While the U.S. mainstream media widely-reported the U.S. Department of Justice’s recent indictment of 50 rebel leaders belonging to the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), an announcement by the State Department the next day received surprisingly little coverage. On March 24, Assistant Secretary of State Anne Patterson told Colombia’s Radio Caracol that, while the United States would not initiate any unilateral military action to capture FARC leaders, it would intervene if invited by the Colombian government. Given that the U.S. government’s intervention in Colombia already involves everything but the deployment of U.S. combat troops, it is clear that Patterson’s comments were intended to illustrate the Bush administration’s willingness to deploy U.S. troops to Colombia to combat FARC guerrillas.
colomibiajournal.org

The exiled former Liberian president Charles Taylor has gone missing in Nigeria, just as a prison cell at Sierra Leone’s war crimes court was being readied for his imminent arrival.

His disappearance is a major embarrassment for Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who arrives today in Washington where he will have to answer to US critics who have pushed for Taylor’s handover for years.

The Nigerian authorities, who have been overseeing Mr Taylor’s exile for almost three years, said yesterday that he had disappeared on Monday night from his riverside villa in the south-eastern city of Calabar.

The UN secretary general Kofi Annan said he intended to contact the Nigerian government for answers. “It would be extremely worrying if indeed he had disappeared because the Nigerian government had indicated it will co-operate with his transfer to Liberia and to the court,” Mr Annan said.

“If he is not where he normally stays, where is he? Has he been moved elsewhere by the authorities? Did he vanish?”
independent.co.uk

Joseph Nyamiroko never reached the safety of the Amahoro stadium with his family. On 11 April 1994, he witnessed soldiers hacking his wife and son to death with machetes before shooting his brother in the face as they fled towards the sports complex.

Ever since, the 56-year-old shopkeeper has avoided the towering arena. He believes it is where the “ghosts” of his loved ones finally found refuge from Rwanda’s genocide.

But on Monday night, almost 12 years to the day after seeing his family butchered on a muddy brick-red road, Mr Nyamiroko finally completed the journey to the stadium.

There he found those ghosts, walking and talking before him on a 20ft-tall cinema screen.

Sat on the terraces with 2,000 others, he saw a version of the events of that day resurrected in the world premiere of Shooting Dogs during a tropical rainstorm. The £3m British film, starring John Hurt, portrays the massacre started at the Ecole Technique Officielle (ETO) in Kichukiro, a southern suburb of the Rwandan capital, Kigali.

It was one of the most bestial and troubling killing sprees in the planned campaign of extermination which claimed 800,000 lives in 100 days between April and July 1994.

…Indeed, the makers of Shooting Dogs – financed by the film arm of the BBC, the UK Film Council and a German production company – have been eager to emphasise what they consider to be its key virtue – the fact it was made in Rwanda with Rwandans actors and crew and as much input from Rwandans as possible. By contrast, the Oscar-nominated Hotel Rwanda was made in South Africa.
independent.co.uk

How sick is this.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (Reuters) — A series of blasts killed one person and injured several others in Addis Ababa on Monday, the first fatality in a string of mysterious explosions in the Ethiopian capital.

One person was killed and three others injured when the first blast ripped through a minibus in the southern part of the city.

Over the next six hours in different parts of Addis Ababa, explosions went off in a small cafe, a guard shack and at an abattoir.

An employee in the cafe said the explosion there injured 10 people and ambulances could be seen leaving for the hospital.

Police who had cordoned off the area around the cafe, littered with broken glass, had no immediate comment.

The fourth explosion, in the busy Mercato trading district, tore the tin roof off a guard shack near some warehouses. A sidewalk vendor was seriously injured, witnesses said.

A Reuters reporter at the scene of the bus explosion said the rear of the 11-seat vehicle was torn apart by the blast.

The bus owner, Berhanu Gebremichael, told Reuters: “One person was killed in the explosion. Three others were injured slightly and they are in hospital for treatment.”

It was the first death in a wave of attacks that began in January with minor blasts targeting public buildings and hotels.

Although grenade attacks to settle scores are relatively common in Ethiopia, the unexplained blasts have boosted tension in Addis, which was shaken by two bouts of unrest in the wake of disputed parliamentary elections last May.

At least 80 people were killed in clashes between police and opposition demonstrators in June and November.

On March 7 this year, three separate explosions injured at least four people at a restaurant, a market and outside a school.

Ethiopia’s government said the plastic explosives used in those blasts were smuggled from neighboring Eritrea and used by what it called Eritrean-backed “terrorists.”

Eritrea, which has been locked in a dispute with Ethiopia over their border since a 1998-2000 war that killed 70,000 people, ridiculed the charges.
cnn.com

FORT WORTH, Texas — Students rushed Dallas City Hall Tuesday in the second day of marches for the rights of illegal immigrants, leaving at least three injured; students also gathered at Kiest Park in Oak Cliff and Fort Worth City Hall.

The students flooded the most floors of Dallas City Hall, disrupting a council meeting, before police and security guards managed to usher them back out. Councilwoman Elba Garcia left a closed-door meeting to used a police-car public address system to ask students to return to school.

Hundreds of students were gathered outside Dallas City Hall with flags and signs. Several students were seen wading in the reflecting pond in front of City Hall.
One girl was carried out of the water and attended to by paramedics. At least one other person was injured moments later.

Police lined the City Hall entrance, and elevators inside the building were shut down late Tuesday morning. There was no word on damage or arrests.

Video footage Tuesday showed gridlocked traffic two or three lanes wide in front of one Dallas high school, with many truckbeds packed with students who waved Mexican flags.

At Kiest Park, about 1,500 students from Dallas and Grand Prairie schools demonstrated. Dallas police outfitted in riot gear moved in on the crowd after some of the students started throwing rocks and bottles at a woman who staged a one-person counterprotest.

Dallas police said they were forced to separate the woman from the crowd. They also moved students to a different section of the park.

Police withdrew after a few minutes and watched from a distance as the students boarded buses, which took them back to school.

Students from at least four Irving high schools walked out of class at about 9 a.m. and took the Trinity Railway Express to Dallas City Hall.
nbc5i.com

Senators Back Guest Workers
A key Senate panel broke with the House’s get-tough approach to illegal immigration yesterday and sent to the floor a broad revision of the nation’s immigration laws that would provide lawful employment to millions of undocumented workers while offering work visas to hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year.

Is this a phony trumped-up feud between Bush and the Conservatives to court the Latinos and build up Bush’s political capital?

A strike by local authority workers has closed thousands of schools, libraries and leisure centres, crippled council services across the UK and led to travel chaos for motorists.

Unions said the walkout, in a bitter row over pensions, had been solidly supported by more than a million workers in the biggest bout of industrial action since the 1926 General Strike.

All bus and rail services were at a standstill in Northern Ireland, while the Mersey Tunnels in Liverpool and the Metro on Tyneside were closed.

Picket lines were mounted outside council offices, police stations, universities, day centres, libraries, museums, schools and other local authority buildings.

Unison, the biggest of 11 unions involved in the row, said the turnout had been larger than expected, adding that strikers had received warm public support for their stance.

General secretary Dave Prentis said: “Our members have taken the decision to strike very seriously indeed. They are not selfish people, they are not using any excuse to call ‘strike’ and have a day off – they are asking simply for what they have paid for and what they deserve.

“These are real people who have paid 6% year in, year out to their pension scheme, and are now being treated like second-class citizens when it comes to paying out on their pensions.
thisislondon.com

· Organisers claim 3m people join marches
· Sarkozy floods Paris with 4,000 riot police

Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of France yesterday, disrupting schools and transport in a nationwide strike to pressure the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, to withdraw his controversial new employment law.
Organisers of the marches claimed that three million people joined marches with major demonstrations in Marseille, Bordeaux and a dozen cities and towns across the country. In Paris, unions estimated that 700,000 people joined the biggest and most heavily policed demonstration that snaked its way to Place de la Republique over several hours led by students, schoolchildren and trade unionists, including striking Air France workers.
guardian.co.uk

NBC news reporter Pete Williams speculates that the feds have rigged a defiant Zacarias Moussaoui with a stun belt, an “electro-shock” device, apparently part of a growing “shock technology” arsenal used by torturers in South Africa, China, and Lebanon. “Amnesty International is extremely concerned about the introduction by the prison authorities in the United States of America of a remote controlled electro-shock stun belt for use on prisoners in chain gangs, judicial hearings and transportation,” the human rights organization declared in 1996. “Officers can use it to psychologically threaten a prisoner, and it appears designed to humiliate and degrade a prisoner… Data from other electro-shock weapons indicate that the high pulse 50,000 volt shocks lasting eight seconds at a time could result in longer term physical and mental injuries.”

Is it possible Moussaoui is now admitting he was involved in a plot to crash an airliner into the White House with the shoe bomber mental case Richard Reid in a Pavlovian response to 50,000 volts of electricity? If the feds are using electro-shock against the alleged wanna-be “al-Qaeda” operative, is it possible they are also drugging him? Aicha el-Wafi, Moussaoui’s mother, believes her son “must have been drugged” when she saw him in court, according to Yahoo News. “That is not Zachary,” she declared.

It should be remembered that Moussaoui previously denied any involvement in the nine eleven attacks and his sudden if not electrifying (pun intended) eleventh hour conversion during the penalty phase of his trial is highly suspicious. Moreover, according to nine eleven “mastermind” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (supposedly in custody), Moussaoui was to take part in a second wave of attacks and was not part of the September 11, 2001, attack. Of course, this contradiction is not worth consideration, either by the jury or the corporate news media. It appears the patsy Zacarias Moussaoui is indeed a dead man walking—with a little help from a 50,000 volt shock belt.
kurtnimmo.com

The US supreme court was urged yesterday to rein in President George Bush’s use of his powers as a wartime president, challenging his order to dispatch al-Qaida suspects to trial before military tribunals.

In arguments that could redefine the balance between presidential power and the laws of war, lawyers for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, an inmate at Guantánamo, told the court that Mr Bush had violated basic military protections with his November 2001 executive order setting up the tribunals.

Mr Hamdan, a Yemeni accused of driving a pick-up truck for Osama bin Laden, was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 and charged with war crimes. The Bush administration claims he conspired with the al-Qaida leader to carry out attacks in the US. He says he was merely working to support his family, and needed the $200-a-month salary.

The case challenges the Bush administration’s justification for holding people without recourse to US courts or the Geneva convention.

Terror suspects brought before the tribunals do not have the right to an attorney of their choice or to see the evidence against them. Even if they are acquitted and freed, the verdict can be reversed by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Mr Hamdan’s lawyers contended yesterday that that makes the tribunals unconstitutional because they allow the president to define the crime, and select the prosecutor and judges who act as jury.

“This is a military commission that is literally unburdened by the laws, constitution and treaties of the United States,” one lawyer, Neal Katyal, told the court.
guardian.co.uk

In Bushzarro world, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was first about Saddam’s illusory weapons of mass destruction, and then in lieu of actually finding any weapons the excuse shifted to altruism, a mawkish desire to bestow democracy on benighted Iraqis (who pretty much pioneered civilization 12,000 years ago as Mesopotamians and didn’t need any help from the neocons). In fact, the invasion had nothing to do with either of these things, as some of us said in late 2002, about the time the Straussian neocons began making serious noise about invading Iraq and killing thousands of people.

Instead, the invasion of Iraq was all about destroying Iraqi society and nationalism. It was a coup de grâce delivered after twelve years of brutal, immoral, sadistic, and medieval sanctions designed to break the Iraqis down. It has everything to do with defeating secular Arab nationalism and in this respect the occupation (and destruction) of Iraq is an Israeli project. Both Syria and Lebanon loom large on the Straussian neocon hit list precisely because they represent Arab nationalism. Syrian thinkers such as Constantin Zureiq, Zaki al-Arsuzi and Michel Aflaq formulated pan-Arab ideology and Aflaq and al-Arsuzi were key figures in the establishment of the Arab Ba’ath (Resurrection) Party. Since the 1980s, the Israelis and their neocon allies in the United States have work diligently to replace pan-Arab nationalism with Islamic fanaticism.

According to retired Delta Force Command Sergeant Major Eric Haney, the United States has “fomented civil war in Iraq” and has “probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis…. I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies,” Haney will tell the Los Angeles Daily News tomorrow, Raw Story reports.

Back in November, 2003, Leslie Gelb, “an influential man who, until recently, presided over the very important Council of Foreign Affairs, a think tank that brings together the CIA, the secretary of state and big shots from U.S. multinational corporations,” writes Michel Collon, proposed breaking Iraq into three ethnically distinct balkanized mini-states as an effective way to “weaken resistance,” a continuation and amplification on the old British “divide and rule” technique used to great effect in Ireland, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere (see Gelb’s The Three-State Solution, New York Times, 25 November 2003). It is an idea pushed long and hard by the Israelis, as proposed in Oded Yinon’s A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. “Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon,” Yinon wrote. It is precisely “inter-Arab confrontation” initiated through false flag provocative operations occurring currently in Iraq.
kurtnimmo.com