…I’m London-born to Jamaican parents, and like most people I want to stay alive while travelling around my home city. Easier said than done now that terrorists are blowing up buses and tubes, and police have killed a dark-skinned man they thought was on the verge of an atrocity.

Up until Jean Charles de Menezes was shot in Stockwell, I was scared of the explosions. Now there’s a double whammy. Do I worry about the Asian with the backpack or the nonchalant white guy?

“De Menezes acted suspiciously by running” is one line that’s wheeled out to abrogate responsibility for a catastrophe. But if you’re in an ethnic minority the errors seem to hit you thick and fast throughout your life. It really doesn’t take that much for a police officer to be suspicious.

I remember Doreen Lawrence telling me that police initially treated her and her husband Neville like they were the criminals after their aspiring architect of a son had been stabbed to death by white racists at a bus stop in south-east London. In 1993 she had to grieve through the bigotry, but the bungled investigation into Stephen’s murder forced the Macpherson report, which among other things highlighted the institutional racism within police forces. And to their credit the police have moved to eradicate that blight.

So far I’ve evaded the racist thugs at the bus stops, but I haven’t eluded the institutionalised stupidity. Like countless other law-abiding black men in the capital, I’ve been stopped, questioned and searched by police professing to be doing their utmost to protect the community. When I owned a Golf convertible I’d be tailed or pulled over for driving what they suspected to be a stolen car.

While trying to catch the last bus home from the City a few years back I was stopped by an officer who told me that I was acting suspiciously by running through a high-risk burglary area with a holdall. He looked through the bag, asked me whether the shoes and clothes were mine, and then wanted to know where I’d come from. When I told him the Guardian in Farringdon Road, he asked if I could prove it. I showed him my press card and I thought that would be the end of it.

Wrong. He asked where I lived, and even though the address tallied with the bus that I’d been running to catch, he still radioed my details through. When these were confirmed, the officer’s explanation was that he had a job to do, and was sure I’d understand. I was livid because I had understood.

Now what frightens me is that, unlike the Lawrences, the grief of the De Menezes family seems not to be yielding anything positive. The Met commissioner apologises but says police may have to shoot other innocent people to protect the community. And their colour will be … ?
Full: countercurrents.org

…The crash, which came just three weeks after Mr Garang was sworn in as Sudan’s vice-president under the peace settlement, has aroused suspicions, particularly among his supporters in the south.

Yesterday, the southern town of Juba also saw violence, as Arab northerners were hounded out of town by rampaging locals. Aid workers said at least 18 people had been killed in the area during the past two days. A further 84 have died in the Khartoum violence.

“Peace is being jeopardised in the short run,” said the top UN envoy in Sudan, Jan Pronk.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Speech to the “Out of Iraq” Congressional Caucus on July 19, 2005
…At that moment I knew it was going to be a very long deployment. I realized that I was not being greeted as a liberator. I became overwhelmed with fear because I felt I never would be viewed that way by the Iraqi people. As a soldier this concerned me. Because if they did not view me as a liberator, then what did they view me as? I felt that they viewed me as foreign occupier of their land. That led me to believe very early on that I was going to have a fight on my hands.

During my year in Iraq I had many altercations with the so-called “insurgency.” I found the insurgency I saw to be quite different from the insurgency described to the American people by the Bush Administration, the media, and other supporters of the war. There is no doubt in my mind there are foreigners from other surrounding countries in Iraq. Anyone in the Middle East who hates America now has the opportunity to kill Americans because there are roughly 140,000 US troops in Iraq. But the bulk of the insurgency I faced was primarily the people of Iraq who were attacking us as a reaction to what they felt was an occupation of their country.

I was engaged actively in urban combat in the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad. Many of the people who were attacking me were the poor people of Iraq. They were definitely not members of Al Qaeda, left over Baath Party members, and they were not former members of Saddam’s regime. They were just your average Iraqi civilian who wanted us out of their country.

…we were being told that in order for us to get out of Iraq completely the Iraqi military would have to be able to take over all security operations. The training of the Iraqi Army became a huge concern of mine. During the time I trained! them, their basic training was only one week long. We showed them some basic drill and ceremony such as marching and saluting. When it came time for weapons training, we gave each Iraqi recruit an AK-47 and just let them shoot it. They did not even have to qualify by hitting a target. All they had to do was pull the trigger. I was instructed by my superiors to stand directly behind them with caution while they were shooting just in case they tried to turn the weapon on us so we could stop them.

Once they graduated from basic training, the Iraqi soldiers in a way became part of our battalion and we would take them on missions with us. But we never let them know where we were going, because we were afraid some of them might tip off the insurgency that we were coming and we would walk directly into an ambush. When they would get into formation prior to the missions we made them a part of, they would cover their faces so the people of their communities did not identify them as being affiliated with the American troops.

Not that long ago President Bush made a statement at Fort Bragg when he addressed the nation about the war in Iraq. He said we would “stand down” when the Iraqi military is ready to “stand up.” My experience with the new Iraqi military tells me we won’t be coming home for a long time if that’s the case.
Full: informationclearinghouse.info

NEW YORK (AP) – The suicide bombers cooked up their explosives using mundane items like hydrogen peroxide. They stored them in a fancy commercial refrigerator that was out of place in their grimy apartment. And cell phones were likely used to set the bombs off.

Those details from the July 7 London bombing emerged Wednesday at an unusually wide-ranging briefing given by the New York Police Department to city business leaders.

The briefing – based partly on information obtained by NYPD detectives who were dispatched to London to monitor the investigation – was part of a program designed to encourage more vigilance by private security at large hotels, Wall Street firms, storage facilities and other companies.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly warned the materials and methods used in the London attack were easily adaptable to New York.

“Initially it was thought that perhaps the materials were high-end military explosives that were smuggled, but it turns out not to be the case,” Kelly said. “It’s more like these terrorists went to a hardware store or some beauty supply store.”

The NYPD officials said investigators believe the bombers used a peroxide-based explosive called HMDT, or hexamethylene triperoxide diamine. HMDT can be made using ordinary ingredients like hydrogen peroxide (hair bleach), citric acid (a common food preservative) and heat tablets (sometimes used by the military for cooking).
Full: guardian.co.uk

You’d think one of the simplest things to determine would be what the bombs were made of. This is the third change of story. And the fact that it’s the NYPD saying this…weird.

THOUSANDS of investors joined sharp institutions in making millions of pounds from the short-lived collapse in share prices that followed the terrorist strikes in London last week.

It was the busiest day of trading for over two years. The London Stock Exchange said 4.75 billion shares were traded on Thursday compared with the recent daily average of about 3.1 billion.
BP and Vodafone were among Britain’s largest companies that took advantage of the volatile markets to improve their balance sheets.

Financial spread-betting firm City Index said more than 8000 retail investors had dived into the market on Thursday, correctly backing their hunch that share prices would quickly bounce back.

Some will find profiteering from horror distasteful. But many in the City applauded the resilience of capitalism.
Full: finance.news.com

by Tim Wise
Growing up in the South, I often heard folks criticize others for being “common.” To be called common was to be vilified as trashy and unworthy of respect. Putting aside the elitist implications of such a slur, the pejorative nature of the term has always stuck with me, so much so that when I hear something described as “common sense,” I instinctively assume that while it may indeed be the former, it is rarely ever the latter.

There is no better example of this truism than with the desire of so many to endorse racial and religious profiling of Arabs and Muslims so as to thwart terrorist attacks. In the wake of the London subway bombings, the call for profiling is being heard once again (as it was after 9/11), and once again those proposing such measures are cloaking their demands in the garb of “common sense,” while mocking as politically correct fools, anyone who dares criticize the idea.
Full: counterpunch.org

As Tim Wise points out, ‘dedicated terrorists’ will always find a way, profiling or not. But the other weird angle of this is the obssession with ‘safety.’ The only way a government can provide some measure of safety to its people is to pursue humane policies. The same people who are making it unsafe for everybody are in charge of ‘homeland security.’
Ha.Right now, the least ‘safe’ people in the Western world are young men with dark skin.

Safe

In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran. The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.
* * *
There is increasing evidence that the Iraqi police forces, now under Shi’ite control, are carrying out systematic revenge killings against Sunnis in Baghdad. The bodies now showing up at the morgue have obvious signs of handcuffing and blindfolding and evidence of being tortured before death. U.S. sources indicate that the suspicious killings have reached the rate of almost 700 per month. The police are supervised by the Shi’ite-run Ministry of Interior, which claims that the killings are being carried out by insurgents wearing stolen police uniforms. But American intelligence sources disagree, noting that many of the killers appear to be actual policemen carrying the expensive standard-issue Glock automatics and driving official Toyota Land Cruisers.
Full: amconmag.com

Strange days indeed when Pat Buchanan’s mag is the voice of truth and reason in the U.S. True conservatives are as appalled by fascistic policies at home and abroad as the rest of us are.

by Paul Craig Roberts
…Now that we really need them, the watchdog media has hired out as public relations and propaganda shills for the Bush administration and the neocon network.

The entire Bush administration-not merely the president-is involved in the most extraordinary lies and fabrication of false intelligence claims in order to lead

America into an unwarranted and illegal invasion of Iraq, an invasion that has cost the US taxpayers $300 billion and resulted in the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands of people.

The sordid affair has been revealed in leaked top secret Downing Street memos, which were prepared for UK prime minister Tony Blair and his cabinet. Unlike the Nixon episode, there is no need to search for a “smoking gun.” Smoking guns have been printed all over the pages of the London Times. Yet hardly a peep from the watchdog media.

The August 1 issue of The American Conservative reports that Vice President Cheney has instructed the US Strategic Command to prepare a plan to spread the war by attacking Iran with tactical nuclear weapons in the event of another terrorist attack on the US. Appalled US Air Force officers have leaked the story, but you have not learned of it from the tamed media.

A federal prosecutor seems to be closing in on Karl Rove, president Bush’s righthand man, and on Scooter Libby, vice president Cheney’s righthand man. The two are suspected of leaking the identity of a covert CIA agent, a felony. Both have had to hire lawyers. But there is no demand for accountability from the US media.

American civil liberties have been trounced by the “Patriot” Act. Torture of detainees is now a routine practice of the US government and defended by the attorney general. Senators and military officers who try to place constraints on the inhumane treatment of detainees are stonewalled by the White House.

The mainstream media has been co-opted as propaganda organ for the Bush administration. How did this come about?
Full: counterpunch.org

NEW YORK – Military doctors are fighting to contain an outbreak of a potentially deadly drug-resistant bacteria that apparently originated in the Iraqi soil. So far at least 280 people, mostly soldiers returning from the battlefield, have been infected, a number of whom contracted the illness while in U.S. military hospitals.

Most of the victims are relatively young troops who were injured by the land mines, mortars and suicide bombs that have permeated the Iraq conflict. No active-duty soldiers have died from the infections, but five extremely sick patients who were in the same hospitals as the injured soldiers have died after being infected with the bacteria, Acinetobacter baumannii.

“This a very large outbreak,” says Arjun Srinivasan, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. public health service and a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control.

Acinetobacter was the second most prevalent infection for soldiers in Vietnam, but the military did not expect to see it as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Researchers are still working to understand where it came from and how patients were infected. (See: “Military Chases Mystery Infection.”)

Doctors worry not only about soldiers who are already infected but also those who are carrying Acinetobacter on their skin even though they themselves are not infected. Lt. Cmdr. Kyle Petersen, an infectious disease specialist at National Naval Medical Center (NNMC) in Bethesda, Md.,says his hospital treated 396 patients who had been wounded in Iraq between May 2003 and February 2005. About 10% were infected and another 20% were found to have Acinetobacter bacteria on their skin but were not infected. The rate of appearance of the bacteria has “been flat-out steady,” says Petersen.
Full: forbes.com

The State Department issued an updated worldwide caution on terrorism yesterday, warning Americans about the threat of extremist violence against U.S. citizens and interests abroad.

The warning did not list countries, nor did department officials offer any additional specifics about threats. The statement said “current information” indicates that al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups are planning attacks against U.S. interests in “multiple regions, including Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.”

The department’s official caution, which supersedes an alert issued in March, said attacks against private and official targets could come in the form of assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings or bombings.

The targets could include places where Americans meet or visit, such as residential areas, hotels and restaurants, as well as places of worship, schools, clubs, business offices and public areas, the caution said. It also noted that “demonstrations and rioting” can occur with little or no warning.
Full: washingtonpost.com

Well it’s real helpful not to name specific countries, just be afraid of ever ‘foreign’ person, place, or thing. Just to be on the safe side, don’t move at all, and breathe as little as possible. Aiight?