by Robert Fisk
So, the Palestinians will end their occupation of Israel. No more will Palestinian tanks smash their way into Haifa and Tel Aviv. No more will Palestinian F-18s bomb Israeli population centers. No more will Palestinian Apache helicopters carry out “targeted killings” — i.e., murders — of Israeli military leaders.

The Palestinians have promised to end all “acts of violence” against Israelis while Israel has promised to end all “military activity” against Palestinians. So that’s it, then. Peace in our time.

A Martian — even a well-educated Martian — would have gathered that this was the message, supposing he dropped in on the fantasy world of Sharm el-Sheikh this week. Palestinians had been committing “violence,” the Israelis carrying out “innocent” operations. Palestinian “violence” or “terror and violence” — the latter a more popular phrase since it carried the stigma of 9/11 — was now at an end.

Mahmoud Abbas, who told a close Lebanese friend this year that he wore a suit and tie so that he would look “different” from Yasser Arafat — went along with all this. Just which people were occupying the homes of which other people remained a mystery.

Silver-haired and wisdom-burdened, Abbas looked the part. We had to forget that it was this same Abbas who wrote the Oslo Accords, who in 1,000 pages failed to use — even once — the word occupation and who talked not of Israeli “withdrawal” from Palestinian territory but of “redeployment.”

At no point at Sharm el-Sheikh did anyone mention occupation. Like sex, occupation had to be censored out of the historical narrative. As usual — as in Oslo — the real issues were put back to a later date. Refugees, the “right of return,” East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital: Let’s deal with them later.
Full Article: commondreams.org

WASHINGTON (AP) – Concerned about government secrecy in a terrorism case, a federal judge expressed skepticism Friday at the Bush administration’s request to dismiss a lawsuit on behalf of a Virginia man held in Saudi Arabia.

The government is bolstering its effort to get the case thrown out by submitting classified information to U.S. District Judge John Bates that is unavailable to lawyers for imprisoned terrorist suspect Ahmed Abu Ali.

“This is about as close to a state secrets shutdown” of a case without the executive branch of government actually doing so, the judge said at a hearing.

One of Abu Ali’s lawyers, David Cole, argued that “the government would throw the adversarial process out the window” with classified information that the other side is not allowed to see.

The suit by Abu Ali’s family marks the latest instance in which the Bush administration is trying to keep terrorism suspects beyond the reach of U.S. courts.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

As the British bombers streamed towards Dresden, 18-year-old Götz Bergander was heading home on a tram with his mother.

The family’s second-floor flat in Friedrichstrasse was one of the few homes in the city equipped with a proper air-raid shelter. ‘It had steel doors and rubber curtains. Most other people had merely dumped a few sandbags in the cellar,’ said Bergander, who survived the raid on Dresden 60 years ago today and later became a historian. It was the shelter that almost certainly saved his life when, at 9.50pm on 13 February 1945, the first RAF planes appeared in the cloudless skies above.

According to Bergander, the city’s population had wrongly assumed that the allied air raids that had devastated Hamburg, Cologne and other German cities wouldn’t affect them. Dresden’s Nazi gauleiter had encouraged the myth that the baroque city wasn’t a target, he added. ‘The opera house and theatre closed down only in September 1944. Right up until the attack, cinemas were still open,’ Bergander, now 78, recalled. ‘I was going there two or three times a week. People weren’t prepared.’

After the alarm sounded, Bergander retreated to the air raid shelter, taking with him his Philips radio. ‘From there we followed the progress of the bombers as they flew across Germany.’

The first attack lasted 30 minutes. When Bergander emerged from his shelter, he found Dresden’s central Neustadt on fire. The nearby yeast factory where his father worked had survived, but much of the city no longer existed. ‘Many houses were burning. People were fleeing from the city. They were covered in dust. Other people headed to the hospital because their eyes had been burnt.

‘And then we heard the air raid sirens again. We thought, “There can’t be another attack. It isn’t possible.”‘
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Martyn Loosman, impeccably turned out in a traditional costume of baggy trousers and a red and white striped shirt, buffs up the Dutch Queen Wilhemina coins on his belt buckle.

‘The government is going too far by proposing body searches and forcing suspected terrorists to report weekly to police,’ he says before sloping off, his black clogs scraping nonchalantly against the cobblestones of the fishing village of Urk.

Forty miles south, in an Amsterdam coffee shop, advertising copywriter Geert Beck toys with his blond dreadlocks while sucking on a joint. ‘There are too many immigrants in Holland. They are stealing our society.’

The men, both 29, represent the contradictions in the Netherlands’ liberal society and pose questions over whether it has died or was only ever superficial.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Iraq’s most wanted terrorist, the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is hiding out in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk after fleeing from Mosul, according to police sources.

The claim comes barely days after the Iraq’s interim government said that it was close to catching the jihadist, whose group has been behind the beheadings of foreign hostages, including Briton Kenneth Bigley, and suicide bombings.

‘He came to Kirkuk from Mosul,’ a source in the Kirkuk police department told Reuters yesterday, speaking anonymously. ‘There’s a possibility that he might be captured at any moment.’
Full Article:guardian.co.uk

I won’t be holding my breath.

HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuban President Fidel Castro warned the United States Saturday against plotting to kill his most important ally, Venezuela’s leftist President Hugo Chavez.

“I say to world public opinion: if they assassinate Chavez, the responsibility will fall squarely on the president of the United States, George W. Bush,” Castro said.

The Cuban leader, who was the target of CIA assassination plots after his 1959 revolution steered Cuba toward Soviet Communism, gave no evidence that Chavez’s life was in danger.

But he said the United States would be responsible for killing Chavez even if the Venezuelan military was to carry out the assassination.

He added: “If they can eliminate him, they will.”
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) – Venezuela Friday dismissed as “impertinence” U.S. criticism of its plans to buy Russian rifles and helicopters and suggested Washington was just sore it was not buying U.S. weapons.

“This is a sovereign action by Venezuela which President (Hugo) Chavez’s government is not willing to discuss,” Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel said in a terse statement.

It was the second public rebuttal this week by left-winger Chavez’s government of U.S. fears about the planned Venezuelan arms purchases announced several months ago.

Venezuela, the world’s No. 5 oil exporter, is a major supplier of oil to the United States. But Chavez and President George. W. Bush’s government have been at loggerheads for several years.

Rangel rejected concerns expressed by the State Department Thursday that 100,000 Kalashnikov automatic rifles Venezuela is buying from Russia could fall into the hands of leftist guerrillas Washington considers “terrorists.”

In his statement, Rangel described the U.S. reaction as “another impertinence from Mr. Bush’s government.”

“One has to ask whether the U.S. concern might not stem from the fact that this equipment is being bought in Russia and not in the United States,” he said.
Full Article: nytimes.com

ANTWERP, Belgium – Filip Dewinter, a boyish man in a dark blue suit, bounds up two flights of steep stairs in his political party’s 19th-century headquarters building where posters show a Muslim minaret rising menacingly above the Gothic steeple of the city’s cathedral.

“The radical Muslims are organizing themselves in Europe,” he declared. “Other political parties, they are very worried about the Muslim votes and say let’s be tolerant, while we are saying – the new political forces in Europe are saying – no, we should defend our identity.”

From the Freedom Party in Austria to the National Front in France to the Republicans in Germany, Europe’s far right has made a comeback in recent years, largely on the strength of anti-immigration feelings sharpened to a fear of Islam. That fear is fed by threats of terrorism, rising crime rates among Muslim youth and mounting cultural clashes with the Continent’s growing Islamic communities.

But nowhere has the right’s revival been as swift or as strong as in Belgium’s Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, where support for Mr. Dewinter’s Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, has surged from 10 percent of the electorate in 1999 to nearly a quarter today.
Full Article: nytimes.com

RIYADH (Reuters) – Islamist-backed candidates triumphed over tribal opponents and businessmen in Saudi Arabia’s landmark men-only elections in the capital Riyadh, according to preliminary results released Friday.

Losing candidates cried foul, saying six of the seven victors had violated a ban on election alliances when their names were circulated via mobile phones and the Internet to voters in the deeply conservative Muslim kingdom with messages suggesting they had Islamist backing.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters

A rare strain of H.I.V. that is highly resistant to virtually all anti-retroviral drugs and appears to lead to the rapid onset of AIDS was detected in a New York City man last week, city health officials announced on Friday.

It was the first time a strain of H.I.V. had been found that both showed resistance to multiple drugs and led to AIDS so quickly, the officials said. While the extent of the disease’s spread is unknown, officials called a news conference to say that the situation is alarming.

“We consider this a major potential problem,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The department issued an alert to all hospitals and doctors in the city to test all newly detected H.I.V. cases for evidence of the rare strain.

The virus was found in a New York City man in his mid-40’s who engaged in unprotected anal sex with other men on multiple occasions while he was using crystal methamphetamine. Health officials have long said that the drug’s stimulating effect and erasure of inhibitions contributes to sex marathons that have increased the spread of H.I.V.

…Some AIDS specialists outside New York City expressed skepticism about the alarm, believing that it might be an isolated case related to the patient’s immune system.
Full Article: nytimes.com