For decades South Africans have known him as the Arch, an affectionate nickname for a towering figure in the liberation struggle.

Yet this weekend Archbishop Desmond Tutu claims he has been branded a liar, charlatan and poser.

The insults flew in a bitter clash between the archbishop and President Thabo Mbeki that exposed intolerance in the ruling African National Congress.

The row has polarised the country. Some called Tutu an out-of-touch cleric parroting white concerns. Others hailed him as a bulwark against creeping authoritarianism in Mbeki’s government.

The archbishop triggered the row while giving last week’s annual Nelson Mandela Lecture In Johannesburg by criticising its policies on poverty, Aids, Zimbabwe and the enrichment of a new black elite.

‘Too many of our people live in gruelling, demeaning, dehumanising poverty. We are sitting on a powder keg,’ said Tutu, joint winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize.

He disagreed with Mbeki’s questioning of the link between HIV and Aids and his silence over human rights abuses by Robert Mugabe’s regime.

He railed against the policy of ’empowerment’, which obliged white-owned companies to transfer shares to black people: ‘What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority, but a small elite that tends to be recycled?’

In remarks interpreted as aimed at the president’s centralised rule, Tutu said: ‘We should not too quickly want to pull rank and to demand an uncritical, sycophantic, obsequious conformity.’
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

SKIDEGATE, British Columbia – In this rainy land of scarlet dawns and big black bears, workers are busy constructing a 40,000-square-foot extension to a museum that sits in a bushy cove where gray whales come to eat herring and roll over the shell beach to scratch barnacles off their bellies.

It is an ambitious project, not least because the hundreds of traditional masks, carvings and blankets the building is meant to display for the native Haida people still belong to some of the world’s most prestigious museums. Resistance to the return of artifacts is likely, but the Haida have become used to challenging the rich and powerful, and winning.

Today they are in the vanguard of what appears to be a renaissance of Indian nations in Canada that legal scholars and others say could determine ultimate control over many resources vital to Canada’s future, including oil, timber and diamonds.

The Haida won a landmark case in November in Canada’s Supreme Court obliging British Columbia to consult with them over land use anywhere on their traditional homelands here on the Queen Charlotte Islands. The decision is expected to have a sweeping impact on similar Indian claims across Canada.

Adapting their old warrior ways to federal and provincial courtrooms, the Haida have already managed to slow efforts to clear-cut their lands by Weyerhaeuser and other companies. They have stalled plans by Petro-Canada and other companies to drill in ancestral waters should a government moratorium be lifted along the coast.

They are not alone in their efforts. Native bands are similarly exerting increasing control over natural resources across vast stretches of northern Canada that promise to be vital economically in a future of global warming. The developments have pleased environmentalists. But some legal experts warn that the stirrings represent a danger to the unity of a nation already struggling to keep separatist leanings in Quebec under control. There has not been a full-blown public debate on the issue, partly because most Canadians agree that native people deserve better conditions.
Full Article: nytimes.com

‘Native bands’ with their ‘warrior ways.’

In the past year, the Supreme Court has heard three appeals from inmates on death row in Texas, and in each case the prosecutors and the lower courts suffered stinging reversals.

In a case to be argued on Monday, the court appears poised to deliver another rebuke.

Lawyers for a Texas death row inmate, Thomas Miller-El, will appear before the justices for the second time in two years. To legal experts, the Supreme Court’s decision to hear his case yet again is a sign of its growing impatience with two of the courts that handle death penalty cases from Texas: its highest criminal court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans.

Perhaps as telling is the exasperated language in decisions this year from a Supreme Court that includes no categorical opponent of the death penalty. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in June that the Fifth Circuit was “paying lip service to principles” of appellate law in issuing death penalty rulings with “no foundation in the decisions of this court.”

In an unsigned decision in another case last month, the Supreme Court said the Court of Criminal Appeals “relied on a test we never countenanced and now have unequivocally rejected.” The decision was made without hearing argument, a move that ordinarily signals that the error in the decision under review was glaring.

The actions of the two appeals courts that hear capital cases from Texas help explain why the state leads the nation in executions, with 336 since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated, more than the next five states combined.

In the Miller-El case, appellate lawyers and legal scholars are buzzing over what they say is the insolence of the Fifth Circuit.

In an 8-to-1 decision last year, the Supreme Court instructed the appeals court to rethink its “dismissive and strained interpretation” of the proof in the case, and to consider more seriously the substantial evidence suggesting that prosecutors had systematically excluded blacks from Mr. Miller-El’s jury. Prosecutors used peremptory strikes to eliminate 10 out of 11 eligible black jurors, and they twice used a local procedure called a jury shuffle to move blacks lower on the list of potential jurors, the decision said. The jury ultimately selected, which had one black member, convicted Mr. Miller-El, a black man who is now 53, of killing a clerk at a Holiday Inn in Dallas in 1985.

Instead of considering much of the evidence recited by the Supreme Court majority, the appeals court engaged in something akin to plagiarism. In February, it again rejected Mr. Miller-El’s claims, in a decision that reproduced, virtually verbatim and without attribution, several paragraphs from the sole dissenting opinion in last year’s Supreme Court decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Full Article: nytimes.com

Race and Election 2004
by Bob Wing
The 2004 presidential contest was a warning shot across the bow of all progressives. While the president and the Republican pundits vastly overstate their “mandate,” progressives need to become clear on the motion of racial politics if we are to get ourselves in shape for the coming battles.

Many spin doctors would have us believe that the story of the 2004 election turns on evangelicals and moral values, the better to advance their rightwing agenda in both the Democratic and Republican parties, not to speak of the halls of power.

But an examination of the exit polls shows something very different (though not at all new): the centrality of race in U.S. politics. The bad news is that the Republicans, trumpeting their program of aggressive war and racism, swung the election by increasing their share of the white vote to 58 percent. This represents a four-point gain over 2000; a 12-point gain over 1996 and a grim18-point gain over 1992.

The good news is that people of color–African Americans, Latinos, Native peoples, Asian Americans and Arab Americans–surged to the polls in unprecedented numbers and voted overwhelmingly in opposition to the Bush agenda despite an unprecedented Republican attempt to intimidate them. People of color constituted about 35 percent of new voters and, despite their dazzling diversity, showed uncommon political unity.

A key lesson of this election is that progressives and Democrats need to stop chasing the Republicans to the right and instead adopt a clear vision that mobilizes our main social constituencies and wins new allies. Only a long term strategy that draws deeply and skillfully from the high moral ground of peace, jobs and equality and refuses to cede the South and Southwest to the right can enable us to staunch the country’s longstanding movement to the right. Otherwise what Lani Guinier calls the “tyranny of the (white) majority” will continue to lead us into authoritarianism and empire.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

Well for one thing the writer of this uses the official numbers for his analysis. In fact, it is only blacks who are bothering to officially dispute them. Also, to congratulate the left for its big mobilization around this election is a joke. They completely capitualted to the terms laid out by the two parties, and their analysis seldom went deeper than ‘anybody but Bush.’ Also, to assume that the solution to America’s ills is for the left to reach out and embrace minorities through the electoral process is naive at best. It’s a little late in the day for liberals and progressives to suddenly get bold and declare it’s time to stop chasing the Republicans to the right. Republicans can be expected to pander to white fears: what’s the Democrats’ excuse?

“The Pianist” of Palestine
By Omar Barghouti
When I watched Oscar-winning film The Pianist I had three distinct, uneasy reactions. I was not particularly impressed by the film, from a purely artistic angle; I was horrified by the film’s depiction of the dehumanization of Polish Jews and the impunity of the German occupiers; and I could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israel’s much more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prisons.

In the film, when German soldiers forced Jewish musicians to play for them at a checkpoint, I thought to myself: “that’s one thing Israeli soldiers have not yet done to Palestinians.” I spoke too soon, it seems. Israel’s leading newspaper Ha’aretz reported last week that an Israeli human rights organization monitoring a daunting military roadblock near Nablus was able to videotape Israeli soldiers forcing a Palestinian violinist to play for them. The same organization confirmed that similar abuse had taken place months ago at another checkpoint near Jerusalem.

In typical Israeli whitewashing, the incident was dismissed by an army spokesperson as little more that “insensitivity,” with no malicious intent to humiliate the Palestinians involved. And of course the usual mantra about soldiers having to “contend with a complex and dangerous reality” was again served as a ready, one-size-fits-all excuse. I wonder whether the same would be said or accepted in describing the original Nazi practice at the Warsaw ghetto gates in the 1940’s.

Regrettably, the analogy between the two illegal occupations does not stop here. Many of the methods of collective and individual “punishment” meted out to Palestinian civilians at the hands of young, racist, often sadistic and ever impervious Israeli soldiers at the hundreds of checkpoints littering the occupied Palestinian territories are reminiscent of common Nazi practices against the Jews. Following a visit to the occupied Palestinian territories in 2003, Oona King, a Jewish member of the British parliament attested to this, writing: “The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature – though not its extent – to the Warsaw ghetto.”

Even Tommy Lapid, Israel’s justice minister and a Holocaust survivor himself, stirred a political storm last year when he told Israel radio that a picture of an elderly Palestinian woman searching in the debris for her medication had reminded him of his grandmother who died at Auschwitz. Furthermore, he commented on his army’s wanton and indiscriminate destruction of Palestinian homes, businesses and farms in Gaza at the time, saying: “[I]f we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague.”
Full Article: counterpunch.org

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 – Calling the current system of Social Security benefits unsustainable, a top economic adviser to President Bush on Thursday strongly implied that any overhaul of the system would have to include major cuts in guaranteed benefits for future retirees.

“Let me state clearly that there are no free lunches here,” said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, at a conference on tax policy here.

“The benefits now scheduled for future generations under current law are not sustainable given the projected path of payroll tax revenue,” he added. “They are empty promises.”
Full Article: nytimes.com

Unbelievable. “Free lunch.” Mortgaging people’s retirements to pay for this dirty war.

The hardline leftwing party led by Latin America’s most prominent indigenous leader is set to emerge as the biggest victor in Bolivia’s municipal elections on Sunday chiefly because support for its discredited traditional rivals will see their support sink to new lows.

Independent candidates backed by a variety of local committees look likely to retain control of La Paz and other large cities. Evo Morales’s Movement to Socialism (MAS) party’s expected advantage reflects broader political fragmentation in Latin America, especially its turbulent Andean region. However, analysts do not expect him to score more than 25 per cent of the vote well short of the results expected by independent candidates in most Bolivian cities. The MAS “will be the biggest party but only because everyone else has gone into meltdown”, says Winston Moore, a La Paz-based political analyst.

Mr Morales is hoping to build significantly on his 22 per cent of the vote in the 2002 presidential elections, in order to launch another bid for the presidency in 2007. His firebrand leadership of the coca growers’ union, support for Cuba and leftwing ideology have made him a bête noire for US policymakers: two years ago, the former US ambassador to La Paz controversially advised Bolivians not to vote for him.
Full Article: nytimes.com

Another firebrand. South America is positively bristling with them. Yay.

by Donna J. Volatile
“There’s gonna be hell to pay, at the end of the day…”
Les Miserables (the musical) Lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer

It’s tempting to want to see the latest events unfolding in Ukraine as romantic: The people rising up in mass, demanding ‘democracy’, like something out of Les Miserables as the people man the barricades! It’s especially appealing to many here in the U.S. who so desperately need to believe that democracy can still prevail, somewhere in the world, if not here at home, yet, this is a dangerous aberration, one that promises to deliver disappointment.

The “velvet revolution” taking place in Ukraine, is nothing more than an illusion carefully crafted by the masters of the universe, in an effort to further their collective goal: conquering the world’s resources and expanding their global dominion. (If the velvet revolution had commercial breaks, the sponsors would announce that this is being brought to you by the IMF, World Bank and all the other usual suspects.) Would that true democracy could win the day, anywhere in the world today, surely we would celebrate in earnest but the fact of the matter is real democracy will never be allowed to exist simply because it is abhorrent to the powers that be.

What passes for a democratic revolution in Ukraine is nothing more than a U.S. staged coup d’etat, very similar to the one the Bush administration backed in Georgia last year, which toppled Eduard Shevardnadze and helped to further pave the way for U.S. ambitions in the region. (1)

The cast of characters in this epic tale of revolution, American style, are: Vladimir Putin, the supposed arch enemy of the free world and our villain; Viktor Yanukovych, the president elect in question and at the center of the controversy, who is supported by Moscow; Viktor Yushchenko, the U.S./IMF/World Bank puppet hero and The People on the streets (the supporting cast), replete with costumes made up of orange hats and scarves, their props consisting of orange banners, flags and an endless sea of tents, which line the icy streets of Kiev and illustrate their resolve to stay until they are victorious.

Behind the scenes of the revolution, operating in dark alley ways, conjuring and manipulating the desperate images of a people fighting for their freedoms, are our usual suspects: The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Freedom House and last but certainly not least, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, all of whom helped to fund pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko.(2) (Does anyone ever wonder about George Soros, famed ‘philanthropist’ and promoter of ‘democracy’ around the world? Soros poured fifteen million dollars of his own money into anti-war and anti-Bush groups during the presidential election, publicly proclaiming his hatred of George W. Bush and yet Soros and his organization seem to support the same agenda: exporting the U.S. idea of democracy to areas of the world strategic to U.S. interests and miraculously following the Bush Administration’s chosen route for oil pipelines…)
Full Article: counterpunch.org

Marines Find Alleged Iraqi Torture Chamber
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) – Down a steep staircase littered with glass shards and rubble, U.S. Marines descended Thursday to a dark basement believed to have been one of Fallujah’s torture chambers. They found bloodstains and a single bloody hand print on the wall – evidence of the horrors once carried out in this former insurgent stronghold.

“We had sensed that there was a pure streak of evil in this town, ever since the first days of engagement here,” said Maj. Wade Weems.
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?flok=ne-world-10-Full Article:netscape.cnn.com

200 pledge willingness to carry out suicide attacks against Americans, Israelis
TEHRAN, Iran, (AP) – Some 200 masked young men and women gathered at a Tehran cemetery Thursday to pledge their willingness to carry out suicide bomb attacks against Americans in Iraq and Israelis.

The ceremony was organized by the Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement, a shadowy group that has since June been seeking volunteers for attacks in Iraq and Israel.

A spokesman, Ali Mohammadi, described Thursday’s group as the “first suicide commando unit,” though another official has claimed members already have carried out attacks in Israel.

“Sooner or later we will bury all blasphemous occupiers of Islamic lands,” Mohammadi said.
Full Article:cbc.ca

U.S. told of Iranian effort to create nuclear warhead
Recent intelligence shows Iran has been working to produce a missile re-entry vehicle containing a small nuclear warhead for its Shahab missiles and has encountered problems developing a reliable centrifuge system for uranium enrichment, U.S. officials said.

    The officials, who discussed the intelligence on the condition of anonymity, said Iran’s new nuclear warhead program includes what specialists call the basic “physics package” for fitting a nuclear bomb inside the nose cone of a missile.

    The officials provided details on the program after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell disclosed Nov. 17 that Iran was developing delivery systems for nuclear missiles. Iran has since agreed to halt uranium enrichment under pressure from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and three European governments, a deal the Bush administration views skeptically.

    The warhead is based on an indigenous Iranian design and is not being built from design information supplied by the covert nuclear network headed by Pakistani technician Abdul Qadeer Khan, who has admitted supplying nuclear goods to Libya, Iran and North Korea, the officials said.
    ”They are moving ahead with a design for a warhead,” one official said.
    Mr. Powell two weeks ago told reporters traveling with him to Santiago, Chile, that the intelligence shows that Iran is “actively working on [nuclear delivery] systems.”
Full Article: washingtontimes.com

At this point, why should we believe a thing these people are saying?

by Michael Sniffen
WASHINGTON (AP) – U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of foreigners as enemy combatants are allowed to use evidence gained by torture in deciding whether to keep them imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the government conceded in court Thursday.

The acknowledgment by Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle came during a U.S. District Court hearing on lawsuits brought by some of the 550 foreigners imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The lawsuits challenge their detention without charges for up to three years so far.

Attorneys for the prisoners argued that some were held solely on evidence gained by torture, which they said violated fundamental fairness and U.S. due process standards. But Boyle argued in a similar hearing Wednesday that the detainees “have no constitutional rights enforceable in this court.”

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon asked if a detention would be illegal if it were based solely on evidence gathered by torture, because “torture is illegal. We all know that.”

Boyle replied that if the military’s combatant status review tribunals (or CSRTs) “determine that evidence of questionable provenance were reliable, nothing in the due process clause (of the Constitution) prohibits them from relying on it.”

Leon asked if there were any restrictions on using evidence produced by torture.

Boyle replied the United States would never adopt a policy that would have barred it from acting on evidence that could have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks even if the data came from questionable practices like torture by a foreign power.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk