LIMA, Peru – This is the country where a radical, left-leaning “theology of liberation” first emerged 35 years ago. But it is also the place where, four years ago, a member of the Roman Catholic Church’s profoundly conservative Opus Dei movement was for the first time elevated to cardinal.

Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, the archbishop of Lima, has accused some bishops of engaging in a campaign to undermine him.
Now, with the ascension of Pope Benedict XVI, the longstanding divide between conservatives, emboldened by the choice of a kindred spirit, and liberal clergy here and throughout Latin America could intensify. If Peru’s recent past is any measure, such a competition, even if the two sides are not evenly matched, is certain to be fierce.

Today, the priest who coined the term “liberation theology,” the Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, spends much of his time teaching in the United States, in what some of his admirers describe as a kind of exile. The bishop who was elevated to cardinal, Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, now archbishop of Lima, has accused fellow bishops of a smear campaign of forged letters to undermine him.

How the tensions between those camps play out could affect not only issues of theology, but also how the church addresses related matters like the centralization of authority, the role of lay people, the decline in priestly vocations and the mounting challenge of evangelical Protestant groups in a region where nearly half the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics live.
Full: nytimes

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — Ministers from 34 South American and Middle Eastern nations on Sunday began preparing the groundwork for the first-ever summit of leaders from the two regions.

Their talks could lead to a commitment to negotiations for a South American-Arab free trade zone — part of an effort to counter U.S. political and economic influence.

Brazilian media stressed Sunday that the leaders of key U.S. allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia will be absent. But Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is scheduled to attend. The United States’ request to observe the event was denied.

While the stated goal of the gathering is to boost economic ties, the summit will bring together leaders from countries that resent America’s forceful hand in everything from regime changes to globalization that critics say benefits only large multinational corporations.

”It’s important for these countries to not be seen as being bullied by the West,” said Amany Jamal, a Middle East political development expert at Princeton University. ”What better way to do that than re-establish dominance on another front?”
Full:aponline

They’ll nuke ’em all before they allow this…

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday that the media can spread peace but also foment violence, and he called on journalists to exercise responsibility to ensure objective reports that respect human dignity and the common good.

Benedict made the comments during a brief appearance at his studio window to bless thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square below, following in the beloved Sunday tradition of Pope John Paul II.

Draped underneath the window for the first time was the red tapestry bearing Benedict’s papal coat of arms, which includes traditional elements from his native Bavaria and a nod to St. Augustine.

Noting that Sunday was the world day of social communications, the pope praised the media for what he called the ”extraordinary” coverage of the death and funeral of John Paul.

”But everything depends on the way it (the media) is used,” he said.

”These important tools of communication can favor reciprocal knowledge and dialogue, or on the contrary, they can fuel prejudice and disdain between individuals and peoples; they can contribute to spreading peace or fomenting violence.”

As a result, Benedict called for members of the media to exercise ”personal responsibility” to ensure objective reports that respect human dignity and pay attention to the common good.
Full:nytimes.com

Yeah, objective like the Jesuit journalist he sacked for giving both sides of issues declared by the Holy See to be verboten.

by Rootsie

Having come through Holocaust Remembrance week sufficiently chastened and guilt-ridden, we are now treated to the pomp and pageantry of the 60th anniversary celebration of V-E Day.

The one piece of European history that every schoolchild in the West is admonished from the earliest age to ‘never forget’ is the Holocaust. He or she is taught to view the Nazis’ mass extermination of the Jews as a ghastly and fascinating anomaly. The suggestion is made that a sudden eruption of ‘pagan’ notions of blood purity forms the ideological basis for Germany’s brief bout with insanity. Today, the Germans are in church, while the rest of us are patting each other on the back for banding together to defeat the evil of Hitler.

I was one of those children thus indoctrinated and thus believing. I remember the first time I came across some of those lurid photos from the camps in Readers Digest. I looked at them again, and then again. I could not stop looking.

I also ‘never forgot’ the history that gave rise to Hitler; I was never taught it

Ah, but when we become grown, we are admonished to put away childish things.

Anybody who has sufficiently informed herself knows that Hitler was no odd man out in European history. Like the centuries of European imperial bandits before him, he sought ‘breathing room’ for his cramped country. By the time he came along, the more exotic places like Africa and South America were taken, so he looked East. The idea of ‘racial purity’ was the one-note song of the previous centuries of European thought and action. Hitler neither invented the notions of Aryan supremacy nor of world conquest and the mass extermination of groups of human beings: 8 million in Leopold’s Congo, 50 million in South America and the Caribbean, 50 million in the years of the slave trade. Hitler had centuries of European science and philosophy to back him up. He didn’t have to dream up a thing.

The queer-eye guys who script the ‘look’ for all these pageants we’ve been treated to lately, from the red, white, and blue Reagan funeral to the bling bling and the acres of pricey fabric of the ‘Pope dies/Pope is elected’ party, to this weekend’s more explicitly martial themes (lots of leather and steel, with flowers strewn about for contrast), do however, owe a lot to the Nazi aesthetic. Nobody since Napolean could put together an imperial pageant like them Nazis.

Until now. It can’t be lost on the rest of the world that the V-E festivities bear an unmistakable message about power. They scream,
“Don’t fuck with me.” The heavy nostalgia of the proceedings owe a lot to Hitler too. They emotionally enjoin us to remember our past greatness and perseverance, to ‘stay the course,’ to spread the light of freedom hither and yon.

Whether Hitler died in that bunker in Berlin or lives on Mars with Elvis, the values he embodied have galloped across the planet untrammeled since V-E day. A bunch of little Hitlers, Nazis smuggled out of Europe with the help of the OSS and the Pople, were unleashed on Latin America and turned it into one giant torture chamber. European and American colonialism are directly accountable for a million slaughtered in two years in Cambodia, a million in 8 weeks in Rwanda, a million a year for the past three years in DR Congo. The techniques of and cracked rationales for mechanized mass murder have been embraced and perfected all over the place. ‘Paramilitaries,’ ‘death squads’, ‘gulags’ and ‘special forces’ stalk the planet. And the perpetrators of this hideous suffering were and are the victors partying hearty in Europe today. Bush says evil like Hitler’s still exists in the world. About that he is right. The bad guys are definitely on the march. And they are winning.

Today is Mother’s Day, but I don’t believe there has been a day for 2000 years that has reflected the interests of mothers. That muscular and distant male Sky God seems to hold all the cards, and brother do we suffer for him. “Fascism” is virtually hardwired into the European psyche, with its “anti-sexual religious morality,”* and its perverse twisting of our ancestral ideas of blood purity. Fascism is not a throwback to more “barbarous” times. It is a pure product of “Western Civilization” itself. Repression, sadism, greed, violent competition: these are not “human nature.” These are what happens when people have forgotten their humanity.

All those Holocaust museums and memorials have “Never Forget” engraved on a rock somewhere. This should set off alarm bells for anybody who has noticed that fostering forgetfulness is the primary tool of empire.

From The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor (Harper Collins, 1987)

By Naomi Klein
In These Times
The central question we need to answer is this: What were the real reasons for the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq?

When we identify why we really went to war – not the cover reasons or the rebranded reasons, freedom and democracy, but the real reasons – then we can become more effective anti-war activists. The most effective and strategic way to stop this occupation and prevent future wars is to deny the people who wage these wars their spoils – to make war unprofitable. And we can’t do that unless we effectively identify the goals of war.

When I was in Iraq a year ago trying to answer that question, one of the most effective ways I found to do that was to follow the bulldozers and construction machinery. I was in Iraq to research the so-called reconstruction. And what struck me most was the absence of reconstruction machinery, of cranes and bulldozers, in downtown Baghdad. I expected to see reconstruction all over the place.

I saw bulldozers in military bases. I saw bulldozers in the Green Zone, where a huge amount of construction was going on, building up Bechtel’s headquarters and getting the new US embassy ready. There was also a ton of construction going on at all of the US military bases. But, on the streets of Baghdad, the former ministry buildings are absolutely untouched. They hadn’t even cleared away the rubble, let alone started the reconstruction process.

The one crane I saw in the streets of Baghdad was hoisting an advertising billboard. One of the surreal things about Baghdad is that the old city lies in ruins, yet there are these shiny new billboards advertising the glories of the global economy. And the message is: “Everything you were before isn’t worth rebuilding.” We’re going to import a brand-new country. It is the Iraq version of the “Extreme Makeover.”

It’s not a coincidence that Americans were at home watching this explosion of extreme reality television shows where people’s bodies were being surgically remade and their homes were being bulldozed and reconstituted. The message of these shows is: Everything you are now, everything you own, everything you do sucks. We’re going to completely erase it and rebuild it with a team of experts. You just go limp and let the experts take over. That is exactly what “Extreme Makover:Iraq” is.

There was no role for Iraqis in this process. It was all foreign companies modernizing the country. Iraqis with engineering Ph.D.s who built their electricity system and who built their telephone system had no place in the reconstruction process.

If we want to know what the goals of the war are, we have to look at what Paul Bremer did when he first arrived in Iraq. He laid off 500,000 people, 400,000 of whom were soldiers. And he shredded Iraq’s constitution and wrote a series of economic laws that the The Economist described as “the wish list of foreign investors.”
Full: truthout.org
(more…)

P. Saineth
Water, its status as a public resource as against a private asset, is one of the most explosive issues facing India in the coming years, even as the neoliberal model comes under increasing fire as a catastrophic failure for the vast majority of India’s populationt. across the last decade. Privatization of water will destroy countless small farmers. It will hand over agriculture to the rich and corporations. Undeterred, the World Bank is pressing forward with its local accomplices in India’s government and corporate sectors.A few weeeks ago we described the battle in northern Kerala over Coca Cola’s bottling plant at Plachimada. Here P. Sainath reports on the water pirates and their raids in Maharashtra. AC/JSC

It has been happening for some time. Maharashtra is not the first State. It won’t be the last. The drive towards privatisation of water in this country was planned by the World Bank in the 1990s. The just-passed Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority Bill reeks of Bank edicts already promulgated in 1998. In that year, the “The Irrigation Sector” report of the Bank (teamed up with the Indian Government) laid down the line. [Maharashtra (in western India) is a state of close to 100 million people. Mumbai with 17 million people is its capital. A lot of wealth is concentrated in this state particularly in Mumbai. Editors’ note.]

It listed things that “need to be urgently put into practice.” Among them: “drastically increasing and rationalising the current water rates.” The rest of its “urgent needs” were the standard Bank rules for the capture of a country’s farming by corporations. In pushing brutal hikes, the Bank was frank. Its report opposed gradual hikes. “The more recent experience is that `a big bang’ approach may be better.” Laughably, it cites Andhra Pradesh and Mexico as among the success stories of that approach.

The Latin American experience

Latin America is strewn with the corpses of economies and governments that went for the `big bang’ approach. Water, especially, has been a giant factor in the rage of peoples there against regimes. This year, The New York Times ran a front-page piece on the collapse of privatised water services across Latin America. Being the Times, it coyly sidestepped any criticism of corporations. Or even of the basic concepts themselves. But it did measure the Big Bang. In Andhra Pradesh, the voters threw in a bang of their own last May . You’d think we’d learn something from all this. [Editors’ note: Andhra Pradesh is a southern Indian state close to 80 million people, which the NYT correctly described (at that time) as the darling of western governments and corporations. A year ago the voters there threw out the World Bank’s posterboy chief minister, Naidu, entirely against the fervent predictions of Naidu’s innumerable choristers in the Indian and US press.]
Full: counterpunch.org

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, May 5 – Two American soldiers arrested by Colombian police in an arms smuggling case were handed over to the United States Embassy today, angering both authorities and ordinary Colombians who believe the servicemen should face charges here.

Under treaty obligations, Allan Tanquary and Jesus Hernandez, stationed here as part of the American effort to fight drugs and Marxist rebels, will be investigated by American officials and, if charged, face trial in the United States. The two men, along with four Colombians, were arrested Tuesday in a posh gated community in Melgar, where the police found 32,000 rounds of ammunition they say was bound for right-wing paramilitary groups.

The case has deeply embarrassed the United States, which denied today that the Bush administration is secretly helping Colombia’s brutal paramilitary organization, the United Self-Defense Forces, in its fight against Marxist rebels.

“There is absolutely no U.S. policy and U.S. support or U.S. inclination or U.S. military operations involved in arming paramilitaries,” Richard Boucher, a State Department spokesman, told reporters in Washington. “We have declared these groups to be terrorist groups.”
Full:nytimes.com

Whatever. These are ‘our’ terrorists, and under Plan Colombia they have total immunity. What is ‘deeply embarassing’ is the simple fact that these two were actually caught. They absolutely were under orders, just dutifully doing what the US wants done.

by Gregory Elich
Twenty-five years ago, Zimbabwe’s liberation movement came to power after years of struggle. Hopes soared that independence would bring an end to the legacy of colonial rule and apartheid power and give birth to a more equitable and just social order. But in many ways, those expectations had to be put on hold due to British and U.S. pressure, and for years Zimbabwe was compelled to maintain the inequitable land ownership patterns inherited from apartheid Rhodesia. The process of land reform is at root a struggle for justice and a challenge to the Western neoliberal model. The refusal to serve Western interests is what motivates U.S. and British hostility.

It is impossible to understand the nature of land reform in Zimbabwe without first examining the history of land allocation in Rhodesia. In 1893, invading British troops and volunteers conquered Matabeleland. Under terms of the Victoria Agreement, every British soldier and volunteer was allowed 6,000 acres of land, and within a year 10,000 square miles of the most fertile land was seized. White settlers confiscated cattle and dragooned the Ndebele people into serving as forced laborers on the land they once owned. Colonial Administrator Starr Jameson felt that by depriving the Ndebele of their cattle, he could secure their “submission and future tranquility.” The Shona people also saw their cattle taken by settlers and in 1896, resentments had accumulated to the point where an uprising resulted. It took more than a year, but the British crushed the rebellion at the cost of 8,000 African lives.

In 1899, Rhodesia established reserves on the most arid land onto which the indigenous inhabitants were to be herded, where in just six years half of the indigenous population was confined. Passage of the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 forbade Africans from owning land outside of the barren reserves. During a twenty-year period beginning in 1935, the Rhodesian regime expelled a further 67,000 African families from their homes and transported them to the reserves. Dispossessed Africans were beaten and herded onto trucks at gunpoint, while bulldozers levelled their homes. As more and more people were forced from their homes, the reserves became increasingly overcrowded with people and cattle. To “solve” that problem, in 1944 the colonial government decreed that many of the reserves were overstocked and would have to be thinned out. Over the course of the next thirty-some years, more than a million cattle were either killed or confiscated by white settlers. In the ten years following the Second World War, another 100,000 people were expelled from their homes and dumped onto the reserves.

The liberation movement’s successes eventually brought it to the verge of taking power and it was clear that the apartheid government of Rhodesia would not survive much longer. Although Rhodesia had declared its independence from the colonial system in 1965, Great Britain intervened to protect white privilege. Under British tutelage, the Lancaster House Conference was convened in 1979. The core issue for the liberation struggle was land, but British and American negotiators made the granting of independence to the liberation movement conditional. The agreement that resulted from the conference imposed a number of limitations on the new government. One provision stipulated that for a period of ten years, land ownership in Zimbabwe could only be transferred on a “willing seller, willing buyer” basis, a formula that effectively stymied any meaningful attempt at land reform. Whites were also allotted a quota of 20 out of 100 seats in Parliament, far exceeding their actual percentage in the population, and the measure had the effect of making constitutional change nearly impossible.

Passage of the Land Acquisition Act in 1992 finally established a more flexible approach to land reform, but the process continued to be constrained by outside pressures. Progress was slow and by the time fast track land reform was launched in 2002, 70 percent of the richest and most productive land still remained in the hands of just 4,500 white commercial farm owners. At the same time, six million African peasants eked out a precarious existence on small farms in the “communal areas,” the land encompassing the former native reserves. Because of historically imposed overcrowding in the communal areas, the already barren land was depleted long before by deforestation and over-grazing, thus making it even more unsuitable for agriculture. More than a million landless blacks were engaged as hired labor on white commercial farms, laboring for abysmally low wages to make the few commercial landowners even wealthier. A team sent by the United Nations Development Program in 2001 reported, “Given the rapidly rising population growth rates and the decreasing opportunities for non-farm employment over the years, many rural dwellers were thrown into increasing poverty as a result of inadequate and poor-quality land for subsistence farming and unemployment. These inequities, the team said, were “the motivation for the Government’s determination to correct the past injustices caused by dispossessing the indigenous people of their land.”
Full:globalresearch.ca

Hard to believe, but there’s been very little notice (even among my fellow crazed, leftist bloggers) concerning Peter Maas’ cover story for this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine, “The Way of the Commandos.” (The honorable exception is Lenin’s Tomb; scroll down to the post, “Language Fatigue,” then scroll back up to read his fascinating history of Britain’s Labour Party.) This is particularly strange because there was a considerable dust-up in January after Newsweek ran a story about how Pentagon officials were considering employing the “Salvador Option” against insurgents in Iraq. According to Maas, they’ve now endorsed it wholeheartedly:

“The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high-more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million.”

The template entails the hiring of ex-Baathists to work alongside U.S. advisers like James Steele, who cut his teeth training paramilitaries in El Salvador in the ’80s. Together, they’ve come up with a thrilling new reality TV show, “Terrorism in the Grip of Justice,” where bruised and beaten terror suspects (who have not yet been charged with a crime) “confess” their sins (such as having homosexual sex in a mosque) to a shell-shocked Iraqi audience. (And as Direland reported in March, it’s all funded by your tax dollars.) Is this show similar to the “hate-sessions” broadcast in Orwell’s 1984? No. This is an exact replica of those hate-sessions, yet another example of our bringing dystopacy to Iraq.

As always, it gets worse. Maas reports what happens on a late night raid when one of the Iraqi commanders believes they’ve been led on a wild-goose chase by a detainee (and keep in mind this occurs while a journalist is standing right there):

“One of [Major] Falah’s captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard the sound of the captain’s fists and boots on the detainee’s body, and we heard the detainees pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging.”

The mugging took place in front of American soldiers, who looked away from it in shame. As their captain explains his decision to do nothing: “You only get so many interventions, and I’ve got to save my butting in for when there is a danger it could go over the line.” It must be a fairly large line, however, because, “In terms of kicking a guy, they do that all the time, punches and stuff like that.”

Such outsourcing of our “dirty work” (a.k.a. “stuff like that”) is something to keep in mind the next time you come across cheery headlines like this.
Full: inthesetimes.com

by Chris Floyd
An occupational hazard of dissidence in the Age of Bush is the unavoidable necessity of belaboring the obvious. Again and again, you must ring the same bell; over and over, you must repeat the same, blatant irrefutable fact: that George W. Bush and his ghastly minions are lying hypocrites with blood on their hands.

But what can you do? Each week–each day–brings fresh confirmation of this damning truth. And until the American people redeem their lost national honor by rising up in their millions–taking to the streets with the patriotic cry, “These murderous jackals no longer represent us!”–the Bush crimes will go on, and must be documented. So grab the bell-rope: here we go again.

Last week saw a bumper crop of death-dealing hypocrisy, as the freedom-lovin’, terrorist-fightin’ he-men of the Bush Regime were caught in flagrante delicto with some rough trade indeed: genocidal rape-fiends, diabolical flesh-boilers and tyrannical peddlers of violent, ignorant religious extremism. (And no, it wasn’t a meeting of the Republican National Committee.)

First the Bushists rolled out the red carpet for one of Osama bin Laden’s former partners, Sudan’s intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh, the Los Angeles Times reports. Gosh was Osama’s designated minder in the 1990s, when the ex-CIA ally was comfortably ensconced in Sudan. Gosh is also accused–by members of his own government of directing military attacks on civilians in Sudan’s Darfur region, where the Janjaweed militia is carrying out a government-backed “ethnic cleansing” program of rape, pillage and murder against the region’s black Muslims. At least 400,000 people have died in the carnage, with 2 million more driven into exile.

Last year, the Bush Regime itself officially declared the Darfur despoliation a “genocide,” and called Gosh’s gang of terrorist-coddling goons “an extraordinary threat” to America’s national security. But that was before the 2004 election, when Bush had to drag his “compassionate conservative” crapola out of mothballs for a few months to mollify soccer moms distressed at the pictures they saw on CNN of those poor little Ewoks dying in–where was it? Biafra? Burundi? Rwanda? Rangoon? Once Bush had his teeny-tiny mandate in hand, it was back to business.

That’s oil business, of course. Sudan has become one of the chess pieces in the “Great Game” of petropolitics, as the “full spectrum dominators” of the Bush Regime plant their “military footprints” all over the globe in a relentless crusade to stem the inexorable rise of China and India as rivals to “the world’s only superpower.” It just so happens that China has become the leading player in Sudan’s burgeoning oil industry, securing fat concessions in choice fields. Gosh and his goon squads gorge on these oil profits to fuel their mass terrorism in Darfur. Now Bush wants a piece of that action; and if he has to abet the murder of a few hundred thousand desert darkies to get it, who cares? (Certainly not those soccer moms, now fretting about high gas prices for their SUVs: “Get us more cheap oil, Georgie, pronto!”)

And so Bush has bedded down with Gosh, who for his part is happy to swap a minor league privateer like Osama for a big-time state terrorist with unlimited resources. Gosh was flown to Washington for high-level “consultations” with his new partners in the CIA–just as the Sudanese government was announcing that “abundant” oil reserves have been found in Darfur, the Sudan Tribune reports. At the very same time, Bush moved–secretly–to gut legislation that would freeze financial assets of the genocidists and increase international protection for Darfur’s people, the New York Times reports. Happy coincidences all around!

Meanwhile, the killing in Sudan goes on. Just days before Gosh’s extra-special visit, the Janjaweed launched a “senseless and premeditated attack” in Darfur, “burning everything in their paths and leaving in their wake total destruction,” Amnesty International reports. What’s more, Bush’s new allies in Khartoum knew the attack was coming and deliberately blocked African Union peacekeepers from intervening. But the cries of the raped and dying never reached Washington, where Gosh and the Bushists were happily plotting “joint security operations”–and no doubt divvying up the new Darfur oilfields.

How is such two-faced cynicism possible? It’s easy: the Bushists don’t regard the people of Darfur as human beings, unique individuals of infinite worth and intrinsic value. They’re just counters in the game of greed and power, to be shifted or discarded as the need arises.

The same holds true for the people of Uzbekistan, now being abducted, tortured and boiled alive by Bush buddy Islam Karimov. Last week, Bush’s “strategic relationship” with the Uzbek Boiler was laid bare in rich detail by the New York Times. Bush has lavished more than $500 million on Karimov’s marauding security services, In return, he tortures Bush’s own abducted, uncharged, “rendered” prisoners, while providing the Pentagon with a big ole “footprint” for dominating Central Asian oil. Again, the individuals being served up for Tashkent gumbo don’t matter; only the game is important.

Bush capped Hypocrisy Week by strolling hand-in-hand with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah: de facto ruler of the fiercest religious tyranny on earth; mentor to the Taliban; global propagator of the vicious Wahhabi distortion of Islam; fount of corruption, bribery and baksheesh; longtime Bush Family business partner. With his warm embrace of the hereditary despot, Bush gave the lie to months of high-flown jive about lighting “fires of freedom” in the Middle East. As always, Bush’s real message to those longing for liberty, at home and abroad, was clear as a bell:

“Tough luck, suckers.”
Full: counterpunch.org