Chavez Considers Breaking US Ties

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says he will consider breaking diplomatic ties with the US if it fails to hand over a Cuban-born terror suspect.

Venezuela says Luis Posada Carriles must stand trial over the 1976 bombing of Cuba’s plane that killed 73 people.

Mr Chavez says Washington would be guilty of protecting international terrorism if it refused extradition.

Mr Posada Carriles – the 77-year-old former CIA employee – was charged last week with illegal entry into the US.

US immigration officials said that he would be held in custody until an immigration court hearing on 13 June.

Washington has up to 60 days to consider Venezuela’s extradition request under a 1922 treaty between the two countries.

‘Wasting money’

“If they don’t extradite him (Mr Posada Carriles) in the time allowed in our agreement, we will review our relations with the United States,” Mr Chavez said in his regular Sunday TV program.

He said Caracas would decide “if it worth having an embassy in the United States, wasting money, or for the United States to have an embassy here”.

“It is difficult, very difficult, to maintain ties with a government that so shamelessly hides and protects international terrorism,” Mr Chavez said.
Full: commondreams.org

WASHINGTON — It was the first prison abuse scandal of the post-Sept. 11 era, when scores of immigrants were rounded up and jailed in New York after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

They were never charged with terrorism — but they endured abusive treatment that Justice Department investigators concluded was outrageous and cruel. It included being slammed into walls and subjected to unnecessary body cavity searches, some of it captured on videotape.

More than three years after the incidents, despite a recommendation from the department’s internal watchdog that a dozen correctional officers be disciplined, no one has been held to account. A Bureau of Prisons official said the agency was still reviewing the matter and “working as expeditiously as possible.”

“It is important that our investigation be thorough and complete, leaving no stone unturned,” spokeswoman Traci Billingsley said.

But the inaction has triggered criticism from human rights groups and dissension in the Justice Department. Recently, the department’s inspector general expressed dismay that the Bureau of Prisons, the arm of the department overseeing the investigation, was dragging its feet.

U.S. Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, said he wasn’t familiar with details of the matter but voiced concern.

“They need to review it,” Gonzales said, “but honestly, review needs to end at some point.”

The drawn-out process has angered former prisoners, many of them long since deported on immigration violations. Some have joined civil rights suits against U.S. authorities. But those actions are also stalled. The defendants, from prison guards up to former U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, argue in court papers that they are immune from legal action because the circumstances of the detentions were within the scope of their official duties.

A federal judge in Louisiana dismissed one such suit, filed on behalf of a man held in solitary confinement for 73 days after Sept. 11, saying that security-related decisions by prison administrators deserved “great deference.”

“They … let them get away with it,” said Yasser Ebrahim, who after Sept. 11 spent more than eight months in solitary at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, a maximum-security facility that has been the focal point of the abuse investigation.
Full: commondreams.org

WASHINGTON, May 21 – An American proposal to create a committee at the Organization of American States that would monitor the quality of democracy and the exercise of power in Latin America is facing a hostile reception from many countries in part because it is being viewed as a thinly veiled effort to attack Venezuela.

A mural at the entrance to a state-financed cooperative in Caracas depicts workers in the oil fields.
Roger F. Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs and a principal architect of the proposal, said in an interview this week that he was “not surprised they are seeing this in the context of Venezuela,” but he added, “I am determined that it not be regarded as some kind of effort to isolate Venezuela.”

Last month, however, he and other administration officials made several statements tying the effort directly to their concern about Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s populist, anti-American president. Mr. Chávez has curtailed some press freedoms and judicial independence while forming close ties with Cuba, an alliance that, more than anything else, infuriates some Bush administration officials.
Full: nytimes.com

A leaked report on a military investigation into two killings of detainees at a US prison in Afghanistan has produced new evidence of connivance of senior officers in systematic prisoner abuse.
The investigation shows the military intelligence officers in charge of the detention centre at Bagram airport were redeployed to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003, while still under investigation for the deaths of two detainees months earlier. Despite military prosecutors’ recommendations, the officers involved have yet to be charged.

The Bagram case also suggests that some of the prison guards were given little if any training in handling detainees, and were influenced by a White House directive that “terrorist” suspects did not deserve the rights given to prisoners of war under the Geneva convention.

The prosecution dossier from the army’s investigation into Bagram, leaked to the New York Times, deals with the deaths of detainees Dilawar and Habibullah (both, as is common for Afghans, taking a single name).

Dilawar was a taxi driver who appears to have driven past a US military base soon after a rocket attack. Habibullah was handed over to the US by an Afghan warlord, and was identified as the brother of a Taliban commander. Both men were seized in late 2002, interrogated, beaten and killed in a hangar used for holding detainees who were being vetted for dispatch to Guantánamo Bay.

The two were chained to the ceilings of their cells for days at a time and beaten on the legs. They had been subjected to a blow known as the “common peroneal strike”, aimed at a point just below the knee and intended to disable. Coroners in the Habibullah case said his legs “had basically been pulpified” and looked as though they had been run over by a bus.
Full:guardian.co.uk

By LAITH AL-SAUD

Much of the American left has been less than consistent with its approach to the occupation of Iraq. Before the invasion of March 2003, the streets of metropolitan America hosted a pageant of political dissent and indignation directed at the current administration. Yet in the post-invasion world the American left has been remarkably ambiguous and ambivalent. Whenever any one addresses this seeming inconsistency the rhetorical response is the same-“we” are there now so “we have to finish the job”-what “the job” is precisely always remains vague, however, it is intimately tied to Iraq’s security. Donald Rumsfeld on a recent trip to Iraq reiterated the administration line; namely that the US would supposedly leave Iraq when the Iraqis were capable of putting down the so-called “insurgency.” In other words, the reason the US invaded Iraq was WMD, but the reason they now remain is the resistance. And again the media have been as professionally contemptuous about examining American claims about the resistance as it was about weapons.

The media’s misrepresentation of the resistance in Iraq has been a central component to the Bush administrations ideology for occupation. As an occupying power the US has ostensibly claimed a duty to protect the Iraqi people from the insecurity that the US presence ironically induces. Notwithstanding the many criticisms we could make of the American media in this regard, what is most frustrating is that many on the so-called “left,” self-proclaimed critics of the war, have invested in the ideology of occupation.
Full: counterpunch.org
(more…)

At around 8:00am on Monday morning, massive crowds of mostly poor indigenous Bolivians gathered on the cusp of a mountainside that descends into the capital city of La Paz. They are residents of the massive shantytown of El Alto, located on the high plateau (the altiplano) that overlooks the valley which encompasses La Paz.

Workers in the massive informal sector, ex-miners “relocated” to the shantytown after privatization of the mines in 1985, the unemployed, recent migrants from the countryside pushed from their former livelihoods through the devastation of the agricultural economy in the high plateau, women in traditional indigenous dress with their unique bowler hats, shoe-shine boys, Trotskyist teachers, communists, socialists, indigenists, neighbourhood activists, populists, and others milling around in a jovial mood eating breakfast on the street, provided by women venders who have erected their food-stands along the opening path of the planned march for the nationalization of the country’s natural gas. Organizations participating in the day’s actions include the Federation of United Neighbours of El Alto (FEJUVE-El Alto), the Regional Workers Central of El Alto (COR-El Alto), the Public University of El Alto, the Departmental Workers Central, the Confederation of Original Peoples, the Federation of Peasants of La Paz “Tupaj Katari,” the Bolivian Workers Central (COB), the teachers unions of El Alto and La Paz, among many, many others.

The theme is the nationalization of gas, but it doesn’t stop there. They want to close the Parliament and kick out the president. Frustration is running high in El Alto and throughout popular sectors in the country. The nationalization of gas was the historic demand of the October rebellion of 2003 that left many dead and ousted the hated president Gonzalo (“Goni”) Sánchez de Lozada. Vice president at the time, Carlos Mesa Gisbert, who had distanced himself from the state violence perpetrated by Goni, assumed the presidency through constitutional mechanisms, with the support of many of the protesters who believed Mesa would carry through the “October Agenda,” as he promised. Nineteen months later and Mesa remains in the hands of the transnationals, the American empire, European imperialists, the IMF, the World Bank, and the internationalized sections of the local bourgeoisie.
Full: counterpunch.org

The Indian Ocean earthquake that triggered the great Boxing Day tsunami literally shook the world and triggered a swarm of minor earthquakes 11,000 kilometres away in Alaska.
It set new records – the longest fault rupture ever seen; the longest duration and the most energetic swarm of aftershocks ever observed.

The calamity began with a sudden shift on average of more than 16.5ft (5 metres) along an 800 mile fault line deep below the ocean. Just off Banda Aceh in northern Sumatra, the ocean floor suddenly moved north-eastward, pushing as much as 20 metres under the Burma tectonic plate.

It raised the tip of the Burma plate several metres, and it lifted the ocean itself, setting up a tsunami that slammed into the coasts of Sumatra, Malaysia, India and Sri Lanka, killing 300,000 people.
The earthquake was so catastrophic that its effects could be measured from space, according to scientists reporting today in the US journal Science. It rearranged the Earth’s surface and caused measurable deformation almost 2,800 miles away.

“The Earth is still ringing like a bell today,” said Roland Bürgmann of the University of California, Berkeley. “We have never been able to study earthquakes of this magnitude before, where a sizable portion of the Earth was distorted. Normally, we see deformation of the surface a few hundred kms away. But here we see deformation 4,500 kms away, and five or six times the deformation we have seen in previous quakes.”
Full: guardian.co.uk
(more…)

Evolutionary scientists have never had difficulty explaining the male orgasm, closely tied as it is to reproduction.

But the Darwinian logic behind the female orgasm has remained elusive. Women can have sexual intercourse and even become pregnant – doing their part for the perpetuation of the species – without experiencing orgasm. So what is its evolutionary purpose?

Enlarge This Image

“Tilly Losch,” circa 1935, by Joseph Cornell, Construction, 10 x 9¤ x 2? inches ©The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York City
Enlarge This Image

Michael Houghton for The New York Times
Dr. Elisabeth Lloyd says the female orgasm has no evolutionary function.
Over the last four decades, scientists have come up with a variety of theories, arguing, for example, that orgasm encourages women to have sex and, therefore, reproduce or that it leads women to favor stronger and healthier men, maximizing their offspring’s chances of survival.

But in a new book, Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, a philosopher of science and professor of biology at Indiana University, takes on 20 leading theories and finds them wanting. The female orgasm, she argues in the book, “The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution,” has no evolutionary function at all.

Rather, Dr. Lloyd says the most convincing theory is one put forward in 1979 by Dr. Donald Symons, an anthropologist.

That theory holds that female orgasms are simply artifacts – a byproduct of the parallel development of male and female embryos in the first eight or nine weeks of life.

In that early period, the nerve and tissue pathways are laid down for various reflexes, including the orgasm, Dr. Lloyd said. As development progresses, male hormones saturate the embryo, and sexuality is defined.

In boys, the penis develops, along with the potential to have orgasms and ejaculate, while “females get the nerve pathways for orgasm by initially having the same body plan.”

Nipples in men are similarly vestigial, Dr. Lloyd pointed out.

While nipples in woman serve a purpose, male nipples appear to be simply left over from the initial stage of embryonic development.

The female orgasm, she said, “is for fun.”
Full: nytimes.com

I think female orgasm is not merely vestigial, but performs an evolutionary function. We as yet understand little about evolution…if sex were not fun, there would be no symbolic human culture, and no poetry…
(more…)

Homeland Security Department officials said Thursday that they had charged Luis Posada Carriles, the violent anti-Castro militant, with illegally entering the United States.

The charge could be the first step in the deportation of Mr. Posada, 77, who resurfaced outside Miami and was arrested on Tuesday after 45 years of shadowy combat against Fidel Castro.

It also represents a legal and political dilemma for the Bush administration.

Mr. Posada, who served both the Central Intelligence Agency and Venezuela’s spy service in the 1960’s and 1970’s, is wanted in Venezuela in connection with the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner off the coast of Barbados that killed 73 people. The government of Venezuela wants to extradite him under international law.

United States officials have not said whether or not they want to deport Mr. Posada. They have indicated that they would not willingly send him to Venezuela, Cuba’s closest ally in the Western Hemisphere.

“This is a case that the Department of Homeland Security now will handle,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday. “The issues here concern understanding the record of Mr. Posada and then making judgments about what that means about his request” for asylum. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security said Mr. Posada had been charged with illegally entering the country, was being held without bond and would see an immigration judge on June 13.

A Cuban exile who signed up with the C.I.A. before the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and received training in espionage and explosives from American military and intelligence officers, Mr. Posada joined the Venezuelan intelligence service in 1969 and left it as a senior official in 1974, according to declassified United States government documents.
Full: nytimes.com

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 19 – A small window in the city morgue is the last hope for people looking for their dead. Holding photographs of the missing, they peer through it to a computer screen where a worker flashes pictures of all the bodies no one has claimed. In Baghdad these days it can be a lengthy process.

Ahmed Ali displayed photos of unclaimed bodies on his computer screen at the Baghdad city morgue as Asya Khaadi looked for her missing son.
As the pace and intensity of the violence here increases, it is growing ever more difficult to match the missing with the dead. Car bombs explode, creating circles of chaos and mutilated bodies that often take days to sort out. Kidnappings punch holes in families for months.

Bodies, old and new, turn up daily. On Sunday alone, the authorities in Baghdad and three other cities found 46. Some of those found that day were buried in a Baghdad garbage dump. Others were discovered on a poultry farm south of here. Their tied hands and broken bodies are their most distinguishing features.

So people go to the window for answers.

“Every day people come to me,” said Ahmed Ali, an Interior Ministry worker who displays the photographs. “I listen to their stories. People are in pain. They say: ‘We know he’s dead. We just want to bury him.’ “

Bodies have surfaced almost without stop since the American invasion two years ago. First came the exhumation of mass graves from the time of Saddam Hussein. Those killings were often carried out in secret, and relatives were eager to finally find the bodies and some peace.

Since then the numbers of bodies have risen and fallen on the waves of violence that have rolled through the country. One crest was reached in January, before national elections, when 111 unidentified bodies were taken to the morgue, workers said. Only about half were claimed.

The violence is cresting again, with more than 400 Iraqis killed since late April.

“When they kill someone they just throw them away in deserted places,” said Dr. Ibtihaj al-Aloosi, 60, a gynecologist who survived a five-day kidnapping in December. “The family has to go here and there to find them. This is very scary.”

…The bodies often bear marks of torture, like tied hands and feet and mutilation…
Full: nytimes.com

Salvador option, baby