A sheik from the United Arab Emirates contributed at least $1 million to the Bush Library Foundation, which established the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University in College Station.

The UAE owns Dubai Port Co., which is taking operations from London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., which operates six U.S. ports. A political uproar has ensued over the deal, which the White House approved without congressional oversight.

The donations were made in the early 1990s for the library, which houses the papers of former President George Bush, the current president’s father.
freenewmexican.com

It’s a family affair…

The US will send an extra 15 diplomats to China, 15 to Latin America and 12 to India as part of a major rethink of its foreign policy for the next few decades.

US embassies in Europe will lose 38 diplomats, including one in Britain, a reflection that the economic, political and religious frontlines have moved elsewhere.

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, who is accompanying George Bush on a visit to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan that begins today, said in January that hundreds of diplomats would be moved from Europe and Washington to Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
guardian.co.uk

All the better to make mischief with, my dear.

Police fired at prisoners trying to push down a gate at Kabul’s main jail as about 2,000 prisoners resumed rioting yesterday after a 24-hour pause.
One prisoner was killed and three injured, police said.

The fighting restarted after negotiations broke down, said Abdul Halik, a prison police commander. He said authorities had urged prisoners to move into a different wing but they refused. “The prisoners have tried to break down the door to their block and the police opened fire,” Mr Halik said.

Five people have been killed and 41 injured since violence erupted on Saturday.
guardian.co.uk

British forces stay away as Afghan opium war begins
The convoys are formed, line after line, in the swirling dust of Lashkar Gar airfield – bulldozers, oil tankers and trucks bristling with guns. Afghanistan’s opium war is about to begin.

The force to eradicate the poppy fields arrived at the capital of Helmand province from Kabul yesterday, and the programme will be under way in time, it is expected, for the weekend visit of President George Bush.

The policy is emotive and controversial. The poppy crop is the livelihood for many small farmers and their resentment is expect-ed to spark violence.

But Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, a beneficiary of Western largesse, is under pressure from the US and Britain to end his country’s opium production, the biggest in the world and the source of much of the West’s drugs. Helmand, which produces 25 per cent of the crop, has been chosen as a show of his government’s toughness during the US President’s visit.

The prospect of the farmers taking up arms and being joined by a resurgent Taliban and their Islamist allies has led to an eradication operation more military than agricultural in nature.

The debt of foreign countries to Israel stands at USD 23 billion, almost double last year’s debt of USD 12 billion, Bank of Israel data revealed.

According to the Bank’s statistics, the Israeli economy, which until recently only borrowed money from states abroad, has since 2002 turned

into a lender as well, Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported Tuesday.

As of today, the world owes the private sector in Israel USD 22.7 billion. The Bank of Israel explained that the Israeli market has attracted investments from abroad during the last year, mainly due to the profitability of the private sector, the reduction in the government’s deficit and the acceleration of privatization processes in the economy.

The improvement in the security situation in the country has also contributed to this rise.
ynetnews.com

More than one in three soldiers and Marines who have served in Iraq later sought help for mental health problems, according to a comprehensive snapshot by Army experts of the psyches of men and women returning from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places.

The accounts of more than 300,000 soldiers and Marines returning from several theaters paint an unusually detailed picture of the psychological impact of the various conflicts. Those returning from Iraq consistently reported more psychic distress than those returning from Afghanistan and other conflicts, such as those in Bosnia or Kosovo.

Iraq veterans are far more likely to have witnessed people getting wounded or killed, to have experienced combat, and to have had aggressive or suicidal thoughts, the Army report said. Nearly twice as many of those returning from Iraq reported having a mental health problem — or were hospitalized for a psychiatric disorder — compared with troops returning from Afghanistan.
washingtonpost.com

A THIRD of Britain’s overstretched armed forces would struggle to be ready for action because of the country’s heavy military commitments, a damning parliamentary report has concluded.

Last night, it also emerged that the government has spent £100 million on private security firms in Iraq – prompting calls for the money to be spent instead on the army, air force and navy.

The new report warns of serious or critical weaknesses to peacetime readiness levels in 30 per cent of Britain’s armed forces because in five of the last six years troops have had to take on far more work than military planners previously envisaged.
scotsman.com

BAGHDAD, Feb. 27 — Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week’s bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad’s main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.

Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday — blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound — and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
washingtonpost.com

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 27 — Mardi Gras revelers along St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street Monday night and over the weekend whooped for the marching bands, hollered for celebrities such as Dan Aykroyd, applauded the lavish floats and cried out for the trappings and trinkets tossed by costumed riders as they had for decades, but behind all the merriment and the masks something was missing.

New Orleanians are tired. They are distracted. On the face of it, they seem normal and as lighthearted as ever. But they are not. And so it is with Mardi Gras — the two-week pre-Lenten celebration that ends Tuesday, “Fat Tuesday.” It is exuberant on the outside, strange and different and diminished by loss on the inside.

“What is there to celebrate?” asked Elphamous Malbrue, a 29-year veteran of the New Orleans police as he watched the Krewe of Hermes parade. “The spirit is just not here.”
washingtonpost.com

…
And in early 2002, the Pentagon created at DARPA something called the Information Awareness Office and put Poindexter in charge of it, and this office really was meant to build TIA and to look into things like data mining, pattern recognition, software that can translate something from Arabic into English text automatically and kind of tie all these together in a sort of big prototype, which was called at the time “TIA,” and that office was in charge of it.

When news broke that this had been going on for several months, the controversy was sort of fanned, not only by the privacy concerns that are raised by something like this, but also by Poindexter, at least being the titular head and the brainchild of all this, and the program was then shut down, essentially, in name only. In the 2004 Defense Authorization Act, this being the bill that authorizes the government to spend money on defense programs, TIA and most of its components were specifically eliminated under DARPA, and there was sort of a loophole that was left open that funding could continue for certain projects out of the National Foreign Intelligence Program, which is the black budget of the intelligence community.

At that point the project sort of went behind that black curtain, and no one was really sure where they had gone, but what my reporting now has confirmed is that really quickly after Congress shut down TIA at DARPA, a new sponsor came forward, this new sponsor being this Research and Development Office that’s actually housed at NSA headquarters, not far from outside of Washington here, and picked up the projects, changed their names to conceal their identities, kept the same contractors that were working under TIA in place, kept the same language, the same specifications, and really just continued the work, and presumably has expanded significantly from where it was three years ago.
democracynow.org

Send in the Clowns (2003) by Rootsie

This newest permutation of ancient conspiracy
with imperial fantasy
of world ascendancy
looks like a clown convention to me.
my, these boys love to play.
The catchy logo of the new
Information Awareness Office IAO
is the good old Masonic pyramid, its hairy eyeball
shooting lurid yellow beam
over an unsuspecting little earth:
“Scientia est Potentia” written underneath
knowledge is power. Well of course.
IAO-“I am the Alpha and the Omega.”
Now there’s some balls.
Apparently they think their big bad
New World Order is in the bag.
They manipulate images
Put finishing touches on oily messages,
But the bag is leaking all over
Its greasy contents smearing everything.
Of the true juju behind those symbols they flaunt
They know not. Not a clue.
If they did, like me and you
they would breathe into peace,
see enough everything for everybody
and be mad lovers.
They don’t look like lovers, not much,
so gray, so overstuffed.
Look the best they can do
is to hold off the new earth coming
this way, impervious to their cartoon ray.
Their silly suits, their sad eyes,
their wizard hats and magic wands-
I think it’s time
we laughed ‘em out of town. Don’t you?

On his triumphalist tour of India and Pakistan, where he hopes to wave imperiously at people he considers potential subjects, President Bush has an itinerary that’s getting curiouser and curiouser.

For Bush’s March 2 pit stop in New Delhi, the Indian government tried very hard to have him address our parliament. A not inconsequential number of MPs threatened to heckle him, so Plan One was hastily shelved. Plan Two was to have Bush address the masses from the ramparts of the magnificent Red Fort, where the Indian prime minister traditionally delivers his Independence Day address. But the Red Fort, surrounded as it is by the predominantly Muslim population of Old Delhi, was considered a security nightmare. So now we’re into Plan Three: President George Bush speaks from Purana Qila, the Old Fort.

Ironic, isn’t it, that the only safe public space for a man who has recently been so enthusiastic about India’s modernity should be a crumbling medieval fort?

Since the Purana Qila also houses the Delhi zoo, George Bush’s audience will be a few hundred caged animals and an approved list of caged human beings, who in India go under the category of “eminent persons.” They’re mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.
commondreams.org