the terrorist mullahs of Iran".
An Israeli proxy?
Vice President Dick Cheney has even suggested that Israel might do the job. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the US recently sold Tel Aviv 500 GBU-27 and 28 "bunker buster" guided bombs (although Syria would be a more likely target for such weapons).
The Israeli right has been spoiling for a fight with Syria for some time. The Israelis bombed near Damascus last year, and one cabinet minister, Gideon Ezra, threatened to assassinate Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made a similar threat about Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasallah.
The Sharon government is just as belligerent about Iran. When he was Israeli chief of staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon said he hoped international pressure on Iran would halt its development of nuclear weapons, adding ominously, "If that is not the case we would consider our options."
One Israeli intelligence official told the Financial Times, "It could be a race who pushes the button first - us or the Americans."
What that official meant by "the button" is not clear, but the logical candidate is a nuclear strike. In 1981, the Israelis used conventional aircraft and weapons to destroy the Iraqi nuclear power plant at Osirak, but an attack on Iran's facilities would be another matter.
Following the 1981 attack, the Iranians hardened and dispersed their nuclear infrastructure. Israel's newly purchased "bunker busters" might do the job, but distance is a problem. Iran is a lot farther from Israel than Iraq, and Israeli aircraft would have difficulties making a round trip to Iran without mid-air refueling. Israel has missiles, however, plus several hundred nuclear weapons, and there are at least some in Tel Aviv who wouldn't flinch from using them.
Last month senior Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin, admitted passing classified information on Iran to Israel through two AIPAC employees. Franklin used to work for former under secretary of defense Douglas Feith, and has close ties to neo-conservative Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, who said, "Tehran is a city just waiting for us."
If all these names sound familiar it is because they are the ones who brought us the war in Iraq.
Prospects for invasion: Cambodia redux?
Would the United States (possibly allied with Britain and Israel) actually attack Iran and/or Syria?
Iran seems a stretch. The country has three times the population of Iraq, almost four times the land area, plus many mountains in which one really does not want to fight.
Iran also has considerable international support, and while a number of nations are nervous about its nuclear activities, the country is not seen as a regional threat. Its military budget is only one-third what it was in 1980 and, according to Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes, Iran actually has fewer tanks and planes than it did 20 years ago.
Some of that support is based on the fact that Iran has the second-largest oil and gas reserves on the planet, reserves that Europe, China and India simply cannot do without.
Syria is an easier target than Iran. With the exception of its northern border, the country is a flat plain, less than half the size of Iraq and with a population of only 16.7 million. It is also reeling from the UN investigation into the death of Hariri.
This may make Syria look like fruit ripe for the picking, and an invasion would certainly divert attention from the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would also be a logical extension of the Bush administration's mythology that all its troubles in the Middle East are caused by foreign Islamic terrorists.
For the outcome of such a strategy, see the war in Southeast Asia.
Conn Hallinan is a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus and a lecturer in journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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KATHERINE SHRADER
Associated Press
Nov 16, 2005
Enough prisoners to nearly fill the NFL's largest stadium...
WASHINGTON - The United States has detained more than 83,000 foreigners in the four years of the war on terror, enough to nearly fill the NFL's largest stadium. The administration defends the practice of holding detainees in prisons from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay as a critical tool to stop the insurgency in Iraq, maintain stability in Afghanistan and get known and suspected terrorists off the streets.
Roughly 14,500 detainees remain in U.S. custody, primarily in Iraq.
The number has steadily grown since the first CIA paramilitary officers touched down in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, setting up more than 20 facilities including the "Salt Pit," an abandoned factory outside Kabul used for CIA detention and interrogation.
In Iraq, the number in military custody hit a peak on Nov. 1, according to military figures. Nearly 13,900 suspects were in U.S. custody there that day - partly because U.S. offensives in western Iraq put pressure on insurgents before the October constitutional referendum and December parliamentary elections.
The detentions and interrogations have brought complaints from Congress and human-rights groups about how the detainees - often Arab and male - are treated.
International law and treaty obligations forbid torture and inhumane treatment. Classified memos have given the government ways to extract intelligence from detainees "consistent with the law," administration officials often say.
On Capitol Hill, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is leading a campaign to ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. The administration says the legislation could tie the president's hands. Vice President Dick Cheney has pressed lawmakers to exempt the CIA.
"There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. And so you bet we will aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law," President Bush said last week.
Some 82,400 people have been detained by the military alone in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to figures from officials in Baghdad and Washington. Many are freed shortly after initial questioning.
To put that in context, the capacity of the Washington Redskins' FedEx Field, the NFL's largest, is 91,704. The second largest, Giants Stadium, holds 80,242.
An additional 700 detainees were sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Just under 500 remain there now.
In Iraq, the Defense Department says 5,569 detainees have been held for more than six months, and 3,801 have been held more than a year. Some 229 have been locked up for more than two years.
Many have been questioned by military officials trained at the main U.S. interrogation school, Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Pentagon officials say those mistreated are relatively few when the sheer numbers are considered.
Yet human rights groups say they don't know the extent of the abuse. "And there is no way anyone could, even if the military was twice as conscientious. It is unknowable, unless you assume that every act of abuse is immediately reported up the chain of command," said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch.
As of March, 108 detainees were known to have died in U.S. military and CIA custody, including 22 who died when insurgents attacked Abu Ghraib and others who died of natural causes. At least 26 deaths have been investigated as criminal homicides.
Last week, Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner, R-Va., said that more than 400 criminal investigations have been conducted and 95 military personnel have been charged with misconduct. Seventy-five have been convicted.
Through the CIA, a much smaller prison population is maintained secretly by the agency and friendly governments. A network of known or suspected facilities _ some of which have been closed _ have been located in places including Thailand, Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
The governments of Thailand and a number of Eastern Europe countries have denied the CIA operated prisons within their borders. The agency consistently declines to comment.
About 100 to 150 people are believed to have been grabbed by CIA officers and sent to their home countries or to other nations where they were wanted for prosecution, a procedure called "rendition." Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt are known to cooperate.
The practice has taken on a negative connotation, but that wasn't always the case. In a December 2002 speech touching on intelligence successes, former CIA Director George Tenet said the agency and FBI had "rendered 70 terrorists to justice."
While officials won't confirm the number, another two to three dozen "high-value" detainees are also believed to be in CIA custody. Among them, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, an alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
As House Intelligence chairman in 2004, CIA Director Porter Goss took a strong stand on some of the gray areas of detention practices. In an AP interview, he said, "Gee, you're breaking my heart" in response to complaints that Arab men found it abusive to have women guards at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Before Goss took over the agency, its inspector general completed a report on the treatment of detainees, following investigations into at least four prisoner deaths that may have involved CIA personnel. To date, one agency contractor has been charged.
The inspector general's report discussed tactics used by CIA personnel _ called "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques." Former intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the practices are classified, say some interrogation techniques are well-known: exposing prisoners to cold, depriving them of sleep or forcing them to stand in stressful positions.
Perhaps the most publicly controversial technique is waterboarding, when a detainee is strapped to a board and has water run over him to simulate drowning.
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AFP
Thu Nov 17, 3:13 AM ET
WASHINGTON - The former US commander of Abu Ghraib prison says that she was held up unfairly as a scapegoat by "male warriors" but the real blame for the abuse scandal rests with military leaders and the White House.
In her newly released autobiography "One Woman's Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story," Janis Karpinski recounts her side of a scandal that led to her demotion and prompted international outrage over the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees at the US military-run prison.
While accepting her "share of the responsibility" for some of what occurred when she presided over military police across Iraq, Karpinski says the abuses at Abu Ghraib "were not the work of a few wayward soldiers and their female leader."
"They were the result of conflicting orders and confused standards extending from the military commanders in Iraq all the way to the summit of civilian leadership in Washington," she writes.
While other senior army officers have yet to be prosecuted or demoted, Karpinski said the male-dominated military quickly pinned blame on her after the scandal erupted in 2004.
"When things went wrong at Abu Ghraib prison, nobody stood out as a more convenient target than the female general who looked so out of place from the perspective of all those male warriors," she writes.
On the order of President George W. Bush, Karpinski was later demoted from the rank of brigadier general to colonel. Lower ranking officers and soldiers have been punished as well.
Born to an affluent family in New Jersey, the 54-year old Karpinski recounts how she rose up the army ranks and was sent to Iraq "as the first female general ever to command soldiers in a combat zone."
Notorious photographs of US soldiers sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners shocked the world and damaged the US image, particularly in the Islamic world. Human rights groups have accused Washington of turning a blind eye to similar abuses of detainees in Afghanistan and at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
Karpinski writes that she had no idea of the brewing scandal until she learned in a brief e-mail that proof of abuse from an internal investigation would be presented to the commander of US troops in Iraq.
"Prisoner abuse? Photographs? An aide looked at me closely and said, 'Ma'am, are you okay?,'" she writes.
"I had lost color, and he thought I was about to keel over."
According to her book, it was the first time she had heard about possible abuses at Abu Ghraib and the first time she had heard about the internal investigation.
Ten days later, she met General Richard Sanchez, then commander of US forces in Iraq, and she remains bitter that she was made a "sacrificial lamb."
"Nothing sticks in my craw more than Sanchez's comment during our meeting. 'Do you have any idea what this will do to my Army?'"
"There was nothing subtle about that message. This was his Army. I wrote this book to dispute that claim." [...]
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by Mike Whitney
How can the Senate vote to ban habeas corpus?!?
It makes no sense at all. It’s like voting for an end to freedom. And, yet, this is exactly what happened on Friday, November 11, when the Senate passed the (Lindsay) Graham amendment which overturns an earlier Supreme Court ruling (Rasul vs. Bush) allowing Guantanamo detainees to challenge their imprisonment in federal court. By a 49 to 42 margin the Senate approved the measure which effectively deprives them of the right to know why they are being held or of any legal means to defend themselves.
None of the Guantanamo inmates have ever been charged with a crime. The Senate vote ensures that they never will.
The action goes beyond a simple dispute with the high court’s decision to honor the rights of so called “enemy combatants”. The vote denies the prisoners any civil liberties provided under the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions or any other of the human rights treaties to which the US is a signatory. It is a blatant attempt to rescind the principle that men are entitled to equal treatment under the law or that they are innocent until proven guilty. From this point on, everyone who has been caught up in Bush’s “war on terror” dragnet will be presumed guilty.
Habeas corpus is the cornerstone of American jurisprudence dating back 800 years in British Law. It allows a detained person to appear before a judge to determine the legitimacy of his imprisonment, and it forces the state to charge that person with a crime if it intends to continue holding him. It is the most fundamental of all human rights, and certainly the most important. Without the protection of habeas the state is free to disregard the law and jail anyone it pleases. The denial of habeas is the beginning of tyranny.
Freedom does not exist in a vacuum; it can only thrive where there are restrictions to state power. Civil liberties are the fire-wall which protects the citizen from the threat of government abuse. Habeas corpus is the foundation upon which the entire scaffolding of civil liberties is erected. It is the primary shield against the violence of the state.
Senator Lindsay Graham knows all of this; after all he’s an attorney. And, yet, he has taken this extraordinary step to revoke The Great Writ of Liberty (habeas corpus) to confer absolute authority on the president.
Why?
Where is the evidence that eviscerating basic liberties improves our chances of winning the war on terror?
In case after case, the Bush administration has taken the position that the president is above the law and can imprison “terror suspects” according to his own discretion. On September 9, 2005 the administration won a crucial battle when the 3 judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals voted unanimously that Bush could continue to imprison an American citizen, Jose Padilla, without charging him with a crime. The court said that the Joint Resolution issued by Congress following 9-11 authorized the President to use “all appropriate force” in fighting the war on terror. This, they concurred, allows the president to ignore the Bill of Rights and act on his own judgment.
Once again, the target of Bush’s assault on Padilla was habeas corpus, the ideological nerve-center of American jurisprudence
Consider the words of Alexander Hamilton who said, the writ of habeas corpus protects against "the practice of arbitrary imprisonment...the favorite and most formidable instrument of tyranny."
Or, this from Justice Antonin Scalia:
"The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive."
The Bush administration, under the cover of the war on terror, is marching inexorably towards a totalitarian state. Since Sept 11 they have taken steps to reconfigure the legal landscape and promote their vision of the supreme presidency. Their colleagues in the Congress and the judiciary have supported their efforts to bolster executive power while putting the president beyond the range of accountability. All the while, they have calculatingly zeroed in on the essential human right upon which liberty depends; habeas corpus, the epicenter of American freedom.
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Nov. 13, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Vin Suprynowicz
When I met with Dawn last weekend she told me she was wearing exactly what she'd been wearing as she entered the security checkpoint at Oakland International Airport Aug. 27 -- a navy blue jacket with two small American flag pins and two political buttons with writing on them. The larger one reads "Dissent is Patriotic." The smaller, red one bears a smiling portrait of President Bush, labeled " Daddy's Little War Criminal."
She's convinced that's what started the trouble.
Dawn Hansen is Nevada chairman of Mothers Against the Draft. Her husband, Christopher Hansen, is the paralegal and retired contractor who served as chairman of last year's failed "Axe the Tax" tax-rollback petition drive. The couple are active in the Independent American Party; they're no wallflowers when it comes to voicing their political views.
But Dawn says she does not set out to cause problems at the airport -- just the opposite.
"I'm always smiling and polite, I never wear anything that I think is going to set off the alarms," she said.
She does wear a couple of political buttons, though. When I met with Dawn last weekend she told me she was wearing exactly what she'd been wearing as she entered the security checkpoint at Oakland International Airport Aug. 27 -- a navy blue jacket with two small American flag pins and two political buttons with writing on them. The larger one reads "Dissent is Patriotic." The smaller, red one bears a smiling portrait of President Bush, labeled "Daddy's Little War Criminal."
She's convinced that's what started the trouble.
"I went to show my ID, and the guy said, 'Oh, I don't need that.' But when I went to show my boarding pass she looked at me, yanked it out of my hand, undid the rope, and said, 'Come over here!' No 'Please,' no ID check. Then she said, 'Give me your jacket!' They made me go through the metal detector twice even though I didn't set it off either time. Then this second woman said, 'You go sit down over there!' They wanded me, they made me put my legs out, they went up inside my back and around my boobs.
"They passed my jacket from person to person, each security person in turn was looking at the buttons. They asked me, 'Why are you traveling with so much reading material?' "
Dawn says she was carrying seven or eight general circulation magazines, a biography of Ben Franklin and Bob Woodward's latest book. "I did have one subversive publication; I was carrying a copy of The New York Times. ... They asked me why I was carrying so many legal documents. I'd been in California helping my brother do some legal research on a case.
"When I got home I found out they'd taken the lids off all my creams and just left them like that so they got all over everything."
They finally let Dawn Hansen fly home. She called Southwest Airlines on Monday morning and was referred to the Transportation Security Administration. When she called the TSA, " I was informed I'd been put on the watch list. I was not on any watch list before I went to Oakland. ...
" TSA told me I would be under that kind of security every time I fly. TSA said I could fill out this big form that you can download from their Web site, it asks for your Social Security number and three separate forms of ID and all this information. ... I said, "You can forget that. You're just data mining. You have no right to all that information.' And they said, 'Well then you're going to have to go through it every time.' "
I called Nico Melendez, TSA spokesman for the western region, at his office in Los Angeles, to ask if Dawn Hansen is on the watch list and why she was placed there.
"We don't confirm the presence of any persons on any list," he said. "The people on any of our watch lists are people that are suspected of posing a threat to civil aviation."
Do people on the list have any due process right to a hearing to get off these lists?
"Yes, and all the information is on our Web site at TSA.gov."
Mr. Melendez called back a short time later. "We don't have an agenda," he said. "I don't have any idea what the politics of our screeners are. Maybe it was just a cool jacket and they liked the buttons and they wanted to read them. Frankly we don't check photo IDs, that's not our job, that's the responsibility of the airline," which is responsible for checking passenger names against the watch lists.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of "Send in the Waco Killers" and the new novel "The Black Arrow." His Web sites are www.TheLibertarian.us or www.LibertyBookShop.us.
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Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Minneapolis Star-Tribune (Minnesota)
by Bill O'Brien
Sleep, America, sleep. Sleep the dreamy, undisturbed sleep of the contented. Breathe deeply to the cadence of our president's lullaby: "We are strong, you are safe, go to sleep."
Ignore the distant sirens and 2,000 dead in Iraq with no end in sight. Ignore that tonight, as you slumber, three more will die. They are your neighbors' children, not yours.
Plug your ears to the voices that agitate you, to Brent Scowcroft -- hawk in the first Gulf War, former Air Force general and national security adviser, best friend to George Bush Senior. Shut your eyes tight to his rebuke of our Iraq policy, and to his alarm that we are fueling, and not quelling, jihadists around the world bent on harming us.
"We are strong. You are safe. Go to sleep."
Sleep, America, the sleep of the righteous even as visions of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib haunt your rest. Shut out the meddlesome plea of John McCain to stop, for the sake of our own troops, the torture of the prisoners we take. Listen instead to Dick Cheney's soothing baritone, making the case for flouting the Geneva Conventions, for legalizing torture. We are America the free.
Ignore the disquieting dreams that disturb your rest: that you were lied to in order to justify a preemptive war. Pull the quilted covers tight around you and dispel the troubling notions that there are no weapons of mass destruction, no imminent nuclear threat, and no connection between Iraq and Al-Qaida. We are America the brave.
Close the shutters to the memory that the architect of your safety and security, Don Rumsfeld, trumpeted that we'd be embraced as liberators in Iraq, that the insurgency -- now in its third year -- was the last gasp of "a few dead-enders."
And, by all means, America, do not rise to investigate those bumps in the night that cause you to startle. Do not wonder, for instance, where Osama sleeps and why he too sleeps peacefully.
You are safe, America. Lullaby and good night.
Bill O'Brien lives in Minneapolis and is a workplace lawyer.
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OCAction Center
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Public comments are now being accepted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on its newly proposed federal regulation regarding the testing of chemicals and pesticides on human subjects. On August 2, 2005, Congress had mandated the EPA create a rule that permanently bans chemical testing on pregnant women and children. But the EPA's newly proposed rule, misleadingly titled "Protections for Subjects in Human Research," puts industry profits ahead of children's welfare. The rule allows for government and industry scientists to treat children as human guinea pigs in chemical experiments in the following situations:
- Children who "cannot be reasonably consulted," such as those that are mentally handicapped or orphaned newborns may be tested on. With permission from the institution or guardian in charge of the individual, the child may be exposed to chemicals for the sake of research.
- Parental consent forms are not necessary for testing on children who have been neglected or abused.
- Chemical studies on any children outside of the U.S. are acceptable.
OCA's focal concerns with this proposed rule specifically involve the following portions of text within the EPA document (Read the full EPA proposed rule here: PDF --- HTML):
70 FR 53865 26.408(a) "The IRB (Independent Review Board) shall determine that adequate provisions are made for soliciting the assent of the children, when in the judgment of the IRB the children are capable of providing assent... If the IRB determines that the capability of some or all of the children is so limited that they cannot reasonably be consulted, the assent of the children is not a necessary condition for proceeding with the research. Even where the IRB determines that the subjects are capable of assenting, the IRB may still waive the assent requirement..."
( OCA NOTE: Under this clause, a mentally handicapped child or infant orphan could be tested on without assent. This violates the Nuremberg Code, an international treaty that mandates assent of test subjects is "absolutely essential," and that the test subject must have "legal capacity to give consent" and must be "so situated as to exercise free power of choice." This loophole in the rule must be completely removed.)
70 FR 53865 26.408(c) "If the IRB determines that a research protocol is designed for conditions or for a subject population for which parental or guardian permission is not a reasonable requirement to protect the subjects (for example, neglected or abused children), it may waive the consent requirements..."
( OCA NOTE: Under the general rule, the EPA is saying it's okay to test chemicals on children if their parents or institutional guardians consent to it. This clause says that neglected or abused children have unfit guardians, so no consent would be required to test on those children. This loophole in the rule must be completely removed.)
70 FR 53864 26.401 (a)(2) "To What Do These Regulations Apply? It also includes research conducted or supported by EPA outside the United States, but in appropriate circumstances, the Administrator may, under § 26.101(e), waive the applicability of some or all of the requirements of these regulations for research..."
( OCA NOTE: This clause is stating that the Administrator of the EPA has the power to completely waive regulations on human testing, if the testing is done outside of the U.S. This will allow chemical companies to do human testing in other countries where these types of laws are less strict. This loophole in the rule must be completely removed.)
70 FR 53857 " EPA proposes an extraordinary procedure applicable if scientifically sound but ethically deficient human research is found to be crucial to EPA’s fulfilling its mission to protect public health. This procedure would also apply if a scientifically sound study covered by proposed § 26.221 or § 26.421--i.e., an intentional dosing study involving pregnant women or children as subjects..."
( OCA NOTE: This clause allows the EPA to accept or conduct "ethically deficient" studies of chemical tests on humans if the agency deems it necessary to fulfull its mission. Unfortunately, the EPA report sets up no criteria for making such an exception with any particular study. This ambiguity leaves a gaping loophole in the rule. Without specific and detailed criteria, it could be argued that any and every study of chemical testing on humans is "necessary." This loophole in the rule must be removed, based on this inadequacy of criteria and definition.)
Send an email to EPA here!
Forward this alert to friends and colleagues
By mail: Send two copies of your comments to:
Public Information and Records Integrity Branch (PIRIB)
Office of Pesticide Programs
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Mail Code: 7502C
1200 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington, DC, 20460-0001
Attention: Docket ID Number OPP-2003-0132
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By Spengler
Asia Times
Never have the governments of the old Atlantic alliance appeared as weak as they do today. President George W Bush, his popularity ruined and his political agenda junked, is boxed into a corner, but his position seems enviable compared to that of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who just lost a decisive battle over anti-terror measures.
But both appear strong compared to President Jacques Chirac, who has let France slip into civil unrest. Germany, despite last week's appointment of Angela Merkel as federal chancellor, in effect has no government, for the parallelogram of political forces neutralizes all parties. Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi must do his best to avoid prison after the seizure of funds from his media company.
The leaders of the West seem to somnambulate through affairs of state, oblivious to the disaster around them. In her mercy, history anesthetizes those whom she intends to destroy, wrote Leon Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution. He had in mind Czar Nicholas II's diary entries for the days before the October Revolution of 1917, full of court gossip and the minutiae of family life, but without a glimmer of the doom soon to befall him.
No part of the political spectrum can take comfort from this predicament. Those who want to subject American policy to the counsel of the world community, as Senator John Kerry proposed, now have difficulty identifying who that world community might be ? surely not France, which has become an embarrassment, and surely not the United Nations, which has a black eye from its scandal-plagued Iraq oil-for-food program. Only in Beijing and Tokyo do we find strong governments in powerful nations.
Is it simple coincidence that the West cannot field a single functioning government? The punditry dismisses Bush as dumb, Blair as smarmy, Chirac as arrogant, Berlusconi as bent, and Merkel - well, when they discover some identifying characteristics of the new German chancellor, the punditry doubtless will find grounds to dismiss her as well. Perhaps it is just the luck of the draw, but the odds do not favor the interpretation that all the big nations of the West had the misfortune to find themselves led by ninnies at precisely the same time.
What is it about the personalities of Western leaders, though, that might explain their common predicament? Perhaps it is the fact that the leaders of the West mirror the qualities of the people who voted for them. Americans are obstreperously anti-intellectual, and chose a president with whom they can identify. The British always have been hypocrites, and elected the most hypocritical of prime ministers. The average Frenchman is no less arrogant than the president of the republic, while the Germans, at least since 1945, have devoted their storied thoroughness to becoming as nondescript as possible. Almost every Italian is on the fiddle, and it is fitting for their prime minister to be fiddler-in-chief.
That leads to a simple interpretation of the general crisis of Western politics, namely, that the people of the West, as it were, are the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is not the leaders of the West per se, but rather the voters who put them in office, who comprise the problem.
To make clear why the French are the wrong sort of people to begin with, consider why American Muslims do not sally out by night to burn cars. A very different sort of Muslim emigrates to the United States; according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, more than half of American Muslims hold a graduate degree. Among the brightest Arabs, Persians or Pakistanis, a high proportion seeks graduate training in the United States, especially in engineering, computer sciences, physics and chemistry. The median income of Muslim households in the United States is above average.
American immigration laws, to be sure, favor the rich, the talented and educated. But that sheds some light on the character of the United States, which absorbs immigrants directly into its elite. Europe, which allows barely one in eight of its school leavers into university, does not want immigrants who might displace the local talent. It has recruited an immigrant population of dustmen, whose children burn cars out of frustration. As their numbers diminish, the Europeans confront an army of 30 million unemployed young Arabs, which they neither can absorb nor expel. The reason that the leaders of France can offer no solution to the present crisis is that no solution exists, given the present demography and predilections of the population of France.
The tragedy of the Americans, I have argued in the past, is that they cannot understand the tragedy of other peoples. With force as deadly as the mounted hordes of the past, America's influence has swept through the world and overturned the traditional order, leaving ill-prepared peoples to fend for themselves in the chaos. The president's presumption that Americas can lead Iraq towards American-style democracy ignores the fact that Americans selected themselves according to precisely the criteria that make democracy succeed. Those who remained behind are the other sort.
Survivor bias is the most insidious of logical flaws. Americans selected themselves out of the nations of the world. Americans believe that Chinese and Indians are clever, simply because most of the Chinese and Indians they have met are clever. I can assure the Americans on the basis of personal observation that rural India is teeming with dull Indians, and that rural China is full of dull Chinese. Those are not the ones who have immigrated to America. Rather it is clever Indians and Chinese who have emigrated, either by accumulating capital in business or by passing competitive examinations to obtain a university degree.
"Many will be the night during his second term that Bush will wish he were still in Texas, and still drunk," I warned before America's last elections (Careful what you Bush for, August 3, 2004). Tragedy entertains us on the stage because tragic protagonists do not know that they are tragic, even after the chorus admonishes them that this is the case. Bush will go into retirement wondering what he did wrong. The trouble is not what he did, but what he is, and what Americans are.
In the classic tragedy of Greek religious festivals, the tragedy of the individual is the tragedy of a culture; the case of Orestes can be resolved only by a cultural change, in this case trial by jury at Athens. Bush, whose second administration has failed on all fronts after 10 months in office, may be less articulate than Pericles, but he is no less tragic, and his tragedy is that of the Americans as a people, just as Chirac's tragedy is that of the French.
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By Ramtanu Maitra
16 November 2005
Asia Times
Reports indicate the West is now working toward a "solution" to the opium explosion in Afghanistan, namely the licensing of legal opium production for medical purposes.
The formal proposal was floated in September by the Senlis Council, a French think tank on narcotics. The council's study was conducted in partnership with Kabul University as well as academic centers in Europe and North America, such as Ghent University, Lisbon University and the University of Toronto.
The proposal comes in the wake of a general admission by Washington, its adjunct in Kabul and the United Nations that eradication of drugs in Afghanistan cannot be accomplished by the warriors against terror.
Touching a sensitive chord, however, Afghanistan's Counter-Narcotics Minister Habibullah Qaderi questioned the timing of the Senlis report. "We don't want to confuse the Afghan people, because while the government on the one hand wants to control and stop cultivation, we are talking about licensing."
What Qaderi did not say was that the West, being unable to eradicate opium, is moving to repackage Afghanistan's uncontrollable scourge as a legalized and regulated industry, to be included along with elections among the "democratic successes" in that benighted land.
Scale of the problem
The massive annual growth in opium production coincided with the "liberation" of Afghanistan from the Taliban by US occupation forces in the winter of 2001. Having registered unprecedented growth in 2002, 2003 and 2004, the 2005 harvest showed a slight reduction. But if the numbers made public are correct, the reduction will not affect the drug users of Europe significantly.
In its Afghanistan Opium Survey 2005, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported that the area of opium cultivation in the country decreased by 21% from a record high of 131,000 hectares to 104,000 hectares. In other words, one out of five opium fields cultivated in 2004 was not replanted in 2005. This decline in cultivation was attributed to several factors: the farmers' choice to refrain from poppy cultivation, the government's eradication program, the ban on opium and law enforcement activities.
But according to UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa, despite the overall decline in cultivation, Afghanistan remains far and away the world's largest supplier of opium (87%). According to the UN survey, opium production in Afghanistan in 2005, by comparison with the production figures in 2004, dropped by only 2.4%. Favorable weather conditions resulted in a 22% higher yield. Cultivation also increased in some provinces. In 2005, the drug economy accounted for 52% of the country's gross domestic product.
If you can't beat it ...
At least a year before the Senlis Council stuck its neck out on behalf of the United States and NATO, hand-wringing in Washington over the West's inability to curb opium production in Afghanistan had begun in earnest.
After the record production of more than 4,200 tons of opium in 2004, not only officials serving the Bush administration - the Pentagon, in particular - but also behind-the-scenes policy directors lodged in various think tanks, began putting forward arguments against taking on the drug warlords.
For example, Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute (a non-profit public policy research foundation headquartered in Washington) and a former special assistant to Ronald Reagan, writing soon after the presidential elections in Afghanistan last fall, acknowledged that "controlling opium trafficking has not been the top US priority in Afghanistan".
Therefore, the opium explosion in Afghanistan during the US occupation should not be considered a US failure. Although the Defense Department is careful to appear to be cooperative, Bandow points out, US forces have largely ignored drug trafficking unrelated to enemy action. "Attempting to suppress the drug trade with more than rhetoric will make it even harder to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda," he said. "Yet Washington's most important goal today remains destroying transnational anti-US terrorist networks, led by al-Qaeda."
Soon after the Senlis Council came out with its study, a view similar to Bandow's was expressed by another Cato Institute academic and vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, Ted Galen Carpenter. In a recent article he argues that the US military must not become an enemy of Afghan farmers whose livelihood depends on growing opium poppy.
"If zealous American drug warriors alienate hundreds of thousands of Afghan farmers, the Karzai government's hold on power, which is none too secure now, could become even more precarious," he wrote. "Washington would then face the unpalatable choice of letting radical Islamists regain power or sending more US troops to suppress the insurgency."
Throwing an economic spin into his argument, Carpenter pointed out that for many Afghans involvement in the cultivation of opium poppy crops and other aspects of drug commerce is "the difference between modest prosperity and destitution. They will not look kindly on efforts to destroy their livelihood."
According to Carpenter, US efforts to eradicate Afghanistan's opium crop actually amount to beating plowshares into swords: such efforts drive Afghan farmers, who have so far helped in the "war against terror", straight into the arms and camps of anti-American terrorists.
Naivety or avoidance?
If Bandow and Carpenter could be considered apologists for burgeoning opium production in Afghanistan under the US and NATO's close watch, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's statements prior to her October 2005 visit to Kabul demonstrated that, indeed, Washington has nary a thought about the opium explosion in Afghanistan.
In her news conference en route to Kabul from Kyrgyzstan, Rice heaped praise on the US "success" in Afghanistan and congratulated the Karzai administration for bringing about "remarkable progress".
On the narcotics issue, however, all she could come up with was the following: "I'm going to have a meeting with the members of the cabinet who are responsible for the narcotics problem and to discuss with them how we might accelerate those efforts. We and the British - the British, of course, have the lead on this - [want] to help the Afghans to root out narcotics. If they can do that then I think they really have made a major step forward in stabilization - they will have made a major step forward in stabilization."
Several hard realities raise questions about Rice's words. To begin with, Rice was fully aware that the US Department of Defense had made it clear that they would not antagonize the warlords and thus forsake their friendly alliance by going after opium cultivation.
Secondly, Rice is fully aware of the lack of strength of the Hamid Karzai presidency. It has been observed again and again that the writ of the US-backed Karzai does not extend beyond Kabul. It is ridiculous to try to make others believe that a president, who has to depend for his personal security on a foreign country - the occupying forces, really - would be able to go on a campaign to eradicate opium, battling hundreds of powerful warlords and about 30% of all Afghan families.
Finally, opium is not domestic garbage. Unfortunately, it is valuable, indeed, almost as expensive as gold, if not more so in some countries of the West. Those who bring it into western Europe, and carry it further west, generate enough money to corrupt not only the security infrastructure but the entire political economy of Europe. To suggest that a weak president, without any real help from US and NATO forces, will be able to eradicate opium in Afghanistan is simply a cruel joke.
Moreover, while Carpenter concludes that terrorist and other anti-government forces are hand in glove with the opium growers and traffickers, and that the connection between drug trafficking and terrorism is a direct result of making drugs illegal and, therefore, extremely profitable, Rice chose to remain mum. During her talks with reporters, she did not bring up the close nexus between drugs and terrorism.
Comment: The nexus between drugs and terrorism? Is that the Bush Crime Family and its CIA drug-running connections?
And along comes the Senlis Council
As Washington and London came to the conclusion that opium eradication in Afghanistan is neither useful nor of immediate importance, the Senlis Council conveniently trotted out its proposal and supporting study.
Prior to the feasibility study, funded by a dozen European social policy foundations, the council held a series of seminars to hone its arguments. Because the Blair government in the UK has been the loudest voice heard on eradication of opium poppy in Afghanistan, the council held one seminar, "The Opium Policy Challenge in Afghanistan: Current Responses and New Strategies," at the British House of Commons on July 20.
The seminar brought together British policymakers and senior officials responsible for UK reconstruction policies in Afghanistan, with representatives from United Kingdom-based policy centers and organizations, and academics engaged in research work on Afghanistan, according to news reports. At the seminar, Senlis Council Executive Director Emmanuel Reinert presented the "Feasibility Study on Opium Licensing in Afghanistan for the Production of Morphine and other Essential Medicines", ostensibly a ground-breaking project to consider the licensing of opium production in Afghanistan for medical uses.
In his opening remarks, Chris Mullin, a British MP who is chairman of the council, made clear Afghanistan's reconstruction has been threatened by the failure of current counter-narcotics policies and that there exists no simple solution to the drugs problem. Mullins told the audience to take a good look at the study.
In response to questions raised, Reinert explained the benefits the Afghan farmers would gain within the proposed legal and controllable framework. He also explained the importance of non-governmental organization involvement in achieving a successful and viable intervention, especially with regard to economic development, farming and health treatment.
Though Western countries have begun pushing the Senlis Council's concept as a viable proposition, it was greeted with opposition by Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Counter-Narcotics Minister Habibullah Qaderi stated plainly that the country's security system was still too weak to police the legal production of opium.
"Without an effective control mechanism, a lot of opium will still be refined into heroin for illicit markets in the West and elsewhere. We could not accept this," Qaderi said in a statement.
UNODC, careful not to antagonize the Western countries, said the proposal would offer little attraction to opium farmers because they would earn less selling their crop on the legal market than on the black market.
The fallacy
To sell the concept, Reinert points out that the plan is modeled on programs in India and Turkey, which have helped reduce illegal opium production through a strictly supervised licensing scheme backed by the US Congress. In addition, legal opium production programs are already in place in several other countries, including Australia, France and Japan. With India and Turkey these nations provide the bulk of the world's legal opium for medicine, notably morphine and codeine.
The salesman in Reinert allowed him to suppress the obvious. Neither in India nor Turkey, nor any of the other countries that produce legal opium, does opium make up 52% of the gross domestic product. None of these countries has ever produced 87% of world's opium annually. The fact of the matter is that apart from Turkey, which did have a problem concerning illegal production of opium poppy, no other country mentioned has had any opium-related problems. And none were ever under the control of drug warlords.
The fact of the matter is that the political system that has evolved in Afghanistan following the US invasion is extremely fragile, and verges on being a joke. What really has been strengthened in Afghanistan since 2001 is opium production. Afghanistan now has "pro-democracy" drug warlords who raise illegal opium by the hundreds of tons every year. But pro-democracy sentiments notwithstanding, they have so far remained illegitimate in the eyes of the world.
Now, along comes the Senlis Council to give legitimacy to what is otherwise a political embarrassment. In their study, the council recommends the government fast-track the establishment of a national authority to license opium producers and research an amnesty that would "integrate illegal actors into the opium licensing system".
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17 November 2005
AFP
PARIS, Nov 17 (AFP) - The situation throughout France has returned to normal after nearly three weeks of urban violence that left 9,000 vehicles torched and during which almost 3,000 people were arrested, police said Thursday.
There was a "return to a normal situation everywhere in France" overnight, the national police service said in a statement.
It said 98 vehicles were burnt nationwide, which was within the average nightly range for such arson attacks, and none of the 10,000 officers deployed was injured in any confrontation.
Thirty-three people were arrested, a number which showed that the police presence "remains very strong," according to one officer.
Police service figures given early Wednesday showed that 8,973 vehicles had been set fire to since the troubles erupted October 27, and 2,888 people had been arrested.
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17 November 2005
AFP
PARIS, Nov 17 (AFP) - France's weeks of riots may have created many victims, but they have also produced a clear victor: Nicolas Sarkozy, the ambitious interior minister who sees himself becoming the next French president.
While the French public has given general backing to president Jacques Chirac's government in cracking down on youths behind the urban violence, it is Sarkozy who has benefited most, according to a new survey out this week.
The Ipsos poll found his popularity has leapt 11 points to 63 percent, his "presidential vote potential" has climbed to 61 percent, and 68 percent supported his hardline approach to the unrest.
That puts him well ahead of prime minister Dominique de
Villepin, whose popularity rose a more modest seven points to 50 percent, while Chirac lifted his rating by six points to 39 percent.
Villepin, who is seen as Chirac's designated heir for the 2007 presidential elections, had a "presidential vote potential" of 53 percent while the incumbent head of state -- who, at 72, is looking increasingly unlikely to stand again -- managed just 37 percent.
The numbers reveal where much of Sarkozy's fresh support comes from: 90 percent of voters in the camp of the extreme-right National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen (the 2002 presidential contender) think he is doing a good job.
At the same time, though, many in France -- especially those in the impoverished city suburbs where the violence fomented -- blame the unrest on his tough talk, particularly his repeated description of delinquents as "rabble" and "louts".
Sarkozy himself, though, has welcomed all the attention, no matter what the quarter.
He told the French senate late Wednesday that the violence erupted because "the delinquents rebelled" against his zero-tolerance law-and-order policies implemented over the past three years, during which he boasted that 3,205 people had been jailed.
"The moment of truth has come: to see if it's the Republic's order which triumphs, or the order of gangs, the order of 'barbus'," he said, using a term referring to Muslim extremists that some in France fear are multiplying in high-immigrant suburbs.
"In reality, it's a new society of progress and justice we have to build. It's a new republican policy we must imagine together and put in place."
The would-be presidential language is matched by a would-be presidential vehicle.
Sarkozy is also head of the ruling conservative UMP party -- a position he exploited during the violence by ensuring that those searching for, say, "riots" and "Paris" on the French Google website were greeted with a sponsored link to a UMP petition backing his stern policies.
His US-style politicking has, predictably, raised hackles in France, where brashness and flagrant self-promotion are frowned on.
But while Chirac has been left to fume in quiet over his inability to rein in his interior minister, the opposition parties have been left to grudgingly concede Sarkozy's gains.
"Sarkozy knows how to play with fear and has an undeniable talent for communication," a Socialist MP, Eric Besson, said.
"Right now, he is pocketing votes, but when it comes time to analyse this crisis coldly, I think we'll be able to say that he carries a heavy responsibility for it."
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Jon Henley in Paris
Thursday November 17, 2005
The Guardian
France's interior minister and presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy, his popularity soaring, last night threw down the gauntlet to President Jacques Chirac, saying some form of affirmative action was essential to overcome the problems of the country's ethnic minorities.
After three weeks of the worst urban violence to hit France for 40 years, Mr Sarkozy, one of very few French politicians to favour positive discrimination, said in an interview and in the senate that "special measures" were needed to help youths of north and black African origin find jobs.
Mr Chirac, in a televised address on Monday, ruled out such an approach. The principle that all its citizens are equal, regardless of race or religion, means France has long rejected positive discrimination as contrary to its republican values.
But Mr Sarkozy, buoyed by an opinion poll saying his approval rating had soared by 11 points since the rioting started on October 27, told the senate that "some positive discrimination is needed to provide opportunities to France's young".
In an interview with L'Express, he said: "I challenge the idea that we all start life on the same line. Some people start further back because they have a handicap - colour, culture or the district they come from. We have to help them."
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By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 16, 2005; A12
MARSEILLE, France, Nov. 15 -- While several other French cities were under curfew this weekend as an antidote to violence and riot police set themselves at the ready in central Paris, a North African wedding party sped around the harbor at Marseille's Old Port, horns blaring and young men hanging out the automobile windows.
Moments later, several hundred demonstrators, some pale French, others deeply black Africans, marched to protest censorship in Tunisia. No police were in sight.
The very presence of such an ethnic collage in the downtown areas of many French cities during nearly three weeks of rioting would have been cause for alarm. But Marseille's core is a spicy stew of nationalities, giving it a make-up like no other in France.
The free and easy mixture is one answer given by Marseille residents to the question posed over and over in recent weeks: Why has their town had relatively little trouble?
"It's the special quality of Marseille," said Dia Ghazi, a Palestinian-born proprietor of the Royal Bazaar, a hodgepodge of made-in-France textiles and Middle East-manufactured coffee makers and pine nuts. "Here, we all have contact with each other. That's the way it's always been here. We are not separate from each other."
In relative terms, Marseille suffered little violence during the flare-up that shook France. One night, arsonists torched 35 cars, but that was about the extent of the unrest. Around Paris and other French cities such vandalism occurred almost nightly, and included schools, businesses and government offices as targets.
That's not to say that all is well. A trip to the outlying northern neighborhood of Oliviers revealed the same depressed social and economic conditions found in the suburbs of Paris, Toulouse, Lyon and other tense cities. Residents complain of police harassment based on skin color, of joblessness and substandard schooling. But the prevailing sentiment is that people feel at home here and that's why Marseille didn't burn.
"We have our troubles, but I can go to the center of the city without thinking I am entering enemy territory," said Abida Hecini, a mother of six. "We belong to Marseille and Marseille belongs to us."
History is one source of this stability. While other cities in France fret about the arrival of immigrants over the past 50 years, Marseille has been a magnet for outsiders for well over 100: Italians fleeing poverty, Greeks and Armenians escaping wars, Moroccan sailors jumping ship, Spanish smugglers looking for a haven, Europeans returning from France's former Algerian colony and impoverished Algerians themselves seeking work.
A substantial Jewish community exited Algeria and settled here. On any downtown Marseille street corner, distinct fashions float by: a white Arab-style caftan here, the black overcoat of a Lithuanian Jew there, an African dyed garment, and a French short-brimmed cap over there. There's a budding Chinatown up in Panier, the cluttered neighborhood of sand-colored buildings on a hill above the Old Port.
"Marseille was made by immigration," said Pierre Echinard, a local historian. Of a population of 800,000, a quarter is of North African descent. Residents say they miss the ethnic variety when they leave the close quarters of their city, which is squeezed against the Mediterranean Sea by hills.
"I dislike going to Paris. They are cold there. A few days, and I want to return. France does not attract me," said Ghazi, whose family fled Haifa, which became part of Israel, landed in Beirut in 1948 and eventually migrated to Marseille.
When Ghazi referred to France as something distinct from Marseille, he was not speaking loosely. In some ways, it is a pride typical in European cities that existed as independent entities for many centuries -- Barcelona and Naples, for example -- and today feel at least the equal if not superior to the nation-states that absorbed them.
Marseille, a city more than 2,600 years old, long predates France, not to mention the Roman Empire. (It was so anti-Roman that emperors used to send troublesome consuls to Marseille as a kind of uncomfortable exile.) "Marseille feels it submitted to a power -- Paris -- that didn't bring it benefits. Marseille had long stood on its own and it was always open to the world," Echinard said.
Unlike municipal leaders elsewhere, recent mayors of Marseille have given official recognition to communal diversity, rather than trying to fit everyone into one box of Frenchness. A program called Marseille Hope, begun in the late 1980s, periodically organizes consultations among religious leaders -- Catholic, Orthodox Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist -- on community problems.
The meetings helped avert violence during the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and also during the current rioting, city officials and residents say. "We're not saying there could be no explosion here. That is not the case," said Marie-Noelle Mivielle, an aide to Mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin. "We are neighbors and recognize that neighbors have differences."
One final element contributes to the peculiar cohesiveness of the city: No part of town is off-limits or off-putting to the poor. The Old Port is effectively the central plaza of Marseille, but unlike other urban tourist magnets in France, it has not been cleaned up to the point of being without grit.
The stadium that is home to the wildly popular Olympique Marseille soccer team stands in one of the city's wealthy neighborhoods. Hordes of fans from all social classes flock there without a second thought. "Even the beaches here are a factor for peace," said Salah Bariki, coordinator of the Marseille Hope project. "We all mix there."
Some Marseille residents express concern that an urban renewal project that has forced hundreds of families from decayed downtown apartments could make the suburban poor feel uneasy coming downtown. A row of apartment houses on Republic Street downtown stand empty, awaiting renovation.
"I liked the street the way it was," said Mafiane Moncef, a pharmacist, who was born in Tunisia. He is holding out against eviction while bargaining for compensation. "The rents will go up and the poorer generations of immigrants will move away."
Moncef received a bank loan and bought his Globe pharmacy in 2000. "With my name, I could not have gotten the loan anywhere but here," he asserted. "I could have bought a cheaper location in Paris, but I would never leave Marseille."
City Hall insists that affordable housing will be made available to maintain a mix of wealthy and not so wealthy. As proof, Mivielle said, a new mosque is scheduled for inauguration Thursday in one of the neighborhoods scheduled for renovation. "We wouldn't do that if we expected to make an exclusion zone in the city center," she said.
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AFP
November 16, 2005
ROME - Italy's senate approved a sweeping constitutional reform devolving powers to the country's 20 regional governments, finally sealing a pact between ruling Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his partners in the small but influential Northern League.
The bill will give more powers to the head of government, cut the number of parliamentarians in both houses, and devolve decision-making powers on health, education and policing to the regions.
The right-wing party's leader Umberto Bossi, who suffered a stroke in March 2004, came to Rome from his Lombardy base for a triumphant evening for his party.
The League has several times threatened to pull out of the government when it felt its partners were dragging their feet on devolution, the cause closest to the heart of Bossi's once-secessionist party.
Berlusconi was taking no chances of being derailed by a last minute hitch. He cancelled a visit to Israel in order to be present for the vote in the senate, where his House of Freedoms coalition has a weaker majority than in the lower house.
The senators approved the text, which amends about 50 of the 139 articles making up the country's 1948 constitution, by 170 votes to 132 with three abstentions of the 321 member chamber.
Opposition leader Romano Prodi, whose Union centre-left coalition has bitterly opposed the measures, is already pinning his hopes of overturning the reforms in a referendum, which must be held to approve the constitutional changes.
The referendum is expected to be held ahead of the April 9 elections and the centre-left opposition, boosted by its current strong showing in the opinion polls, is confident of being able to overturn it.
"I'm not scared of a referendum", Bossi countered Wednesday as he entered the senate. "Italians will vote for reform no matter where they are in the country. It won't mean a country split in two."
However the measure has far from total support among the ruling coalition ranks. Senate vice-president Domenico Fisichella, announced his resignation from the coalition National Alliance party, lead by deputy prime minister Gianfranco Fini, in protest at the reform.
Opponents of the reform say the measures it contains will simply confirm the wealth gap between the rich industrial northern regions -- the heartland of Bossi's party -- and the under-developed south.
"This reform undermines social cohesion and reduces the ability to govern the country. What Bossi has obtained is not devolution, but dissolution," said Antonio di Pietro, a former anti-corruption magistrate who now heads the small Italy of Values opposition party.
In another criticism, Prodi has said the reform is effectively paving the way for a "prime ministerial dictatorship" in Italy.
Berlusconi, the head of government since 2001, is technically not a prime minister under Italian law and is officially titled the president of the council of ministers.
But the new reform, which is anyway not due to come into force until 2012, will give a successor wider powers, under which he will be able to hire and fire ministers and dissolve parliament without recourse to the state president.
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Last Updated Tue, 15 Nov 2005 18:04:14 EST
CBC News
Smoking has been banned in workplaces, restaurants and theatres, leaving the great outdoors as the next frontier for anti-smoking campaigns.
"People understand the concept of air pollution, that it may be everywhere," said Roberta Ferrence of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. "Somehow [with] second-hand smoke outdoors they feel it's magically whisked away, and it isn't."
Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia are working on provincewide bans on smoking on restaurant patios, which is already the law in 16 municipalities across Canada.
The governments have acted although there is little published research on levels of outdoor second-hand smoke or its health implications.
Ferrence's colleague, Pam Kaufman of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit, points to other reasons to ban or reduce outdoor smoking. "Studies have shown that with restrictions, people are more likely to quit and possibly cut down on the amount that they smoke, even if they don't quit."
For Filip Palda, an economist and senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, the move to restrict or ban smoking outdoors is less about protecting people's health than preaching.
"It's a big business, the anti-tobacco lobby gets a lot of government funding," said Palda. "I'm not saying this in a cynical way, but where there's funding to study something and even to repress it, there will be people who come to take the funding."
The lobbyists' activities are so intense that Palda questions why they don't seek to outlaw smoking altogether. Some smokers lighting up on a sidewalk outside a hospital in Halifax asked the same question.
For their next move, anti-tobacco advocates say they want governments to address what they consider a form of child abuse: parents who smoke in their own cars or homes with children present.
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By John Hanchette
Niagara Falls Reporter
Nov. 1 2005
OLEAN -- Last week's column warned of imminent federal legislation that would toss powerful pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars and complete protection from liability suits in case untested and experimental bird flu vaccines damage American recipients. It drew heavy response.
The bill (S. 1873) -- a big congressional wet kiss to the drug industry -- is dressed up in a noble-sounding title: "Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act."
In essence, however, it would force Americans to receive inoculations against a disease that has yet to kill one of them, while removing their constitutional right to seek redress in our courts in case of injury or death from the shots because of company negligence. The proposal, now moving its way through the Senate, would also ban citizens from using the Freedom of Information Act and other popular informational laws to discover whether the new vaccine (when it is finally produced) was effective and safe, and even whether anyone had suffered adverse reactions to it.
Some of the e-mails and letters were laudatory, but sadly and predictably, many readers missed the point.
One wrote that I could only have reached my conclusions if I started from the position that the pharmaceutical companies were "evil" and that the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and "practically every virologist and epidemiologist in the world is part of a conspiracy." Or was I saying that I have "some sort of privileged information that H5N1 influenza will never mutate and begin to infect humans and even if it does, it won't reach the USA?"
He ended by quoting some venerable Chinese philosopher's advice to "plan for what is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small."
Well, yes, point taken on the aphorism -- but that's exactly the philosophical tack I'm following here: identifying a cancerous piece of federal business and dissecting it while it is still an undivided cell. If this bill -- which is absolutely laden with hidden agendas -- metastasizes into actual law, Senate 1873 could further ruin an already devastated national health care system.
Sure, the bird influenza that has killed 62 Asians may mutate into easily contractible flu for humans. I acknowledge that. It may soon reach the United States. I acknowledge that. But my beef is the thematic hidden agenda in this dangerous Senate bill that is designed to protect wealthy corporate contributors from any consequences of money-motivated, irresponsible scientific research and development. The legal precedent would be ruinous and take decades to set right.
One thing the bill-backer friends of Big Pharma are trying to slip through with this legislation is a market exclusivity provision that would extend patents on hugely profitable drugs that are about to evolve into the category of cheaper generic medicines.
Further, it would prohibit federal drug buyers from contracting with generic medicine makers to save taxpayers billions of dollars -- a current admirable practice.
Further, it would allow federal health officials to purchase medicines, vaccines and other palliatives by simple fiat without taking bids.
Further, and most onerously, the bill would vastly broaden the definition of products eligible to be characterized as "countermeasures" to terrorism -- in other words, potentially classifying commonly purchased substances like ibuprofen and aspirin as terrorist-fighting devices.
I'm not the only one who's noticed the exclusivity aspect of this legislative turkey.
The Coalition for a Competitive Pharmaceutical Market (CCPM) is an unusually broad-based national coalition of organizations powerful on Capitol Hill in representing employers, health insurers, chain drugstores, generic drug makers and pharmacy benefit managers.
Last week, this huge group urged the Senate to revise the "biodefense" bill to remove the broadened definition of terrorism "countermeasures" because the proposal allows it to be done "in a way that could grant existing everyday medicines -- rather than novel products related to (defense) against bioterrorism -- multiple years of additional market exclusivity."
This, contends CCPM chairman Annette Guarisco, "would unnecessarily drive up prescription drug costs for private and public payers without advancing our nation's bioterrorism preparedness."
Even the big health insurance companies and pharmaceutical management lobbyists were startled by the brazen provisions at the expense of common citizens Senate 1873 portends.
Mark J. Rubino, chief pharmacy officer for Aetna Inc., states, "For private and public purchasers seeking to provide consumers with therapeutically equivalent, but more cost-efficient generic drugs, the market exclusivity provision included in the Biodefense bill takes us in exactly the wrong direction."
Mark Merritt, president of the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, said, "This drug monopoly extension proposal is a sweeping and unprecedented measure that would rewrite drug-patenting and force working families, the disabled, and seniors to pay more for their prescription drugs. Perhaps most troubling of all, this measure has moved forward without any regard to the cost (effects) it would have on on Medicare, Medicaid, and private payers. America's working families, seniors, and small businesses deserve better."
Some who read the column accused me of overstating the liability protections for Big Pharma contained in the bill. Surely, they wrote, I was guilty of hyperbole or making things up. Surely, federal legislators wouldn't remove the cherished American right to redress wrongs or seek compensation for uninvited injury.
Oh, yeah? The language seems pretty clear to me. It provides incredibly broad and iron-clad protection from any American seeking legal remedy from Big Pharma and just about everyone else involved in protecting against bird flu. Look up the draft bill's Section 319F-3 (a) if you don't believe me.
"Authority -- As provided in subsection (b), and subject to subsection (b) (1) C, a manufacturer, distributor, or administrator of a security countermeasure, or a qualified pandemic and epidemic product, or a health care provider shall be immune from suit or liability caused by or arising out of the design, development, clinical testing and investigation, manufacture, labeling, distribution, sale, purchase, donation, dispensing, prescribing, administration, or use of a countermeasure, or a qualified pandemic and epidemic product, described in subsection (b) (1) (a)."
That just about covers the waterfront, as they say. The only avenue of relief an injured vaccine or medicine recipient or survivor could follow is requesting an investigation of their allegation by the Secretary of Health and Human Services -- who would have to find "clear and convincing evidence" of "willful misconduct" that "caused the product to present a significant or unreasonable risk to human health and proximately caused the injury alleged by the party."
There are at least seven tough legal tests contained in that one paragraph. And if the HHS Secretary refuses to even investigate the complaint of injury or death, such decision is completely "within the Secretary's discretion and shall not be subject to judicial review."
If the secretary does find for the complaining injured party -- which is extremely unlikely -- the drugmaker or distributor or health care provider named in the determination can petition the federal court in the District of Columbia for "judicial review" of the HHS ruling. But no subpoenas shall be issued, "nor shall other compulsory process apply," and no third parties can intervene. The drug company appeal "shall automatically stay the Secretary's determination for the duration of the judicial proceeding."
There are six more pages of legal gobbledygook backing this up, one of them defining the scope of protection from lawsuit as extending to allegations "relating to, or resulting from the design, development, clinical testing and investigation, manufacture, labeling, distribution, sale, purchase, donation, dispensing, prescribing, administration, or use of product" defined as measures against pandemics or terrorism. There, is that specific enough for you? Is that an imaginative figment?
Interpretation of this congressional language: Pigs will fly backwards and upside down before the common citizen gets any redress or compensation for injury or death resulting from a bird flu vaccine or medicine.
Why are vaccine safety advocates so adamant that John Q. Public might get screwed by all this protect-Big Pharma bird flu legislation? Because it has happened before.
In the 1970s, the panic over swine flu led to an ill-advised vaccine push that crippled many recipients and cost the drug makers millions.
In the 1980s, a dangerously reactive vaccine against whooping cough injured and killed thousands when a safer foreign alternative was already available but stubbornly unapproved by the FDA.
In the 1990s, the federal health establishment insisted -- and still insists -- there is no connection between toxic mercury preservatives in mandated childhood vaccines and the astounding increase in autism (from 1 in 10,000 births to 1 in 166 births), despite ample scientific evidence to the contrary.
Experimental anthrax vaccine is still being tested on troops without informed consent, and was almost tested on infants until a big public fuss erupted.
The yearly hoohah over getting your flu shots to protect against contractible human flu results in less than desired protection because the scientists are always fighting the previous year's struggle that has already mutated or died out.
Both the federal government and big pharmaceutical firms will go to almost any length to protect themselves from blame when vaccines are involved.
Now we read the government experts and private researchers are predicting a minimum of 200,000 deaths and perhaps as many as 2 million deaths if the Asian bird flu mutates into a disease that can be passed from bird to human and then human to human.
"This is shoddy science at best and beyond belief that any reputable scientist could get away with such nonsense," writes Dr. Joseph Mercola, an alternative health physician and author of the popular Total Health Program. "Most of the people (in Asia) who acquired this infection were bird handlers who were in continuous contact with these sick birds. Does anyone in their right mind envision similar circumstances in the United States?"
The issue is certainly timely. This column's date of publication (Tuesday, Nov. 1) will see President George W. Bush go to the National Institutes of Health to tell us how he will spend -- at his executive discretion -- nearly $8 billion that was quickly added to the 2006 funding bill for HHS last Thursday in light of the concern over bird flu. He is expected to devote much of it to stockpiling vaccines once they are developed. The federal government has already committed to buying $162.5 million worth of experimental vaccines against the bird flu strain -- doses which may or may not protect humans -- from Chiron Corp. and Sanofi-Aventis. The feds are also ordering millions of doses of Relenza and Tamiflu, two human anti-flu drugs that seem to slow down the advance of bird flu but not completely halt it.
Meanwhile, the best possible outcome -- that the H5N1 bird flu strain fizzles out or never mutates to threaten humans -- is triggering a new concern among federal officials: that all the frantic warnings so far may have created a sense of public cynicism (or at least skepticism) over global health admonitions about pandemics.
"Will critics say we have been crying wolf?" worried HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt at the end of last week. Will the public "lose the sense of urgency we feel about this issue?"
Well, maybe, Mr. Secretary. But Americans would lend you a lot more credence if you ensured they were treated fairly.
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By Myra P. Saefong
MarketWatch
Last Update: 4:11 PM ET Nov. 16, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO -- Gold futures climbed over $10 an ounce Wednesday to close at a one-month high, while silver prices finished above $8 an ounce for the first time since December 2004 and platinum futures set records.
Strong physical demand, central-bank buying and concerns about inflation drove the broad rally, analysts said.
"It is physical demand from China and strong buying from India in September [that] really pushed the gold market into this bullish trend," said Thomas Hartmann, an analyst at Altavest Worldwide Trading.
"Good economic growth will continue to support the metals and that's how you see gold strength in the face of a strong dollar and [recently] weakening oil prices," he said.
Still, "the real catalyst is momentum, and we are seeing the power of the funds as technical buy signals have been triggered and they were not met with much selling above," said Charles Nedoss, an analyst at Peak Trading Group.
Gold for December delivery traded as high as $479.40 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange before closing up $10.10, or 2.2%, at $479.10 -- a closing level not seen since Oct. 11.
December silver climbed as high as $8.025 an ounce, with the metal reclaiming its highest intraday level in 11 months. The contract finished the session up 21.5 cents at $8.002 an ounce.
Fueling strength
Foreign-currency weakness helped fuel gains in gold, said John Person, president of National Futures Advisory Service.
" European buying has been strong as doubts are increasing over economic stability, [and] inflation expectations are mounting," he said, pointing out that Bundesbank President Alex Webber believes "inflation in Germany has a potential to exceed expectations."
Hartmann said the metals also found support from statements made by a few central banks, particularly South Africa and Russia.
"They hinted rather explicitly about scooping up more gold reserves," he said. "Early 2005 was filled with reports of central banks selling gold, but we've seen bank reserves in gold fall to about 9%, while historically it's been as high as 15%, meaning there's some room for buying."
If gold remains above the $475 level, Person said he expects the momentum to carry through to the end of 2005. His price target remains a range of $497 to $505. [...]
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By Christa Case
The Christian Science Monitor
Wed Nov 16, 3:00 AM ET
In Cambridge, Mass., Nicholas Negroponte and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been chipping away at a long-held dream: producing a laptop so cheap that governments could afford to link every child in the world to the Internet.
Mr. Negroponte, chairman of MIT's Media Lab, will unveil his brainchild with United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan at a technology meeting in Tunisia. The meeting of the UN's World Summit on the Information Society is aimed at beginning to put into effect its stated goals where "everyone, everywhere should have the opportunity to participate" in the benefits of information technology.
To do that, MIT and other groups have been pushing hard to create a low-cost laptop.
For example, the Indian government in cooperation with the US-based Jhai Foundation, has plans for developing a $200 machine for rural villages.
Negroponte's goal is even more aggressive: a $100 computer.
So far, the MIT group has whittled production costs down to less than $130.
To save money, it will run off the free Linux operating system instead of a proprietary system like Microsoft Windows. But the proposed machine will be full-color, capable of wireless connection to the Internet, and rugged enough to survive getting dropped in the mud.
Five corporate sponsors, including Google and Advanced Micro Devices, have chipped in $2 million apiece to form a nonprofit group, One Laptop Per Child, to oversee the project.
Nearly a half-dozen developing countries have expressed serious interest in ordering 1 million or more units, says Alexandra Kahn, spokeswoman for the MIT Media Lab.
Also, the UN Development Program has agreed to help distribute the machines, particularly to countries whose orders fall short of the million-unit bar Negroponte had originally set to help keep costs down.
American students could benefit, too.
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has proposed a $54 million program to equip each of his state's 500,000 middle- and high-schoolers with the laptops, which the students would be allowed to keep. Other states may follow suit.
OLPC officials estimate they'll need another six months to complete development of the machine. Production will begin in the third quarter of 2006, with distribution late next year or early in 2007, says Ms. Kahn. [...]
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By SEAN MURPHY
Associated Press
Wed Nov 16, 9:42 PM ET
EDMOND, Okla. - Tasha Henderson got tired of her 14-year-old daughter's poor grades, her chronic lateness to class and her talking back to her teachers, so she decided to teach the girl a lesson.
She made Coretha stand at a busy Oklahoma City intersection Nov. 4 with a cardboard sign that read: "I don't do my homework and I act up in school, so my parents are preparing me for my future. Will work for food."
"This may not work. I'm not a professional," said Henderson, a 34-year-old mother of three. "But I felt I owed it to my child to at least try."
In fact, Henderson has seen a turnaround in her daughter's behavior in the past week and a half. But the punishment prompted letters and calls to talk radio from people either praising the woman or blasting her for publicly humiliating her daughter.
"The parents of that girl need more education than she does if they can't see that the worst scenario in this case is to kill their daughter psychologically," Suzanne Ball said in a letter to The Oklahoman.
Marvin Lyle, 52, said in an interview: "I don't see anything wrong with it. I see the other extreme where parents don't care what the kids do, and at least she wants to help her kid."
Coretha has been getting C's and D's as a freshman at Edmond Memorial High in this well-to-do Oklahoma City suburb. Edmond Memorial is considered one of the top high schools in the state in academics.
While Henderson stood next to her daughter at the intersection, a passing motorist called police with a report of psychological abuse, and an Oklahoma City police officer took a report. Mother and daughter were asked to leave after about an hour, and no citation was issued. But the report was forwarded to the state Department of Human Services.
"There wasn't any criminal act involved that the officer could see that would require any criminal investigation," Master Sgt. Charles Phillips said. "DHS may follow up."
DHS spokesman Doug Doe would not comment on whether an investigation was opened, but suggested such a case would probably not be a high priority.
Tasha Henderson said her daughter's attendance has been perfect and her behavior has been better since the incident.
Coretha, a soft-spoken girl, acknowledged the punishment was humiliating but said it got her attention. "I won't talk back," she said quietly, hanging her head.
She already has been forced by her parents to give up basketball and track because of slipping grades, and said she hopes to improve in school so she can play next year.
Donald Wertlieb, a professor of child development at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University, warned that such punishment could do extreme emotional damage. He said rewarding positive behavior is more effective.
"The trick is to catch them being good," he said. "It sounds like this mother has not had a chance to catch her child being good or is so upset over seeing her be bad, that's where the focus is."
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By MATT CURRY
Associated Press
November 17, 2005
DALLAS - Amateur fossil hunter Van Turner felt certain he had found something important during his search of earth turned up by bulldozers making way for a new subdivision in Dallas County.
Sixteen years later, scientists finally confirmed that Turner had discovered the first well preserved early mosasaur found in North America — a prehistoric lizard that lived 92 million years ago that evolved into what some call the "T. Rex of the ocean."
"Science marches slowly, and my biggest fear all along has been that another specimen of the same animal would be found, and it would be described, and I would lose any first claim to it," said Turner, an Internet technology manager in the Central Texas town of Mason. "That never happened, and it kind of reassured the rarity of the animal."
The reptile, now known as Dallasaurus turneri, is identified in a special issue of the Netherlands Journal of Geosciences published this month. The article was written by paleontologists Michael Polcyn of Southern Methodist University and Gordon Bell Jr. of Guadalupe National Park.
The lizard is an important link in the evolution of mosasaurs, which lived in the age of dinosaurs and evolved fin-like limbs, Polcyn said. Dallasaurus, the name given the fossil by Polcyn and Bell, is unusual because it shows an earlier version of the mosasaur with tiny feet and hands. The marine animals later developed paddles.
Before this discovery, only five primitive forms of the animal with land-capable limbs were known, and all of them were found over the last century in the Middle East and the eastern Adriatic, Polcyn said.
"This is exciting to us. It tells us the origin of mosasaurs," said Anthony R. Fiorillo, curator of earth sciences at the Dallas Museum of Natural History, which displays a much larger reconstructed mosasaur with sharp teeth and a massive jaw.
On Wednesday, the museum unveiled a model of Dallasaurus, not nearly as threatening as its oversized descendant with a slim body and only 3 feet of length. It looks somewhat like a Komodo Dragon, its closest living relative.
"I call him Todd," said Ross McMillan, the ponytailed sculptor who worked with Polcyn for months to painstakingly construct the lifelike piece. "When you look at his face, doesn't he look like a Todd?" [...]
Right now, the skeletal pieces, comprising about 80 percent of the animal, are being kept at SMU for study. A similar specimen, also acquired and donated by Turner, is at the Texas Memorial Museum at the University of Texas at Austin.
Mosasaurs lived in the shallow seas and shores of a stretch of Texas around Dallas and Fort Worth that was mostly under water back then, Polcyn said. The animals evolved into the top predator of their domain before becoming extinct 65 million years ago.
The lizard is not related to the 13-foot oceanic crocodile discovered recently in Argentina, Polcyn said. The discovery of that creature, given the scientific name Dakosaurus andiniensis and nicknamed "Godzilla," was reported last week in ScienceExpress, the online edition of the journal Science.
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By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
16 November 2005 01:36 pm ET
There is one question that persistently circles the community of Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) true-believers: If the government has nothing to hide, UFO fans often ask, then why is it keeping so many UFO records under lock and key?
"Well, it turns out that the government does have something to hide, but it has nothing to do with extraterrestrials," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C.
A document has surfaced that had been stamped "Top Secret Umbra" — the codeword for the highest, most sensitive category of communications intelligence.
The once-classified affidavit was originally filed by the National Security Agency (NSA) in a 1980 lawsuit to justify the withholding of records on UFOs. The document is largely declassified—with certain sections cut out, ostensibly to protect employee names, and keep NSA technologies, skills, and foreign connections out of the limelight.
The document — In Camera Affidavit of Eugene F. Yeates: Citizens Against UFO Secrecy v. National Security Agency, October 9, 1980 — was released in redacted form on November 3 in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from researcher Michael Ravnitzky and posted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists.
Foreign signals
A read of the document yields insight into how a super-secret agency like the NSA became caught up in the UFO phenomenon.
Created in November 1952, The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is America's cryptologic organization. It coordinates, directs, and performs highly specialized activities to protect U.S. government information systems and churns out foreign signals intelligence information.
Being a high-tech organization, the NSA is a cutting-edge home for communications and data processing. It is also a center for foreign language analysis and research within the government.
The just-released 1980 document explains that a total of 239 documents related to UFOs were located in NSA files, with 79 of those documents originating with other government agencies. One document is an account by an NSA official attending a UFO symposium. A healthy chunk of these reports were produced between 1958 and 1979.
Deceptive data
The titles of NSA-related UFO documents that are noted in the declassified document are intriguing, such as UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions.
Another title cited is UFO's and the Intelligence Community Blind Spot to Surprise or Deceptive Data. In this seven-page, undated, unofficial draft of a monograph authored by an unnamed NSA employee, the author reportedly points out what he considers to be "a serious shortcoming" in the NSA's communications intelligence (COMINT) interception and reporting procedures. That is, "the inability to respond correctly to surprising information or deliberately deceptive data."
The unidentified author uses the UFO phenomenon to illustrate his belief that the inability of the U.S. intelligence community to process this type of unusual data adversely affects U.S. intelligence gathering capabilities.
Within the pages of the newly-released affidavit — and between sections of excised copy — it shows NSA intercepted in 1971 communications between two aircraft and a ground controller discussing a "phenomena" in the sky, as well as radar screen observations, labeling what was viewed as "unidentifiable" objects.
Other intercepted and decrypted reports of bright lights, luminous objects, and unidentified aircraft—along with an elongated ball of fire—scooting through the skies over non-U.S. countries are noted too.
Intercept operations
The 21-page affidavit makes clear that release of documents for public scrutiny, for a variety of reasons, "would seriously damage the ability of the United States to gather this vital intelligence information."
Furthermore, how the NSA works with a network of foreign sources, organizations, and other governments to secure intelligence data would be adversely affected.
The majority of these records, explained NSA official Eugene F. Yeates in the 1980 affidavit, were communications intelligence reports that "are the product of intercept operations directed against foreign government controlled communications systems within their territorial boundaries."
New insight
According to Aftergood, the newly declassified Yeates affidavit provides new insight into the types of records sought by UFO researchers that have been withheld by NSA.
"Even with all of the deletions, one can get a sense of the enormous scale — and the apparent success — of the worldwide electronic intercept operations conducted by NSA at the height of the Cold War," Aftergood told SPACE.com.
"Unfortunately it is not clear from the affidavit how the withheld documents might have related to UFOs," Aftergood said. "There must have been some connection in order for them to be within the scope of the original FOIA request... but I have no idea what it was."
But for those hungry to show a great government conspiracy is at work and that alien-driven UFOs routinely cruise through our skies, the just brought to light document won't help you.
"The affidavit does not discount the UFO phenomenon... it simply doesn't address it one way or the other," Aftergood concluded.
To view the affidavit, check out: http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/yeates-ufo.pdf
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Reuters
Wed Nov 16, 9:07 AM ET
WASHINGTON - Just a few minutes spent patting a dog can relieve a heart patient's anxiety and perhaps even help recovery during a visit to the hospital, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
The effects were much more pronounced than when heart failure patients visited with a human volunteer or were left quietly alone, the researchers told a meeting of the
American Heart Association in Dallas.
"This therapy warrants serious consideration as an adjunct to medical therapy in hospitalized heart failure patients. Dogs are a great comfort," said Kathie Cole, a registered nurse at the University of California Medical Center in Los Angeles who led the study.
"They make people happier, calmer and feel more loved. That is huge when you are scared and not feeling well."
Stress can worsen heart disease, but Cole said no one had scientifically investigated whether simple stress-relieving measures such as petting an animal might help in a way that could be measured.
Cole's team found that a 12-minute visit with a dog helped patients' heart and lung function by lowering pulmonary pressure, reducing the release of harmful hormones and decreasing anxiety. [...]
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Reuters
November 17, 2005
TOKYO - A giant white radish that won the hearts of a Japanese town by valiantly growing through the urban asphalt was in intensive care at a town hall in western Japan on Thursday after being slashed by an unknown assailant.
The "daikon" radish, shaped like a giant carrot, first made the news months ago when it was noticed poking up through asphalt along a roadside in the town of Aioi, population 33,289.
This week local residents, who had nicknamed the vegetable "Gutsy Radish," were shocked -- and in some cases moved to tears -- when they found it had been decapitated.
TV talk shows seized on the attempted murder of the popular vegetable and a day later, the top half of the radish was found near the site where it had been growing.
A town official said Thursday the top of the severed radish had been placed in water to try to keep it alive and possibly get it to flower.
Asked why the radish -- more often found on Japanese dinner tables as a garnish, pickle or in "oden" stew -- had so many fans, town spokesman Jiro Matsuo said: "People discouraged by tough times were cheered by its tenacity and strong will to live."
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SOTT
On the fourth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Laura Knight-Jadczyk announced the availability of her latest book: 9/11: The Ultimate Truth.
9/11: The Ultimate Truth is the definitive book on the secrets of September 11th. Never before has so much information come together for one purpose, to reveal the hidden agenda of 9/11 and answer the question: Why?
Laura Knight-Jadczyk succeeds in laying open the clandestine
plans behind the attack on America. Revealing for the first time ever the shadowed intent of the P3nt4gon Str!ke, why the Twin Towers were selected, and finally, who was behind it all.
Now you will have the Ultimate Truth!
Published by Red Pill Press
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.
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