The Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings and Vice Lords were born decades ago in Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods. Now, their gang graffiti is showing up 6,400 miles away in one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods — Iraq.

Armored vehicles, concrete barricades and bathroom walls all have served as canvasses for their spray-painted gang art. At Camp Cedar II, about 185 miles southeast of Baghdad, a guard shack was recently defaced with “GDN” for Gangster Disciple Nation, along with the gang’s six-pointed star and the word “Chitown,” a soldier who photographed it said.

The graffiti, captured on film by an Army Reservist and provided to the Chicago Sun-Times, highlights increasing gang activity in the Army in the United States and overseas, some experts say.

Military and civilian police investigators familiar with three major Army bases in the United States — Fort Lewis, Fort Hood and Fort Bragg — said they have been focusing recently on soldiers with gang affiliations. These bases ship out many of the soldiers fighting in Iraq.

“I have identified 320 soldiers as gang members from April 2002 to present,” said Scott Barfield, a Defense Department gang detective at Fort Lewis in Washington state. “I think that’s the tip of the iceberg.”

Of paramount concern is whether gang-affiliated soldiers’ training will make them deadly urban warriors when they return to civilian life and if some are using their access to military equipment to supply gangs at home, said Barfield and other experts.
suntimes.com

An extraordinary paradox of the current international scene is that the most powerful countries in the world are also the most afraid – and fear has caused them to lose their senses.

Globally, the United States has no immediate military rival; certainly no other state has the power to strike anywhere on our planet — and far beyond it into space — at very short notice. American strategists call this the doctrine of Global Strike.

Similarly, in terms of military power, both conventional and non-conventional, Israel has no challenger in a vast region from Central Asia, across the Arab world, to north, east and central Africa. At a conservative estimate, it has a nuclear arsenal of between 200 and 300 warheads, as well as highly effective long-range delivery systems. As Ariel Sharon, its stricken leader, used to be fond of saying, Israel’s sphere of influence extends as far as an F16 can fly.
And yet the U.S. and Israel behave as if they are about to be attacked by a formidable enemy. They scold and threaten, huff and puff, flex their muscles and brandish their weapons as if facing an imminent danger to their very existence.
daralhayat.com

…BAGHDAD – An official at Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad said its morgue was full after receiving 65 corpses over the past three days of people who mostly died from gunshot wounds. Some others were beheaded. The victims included three schoolteachers who were gunned down in the capital.

RAMADI – U.S. and Iraqi forces killed more than 100 insurgents last week in the town of Ramadi in the rebel heartland of Anbar province, the U.S. military said on Tuesday. Two Iraqi soldiers were killed in these clashes. An Iraqi Defence Ministry spokesman said he was unaware of major battles.
alertnet.org

TIRIN KOT, Afghanistan, April 27 Ñ Building on a winter campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations and the knowledge that American troops are leaving, the Taliban appear to be moving their insurgency into a new phase, flooding the rural areas of southern Afghanistan with weapons and men.

Each spring with the arrival of warmer weather, the fighting season here starts up, but the scale of the militants’ presence and their sheer brazenness have alarmed Afghans and foreign officials far more than in previous years.

“The Taliban and Al Qaeda are everywhere,” a shopkeeper, Haji Saifullah, told the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, as the general strolled through the bazaar of this town to talk to people. “It is all right in the city, but if you go outside the city, they are everywhere, and the people have to support them. They have no choice.”
nytimes.com

BRITISH Army commanders formally took over responsibility for Afghanistan’s lawless Helmand province yesterday as Britain’s strategy to eradicate opium production and defeat Taleban insurgents was criticised as “doomed to failure”.

A report published by the Senlis Council, an independent think tank that monitors Afghanistan’s drugs trade, paints a depressing picture of the prospects for the deployment of 3,300 British troops to southern Afghanistan later this month.

It says previous efforts to eradicate poppy farming in the province have fuelled the insurgency that is threatening to overwhelm the Kabul government’s control of the lawless region.

Most controversially, it recommends that forced eradication should be replaced by the legal cultivation of poppies for use in legitimate painkilling drugs, such as morphine. The leading producers of legal opium are currently India and Australia.
scotsman.com

ROME — Iranian agents were accused yesterday of masterminding a bomb attack that killed three Italian soldiers in Iraq last week and intensified political pressure for the incoming government to speed up its withdrawal of troops from that country.
washingtonpost.com

Military action against Iran would be fraught with risk and would have repercussions across the region, a leading American general conceded.

“Any action militarily is very complicated,” Lt Gen Victor Renuart, the director of planning for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Daily Telegraph.

“And any action by any country will have second-order effects, and that is a strong case to continue the diplomatic process and make it work.”

His comments are a rare public statement from the US military on what is the most contentious international issue of the day.
telegraph.co.uk

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Before I begin, I’ve been asked to make an announcement. Whoever parked 14 black bulletproof S.U.V.’s out front, could you please move them? They are blocking in 14 other black bulletproof S.U.V.’s and they need to get out.

Wow. Wow, what an honor. The White House correspondents’ dinner. To actually sit here, at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush, to be this close to the man. I feel like I’m dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You know what? I’m a pretty sound sleeper — that may not be enough. Somebody shoot me in the face. Is he really not here tonight? Dammit. The one guy who could have helped.

By the way, before I get started, if anybody needs anything else at their tables, just speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers. Somebody from the NSA will be right over with a cocktail. Mark Smith, ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert and tonight it’s my privilege to celebrate this president. We’re not so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say I did look it up, and that’s not true. That’s cause you looked it up in a book.

Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the “No Fact Zone.” Fox News, I hold a copyright on that term.

I’m a simple man with a simple mind. I hold a simple set of beliefs that I live by. Number one, I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there. I feel that it extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I strongly believe it has 50 states. And I cannot wait to see how the Washington Post spins that one tomorrow. I believe in democracy. I believe democracy is our greatest export. At least until China figures out a way to stamp it out of plastic for three cents a unit.
commondreams.org

Bush Hails a ‘Turning Point’ in Iraq

BAIDOA, Somalia — The young man is nostalgic for a time he can’t even remember.

Aden Osman was 4 when the Somalian government collapsed in 1991. When he was 6, the bodies of American servicemen were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and most of the world turned its back on his country.

That’s when his childhood memories begin to grow clearer.

There was the day when he was 9 and his uncles were shot while fetching water. He had to bury them. Another time, a rival clan slaughtered the family’s livestock and poisoned their well. And in a battle between warlords, he was separated from his family for five days without food.

Most of all, he remembers the running, the constant fleeing through the bush as his family sought refuge from the clan warfare that seized the country 15 years ago after the fall of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre. They prayed for enough time in one place just to grow some food.

But Aden’s parents have told him about better times, before the warlords, when the country was run by something called a government. Back then, they had cattle and crops to eat. People walked the streets at night without fear, his parents said. Children went to school and there was a hospital for the sick.

These are the times Aden dreams of.

”My parents say there were no checkpoints back then,” he said. “There was no random killing without reason. And if you killed someone or robbed someone, you were punished. I wish I lived then. I guess I was born in an unlucky time.”

Aden is one of millions of teens coming of age with little memory of Somalia’s past and few skills to build its future.
twincities.com

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Schools closed. Building permits were on hold. Renewing a driver’s license was impossible.

Many basic functions of Puerto Rico’s government were unavailable Monday as the U.S. commonwealth ran out of money and imposed a partial public-sector shutdown — putting nearly 100,000 people — including 40,000 teachers — out of work and granting an unscheduled holiday to 500,000 public school students.

The shutdown — the first in Puerto Rico’s history — happened despite last-minute attempts by members of the legislature and Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila to agree on a bailout plan.

Police and other emergency services were not affected, but dozens of public offices were either shuttered or partially closed. Hundreds of government employees stood in the rain outside the capitol to protest the politicians’ failure to avoid the shutdown, and to spur them into resolving the impasse.

”I’m not earning any money and the kids don’t have classes,” said Sonia Ortiz, a 44-year-old teacher and single mother of two who attended the protest. ”I have savings but not enough.”

A protest late in the afternoon in San Juan’s financial district turned into a confrontation between police and masked youths, who scrawled graffiti calling for revolution. Officers used nightsticks to disperse the protesters and one youth was taken away in an ambulance. There were no reports of arrests.
nytimes.com