…SJC: We wanted to ask a few questions about the elections that just happened. A number of officials and the top electoral monitors [from the Canadian government] have described this election as being the best that Haiti has ever had. What is your response to that?

SB: As the popular movement of poor disenfranchised people known as Lavalas, we have always had only one weapon: the Democratic Weapon, which is one man, one vote.

After 200 years of independence, on Dec 16th,1990, Haiti held the first democratic election in its entire history. That is when we, the people from poor neighbourhoods, got to elect Jean Bertrand Aristide, the poor priest, as a president who could represent us. So in 1991 there was a clear threat to democracy when some countries like France, United States and Canada joined to a minority of people – who now have organized themselves as the Group 184 – who organized a coup against Aristide and all of the people of Haiti. But because of the support and help of real friends of Haiti, what we call Bon Blans, the people had a chance to get through it [when Aristide was returned to power in 1994]. So with the solidarity from the Black Caucus, the Clinton administration, and the mobilization of people here in Haiti, the people finally got the return of the president they had elected.

So the return of democracy helped relieve a lot of problems in poor neighbourhoods because it gave us access to food, health care, potable water, and different other basic needs. But that didn’t stop the international community and also a minority of the wealthy people in Haiti, from again organizing a coup [in 2004] against the needs of Haiti, causing suffering in the poor neighbourhoods, and bloodshed all over again.

As a people descended from African slaves, we believe in the democratic way. We believe that there is one way to take power, and this is by voting someone that we trust in. So after the coup of Feb 29 we have been mobilizing for a very long time, protesting in the streets peacefully, in order to call for the respect of our vote.

But we have been mobilizing also against exclusion, the social exclusion that people in poor neighbourhoods are victims of. Because when we talk about social exclusion, it’s because the wealthy people in Haiti – joined with some of the wealthy countries – they wanted to have elections but without the people of the poor neighbourhoods.

So when we say that the wealthy countries and the wealthy people in Haiti tried to stop the people in poor neighbourhoods from voting, that’s clear because we have a lot of evidence of it. They committed killings very often in the poor neighbourhoods, so that the people would move away. They didn’t have polling centers in the poor neighbourhoods so people would be discouraged from voting. They called our neighbourhoods no-man’s-lands so that people would not visit and find out about our suffering and our struggles. Many people here do not have food to eat and potable water to drink but they do have the idea that their votes should be respected. They remember September 16th 1990 and they wanted this to occur again through the new elections that just happened.

For us, the vote of February 7th 2006 has a real meaning: it is a clear answer to the coup of 2004. We wanted to show to the wealthy people, who organized themselves as the Group 184, that we will not let them exclude us from the political decision making process and that they cannot take everything for themselves. We wanted to show that we are still part of the country. It was a slap in the face of the defacto Gerard Latortue/Boniface Alexander government to have so many poor people vote.

But compare this slap in the face to the repression that we have been subjected to. We have been imprisoned just because of our political affiliation. We have been victims of different massacres, but we still decided to organize against all of this oppression.

Some people seem to think that the people who live here are all illiterate and that we don’t deserve to have the same vote as everyone else. So that is why we gave them this response – to show that we know what we need and we know how to get it. So while people may say that we are illiterate and that we don’t know anything about democracy, our vote was a clear response to tell them that we know politics better then they do. It was quite a lesson for them because it was above their understanding, what the people accomplished on Feb 7th. Even part of the international community shares the opinion of the elite here – thinking that people in poor neighbourhoods are just dumb and crazy and don’t know what to do.

So our vote on February 7th was a clear response to them too. Our vote was a vote for the release of all political prisoners. We voted for a real national reconciliation through a dialogue of the people which will allow us to move towards peace in Haiti. The vote was not the only step. We will be voting again for the senate so that Preval will be in a strong position to help the people. We will also be mobilizing for a general amnesty which will help the country get the reconciliation that it needs so that we can move against the social exclusion that is going on right now in Haiti.
haiti.nspirg.org

About 2000 women from La Via Campesina occupied the plantation of Aracruz Celulose, in Barra do Ribeiro, Rio Grande do Sul (sur de Basil), early this wednesday morning. The purpose of the mobilization is to denounce the social and environmental impact of the growing green desert created by eucalyptus monocuture. The Barba Negra farm is the main production unit of seedslings of eucalyptus and pines of Aracruz. It also has a laboratory for seedlings cloning.

“We are against green deserts, the enormous plantations of eucalyptus, acácia and pines for cellulose, that cover t housandas of hectares in Brazil and Latin América. ‘When the green desert advancesm biodiversity is destroyed, soils deteriorate, rivers dry up. Moreover cellulose plants pollute air and water and threaten human health”, say the woman protestors.
zmag.org

Slobodan Milosevic is characterized in the obituaries as the “Butcher of the Balkans.” If that is the story you want to read about, please go to almost any other media outlet and read it again and again. Some are now suggesting that death is Milosevic’s final revenge, that he “ended up cheating history” by dying before judgment was passed. But the world has already passed judgment on Milosevic and what is being cheated by his death is history itself.

What the corporate media overwhelmingly ignores in Milosevic’s death is what they ignored in his life as well–his intimate knowledge of US war crimes in Yugoslavia. While Milosevic was undoubtedly a war criminal who deserved to be tried for his crimes, he was also the only man in the unique position of being able to expose and detail the full extent of the US role in the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In fact, that is precisely what he was fighting to do at his war crimes trial when he died.
counterpunch.org

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The federal judge in the Zacarias Moussaoui case is considering ending the death-penalty prosecution of the al-Qaida conspirator after learning that a federal lawyer apparently coached witnesses on upcoming testimony.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said Monday it was “very difficult for this case to go forward” after prosecutors revealed that a lawyer for the Transportation Security Administration had violated her order barring witnesses from any exposure to trial testimony.

Brinkema sent the jury home until Wednesday while she considers her options.

If she bars the government from pursuing the death penalty, the trial would be over and Moussaoui would automatically be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of release. The government likely would appeal that ruling.

A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday to determine the scope of the problem. The TSA lawyer, Carla Martin, and most of the seven witnesses — past or present employees of the Federal Aviation Administration who received e-mails from Martin — are expected to testify.

The judge said she had “never seen such an egregious violation of a rule on witnesses,” and prosecutor David Novak agreed that Martin’s actions were “horrendously wrong.”
news.yahoo.com

Television evangelist Pat Robertson said Monday on his live news-and- talk program “The 700 Club” that Islam is not a religion of peace, and that radical Muslims are “satanic.”

Robertson’s comments came after he watched a news story on his Christian Broadcasting Network about Muslim protests in Europe over the cartoon drawings of the Prophet Muhammad.

He remarked that the outpouring of rage elicited by cartoons “just shows the kind of people we’re dealing with. These people are crazed fanatics, and I want to say it now: I believe it’s motivated by demonic power. It is satanic and it’s time we recognize what we’re dealing with.”
breitbart.com

In a letter to the editor of The New York Times last week, retired Israeli general Shlomo Gazit could not have been more clear: “This is not the time for politicians from your country or ours to offer knee-jerk counterproductive declarations or legislation to cater to their electorates.”

Gazit is not your run-of-the-mill retired general. He was Israel’s first coordinator of government operations in the Palestinian territories and served afterward as head of military intelligence. And he says: This is not a time for posturing. This is a time to “wait and see what unfolds within the Hamas-led Palestinian government.”

Come Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Tom Lantos and offer a bill that was almost surely on Gazit’s mind when he wrote, a bill that could be a poster-child for knee-jerk reaction. Ros-Lehtinen is chair of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia of the International Relations Committee of the House of Representatives, and Lantos is its ranking minority member.

What they have offered, and what at least 70 of their colleagues have by now endorsed, is a draconian measure that would forbid any and all contact between the American government and Hamas — and similarly, between the United States and any Palestinian government in which any member of Hamas has any part at all. According to the language of the bill, for example, if the Palestinian Authority were to employ a postman who is a member of Hamas, any and all relationship between any American government agency and the P.A. would have to cease. No contact.

The bill, as written, is a piece of meddlesome foolishness, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that most members of Congress are reluctant to oppose for fear of seeming “anti-Israel.” That’s been the case in Congress for many years now, and the result has done Israel no service at all.
forward.com

(MENAFN) Syria and Iran are intending to set up an Iranian strategic oil pipeline across Iraq, the official al-Thawra newspaper reported.

According to an official, the pipeline will run across Iraq, Syria to the Mediterranean Sea.

Syrian-Iranian Joint Committee have discussed ways to improve work on building an oil pipeline in cooperation with the Iraqi government, said the paper, adding that Syria, Iran and Iraq would all benefit from the project.

The deal was under a MOU inked between the Syria and Iran in the field of oil, gas and petrochemicals in a bid to continue and develop cooperation in this regard, according to the paper.

The committee also discussed the possibility of building a strategic gas line across Iraq and Syria to link it to the Arab Gas Line which is under construction to transport the Egyptian gas through Syria and Jordan.

The oil pipeline project comes amid Syria and Iran are boosting bilateral economic ties recently, marked by high-level officials visits between the two countries.
menafn.com

BRITAIN has been secretly designing a new nuclear warhead in conjunction with the Americans, provoking a legal row over the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The government has been pushing ahead with the programme while claiming that no decision has been made on a successor to Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent. Work on a new weapon by scientists at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire has been under way since Tony Blair was re-elected last May, and is now said to be ahead of similar US research.

The aim is to produce a simpler device using proven components to avoid breaching the ban on nuclear testing. Known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), it is being designed so that it can be tested in a laboratory rather than by detonation.

“We’ve got to build something that we can never test and be absolutely confident that, when we use it, it will work,” one senior British source said last week.
timesonline.co.uk

Focus: Britain’s secret nuclear blueprint
Two weeks ago a group of Britain’s brightest young physicists gathered at the US nuclear test site in the Nevada desert and headed for Control Point 1. There they waited for a test codenamed Operation Krakatoa to erupt.

A thousand feet beneath the desert scrub, components for a new British nuclear warhead were ready for detonation. Though it was not to be an earthquaking full nuclear blast — since Britain is a signatory to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty — the physicists were about to witness only the second “sub-critical” test Britain has conducted in nearly a decade.

The controlled detonation, measuring the effect of conventional explosives on a small piece of plutonium, was ostensibly to help ensure that the UK’s nuclear warheads, deployed on Trident submarines, remain effective. But that was only half the story.

As The Sunday Times reveals today, the data produced by the test were part of a much wider, secret research programme to build a new nuclear weapon that some experts say will breach the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT).

A former top UN and US arms inspector on Iraq has said it may be too late to stop a nuclear-weapons determined Iran, noting that there is no consensus on taking military action against Tehran.

“I’m afraid that we probably are past the point where there is any meaningful alternative other than military action to stop the Iranians if they are determined to go ahead. And I don’t see that as a possibility,” David Kay, who led the US search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq following the 2003 invasion, said on Sunday.
aljazeera.net

McCain: If Iran Gets Nukes, U.S. ‘In Trouble’
Where Iran is concerned, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, believes President Bush was right in keeping military leverage on the table and considering U.N. sanctions.

“Iran may be the greatest single threat to America since the end of the Cold War,”McCain told an audience at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Memphis, Tenn. “If the Iranians acquire nuclear weapons, then my friends, we are in trouble.”

Bush ties Iran to roadside bombs in Iraq
US President George W. Bush directly linked Tehran to roadside bombings against US forces in Iraq, stepping up his criticisms of Iran amid a tense standoff over its nuclear program.

“Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices in Iraq,” Bush said in a speech.

He cited recent congressional testimony from John Negroponte, the US director of national intelligence.

The president’s comments came as he launched a public relations offensive to bolster support for the war in Iraq some three years after he ordered the US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

Bush also charged that “some of the most powerful IEDs we are seeing in Iraq today include components that came from Iran.”

U.S. denies asking for Iranian help in Iraq
BAGHDAD, March 12 (Reuters) – The U.S. ambassador in Baghdad denied on Sunday seeking Iran’s help to calm violence in Iraq and said there were still concerns about the Islamic Republic’s links with militias in Iraq.

Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper said journalists in Tehran had been shown a letter by a senior Iranian intelligence agent that was purportedly from U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, and which invited Iran to send representatives to talks in Iraq.
The newspaper said the letter was written in Farsi, which the Afghan-born ambassador speaks.

Khalilzad told CNN there had been no meetings between Iranian and U.S. officials.
“We have concerns about their relations with militias and extremists,” said Khalilzad.
Earlier, the U.S. embassy denied such a letter existed.

When Army Sgt. Michael J. Smith faces a court-martial today on charges that he used his military working dog to harass and threaten detainees, one of the prime examples of that alleged misconduct will be a photograph of Smith holding the dog just inches from the face of a detainee. It is one of the notorious images to emerge from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Although officials characterized the other detainees who appeared in the Abu Ghraib photographs as common criminals and rioters, the orange-clad detainee seen cowering before the dog was different. Detainee No. 155148 was considered a high-value intelligence source suspected of having close ties to al-Qaeda. According to interviews, sworn statements from soldiers and military documents obtained by The Washington Post, Ashraf Abdullah Ahsy was at the center of a military intelligence “special project” designed to break him down, and was considered important enough that his interrogation was mentioned in a briefing to high-ranking intelligence officials at the Pentagon.

Although Ahsy — also identified in documents by the tribal last name of al-Juhayshi — was described without his name in an Abu Ghraib military investigation as a “high value” detainee, he has largely remained a mystery. Ahsy’s story, and his months of intense interrogations, contrast with statements by U.S. officials that the images of abuse at Abu Ghraib depicted malfeasance of a few soldiers randomly selecting victims on the night shift.

Ahsy could become a central figure in Smith’s trial because attorneys for the Abu Ghraib dog handlers have said that military intelligence (MI) directed the soldiers to use their animals as part of an interrogation regimen, one that top officers approved in December 2003. Unlike others implicated in the Abu Ghraib abuse, the dog handlers can point directly to approvals of the technique in question from top commanders.

In a Jan. 25 sworn statement to investigators after he was granted immunity, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who ran the Abu Ghraib operation, said he approved the use of dogs for a few detainees in the days before the picture of Ahsy was taken, though he said he did not remember signing off on using dogs with Ahsy. Army officials confirmed that Ahsy is the one in the photograph.

“The preponderance of the evidence suggests the photo was the only photo [depicting Abu Ghraib abuse] which had anything to do with interrogations because the detainee was considered a high-value detainee,” an Army official said Friday in response to questions about the case. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is part of an ongoing court-martial.

Ahsy was interrogated dozens of times by military intelligence soldiers, civilian contractors, and members of other government agencies (OGA), a common euphemism for the CIA, according to the documents. The newly discovered accounts reveal that the military working dog in the photograph was being used in conjunction with a coordinated effort to get Ahsy to talk, an effort that continued for months.

Smith, who has been charged with dereliction of duty and maltreatment of detainees, is scheduled to be tried at Fort Meade this week. He is also accused of using his dog to threaten two other detainees and for allegedly engaging in a contest to make detainees urinate and defecate out of fear. Smith’s military attorney declined requests to comment.

Smith told abuse investigators in 2004 that military intelligence and military police requested Marco, his black Belgian shepherd, for use in interrogations and to control detainees, and that he complied.
washingtonpost.com