…Q: The supporters of Israel, left supporters of Israel, basically say that the two-state solution is the only real possibility for Israel, and thatâ??s why they push its support in the US. What is your answer to that?

I can see a support for a two-state solution emerging, immediately after the Six-Day war, when Israel did not yet annex the East Jerusalem, did not yet build one Jewish settlement in it. There was a lot of logic of saying that despite, despite the fact that it is only 20% of Palestine could be a basis for a Palestinian state, next to Israel, and that these two states, in the future, would develop in such a way that they might turn it into one state, and even find a way of solving the refugees problem. But this is all water under the bridge.

In 2005, with the number of Jewish settlements, with the Greater Jerusalem becoming one third of the West Bank, and the local, and global, and regional balances of power, I think a two-state solution can only become an indirect way for continuing the Occupation. And as I said before, if we understand that the diplomatic effort has deepened the Occupation, has not brought an end to it, so in the case of the two-state solution we have to liberate ourselves from that paradigm. It can only help the Occupation and the Zionist colonization, and only the beginning of ideas of one-state solution can create a different future there.
informationclearinghouse.info

TEHRAN, March 4 — Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, whose foreign policy was defined by a quest for what he called a “dialogue between civilizations,” warned Saturday that tensions between the Islamic world and the West are taking the shape of a new Cold War.

Khatami, speaking at a government conference promoting interfaith dialogue, said the West was largely responsible. Islam was being cast as the “enemy of humanity” by governments reverting to the polarized worldview that divided the planet for 50 years after World War II, he said.

The West “needs an enemy, and this time it is Islam,” Khatami said. “And Islamophobia becomes a part of all policies of the great powers, of hegemonic powers.

“We are not very far from the era of the Cold War that inflicted a lot of damage on the world.”
washingtonpost.com

New US focus on promoting democracy in Iran
The US State Department has created an office dedicated to Iran to reflect the Bush administration’s new focus on promoting democracy in the Islamic republic, officials said on Thursday.

Establishment of the Office of Iran Affairs follows the request to Congress made by Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, last month for an additional $75m this year to spend on influencing democratic change in Iran. The proposed spending has already triggered an internal struggle over who will control the $50m designated for a new Farsi-language television station.

KABUL, March 4 (Xinhuanet) — Four intelligence agents were killed Saturday in a bomb explosion in Afghan southern province of Helmand, a local official said.

“This morning at about 11:00 a.m. (6:30 a.m. GMT) when the intelligence department director of Nawah district traveled in Nadali district with three of his colleagues, their car was blown up by a remote-controlled bomb. All the four persons were killed,” Assadullah Shierzad, the provincial intelligence department chief told Xinhua.

“So far no one has been arrested for the accident, and the investigation is still going on,” he added.

Helmand, together with Kandahar, Uruzgan and Zabul, the former stronghold of Taliban, has become the hotspot of the firefight since the beginning of this year.

Eight Taliban militants were killed, 10 of them were arrested, and four Afghan police were injured in a firefight Friday in Helmand.

After the loss, Taliban carried out several attacks to the official in one of which the district chief of Sangin in Helmand was killed by two militants Friday.
xinhuanet.com

SUSPECTED Sunni militants stormed a small town near Baghdad and executed at least 25 people, including a six-year-old girl, with a single bullet each to the forehead, police said yesterday as a curfew was re-instated in the Iraqi capital.

Most of the victims were poor Shiite labourers at a brick factory in the town of Nahrawan. At least nine others were killed during a gun battle that erupted around Nahrawan power station, which also came under mortar fire.
scotsman.com

SUSPECTED Sunni militants stormed a small town near Baghdad and executed at least 25 people, including a six-year-old girl, with a single bullet each to the forehead, police said yesterday as a curfew was re-instated in the Iraqi capital.

Most of the victims were poor Shiite labourers at a brick factory in the town of Nahrawan. At least nine others were killed during a gun battle that erupted around Nahrawan power station, which also came under mortar fire.
scotsman.com

by Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski

The British medical journal Lancet recently took greater notice of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) than all western media outlets combined. A group of physicians reported that about 4 million people have died since the “official” outbreak of the Congolese war in 1998 (1). The BBC reported the war in Congo has claimed more lives than any armed conflict since World War II (2). However, experts working in the Congo, and Congolese survivors, count over 10 million dead since war began in 1996—not 1998—with the U.S.-backed invasion to overthrow Zaire’s President Joseph Mobutu. While the western press quantifies African deaths all the time, no statistic can quantify the suffering of the Congolese.

Some people are aware that war in the Congo is driven by the desire to extract raw materials, including diamonds, gold, columbium tantalite (coltan), niobium, cobalt, copper, uranium and petroleum. Mining in the Congo by western companies proceeds at an unprecedented rate, and
it is reported that some $6 million in raw cobalt alone—an element of superalloys essential for nuclear, chemical, aerospace and defense industries—exits DRC daily. Any analysis of the geopolitics in the Congo requires an understanding of the organized crime perpetrated through multi-national businesses, in order to understand the reasons why the Congolese people have suffered a virtually unending war since 1996.

Some people have lauded great progress in the exposure of illegal mining in DRC, particularly by the group Human Rights Watch (HRW), whose 2005 report “The Curse of Gold” exposed Ugandan officials and multi-national corporations smuggling gold through local rebel militias. The cited rebel groups were the Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI) and the People’s Armed Forces of Congo (FAPC). The western companies targeted by HRW were Anglo-Ashanti Gold, a company headquartered in South Africa, and Metalor, a Swedish firm. The HRW report failed to mention that Anglo-Ashanti is partnered with Anglo-American, owned by the Oppenheimer family and partnered with Canada-based Barrick Gold described below (3). London-based Anglo-American Plc. owns a 45% share in DeBeers, another Oppenheimer company that is infamous for its near monopoly of the international diamond industry (4). Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, a director of Anglo-American, is a director of Royal Dutch/Shell and a member of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Advisory Board (5). The report also suppressed the most damning evidence discovered by HRW researchers—that Anglo-Ashanti sent its top lawyers into eastern DRC to aid rebel militia leaders arrested there.

Several multi-national mining companies have rarely if ever been mentioned in any human rights report. One is Barrick Gold, who operates in the town of Watsa, northwest of the town of Bunia, located in the most violent corner of the Congo. The Ugandan People’s Defense Force (UPDF) controlled the mines intermittently during the war. Officials in Bunia claim that Barrick executives flew into the region, with UPDF and RPF (Rwanda Patriotic Front) escorts, to survey and inspect their mining interests (6).

George H.W. Bush served as a paid advisor for Barrick Gold. Barrick directors include: Brian Mulroney, former PM of Canada; Edward Neys, former U.S. ambassador to Canada and chairman of the private PR firm Burston-Marsteller; former U.S. Senator Howard Baker; J. Trevor Eyton, a member of the Canadian Senate; and Vernon Jordan, one of Bill Clinton’s lawyers (7).

Barrick Gold is one of the client companies of Andrew Young’s Goodworks International lobbying firm. Andrew Young is the former Mayor of Atlanta, and a key organizer of the U.S.-Uganda Friendship Council. Young was chosen by President Clinton to chair the Southern Africa Enterprise Development Fund in October 1994. Goodworks’ clients—or business partners in some cases—include Coke, Chevron-Texaco, Monsanto, and the governments of Angola and Nigeria (note weapons transfers from Nigeria cited below). Young is a director of Cox Communications and Archers Daniels Midland—the “supermarket to the world” and National Public Radio sponsor whose directors include Brian Mulroney (Barrick) and G. Allen Andreas, a member of the European Advisory Board of The Carlyle Group.
zmag.org

Keep reading, it gets worse…and then worse.

Nigeria’s civil war: Into the heart of darkness

In the lawless Niger Delta, armed militants have waged a brutal war against the oil companies who exploit the region’s lucrative resources.
Christian Allen Purefoy reports from Warri
03 March 2006 The Independent (UK)

Deep in the gloom of the Niger Delta swamp, a motorboat carrying eight men in balaclavas, camouflaged flak jackets, and brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles, sweeps past. Passing abandoned oil installations in the shadows of the mangroves, they chant: “We dey suffer, suffer, suffer, everyday. We are the Niger Delta security men.” They are patrolling an oily creeks in defiance of the Nigerian government that is nowhere to be seen.

After a show of strength, exploding two grenades in the river, the men return to their patrol. Far from the crooked corridors of power the explosions seem lost in the dense, swamp forest.

These are the armed militants who have committed a wave of kidnappings of oil workers and attacks over the past decade, costing 445,000 barrels of oil, a fifth of Nigeria’s oil exports, in their fight for a greater share of oil wealth for the impoverished local population. Their pronouncements have shaken the world’s oil markets and driven multinationals such as Shell to consider their future in Africa’s most populous country.

Militias have blown up pipelines and attacked two of Shell’s platforms in recent months. Despite the delta’s huge energy reserves, millions of people live in extreme poverty. The militants of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) are still holding two Americans and a Briton who were among a group of foreigners abducted two weeks ago from a barge where they were laying a pipeline for Royal Dutch Shell. In a surprise move on Wednesday, Mend released six hostages, including and and and American, Macon Hawkins, to our party, a welcome gift to Mr Hawkins on his 69th birthday.

As we pull out of Warri port, another militia boat roars past the bow of a passing cargo ship Sardonic Pride, displaying the ease with which they can act. The Nigerian Navy has proved itself ill-equipped and unable to defend oil facilities and ships such as the Sardonic Pride against attacks in territories well known by the militias.

Villages scattered along the river’s edge, are swallowed by the third-largest wetland in the world, covering an area the size of Ireland. In the heat and damp of the delta, where the oil flares burn night and day, casting a choking yellow light over the swamp forest, great wealth and poverty lie cheek by jowl.

There are 27 million people living in this black-gold region, 70 per cent of them in poverty. They survive in mud-huts and eke out a living, travelling in the swamps on dug-out canoes to reach the outside world.

In one village, a woman, her feet black and slick with oil, drank, then washed her five-year-old son in contaminated water from a hole dug four feet in the ground. At the local school, four makeshift desks are the only sign of “government development”. Mrs Makosi Orjonko says; “When we drink, it gives us pain. It worries us; it’s no good. We just manage. We want better water.”

But the government’s presence is not forgotten; two bomb craters and bullet holes in roofs of their homes, are testimony to the efforts the state use to keep the oil flowing. One enraged villager, Mr Farele, pointing at bullet holes in one of the village’s buildings, shouted:”The military helicopter came and shot. We want hospitals and schools.”

The horizon is lit by the unnatural orange glow, the flames from massive chimneys flare off the natural gas brought up as a by-product of the region’s oil. Beneath the rivers and mud, Nigeria has 35 billion barrels of oil. One-fifth of US oil imports come from the region and and 10 per cent of the UK’s natural gas coming is expected to be sourced there within a few years.

But these exports are under increasing threat by resentment felt by the people of the delta against, what they see as the theft of the natural resources. The people say the oil industry has caused environmental devastation, polluting their land and fishing grounds.

Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni campaigner, was the first to launch a movement for social and ecological justice in the Niger Delta in the 1980s. He was executed amid international condemnation in 1995. His public killing drew the world’s attention to the role of the oil industry in Nigeria, and forced Western oil companies to adapt their practices, making loud noises about sharing some of the profits with local communities and safeguarding the environment.

Today, the cycle of injustice, poverty and violence continues.

As the sun began to sink behind the dark canopy, three boats of heavily armed men gathered in a creek, circling warily before approaching. In one boat was Mr Hawkins, holding a small plastic bag with his medicine and toothbrush.

One of the spokesmen for the group, armed with a machine-gun, said: “Our interest lies in how to bring the attention of everyone to the issue of the Niger Delta. Let the UN come and intervene, let them set up commissions of inquiry and look into the matter of the Niger Delta, and find out a final solution to the issues.”

Five other captives, two Egyptians, two Thais and a Filipino, were also freed. Mr Hawkins stuck both thumbs in the air and grinned. “Oh God,” he said. “It was an experience I don’t want to do again, but I just had to make the best of it; tried to keep my cool.”

The men in the boats waved their weapons and broke into a song; another man shouted angrily about the government. Unlike many of the regions other militias, these 50 men had an eerie, trained order to their actions, handling their weaponry expertly.

In a statement issued yesterday, they warned of more attacks on oil workers in another area of the Niger Delta. Their objective is “totally destroying the ability of the Nigerian government to export crude oil it has stolen from the Niger Delta over the past 50 years.”

The identities of the militia are unknown; as with many armed groups in Nigeria, “big men” are often at work behind the scenes. Nigeria is holding national elections next year, and in one of the most corrupt countries in the world, the country’s vast oil wealth is at stake. With rumours of President Olusegun Obasanjo attempting to run for a third term, tension and attacks are likely to increase as the elections draw nearer.

John Negroponte, the US director of Intelligence has said: “Speculation that President Obasanjo will try to change the constitution so he can seek a third term is raising political tension and if proven true, threatens to unleash major turmoil and conflict. Such chaos in Nigeria could lead to disruption of oil supply, secessionist moves by regional governments, major flows and instability elsewhere in Africa.”

Militias such as Mend are often used to further the political influence of others, despite the ostensible demands for a greater share of the oil wealth to improve their lives.

The Ijaw leader, Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, who is calling for independence for the oil-rich region, has been jailed on treason charges. Mend insists it is a separate organisation from Mr Asari’s Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force but is campaigning for his release.

The militia leader who had invited the world’s media into the swamps to advocate all oil proceeds being kept by the region also threatened oil facilities and “all-out war” on the Nigerian government. His warnings pushed pushed oil prices above the psychological $50 per barrel level. And Mr Asari’s calls for the “dismemberment of Nigeria led to the secret police putting him in jail.

There are also the gangs who commit the lucrative siphoning of oil from pipelines, which is sold on the black market and believed to fund the purchase of weapons.

After the fighters of Mend handed over the hostages, they fired a farewell volley into the air for Mr Hawkins, circled, then, opening up the two huge outboard engines on each boat, quickly disappeared into the swamp.

Mr Hawkins, with a heavy Texas drawl, said they had been treated well, eating a lot of canned foods to avoid dysentry, sardines, corned beef, and noodles. Living in “kind of a village”, the hostages had been free to roam around, and spent most of the day playing cards. But Mr Hawkins, with high blood pressure and diabetes, had been worried about his health, which may have played a large part in his release.

The American celebrated his 69th birthday in captivity with a “warm Sprite”, hours before his surprise release, and was looking forward to cleaning up with a hot shower and shampoo, deodorant and a razor. He bore his captors no ill ill. “I have no animosity toward them at all,” he said. “I’ve seen their little villages; they’re dirt-poor, poor as field-mice.”

But Mr Farele, still angry, pointed towards the faraway comfort of Escravos oil facility. “We want our village to be like there,” he said.
independent.co.uk

The Independent is a ‘left’ newspaper. If the reader gets past the atmosphere of dread conveyed by the spooky Conrad-like prose of the beginning, they might gain some small appreciation for the situation in the Niger Delta. But the ‘brutes’ are the oil companies and their cronies in the government, which is carrying out massacres in th villages of the Delta. The government is ‘nowhere to be seen??’ One would wish. But remarks like this simply feed into false perceptions of Africa, broken governments and blah blah blah.

But who has time to read entire articles these days? This is the second time in two weeks the Independent has pulled out the ‘Heart of Darkness’ crap; the last was in an article about DR Congo, of course. Whites are stuck in the groove of this blatantly racist discourse, and perhaps the most dangerous purveyors of it are the ‘liberals’, under the arrogant delusion of their virtue. They don’t get that it’s them living in the dismal swamp of their assumption.

Why should we be surprised at this violation of the Magna Carta when the nation that wrote the document threw it out a quarter century ago?

The name Bobby Sands is emblazoned on the Irish psyche, 25 years after he began his hunger strike on March 1, 1981. He died 66 days later, on May 5. Nine of his comrades followed him to their graves. It is an irony of history that as we arrive at this anniversary, men have been on hunger strike in Guantanamo, being cruelly force-fed and artificially kept alive. No one wants another Bobby Sands.

Some memories fade, others remain. It was not that long ago that I arrived in Kingston, Jamaica. The first person I met was a combi-taxi driver.

‘Where you comin’ from, brother?’

‘Ireland.’

‘Ah, Ireland, Bobby Sands, the IRA is fighting for their freedom!’

I’ve heard many similar stories over these 25 years. Most have one thing in common: they come from people who have themselves been in struggle in places like South Africa, Palestine, Turkey and Latin America. The example of Bobby Sands still means a lot to such people. When Turkish political prisoners went on hunger strike five years ago, their secret codeword for their plans was ‘Bobby Sands’.
zmag.org

…While it might be difficult to identify precisely the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as “intelligence”, “security”, “Whitehall” or “Home Office” sources) on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.

As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented: “Most tabloid newspapers – or even newspapers in general – are playthings of MI5.” Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of “one of Britain’s most distinguished journals” as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.

In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. As “satellites” of the secret state, their list included “agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career”.
medialens.org

In an article on the eclipsing fortunes of the neocons vis-ŕ-vis Bush foreign policy, the Wall Street Journal said: “In the past year, the ranks of the neoconservatives within the administration, who moulded the American response to 9/11, have grown thin and their influence has ebbed.” It mentioned the departure from key policy-making positions of some of the administration’s most prominent neoconservatives. Some of them left in disgrace, others left their jobs for other Bush appointments. Perhaps the most interesting of these career changes involves that of former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who was promoted for his role in the Iraq war to president of the World Bank.

From day one, all vice-presidents, directors and staff members of the World Bank were apprehensive in view of his reputation as the “high priest of the hawks” or “The Vulcans”; nicknames for Mr Bush’s tight-knit group of security advisors, the architect of the Iraq war, and the driving ideological force behind the decision to invade Iraq. They also wondered about his arrogant dismissal of all misgivings about the war. They remembered his rosy forecasts, his predictions that the Iraqis would greet US soldiers as liberators, with open arms, and his casual dismissal of warnings by Eric Shimseki, former US army chief of staff, that the US would need several hundred thousand troops in Iraq (and who was fired for daring to give his expert opinion). They remembered well his assertion that the “oil revenues of Iraq over the course of the next two to three years would bring in 50 to 100 billion US dollars which could more than finance its own reconstruction.” But, to be fair, they were all willing to give him the benefit of the doubt despite the deep moral struggle they are each grappling with; working for a man who is morally and politically responsible for a horrendous war that has shed the blood of thousands of innocent victims in Iraq.

Now, it seems that the honeymoon is over. On the cost of the Iraqi war, it is becoming more and more obvious that Wolfowitz’s predictions are, at best, a joke approaching the fanciful, and, at worse, outright intentionally misleading. When White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay forwarded an estimate (September 2002) of the Iraq war at a higher level of $100-$200 billion, the administration dismissed his analysis as “likely very, very high” and promptly fired him (another person who lost his job because he did it conscientiously and professionally). Now it turns out that even his figures were wildly low. According to Joseph Stiglitz, professor at Columbia University and Nobel Prize winner in economics, and Linda Blimes, a Harvard budget expert, the war in Iraq is likely to cost up to $2 trillion. The American Conservative magazine says: “What is certain is that before hiring him to run the World Bank, someone should have recalled Paul Wolfowitz’s prediction that Iraq would fund the operation itself.” Normal people under normal circumstances would have been fired, but not “Wolfie!”

However, even with this grim history in mind which they fear will impact on their ability to address their global clients’ needs and fulfil their mission of addressing world poverty, World Bank staff have even more immediate worries to contend with. What everybody in the Bank perceives most evidently is the increasing rift between Wolfowitz and his inner cabal of advisors and the staff at large. The problem is manifesting itself on several levels.
counterpunch.org