Every year in February, Americans celebrate the eradication of unjust laws that had imprisoned African-Americans behind a wall of segregation for more than 90 years and the centuries of effort that brought them out of slavery — stateless, penniless, oppressed — to a state of equality and justice with their fellow citizens. Yet even now, fifty years after this remarkable transformation of our society, the reality laid bare by Katrina demonstrates that equality remains elusive and racism alive. This truth about America burst from the television screen as Katrina lashed New Orleans. Had the TV crews not presented this scene to Americans, the truth of America’s poverty stricken hordes would have remained hidden behind the glitz of Mardi Gras and Bourbon Street. “Oppressed people,” Martin Luther King reminded us, “cannot remain oppressed forever.” But they can be forgotten, nameless, and voiceless, the detritus of our touted democracy. So while we celebrate this most recent accomplishment in creating a real democracy in America, almost 300 years after its proclamation to the world, we might ask why we allow our touted mid-east allay, the only bastion of American-type democracy in the mid-east, Israel, to create an apartheid state that incorporates the imprisonment of a people behind illegal walls condemned as such by the International Court of Justice, illegal theft of land contrary to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and actions that break the United Nations’ Convention against Genocide?
counterpunch.org

JERUSALEM, Feb. 14 — Omri Sharon, a former member of the Israeli Parliament and the elder son of the prime minister, was sentenced Tuesday to nine months in jail after he pleaded guilty to illegally raising more than $1.3 million for one of his father’s political campaigns.

But because his father, Ariel Sharon, is comatose after a major stroke, a Tel Aviv court allowed Omri Sharon to delay the start of his jail term until at least Aug. 31. He was also sentenced to nine months of probation, to begin after he leaves jail, and fined $66,700.
nytimes.com

SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan – Afghanistan’s Taleban guerrillas are gaining strength and will step up attacks against government and foreign troops when spring comes next month, a Taleban commander said on Tuesday.

The Taleban claimed responsibility for a blast on Monday that the US military said killed four troops. The Taleban said nine Americans were killed and US forces were helpless in the face of such attacks.

“Taleban attacks will further increase with a decrease in the winter cold,” a former Taleban governor of Kandahar province, Mullah Mohammad Hassan Rahmani, told Reuters by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location.

Fighting in Afghanistan traditionally eases off during the winter months when mountain passes get snowed under.

But violence has surged in recent months, including 15 suicide blasts since November.

US military officials say the Taleban have changed tactics since suffering heavy losses in clashes last summer and are now increasingly using roadside blasts and suicide bombers against soft targets.
khaleejtimes.com

ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) — A bomb exploded at an Istanbul supermarket during Monday’s afternoon rush, injuring 15 people. A Kurdish news agency reported that a Kurdish militant group claimed responsibility for the attack, which came days after a fatal bombing at an Internet cafe in the city.

In an e-mail, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons Organization said it carried out both attacks in response to Turkey’s policies toward the Kurdish people, the Firat News Agency said on its Web site.

The shadowy group – believed linked to the main Kurdish guerrilla group, Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK – has claimed responsibility for a number of bomb attacks in Turkey, including a blast in the Aegean resort town of Cesme last summer that wounded 21 people. The same group had also claimed Thursday’s bomb attack on the Internet cafe, which killed one person and injured 15, including seven policemen.

“From now on, we will continue our actions uninterrupted” until the Turkish government changes its policies, the militant group said.
ap.org/nydailynews

The government of oil-rich Kazakhstan has been accused of operating death squads after a prominent opposition politician was found murdered with his driver and bodyguard. Altynbek Sarsenbaiuly, 43, was the second opposition leader to be found dead in suspicious circumstances in three months.

He had made himself unpopular with the government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev by criticising his daughter and heir apparent, Dariga, for her grip on the country’s media.

Though government sources suggested he may have died in a hunting or road accident, the politician’s colleagues allege he was killed to order by the former Soviet state’s secret police.

He was last seen alive on Friday after which his mobile phone went dead. His body was discovered on Monday with that of his driver and his bodyguard in a ravine on the outskirts of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s commercial capital.
independent.co.uk

Of course the jokes are flying all over Texas—what’s the fine for shooting a lawyer?—and so forth. Dick-Cheney-shooting-Harry-Whittington is fraught, as they say, with irony. It’s not as though the ground in Texas is littered with liberal Republicans. I think the vice president winged the only one we’ve got.
truthdig.com

Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration’s warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday.

The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a Democratic-sponsored motion to start an inquiry into the recently revealed program in which the National Security Agency eavesdrops on an undisclosed number of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents without obtaining warrants from a secret court. Two committee Democrats said the panel — made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats — was clearly leaning in favor of the motion last week but now is closely divided and possibly inclined against it.

They attributed the shift to last week’s closed briefings given by top administration officials to the full House and Senate intelligence committees, and to private appeals to wavering GOP senators by officials, including Vice President Cheney. “It’s been a full-court press,” said a top Senate Republican aide who asked to speak only on background — as did several others for this story — because of the classified nature of the intelligence committees’ work.
washingtonpost.com

Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran and popular Democratic candidate in Ohio’s closely watched Senate contest, said yesterday that he was dropping out of the race and leaving politics altogether as a result of pressure from party leaders.

Mr. Hackett said Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York and Harry Reid of Nevada, the same party leaders who he said persuaded him last August to enter the Senate race, had pushed him to step aside so that Representative Sherrod Brown, a longtime member of Congress, could take on Senator Mike DeWine, the Republican incumbent.

Mr. Hackett staged a surprisingly strong Congressional run last year in an overwhelmingly Republican district and gained national prominence for his scathing criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq War. It was his performance in the Congressional race that led party leaders to recruit him for the Senate race.

But for the last two weeks, he said, state and national Democratic Party leaders have urged him to drop his Senate campaign and again run for Congress.

“This is an extremely disappointing decision that I feel has been forced on me,” said Mr. Hackett, whose announcement comes two days before the state’s filing deadline for candidates. He said he was outraged to learn that party leaders were calling his donors and asking them to stop giving and said he would not enter the Second District Congressional race.

“For me, this is a second betrayal,” Mr. Hackett said. “First, my government misused and mismanaged the military in Iraq, and now my own party is afraid to support candidates like me.”

Mr. Hackett was the first Iraq war veteran to seek national office, and the decision to steer him away from the Senate race has surprised those who see him as a symbol for Democrats who oppose the war but want to appear strong on national security.
nytimes.com

LONDON, Feb. 13 — The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair faced down its opposition on Monday in a politically charged vote in the House of Commons on a plan to introduce mandatory national identification cards. The vote moved Britain closer to the use of such cards but did not make clear precisely when that would be.

Despite a rebellion by about 20 members of Mr. Blair’s own Labor Party, the government won the vote, 310 to 279. A defeat would have been Mr. Blair’s fourth humiliation in Parliament since the general election last year — and since taking power in 1997 — raising doubts about his authority in his third term of office.

In the May election his majority was cut to just 64 votes, meaning that a relatively small number of dissident Labor legislators can derail his legislative plans. By surviving the challenge on Monday, Mr. Blair was seen as scoring a qualified victory.
nytimes.com

Today, The Independent publishes detailed analysis of how Tony Blair manipulated the serious threat of terrorism facing Britain to suit the Government’s political agenda. It argues the Prime Minister has repeatedly misrepresented security intelligence to the British people, pandered to the right-wing media, and scuppered a golden opportunity to achieve a cross-party consensus on terrorism in the wake of the London bombings of 7 July.

…THE RICIN PLOT How ministers used discovery of poison to justify Iraq war – but there was none

OLD TRAFFORD How plot to bomb Manchester United ground in 2004 was a total fabrication

BOMBING AFTERMATH How Blair destroyed a cross-party deal on anti-terror laws after London attacks
independent.co.uk