by Reed Lindsay
The blood has been washed away but the blackened concrete below a broken lamppost in this sluggish town’s main plaza is an inescapable reminder of the grisly lynching that took place here this summer.

The mayor of Ayo Ayo, Benjamín Altamirano, was hanged from the lamppost and set ablaze. The post mortem suggested he had been severely beaten.

Apart from his family, no one mourns for Altamirano in Ayo Ayo, a poor rural municipality an hour’s drive from La Paz on the windswept Altiplano plain, homeland of the Aymara people. In fact, most people in the town approve of the killing. No one has claimed responsibility, but the authorities have arrested at least 10 suspects.

‘Altamirano was corrupt, just like the rest of the politicians,’ said 59-year-old tailor Emilio Mamani as he walked through the plaza. ‘We told him if he did not keep his promises we would take more drastic measures. We told him very clearly. But he would not listen.’

The lynching came less than two months after Aymara people in a village in neighbouring Peru lynched a mayor also accused of corruption. And it won’t be the last, warn Aymara leaders. Fed up with corrupt, unresponsive government institutions long controlled by a white and mestizo elite in La Paz, the people of the Altiplano are taking justice into their own hands.

Residents of Ayo Ayo defend the killing of Altamirano as the rightful exercise of communal justice, a homegrown legal system practised semi-clandestinely in the region since the time of the Incas. Critics say the killing is little more than savagery.

What is certain is that, less than a year after thousands of Aymara peasants and urban slum dwellers staged massive road-blocking protests that drove Bolivia’s President from power, the harsh Altiplano remains a redoubt of fierce anti-government defiance and, some analysts say, the most tangible threat to the precarious administration of interim President Carlos Mesa.

At various times in recent years, Aymara peasants have expelled police, judges and prosecutors from Ayo Ayo and other towns. Some are demanding self-rule.

‘We Aymara carry rebellion in our blood,’ said Ramón Coba, who heads the leading Ayo Ayo peasant organisation. ‘Bolivia is totally corrupt, not just the mayor. All of them should be finished in the same way, if not burnt then drowned or strangled or pulled apart by four tractors… It’s the only way they are going to learn.’

Ayo Ayo is steeped in revolt. The municipality is the birthplace of Tupaj Katari, a legendary warrior who led an uprising of thou sands of Aymara peasants against Spanish colonialists in 1781 before he was captured and executed. The lamppost where Altamirano was hanged stands in the shadow of a towering bronze statue of Katari.

Full Article: Guardian UK

KIRKUK, Iraq (AP) – A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb near a crowd of people waiting to apply for jobs with the Iraqi National Guard in the northern city of Kirkuk on Saturday, killing at least 20 people and wounding 16, officials said.

Full Article:cnn.com

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) – Six Venezuelan soldiers and an oil engineer were killed when an armed group attacked a military patrol and state oil company employees near the border with Colombia, Venezuela’s defense minister said.

Gen. Jorge Garcia Carneiro did not identify the attackers but Venezuela’s armed forces have clashed in the past with Colombian left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries entering from the neighboring country.

Friday’s attack was one of the most serious incidents reported recently on the volatile border between the two Andean countries. Another soldier and a civilian engineer were injured in the clash, which took place near the border village of La Victoria, 25 miles from Guasdualito in the southwest state of Apure.

Venezuela rushed troops and armed helicopters to the area to try to capture the attackers, whom Garcia called “terrorists.”

“We are doing everything possible to ensure that these events do not go unpunished,” the defense minister told state television late Friday.

Military officials said the group of Venezuelan soldiers and employees of the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, were ambushed as they were inspecting the Guafita oil field.

They said the civilian engineer killed was 23-year-old Ana Laura Carrasco.

Relations between Venezuela and Colombia have been strained in the past by border incidents.

Colombia’s government and military have in the past accused left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of sympathizing with, and even collaborating with, Colombian Marxist guerrillas fighting a four-decade war.

Full Article:Reuters

The Washington neocons’ commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own

by John Laughland
An enormous head of steam has built up behind the view that President Putin is somehow the main culprit in the grisly events in North Ossetia. Soundbites and headlines such as “Grief turns to anger”, “Harsh words for government”, and “Criticism mounting against Putin” have abounded, while TV and radio correspondents in Beslan have been pressed on air to say that the people there blame Moscow as much as the terrorists. There have been numerous editorials encouraging us to understand – to quote the Sunday Times – the “underlying causes” of Chechen terrorism (usually Russian authoritarianism), while the widespread use of the word “rebels” to describe people who shoot children shows a surprising indulgence in the face of extreme brutality.

On closer inspection, it turns out that this so-called “mounting criticism” is in fact being driven by a specific group in the Russian political spectrum – and by its American supporters. The leading Russian critics of Putin’s handling of the Beslan crisis are the pro-US politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov – men associated with the extreme neoliberal market reforms which so devastated the Russian economy under the west’s beloved Boris Yeltsin – and the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow Centre. Funded by its New York head office, this influential thinktank – which operates in tandem with the military-political Rand Corporation, for instance in producing policy papers on Russia’s role in helping the US restructure the “Greater Middle East” – has been quoted repeatedly in recent days blaming Putin for the Chechen atrocities. The centre has also been assiduous over recent months in arguing against Moscow’s claims that there is a link between the Chechens and al-Qaida.

These people peddle essentially the same line as that expressed by Chechen leaders themselves, such as Ahmed Zakaev, the London exile who wrote in these pages yesterday. Other prominent figures who use the Chechen rebellion as a stick with which to beat Putin include Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch who, like Zakaev, was granted political asylum in this country, although the Russian authorities want him on numerous charges. Moscow has often accused Berezovsky of funding Chechen rebels in the past.

By the same token, the BBC and other media sources are putting it about that Russian TV played down the Beslan crisis, while only western channels reported live, the implication being that Putin’s Russia remains a highly controlled police state. But this view of the Russian media is precisely the opposite of the impression I gained while watching both CNN and Russian TV over the past week: the Russian channels had far better information and images from Beslan than their western competitors. This harshness towards Putin is perhaps explained by the fact that, in the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled “distinguished Americans” who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the “war on terror”.

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be “a cakewalk”; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush’s plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

The ACPC heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin’s Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable “Muslim” causes, Bosnia and Kosovo – implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilise the situation there. In August, the ACPC welcomed the award of political asylum in the US, and a US-government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, foreign minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a man Moscow describes as a terrorist. Coming from both political parties, the ACPC members represent the backbone of the US foreign policy establishment, and their views are indeed those of the US administration.

Although the White House issued a condemnation of the Beslan hostage-takers, its official view remains that the Chechen conflict must be solved politically. According to ACPC member Charles Fairbanks of Johns Hopkins University, US pressure will now increase on Moscow to achieve a political, rather than military, solution – in other words to negotiate with terrorists, a policy the US resolutely rejects elsewhere.

Allegations are even being made in Russia that the west itself is somehow behind the Chechen rebellion, and that the purpose of such support is to weaken Russia, and to drive her out of the Caucasus. The fact that the Chechens are believed to use as a base the Pankisi gorge in neighbouring Georgia – a country which aspires to join Nato, has an extremely pro-American government, and where the US already has a significant military presence – only encourages such speculation. Putin himself even seemed to lend credence to the idea in his interview with foreign journalists on Monday.

Proof of any such western involvement would be difficult to obtain, but is it any wonder Russians are asking themselves such questions when the same people in Washington who demand the deployment of overwhelming military force against the US’s so-called terrorist enemies also insist that Russia capitulate to hers?

Guardian UK

WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 – The Bush administration, using stringent standards adopted after the failure to find banned weapons in Iraq, has conducted a new assessment of Cuba’s biological weapons capacity and concluded that it is no longer clear that Cuba has an active, offensive bio-weapons program, according to administration officials.

The latest assessment contradicts a 1999 National Intelligence Estimate and past statements by top administration officials, some of whom have warned that Cuba may be sharing its weapons capacity with “rogue states” or with terrorists.

It is the latest indication that in the wake of the Iraq intelligence failures, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies are taking a closer look at earlier threat assessments and finding fault with some of the conclusions and the way the reports were prepared.

Full Article: NY Times

Posted on Thu, Nov. 20, 2003
by Jim Fetzer
…Whatever caused the crash was not the plane, the pilots or the weather. In spite of what you may have heard, the plane was exceptional, the pilots well-qualified and the weather posed no significant problems. Even the National Transportation Safety Board’s own simulations of the plane, the pilots and the weather were unable to bring the plane down.

This means we have to consider other, less palatable, alternatives, such as small bombs, gas canisters or electromagnetic pulse, radio frequency or High Energy Radio Frequency weapons designed to overwhelm electrical circuitry with an intense electromagnetic field. An abrupt cessation of communication between the plane and the tower took place at about 10:18 a.m., the same time an odd cell phone phenomenon occurred with a driver in the immediate vicinity. This suggests to me the most likely explanation is that one of our new electromagnetic weapons was employed.

The politics of the situation were astonishing. The senator was pulling away from the hand-picked candidate of the Bush machine. Its opportunity to seize control of the U.S. Senate was slipping from its grasp. Its vaunted “invincibility” was being challenged by an outspoken critic of its most basic values. Targeted for elimination, he was going to survive. Here’s one man’s opinion: Under such conditions, the temptation to take him out may have been irresistible.

Among the striking indications that something was wrong with the NTSB in its inquiry into the causes of the crash is that Carol Carmody, a former employee with the CIA, the head of the team, announced the day after that the FBI had found no indications of terrorist involvement. Yet it is the responsibility of the NTSB to ascertain the cause of the crash, which has yet to be determined to this very day.

So how could the FBI possibly know?

Duluth News Tribune

Also it should be remembered that there had been an assassination attempt in Colombia shortly before. The runway where Wellstone’s plane was to land had been wired, and local people discovered and removed the explosives just in time. Wellstone asked the US Embassy in Colombia to investigate. They refused. Also, being me, I don’t think it was coincidence that Ted Kennedy went to Minneapolis to meet with Wellstone and was there at the time of the crash. ‘They’ like to spook Ted anew every now and then. Keeps him drinking.
(more…)

by Patrick Cockburn
Where freedom was promised, chaos and carnage now reign. A suicide bomber in a car blows himself up in the heart of Baghdad killing 13 people. Air raids by US near the city of Fallujah kill scores more. And so ends one of the bleakest weeks in Iraq’s grim recent history.

Between them, suicide bombers targeting Iraqi police and US air strikes aimed at rebels have killed some 300 Iraqis since last Saturday – many of them were civilians. The escalating violence throws into doubt the elections planned for January and the ability of the US and interim Iraqi government to control the country.

The repeated suicide-bomb attacks and kidnappings in the centre of Baghdad are eroding whatever remaining optimism there might be about the success of the government of Iyad Allawi, the Prime Minister, in restoring order in an increasingly fragmented country.

Violence and abductions are ensuring that even tentative efforts at economic reconstruction have ground to a halt. Earlier in the week, the US diverted $3.4bn (£2bn) of funds intended for water and electricity projects to security and the oil industry. Many Iraqi businessmen and doctors have fled to Amman and Damascus because of fear of being taken hostage. The abduction of one British and two American contractors this week will make it very difficult for any foreigners to live in Baghdad outside fortified enclaves.

Yesterday, a car packed with explosives blew up near a row of police cars blocking off a bridge in the centre of the Baghdad. Police tried to get the bomber to stop but he drove on into the middle of the parked cars. “I saw human flesh and blood in the street, then I fled,” said Mouayed Shehab.

Full Article: Independent UK

Hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters hit a growing number of people worldwide and are on the increase due partly to global warming, the United Nations’ disaster reduction agency said on Friday.

More than 254 million people were affected by natural hazards last year, a near three-fold jump from 1990, according to data released by the inter-agency secretariat of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN/ISDR).

The random nature of disasters renders mapping their impact more difficult as droughts in 2002 pushed the figure of people affected above 734 million.

But the long-term trend over the past decade shows a steady rise in victims, according to the statistics from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaters at the University of Louvain in Belgium.

“Not only is the world globally facing more potential disasters, but increasing numbers of people are becoming vulnerable to hazards,” the UN/ISDR said in a statement.

Hazards, ranging from storms, earthquakes and volcanoes to wild fires, droughts and landslides killed some 83,000 people in 2003 compared with about 53,000 deaths 13 years earlier, it noted.

A lack of facilities such as schools, jobs and hospitals in rural communities is forcing more and more people to live in urban areas where they stand a greater risk of being affected, said UN/ISDR director Salvano Briceno.

“Urban migrants settle in exposed stretches of land either on seismic faults, flooding plains or on landslide prone slopes,” he said in a statement.

In addition, cyclones and freak temperatures appear to be on the rise with 337 natural disasters reported in 2003 up from 261 in 1990, the agency said.

“The urban concentration, the effects of climate change and the environmental degredation are greaty increasing vulnerability,” said Briceno.

“Alarmingly, this is getting worse,” he warned.

An onslaught of deadly hurricanes that have battered the southern United States supported theories that such storms were occurring more frequently, said John Harding, a programme officer at the UN/ISDR.

“Look at the number of hurricanes this year, it is hard to keep up with all the names,” he told AFP.

“The scientific community tells us that the intensity and frequency of disasters are very likely to increase in the medium-term due to climate change and that increase may well be occurring at this stage,” he said.

drudgereport.com

by Dan Glaister
More than 350 women have been murdered in Guatemala this year, placing the central American state at the centre of alarm over so-called femicide.

Most of the Guatemalan killings have taken place in poor areas of the capital, Guatemala City, but there have also been clusters of deaths in the east and south of the country.

The victims are primarily aged between 16 and 35, most are poor, and many are members of the country’s indigenous population.

While the government has sought to blame the murders on youth gang violence, local human rights campaigners argue that the scale and methods suggest otherwise.

“Violence against women today has reached an extreme level,” said José Flores, a spokesman for Guatemala’s human rights commission. “Many of the methods involved in the killings – torture, coups de grace to the back of the neck, all the techniques of extra-judicial executions – stem from the practices of recent years,” he said, in a reference to the murders that characterised the country’s protracted civil war between 1960 and 1996. A truth commission reported that about 200,000 civilians, mainly Mayan Indians, were killed during that time.

Full Article: Guardian UK

At least 13 people were killed in a central Baghdad car bomb attack this morning just hours after US strikes on militant targets in the city of Falluja killed 44 people and injured 27.
A suicide car bomber struck near a major police checkpoint in central Baghdad, killing at least five people and wounding 20, according to the health ministry, which is expecting many casualties from the explosion.

The bomb went off at around 12.45pm (0945 BST). Witnesses reported seeing thick plumes of smoke in the air.

Earlier today at least 44 people were killed and 27 were injured in a wave of US attacks on the alleged hideouts of an al-Qaida-linked group in and around the town of Falluja, the Iraqi health ministry said.

According to a statement by the US military, the strikes, which began last night, targeted a compound in Fazat Shnetir, about 12 miles south of the Sunni stronghold of Falluja, where militants loyal to the Jordanian-born al-Qaida ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were gathering to plot attacks on US-led forces in Iraq.

Militants who survived the strikes later sought refuge in nearby villages, but US forces quickly broke off an offensive to hunt them down in an effort to avoid civilian casualties, the statement said.

“The number of foreign fighters killed during the strike is estimated at approximately 60. The terrorists targeted in this strike were believed to be associated with recent bombing attacks and other terrorist activities throughout Iraq,” the US military said.

But a health ministry spokesman, Saad al-Amili, said at least 17 children and two women were among the wounded. Hospital officials in Falluja said women and children were also among the dead, but exact figures were not immediately available.

Residents of Fazat Shnetir were seen digging graves today and burying the dead in groups of four.

Full Article: Guardian UK