Don’t believe the hype I was in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday when the historic march to protest the racist anti-immigration bill HR 4437 took place. For those who don’t know, this bill would make illegal immigrants felons as well as anybody, including family members who help them in any sort of way.

This means that if you have a cousin living in Mexico who comes over here and his paper work ain’t right, even if you didn’t know, you could face jail time. This means if you unknowingly hire somebody to haul away trash you could be in trouble. This is not about giving the government the power to build a wall at the border. This is much deeper then that..

As for the march, the mainstream news media claim there were 500 thousand people on who showed up. Keep in mind, this is after they tried to hate on the march and say only a few thousand were going to show up the night before. Trust me more than a million people showed up Anyone who was there could attest to that. All the blocks around the courthouse for as far as the eye could see was a sea of people. It was wall to wall. The rally started at 10 am.. Folks showed up in masse around 6 am and it stayed packed with people until 3 or 4 that afternoon.

Also it was a beautiful thing. The vibe in the air and the overall energy was infectious as you saw everyone from church goers to gang bangers all fighting to keep this oppressive bill from passing. There was an enormous amount of young people. Many came with their families. Its been a while since I been to a rally or march where I saw Grandmas, parents, young adults and little kids all in attendance.

I talked to cats who were all tatted up carrying signs that said ‘Stolen Land Defeat HR 4437’ and college cats carrying signs that read ‘Where was George Washington’s Green card’ carrying signs You could feel the spirit of resistance in the air. People are waking up and ready to hold people accountable for being so mean spirited

Also as you listen to the audio clips just don’t think this immigration thing is only gonna effect Brown folks. I guess the media doesn’t like to show what we all have in common, but bear in mind there’s a whole lot of Black folks like Haitians who this bill is designed to smash on if passed.
counterpunch.org

A FORMER British Army mole in the IRA has claimed that MI5 arranged a weapons-buying trip to America in which he obtained detonators, later used by terrorists to murder soldiers and police officers.
In a book to be published next month, the spy, who uses the pseudonym Kevin Fulton, describes in detail how British intelligence co-operated with the FBI to ensure his trip to New York in the 1990s went ahead without incident so that his cover would not be blown.

He claims the technology he obtained has been used in Northern Ireland and copied by terrorists in Iraq in roadside bombs that have killed British troops.

In the book, Unsung Hero, Fulton tells of his double life in which he had to play a convincing IRA man while working for the British. “You cannot pretend to be a terrorist,” said Fulton, who now lives outside Northern Ireland. “I had to be able to do the exact same thing as the IRA man next to me. Otherwise I wouldn’t be there.”

His allegations that the security services helped to obtain weapons that killed their own members follow revelations about British infiltration of terrorist groups and collusion in paramilitary killings.
timesonline.co.uk

March 27 (Bloomberg) — Zacarias Moussaoui testified that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid planned to hijack a jetliner and fly it into the White House on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Before your arrest, were you scheduled to be a pilot in an operation run on Sept. 11, 2001?” defense lawyer Gerald Zerkin asked Moussaoui at his sentencing trial in Alexandria, Virginia.

“Yes, I was supposed to pilot a plane to hit the White House,” Moussaoui said. He also said, “I knew the towers would be hit,” referring to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

Moussaoui said he knew about the plot when he was arrested a month before the attacks and lied to FBI agents because he wanted the mission to go forward. Moussaoui, 37, pleaded guilty last April to conspiracy charges linked to the Sept. 11 attacks. He is the only person charged in the U.S. in connection with the attacks.
bloomberg.com

This stinks of somethin’.

Bush’s foreign policy has failed ignominiously in Iraq, but where does that leave the liberal imperialists?

Liberal imperialists, 1990-2006, RIP? Hardly, but their tails are down. And so they should be. I am referring, of course, to a school of thought associated with the left that took wind after the end of the cold war and came to believe that the US was a benign power that could intervene around the world for the good of democracy and human values.

In the mood that prevailed after 1989, it was perhaps not entirely surprising: the left felt defeated, and many busily took the road of rejecting everything from their past as mistaken. This, for some, included the warm embrace of the US. The first Gulf war was easy to support, and so was American intervention in the Balkans tragedy. The US was not just the global policeman: it was the friendly bobby down the street, waiting to deliver good sense and virtue to some faraway country.

And so we had the spectacle of left figures rushing to support the US occupation of Iraq. It would bring democracy to Iraq, they proclaimed; human rights as well; peace to the region, and the end of a global threat. Rarely has such a huge undertaking ended in such rapid, ignominious and public failure. Just three short years later, the country is on the verge of civil war and patently ungovernable More than 15,000 US troops have been killed or wounded, and many tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead, with absolutely no end in sight and the prospect of worse to come.

It was always an illusion to believe that the US was essentially a benevolent power whose actions were universalistic and altruistic rather than primarily interest-driven. One could understand, perhaps, in the backwash of 1989, people believing this, or wanting to believe it. And Clinton was in the White House to give such a position an air of plausibility for New Labour and its intellectual outriders. But these guys’ fulsome embrace of the US coincided with Bush, a major lurch to the right and the triumph of the neoconservatives. This was the full-blown imperialism of a power that believed it could now rule the world without constraint – unilateralism, pre-emptive war, an overwhelming emphasis on military force, and a military budget that exceeded that of the rest of the world put together. Far from being the benign force of liberal imperialist fantasy, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and the like have told a rather traditional story of how an imperial power behaves when it feels unconstrained. Bizarrely their embrace of the US coincided with its most naked act of imperial aggression and its greatest moment of global isolation.
guardian.co.uk

Contrary to appearances, the elections this week are important, because they will expose the true face of Israeli society and its hidden ambitions. More than 100 elected candidates will be sent to the Knesset on the basis of one ticket – the racism ticket. If we used to think that every two Israelis have three opinions, now it will be evident that nearly every Israeli has one opinion – racism. Elections 2006 will make this much clearer than ever before. An absolute majority of the MKs in the 17th Knesset will hold a position based on a lie: that Israel does not have a partner for peace. An absolute majority of MKs in the next Knesset do not believe in peace, nor do they even want it – just like their voters – and worse than that, don’t regard Palestinians as equal human beings. Racism has never had so many open supporters. It’s the real hit of this election campaign.

One does not have to be Avigdor Lieberman to be a racist. The “peace” proposed by Ehud Olmert is no less racist. Lieberman wants to distance them from our borders, Olmert and his ilk want to distance them from out consciousness. Nobody is speaking about peace with them, nobody really wants it. Only one ambition unites everyone – to get rid of them, one way or another. Transfer or wall, “disengagement” or “convergence” – the point is that they should get out of our sight. The only game in town, the ‘unilateral arrangement,” is not only based on the lie that there is no partner, is not only based exclusively on our “needs” because of a sense of superiority, but also leads to a dangerous pattern of behavior that totally ignores the existence of the other nation.

The problem is that this feeling is based entirely on an illusory assumption. The Palestinians are here, just like us. They will, therefore, be forced to continue to remind us of their existence in the one way they and we both know, through violence and terror.
haaretz.com

Rachel Corrie went to Gaza to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians, whose voice is seldom heard in her country, the US. That she herself should be silenced – first by an Israeli bulldozer, next by a New York theatre cancelling a play created from her words – is a testimony to the power of her message. This song was written on a plane on March 20 and recorded at Big Sky Recordings, Ann Arbor, Michigan on March 22. The tune is borrowed from Bob Dylan.
guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON: The United States is planning to build at least six bases across the Middle East and Central Asia in the next 10 years for “deep storage” of munitions and equipment to prepare for regional war contingencies.

According to William M Arkin, author of more than 10 books on military affairs, and a former US army intelligence analyst and nuclear weapons expert during the Cold War, the plan came to attention this month through contracting documents that call for the continued storage of everything from packaged meals ready to eat (MREs) to missiles in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman, as well as the establishment of two new storage hubs, one in a classified Middle Eastern country “west” of Saudi Arabia and the other in a yet to be decided “Central Asian state.”

The plans to continue to “pre-position” war material in the Persian Gulf region leave ambiguous whether the US military foresees the ability to establish a permanent present in Iraq in the long-term. By 2016, the contracting documents show that the tonnage of air munitions stored at sites outside Iraq will double from current levels.
dailytimes.com

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq’s security minister, a Shi’ite political ally of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, accused U.S. and Iraqi troops on Monday of killing 37 unarmed people in an attack on a mosque complex a day earlier.

“At evening prayers, American soldiers accompanied by Iraqi troops raided the Mustafa mosque and killed 37 people,” Abd al-Karim al-Enzi, minister of state for national security, said.

“They were all unarmed. Nobody fired a single shot at them (the troops). They went in, tied up the people and shot them all. They did not leave any wounded behind,” he told Reuters.

Shi’ite politicians had earlier said 20 people were killed at the mosque. The U.S. military’s account of Sunday evening’s incident said Iraqi special forces with U.S. advisers killed 16 “insurgents”, arrested 15 people and freed an Iraqi hostage. The military denied entering any mosque.
reuters.com

Baghdad governor says suspends cooperation with US
BAGHDAD, March 27 (Reuters) – Baghdad provincial governor Hussein al-Tahan said on Monday he would suspend all cooperation with U.S. forces until an independent investigation is launched into the killing of 20 Shi’ites in a mosque.

“Today we decided to stop all political and service cooperation with the U.S. forces until a legal committee is formed to investigate this incident,” he told reporters, adding that the inquiry panel should include the U.S. embassy and the Iraqi defence ministry but not the U.S. military.

2 weeks ago:Iraqis killed by US troops ‘on rampage’
Claims of atrocities by soldiers mount

THE villagers of Abu Sifa near the Iraqi town of Balad had become used to the sound of explosions at night as American forces searched the area for suspected insurgents. But one night two weeks ago Issa Harat Khalaf heard a different sound that chilled him to the bone.
Khalaf, a 33-year-old security officer guarding oil pipelines, saw a US helicopter land near his home. American soldiers stormed out of the Chinook and advanced on a house owned by Khalaf’s brother Fayez, firing as they went.

Khalaf ran from his own house and hid in a nearby grove of trees. He saw the soldiers enter his brother’s home and then heard the sound of women and children screaming.

“Then there was a lot of machinegun fire,” he said last week. After that there was the most frightening sound of all — silence, followed by explosions as the soldiers left the house.

Once the troops were gone, Khalaf and his fellow villagers began a frantic search through the ruins of his brother’s home. Abu Sifa was about to join a lengthening list of Iraqi communities claiming to have suffered from American atrocities.

According to Iraqi police, 11 bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the house, among them four women and five children aged between six months and five years. An official police report obtained by a US reporter for Knight Ridder newspapers said: “The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people.”

The Abu Sifa deaths on March 15 were first reported last weekend on the day that Time magazine published the results of a 10-week investigation into an incident last November when US marines killed 15 civilians in their homes in the western Iraqi town of Haditha.

Did American Marines murder 23 Iraqi civilians?
US military investigators are examining allegations that Marines shot unarmed Iraqis, then claimed they were “enemy fighters”, The Independent on Sunday has learned. In the same incident, eyewitnesses say, one man bled to death over a period of hours as soldiers ignored his pleas for help.

American military officials in Iraq have already admitted that 15 civilians who died in the incident in the western town of Haditha last November were killed by Marines, and not by a roadside bomb, as had previously been claimed. The only victim of the remotely triggered bomb, it is now conceded, was a 20-year-old Marine, Lance-Corporal Miguel Terrazas, from El Paso, Texas.

An inquiry has been launched by the US Navy’s Criminal Investigation Service after the military was presented with evidence that the 15 civilians, including seven women and three children still in their nightclothes, had been killed in their homes in the wake of the bombing. If it is proved that they died in a rampage by the Marines, and not as a result of “collateral damage”, it would rank as the worst case of deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians by US armed forces since the invasion three years ago.

40 recruits killed at Iraq base
A suicide bomber attacked an Iraqi army recruiting centre today in northern Iraq, killing at least 40 people and wounding 30 others, the Iraqi military said.
The bomber struck shortly after midday at the recruiting centre in front of a joint US-Iraqi military base between Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city, and the ancient city of Tal Afar.

All the victims were believed to all be Iraqis; the US military said no American troops were hurt in the bombing, which was around 18 miles east of Tal Afar.

The psychotropic drugs are a bow to a little-discussed truth fraught with implications: Mentally ill service mem-bers are being returned to combat.

The redeployments are legal, and the service members are often eager to go. But veterans groups, lawmakers and mental-health professionals fear that the practice lacks adequate civilian oversight. They also worry that such redeployments are becoming more frequent as multiple combat tours become the norm and traumatized service members are retained out of loyalty or wartime pressures to maintain troop numbers.

Sen. Barbara Boxer hopes to address the controversy through the Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health, which is expected to start work next month. The California Democrat wrote the legislation that created the panel. She wants the task force to examine deployment policies and the quality and availability of mental-health care for the military.

“We’ve also heard reports that doctors are being encouraged not to identify mental-health illness in our troops. I am asking for a lot of answers,” Boxer said during a March 8 telephone interview. “If people are suffering from mental-health problems, they should not be sent on the battlefield.”
rinf.com

Venezuela has hit UK oil giant BP with a $61.4m (£35m) back tax bill.
The country’s tax authority, the Seniat, said the figure arose from the firm’s operations in the country between 2001 and 2004.

BP confirmed the bill had been given to its BP Venezuela Holdings unit and that it was in talks with tax officials.

Venezuela’s left-wing President Hugo Chavez is demanding foreign oil firms pay more taxes and give up majority control over their Venezuelan ventures.

In the 1990s Venezuela signed 32 operating agreements with private companies at a tax rate of 34%.

But last year Mr Chavez decided the agreements should have set a rate of 50%.

He wants to use the additional revenues to increase social spending in the country.

The move has added to tensions between Venezuela and the US. Relations between the two worsened earlier this year after a tit-for-tat expulsion row over allegations of spying.

At the weekend, Mr Chavez said that America was planning to invade Venezuela, an accusation Washington immediately dismissed.
bbc.co.uk