Reuters
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Brandishing assault rifles and grenade launchers, masked Islamists threatened in a taped message on Thursday to behead any lawyers defending deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

“Saif al-Allah (The Sword of God) group, belonging to the Islamic Jihad, warns all those who defend the criminal file of the cowardly criminal Saddam … that we will sever your necks before you arrive,” one gunman read from a piece of paper.

The gunman, from a previously unknown group, said in the tape given to Reuters that the warning was for “the Iraqi, Arab and foreign lawyers who have taken on the case of the criminal Saddam.”

…The seven gunmen, faces hidden by checkred head-dresses, said they would bring God’s justice down on the heads of anyone who sought to defend the former president, accused of gassing Iraq’s Kurds, crushing a Shi’ite uprising, and condemning countless Iraqis to death in his dreaded torture chambers.

“We will sentence you with cutting off your heads,” one of the gunmen said, as they all drew out long glistening blades. full article

This is all getting to be some pretty bad cinema.

by Giles Tremlett The Guardian UK
 Archbishop attacks new government over religion

Spain’s leading archbishop, Cardinal Antonio María Rouco, yesterday denounced the new socialist government, saying its policies were taking the country back to medieval times, when Muslim invaders swept across the Straits of Gibraltar.

His comments came after the government’s decision to cancel the reintroduction of compulsory religious classes and to find ways of financing other faiths, including Islam, with public money.

“Some people wish to place us in the year 711,” Cardinal Rouco said. “It seems as if we are meant to wipe ourselves out of history.”

The Catholic church is coming to terms with a sudden and dramatic dwindling of its power following the socialists’ victory, in March, over the conservative, pro-Catholic People’s party of the former prime minister José María Aznar. Mr Aznar’s government had planned to make religion a compulsory exam subject.

But the socialists have already announced that the law reintroducing compulsory religion lessons, a feature of the Franco dictatorship, will be scrapped.full article

Well bummer. ‘Back to Moorish times,’ when Christianity, Judaism, and Islam lived and thrived in mutual tolerance under MUSLIM rule. I guess the poor guy is nostaligic for the auto da fe of the Inquisition, and those grand old days of Franco. It is really stunning how irrelevant and just silly the Catholic Church is these days.

by Emir Sader Americas Program
Sending Brazilian troops to Haiti initiates a risky phase of Brazil’s new foreign policy and reflects heavy pressures from abroad.

Since the beginning of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s administration, Brazil’s foreign policy has been assuming a fresh countenance thanks to a broad, more political effort at regional integration through Mercosur; the creation of the Group of 20 at the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun; and a new policy of direct alliances with South Africa, India and China.

For some time now, Brazil has been demanding a permanent spot on the U.N. Security Council. A more aggressive foreign policy and the international prestige of Lula have intensified this campaign, which received significant endorsements from France and China among others. Since the minute Brazil assumed a post as a rotating member of the Security Council earlier this year, its actions have been a test of how it would behave if it were made a permanent member.

A proposal was presented to the Security Council recommending replacing U.S. and French troops in Haiti with a U.N. contingent led by Brazil. The Brazilian government, for its part, received requests from Central American countries, worried about U.S. military intervention in the Caribbean, for Brazil to take the place of the United States.

The Brazilian government found itself pressured, both from within the Security Council and from outside, to assume the role. As a key Latin American country, and more importantly, as a candidate for permanent membership to the Security Council, the Brazilian government accepted the leadership of a contingent of troops in Haiti.

This decision represents a dangerous attitude and has serious implications.

This situation is analagous to the Europeans’ practice of ‘indirect rule’ in Africa, using Africans to ‘police’ other Africans, setting the stage for the Rwandan genocide, among other things. Lula is caving.
(more…)

Reuters
TEHRAN (Reuters) – Two of Israel’s most prominent regional enemies, Iran and Syria, on Wednesday used the current visit to Israel of the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog to assail the Jewish state over its presumed nuclear arsenal.

Iran accused Israel of focusing its talks with Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), on Tehran’s atomic program to divert attention from Israel’s own nuclear weaponry, estimated at up to 200 warheads.

Syria said ElBaradei’s visit “casts light on … the Israeli threat to international security.”

ElBaradei, on a three-day visit to Israel, urged Israeli officials on Wednesday to consider holding serious talks on a nuclear weapons-free Middle East.

He told reporters the officials he met had voiced concern about the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, saying they feared Iran was pursuing nuclear arms which it might use against Israel.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said the Israelis were pointing the finger at Iran in an attempt to avoid censure for Israel’s nuclear weapons program.

“The Zionist regime’s claims about Iran’s nuclear program are aimed at veiling its own nuclear activity and avoiding revealing its nuclear secrets to the IAEA,” state television quoted him as saying.

“The shameful ignoring of international demands by the Zionist regime indicates this regime is stubborn about accepting any obligation to have even the least transparent cooperation with the IAEA,” he added.

“STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY”

Under a policy of “strategic ambiguity” Israel refuses to admit or deny having nuclear weapons. International experts estimate it has between 100 and 200 warheads.

Unlike Iran, it has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and therefore does not have to let IAEA inspectors into its nuclear facilities.full article

Reuters
AMMAN, Jordan (Reuters) – Saddam’s Hussein’s defense lawyers based in Jordan said Wednesday that death threats had forced them to abandon a planned visit to Baghdad to support the ousted Iraqi leader.

Mohammad Rashdan, coordinator of a 21-strong defense team, said “the threats we are getting from Iraqi officials who say they will tear us to pieces” are the reason preventing a trip to Baghdad.

Rashdan is coordinating the team of mainly Arab lawyers, who have a power of attorney from Saddam’s wife Sajida Khairallah.

“We are getting one threat after the other,” Rashdan said.

The lawyers voiced fears for their safety, citing remarks by officials against Arabs who defend Saddam as a hero.

But they said this week a convoy of buses was being arranged to transport lawyers to Baghdad, despite the risk.

Saddam, driven from power by U.S.-led forces in April 2003, appeared before an Iraqi judge last Thursday to face charges that could lead to a formal indictment for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Saddam’s supporters say he was denied a fair trial by being brought before an Iraqi court without a lawyer and independent judges.

Rashdan said a defense team would now go to Baghdad only if U.S. and Iraqi officials give them access to their client and afforded them protection. He said past requests had been ignored.

“There will be no visit to Baghdad until we get approval to see Mr. President Saddam and are given protection,” Rashdan said.

Without a lawyer to represent him, Saddam refused to sign a statement acknowledging he had been charged and read his rights, including the right to legal counsel.

by Lansana Gberie zmag.org
So much for international humanitarian law and justice…

On 3 June  2004, the UN-created Special Court for Sierra Leone began prosecution of those it alleged bear “the greatest responsibility” for war crimes, violations of humanitarian law and related offenses during Sierra Leone’s decade-long dirty war. It was a “solemn occasion,” said the court’s American prosecutor, David Crane, whose many shortcomings surely does not include modesty or under-statement. Crane summoned all of mankind to “once again [assemble] before an international tribunal to begin the sober and steady climb upwards toward the towering summit of justice.” Waxing poetic—rather in the manner of high-pitched tele-evangelists of the American south—Crane declared: “The path will be strewn with the bones of the dead, the moans of the mutilated, the cries of agony of the tortured, echoing down into the valley of death below. Horrors beyond the imagination will slide into this hallowed hall as this trek upward comes to a most certain and just conclusion.”

The prosecutor must surely be thinking of the depredations of Foday Sankoh, the nihilistic and self-adoring ex-corporal whose petty army, known as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), terrorized Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2000 by crudely mutilating civilians and burning down towns? No. Sankoh died peacefully last year. Charles Taylor, the buccaneering Liberian thug-president who helped set up the RUF after unleashing a catastrophic war on his own country? Not a chance. Taylor is hundreds of miles away from the court, in comfortable exile in the Nigerian port city of Calabar. In fact, what inspired Crane’s pithy eloquence was Sam Hinga Norman, a former Sierra Leone government minister and the putative leader of the Civil Defence Force (CDF), a group of civilians who organized to liberate villages overran by the RUF, keep the bloodthirsty rebel force in check, and restore a democratically-elected government which had been overthrown by the rebels and rogue government soldiers.  Bathos is too limited a word to describe this grandly demented exercise in how not to pursue international justice: even Joseph Conrad, with that cold eye for heroic absurdity and hypocrisy, would not have invented this. full article

news24.com
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia – A top economic adviser to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan told African countries on Monday to refuse to pay their huge debts if rich countries did not cancel them.

American economist Jeffrey Sachs made the comment to a conference on hunger on the eve of a summit of the heads of state of the African Union (AU), which estimates sub-Saharan Africa has foreign debts of $201bn.

“The time has come to end this charade. The debts are unaffordable,” said Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special adviser to Annan on global anti-poverty targets.

“If they won’t cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction. You do it yourselves.”

…Sachs called on the developed world to double aid to Africa to $120bn a year, and meet commitments they made in 1970 to spend at least 0.7% of their gross domestic product on grants and loans.

The United States and other rich nations spend billions of dollars on arms but only a minute fraction of that on fighting poverty, he said.
full article

We are not talking about Western pity, mercy, and charity in ‘fighting poverty.’ Poverty is not some impersonal apolitical phenomenon, particularly in Africa. Africa is so poor precisely because Africa is so rich! Rich in resources the West needs and steadily bleeds from her and has for centuries now. And then has the audacity to attribute Africa’s poverty, Latin America’s poverty, to some undefined defect in the people there, whom it is the white West’s moral duty to ‘help.’ Professor Sachs is right in practice but wrong in principle. The truth is, Africa owes nothing. The West owes Africa.

by Abid Aslam Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON, Jul 6 (IPS) – Inequality will shape November’s U.S. general elections, but few voters will voice concern about disparity in the industrialised world’s most lopsided society.

By the time the polls open, wealthy citizens will have determined which candidates their poorer compatriots may choose between in the presidential face-off and in hundreds of contests in Congress and in local legislatures across the land. Then, high-income voters will disproportionately influence the outcome of those races.

”Money, not votes, is the primary currency in our democracy,” says Mark Clack, deputy director of electoral reform advocacy group Public Campaign.

This year’s polls come amid the most unbalanced distribution of wealth and income in the United States since the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s, according to figures compiled by the official Congressional Budget Office.

And perhaps more than in any other prosperous society, inequality casts a long shadow over education, health care and other aspects of life, ”dividing us into two separate nations,” says Miles Rapoport, president of research and advocacy group Demos.

Federal statistics show that in 2000, the wealthiest 2.8 million U.S. citizens — representing one percent of the national population — took home more after-tax income than did the 110 million people who comprised the poorest 40 percent.

The richest five percent controlled more than 59 percent of the country’s wealth, defined as income plus assets, while the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population had to make do with a collective 0.3 percent, says New York University economist Edward Wolff.

Nearly 31 percent of black households and some 13 percent of white households had zero or negative net worth, meaning that their liabilities exceeded their assets, adds Wolff.

Disparity has a profound effect on elections — but not because voters revolt against it. On the contrary, voting is the pursuit of the well to do.

Nine-tenths of U.S. voters with annual family incomes of 75,000 dollars or more cast their ballots, says University of Minnesota political scientist Lawrence Jacobs.

But only about one-half of those whose household incomes fall below 15,000 dollars a year turn out to vote, adds Jacobs, who heads the American Political Science Association’s inequality task force.

Invariably, the people on the ground who are most directly affected by the misguided policies of the government, are unrepresented. The irrational chaos of a life lived in poverty means voting is pretty much the last thing you’re going to be thinking about. Add that to the fact that over 90 million Americans have limited literacy skills (40 million are functionally illiterate) which directly corrolate to poverty, and the sum is that anything we say in the US about having a representative democracy is untrue. And we have liberals so busy defending public education against privatizing attacks from the right that they will not acknowledge the brokenness of that system.
(more…)

by Gideon Alon Haaretz Daily

Israel has a 10 to 12 percent share of the world’s total military-related production. In monetary terms, $2.5 to 3.5 billion dollars out of the international total of $30 billion earned from the production and sales of military products is pulled in by Israel, Defense Minister Director General Amos Yaron told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday.

Yaron said some 80 percent of Israel’s military production is now destined for overseas customers. The Israel Defense Forces was the prime customer in the past, purchasing some 80 to 90 percent of local military production. This reduction can be attributed to the IDF’s reduced demand for locally-produced military products. The defense establishment is thus now making efforts to create new client markets.

IDF reserve Major General Yossi Ben-Hanah, head of the Defense Ministry’s department for security exports, said the defense establishment is aiming to secure exports of $3 billion in 2004. He noted that defense-related exports include items such as pilotless planes, anti-tank missiles, night-vision equipment, radar and the upgrading of planes, helicopters and tanks.

Ben-Hanan said the record year for defense exports was 2000, when the figure reached $4 billion, largely due to an agreement signed with Turkey worth $700 million to upgrade its tanks. There were also other defense-related projects with Far East nations.

Ben-Hanan said Israeli defense exports to the United States also increased and leveled at $500 million in 2000.

Israel also exports “surpluses” of weapons and tanks no longer in IDF service worth some $125 million annually, Ben-Hanan said.

Reuters

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Australia on Tuesday defended plans to help the United States develop a costly and controversial missile defense system, although it faces no current threat from ballistic missiles.

“From an Australian perspective, we are looking well into the future. We don’t have any threat against us from ballistic missiles at this time. But the day might come when we have,” Australian Defense Minister Robert Hill told reporters.

He spoke during a visit to U.N. headquarters before going to Washington on Wednesday to sign a memorandum of understanding committing Australia to work with its U.S. ally on research over the next 25 years on missile defense systems.

U.S. officials said the pact would cover the development, testing and potential future operation of a missile defense system that Washington hopes will ward off attacks; however, critics believe it may never work and could spark an arms race in space.

The U.S. officials said that in the near term Australia may be involved in developing advanced radar systems that can help detect ballistic missiles soon after they are launched.full article

Launched from China, perhaps??