KABUL (Reuters) – Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan were skeptical Monday about an apparent retraction by Newsweek magazine of a report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran and said U.S. pressure was behind the climb-down.

The report in Newsweek’s May 9 issue sparked protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan, India, Indonesia and Gaza.

Newsweek said Sunday the report might not be true.

“We will not be deceived by this,” Islamic cleric Mullah Sadullah Abu Aman told Reuters in the northern Afghan province of Badakhshan, referring to the magazine’s retraction.

“This is a decision by America to save itself. It comes because of American pressure. Even an ordinary illiterate peasant understands this and won’t accept it.”

Aman was the leader of a group of clerics who Sunday vowed to call for a holy war against the United States in three days unless it handed over the military interrogators reported to have desecrated the Koran.

That call for a jihad, or holy war, still stood, he said.

Newsweek originally said investigators probing abuses at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay found that interrogators “had placed Korans on toilets, and in at least one case flushed a holy book down the toilet.”

Muslims consider the Koran the literal word of God and treat each book with deep reverence.

Last week’s bloody anti-American protests across Afghanistan were the worst since U.S. forces invaded in 2001 to oust the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.

“NOT CERTAIN”

Newsweek said Sunday its information had come from a “knowledgeable government source” who told the magazine that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay said interrogators flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a toilet in a bid to make detainees talk.

But Newsweek said the source later said he could not be certain he had seen an account of the incident in the military report and that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.

Afghans were unconvinced.

“It’s not acceptable now that the magazine says it’s made a mistake,” said Hafizullah Torab, 42, a writer and journalist in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, where the protests began last Tuesday. “No one will accept it.”

“Possibly, the American government put pressure on the magazine to issue the retraction to avoid the anger of Muslims,” said Sayed Elyas Sedaqat, who heads a cultural group in the city.
Full: reuters.myway.com

MEXICO CITY – President Vicente Fox refused to apologize Monday for saying Mexicans in the United States do the work that blacks won’t — a comment widely viewed as acceptable in a country where blackface comedy is still considered funny and nicknames often reflect skin color.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City had raised the issue with the Mexican government. “That’s a very insensitive and inappropriate way to phrase this and we would hope that (the Mexicans) would clarify the remarks if they have a chance,” Boucher said.

Fox’s spokesman, Ruben Aguilar, said the remark has been misinterpreted as a racial slur. He said the president was speaking in defense of Mexican migrants as they come under attack by the new U.S. immigration measures that include a wall along the U.S.-California border.

Stung by the U.S. crackdown on illegal immigrants, many Mexicans — including Mexico City’s archbishop — said Fox was just stating a fact.

“The president was just telling the truth,” said Celedonio Gonzalez, a 35-year-old carpenter who worked illegally in Dallas for six months in 2001. “Mexicans go to the United States because they have to. Blacks want to earn better wages, and the Mexican — because he is illegal — takes what they pay him.”

But the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, two black U.S. civil rights activists, said Fox should apologize. “His statement had the impact of being inciting and divisive,” Jackson said.

Lisa Catanzarite, a sociologist at Washington State University, disputed Fox’s assertion. She said there is intense competition for lucrative working class jobs like construction and that employers usually prefer to hire immigrants who don’t know their rights.

“What Vicente Fox called a willingness to work … translates into extreme exploitability,” she said.

Fox made the comment Friday during a public appearance in Puerto Vallarta, saying: “There’s no doubt that Mexican men and women — full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work — are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States.”
Full: news.yahoo.com

by Peter Maas

Getting to Know the General

In a country of tough guys, Adnan Thabit may be the toughest of all. He was both a general and a death-row prisoner under Saddam Hussein. He favors leather jackets no matter the weather, his left index finger extends only to the knuckle (the rest was sliced off in combat) and he responds to requests from supplicants with grunts that mean ”yes” or ”no.” Occasionally, a humble aide approaches to spray perfume on his hands, which he wipes over his rugged face.

General Adnan, as he is known, is the leader of Iraq’s most fearsome counterinsurgency force. It is called the Special Police Commandos and consists of about 5,000 troops. They have fought the insurgents in Mosul, Ramadi, Baghdad and Samarra. It was in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, where, in early March, I spent a week with Adnan, himself a Sunni, and two battalions of his commandos. Samarra is Adnan’s hometown, and he had come to retake it. As the offensive to drive out the insurgents got under way, the only area securely under Adnan’s control was a barricaded enclave around the town hall, where he grimly presided over matters of war and peace, but mostly war, chain-smoking Royal cigarettes at a raised desk in the mayor’s office. With a jowly face set in a permanent scowl, Adnan is perfectly suited to the grim realities of Iraq, and he knows it. When an admiring American colonel compared him to Marlon Brando in ”The Godfather,” Adnan took it as a compliment and smiled.

Early one evening, I was sitting in his office when an officer entered with a click of his heels — an Iraqi salute of sorts. He reported to Adnan that a rebel weapons cache had been discovered, and Adnan congratulated him — but issued a warning. ”If even one AK-47 is stolen,” he said, ”I will kill you.” After a pause, he smiled and refined the threat. ”No,” he said, ”I will kill your” — and he used a coarse word that referred to the officer’s most private body part. There was nervous laughter. Everyone seemed certain that not a single gun, or single anything, would go missing.

Not long ago, hard men like Adnan, especially Sunnis, were giving orders to no one. Six weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority dismissed the Sunni-led Iraqi Army, and the United States military set out to rebuild Iraq’s armed forces from the ground up, training new officers and soldiers rather than calling on those who knew how to fight but had done so in the service of Saddam Hussein. By late last year, though, it had become clear that the new American-trained forces were not shaping up as an effective fighting force, and the old guard was called upon. Now people like Adnan, a former Baathist, have been given the task of defeating the insurgency. The new strategy is showing signs of success, but it is a success that may carry its own costs.
nytimes.com(more…)

ANDIJAN, Uzbekistan (AP) – An estimated 500 bodies have been laid out in a school in the eastern Uzbek city where troops fired on a crowd of protesters to put down an uprising, a doctor said Sunday, corroborating witness accounts of hundreds killed in the fighting.

The doctor, who said she had seen the bodies, said residents were coming to Andijan’s School No. 15 to identify dead relatives, who had been placed in rows. Soldiers were guarding the school, said the doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for her safety.

The doctor also said she believed some 2,000 people were wounded in the clashes on Friday, but it wasn’t clear how she arrived at that estimate. The doctor spoke with The Associated Press by telephone; most outside journalists left Andijan Saturday after several reporters were detained by police.

Thousands of terrified Uzbeks trying to flee into Kyrgyzstan burned a government building Saturday and attacked border guards, a second day of violence triggered by a brazen jail break to free accused Islamic militants and a massive demonstration against economic conditions under the iron-fisted rule of President Islam Karimov.

There was no immediate word on casualties in Saturday’s violence in this former republic of the ex-Soviet Union. Witnesses on Friday had said 200 to 300 people were killed in the gunfire; the doctor’s report of 500 dead raised that estimate.

Andijan is Uzbekistan’s fourth-largest city, about 30 miles from the country’s easternmost border in the narrow finger of territory that protrudes deep into Kyrgyzstan, where an uprising in late March ousted that country’s only post-Soviet leader.

Groups of armed people clashed with Uzbek government forces along the border with Kyrgyzstan on Sunday, killing several soldiers before fleeing to the Kyrgyz side, Uzbek villagers said.
Full: guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON, May 14 – Several of the nation’s most prominent environmentalists have gone public with the message that nuclear power, long taboo among environmental advocates, should be reconsidered as a remedy for global warming.

Their numbers are still small, but they represent growing cracks in what had been a virtually solid wall of opposition to nuclear power among most mainstream environmental groups. In the past few months, articles in publications like Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Wired magazine have openly espoused nuclear power, angering other environmental advocates.

Stewart Brand, a founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and the author of “Environmental Heresies,” an article in the May issue of Technology Review, explained the shift as a direct consequence of the growing anxiety about global warming and its links to the use of fossil fuel.

“It’s not that something new and important and good had happened with nuclear, it’s that something new and important and bad has happened with climate change,” Mr. Brand said in an interview.

For many longtime advocates of environmental causes, such talk is nothing short of betrayal. Because of safety fears that reached a peak during the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and unresolved questions of how to dispose of nuclear waste, environmentalists have waged unrelenting campaigns against plants from Shoreham on Long Island to Diablo Canyon near the California coast.

But as mounting scientific evidence points to a direct connection between increasing carbon emissions and climate change, Mr. Brand and others have come to see conventional fuels like oil and coal as a greater threat.

In his article, Mr. Brand argued, “Everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production.” He ran down a list of alternative technologies, like solar and wind energy, that emit no heat-trapping gases. “But add them all up,” he wrote, “and it’s just a fraction of enough.” His conclusion: “The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon-dioxide loading is nuclear power.”
Full:nytimes.com

ridiculous

PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Under the watchful eyes of police and neighbors, the militant group MOVE marked the 20th anniversary Saturday of the police bombing that destroyed the organization’s home and killed 11 members.

Group members and supporters gathered in West Philadelphia near the site where police trying to evict armed MOVE members from a rowhouse dropped an explosive from a helicopter. Officers then ordered firefighters to keep their distance as flames killed six adults and five children and consumed 61 adjacent homes.

“We will never allow another May 13, 1985,” MOVE supporter Orie Ross shouted through a bullhorn to about 75 people. “Our family can’t be replaced.”

The group, which once espoused equality with animals…
Full: guardian.co.uk

Well actually, there were no weapons found in the MOVE house. The article also does not mention that MOVE is a black organization. For which is reserved especially appalling ‘journalism.’

Heated criticism was growing last night over ‘double standards’ by Washington over human rights, democracy and ‘freedom’ as fresh evidence emerged of just how brutally Uzbekistan, a US ally in the ‘war on terror’, put down Friday’s unrest in the east of the country.
Outrage among human rights groups followed claims by the White House on Friday that appeared designed to justify the violence of the regime of President Islam Karimov, claiming – as Karimov has – that ‘terrorist groups’ may have been involved in the uprising.

Critics said the US was prepared to support pro-democracy unrest in some states, but condemn it in others where such policies were inconvenient.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Up to 20 million Britons are expected to protest against world poverty as part of the biggest mobilisation against global inequality ever seen.
In addition, 250,000 campaigners are planning to attend a rally in Edinburgh to coincide with July’s G8 summit at Gleneagles where key talks among world leaders could witness Tony Blair securing a historic deal to help Africa’s poor.

Oxfam yesterday ordered five million more white Make Poverty History wristbands. The charity has already sold three million.

Adrian Lovett, a campaign spokesman, said: ‘At this rate we would expect between 10 million and 20 million will join the campaign.’

Meanwhile, the BBC is understood to have cleared its schedules on the same day as the Edinburgh march in anticipation of a huge global event.

Although the show of public support will bolster Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown’s efforts to secure a breakthrough on debt, aid and trade, concern is rising in Whitehall that the key measures are failing to win US support.

This week Blair will embark on a charm offensive with President Bush and European leaders. However, there are fears within government that progress on reaching international consensus on increasing aid and writing off poor countries’ debt is stalling.

Although officials maintain that plans to double international aid to around £60 billion a year and eradicate much of the debt of poor countries remain intact, privately they warn that agreement may not be reached during the talks.

Among attempts to build an international consensus, Blair will suggest to the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, that supporting Britain’s moves to tackle Africa’s problems will help Germany in its attempt to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

‘A real commitment to Africa can only help them,’ a Downing Street official said last night.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Well I doubt that. And “concensus” for what? What is the purpose of a bunch of Europeans “ptotesting” poverty? Protesting to who? How about protesting continuing imperialism, the continuing ‘Black Holocaust’ (Aristide’s words)? Just what the world needs, a bunch more muddy thinking from Europeans. Especially when they talk about ‘helping.’

by Frank Morales
The requirement of an ever-escalating level of social violence to meet the political and economic needs of the insatiable “anti-terrorist complex” is the essence of the new US militarism.

What is now openly billed as “permanent war” ultimately serves the geo-political ends of social control in the interests of US corporate domination, much as the anti-communist crusade of the now-exhausted Cold War did.

Back in 2002, following the trauma of 9-11, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted there would be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large. How could he be so sure of that? Perhaps because these attacks would be instigated on the order of the Honorable Mr. Rumsfeld. According to Los Angeles Times military analyst William Arkin, writing Oct. 27, 2002, Rumsfeld set out to create a secret army, “a super-Intelligence Support Activity” network that would “bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception,” to stir the pot of spiraling global violence.

According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organization–the “Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)”–would actually carry out secret missions designed to provoke terrorist groups into committing violent acts. The P2OG, a 100-member, so-called “counter-terrorist” organization with a $100-million-a-year budget, would ostensibly target “terrorist leaders,” but according to P2OG documents procured by Arkin, would in fact carry out missions designed to “stimulate reactions” among “terrorist groups”–which, according to the Defense Secretary’s logic, would subsequently expose them to “counter-attack” by the good guys. In other words, the plan is to execute secret military operations (assassinations, sabotage, “deception”) which would intentionally result in terrorist attacks on innocent people, including Americans–essentially, to “combat terrorism” by causing it!

This notion is currently being applied to the problem of the Iraqi “insurgency,” it seems. According to a May 1, 2005 report by Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine, two of the top US advisers to Iraqi paramilitary commandos fighting the insurgents are veterans of US counterinsurgency operations in Latin America. Loaning credence to recent media speculation about the “Salvadorization” of Iraq, the report notes that one adviser currently in Iraq is James Steele, who led a team of 55 US Army Special Forces advisers in El Salvador in the 1980s. Maass writes that these advisors “trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses.”

The current senior US adviser at the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which Maass writes “has operational control over the commandos,” is former top US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official Steve Casteel, who worked “alongside local forces” in the US-sponsored “Drug War” in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, “where he was involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin cocaine cartel.”
globalresearch.ca
(more…)

by Michael Eric Dyson
Do you view Bill Cosby as a race traitor?” journalist Paula Zahn bluntly asked me on her nighttime television show.

Zahn was referring to the broadside the entertainer had launched against irresponsible black parents who are poor and their delinquent children. Cosby’s rebuke came in a May 2004 speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. Not content with a one-off tirade, Cosby since then has bitterly and visibly crusaded against the declining morality and bad behavior of poor blacks.
Six months into his battle, Zahn snagged the comic legend turned cultural warrior for his first in-depth interview. Cosby clarified his comments and reinforced his position. No, he wasn’t wrong to air the black community’s dirty laundry. Yes, he would ratchet up the noise and pace of his racial offensive. And he surely didn’t give a damn about what white folk thought about his campaign or what nefarious uses they might make of his public diatribe. One could see it on Cosby’s face:
This is war, the stakes are high and being polite or politically correct simply won’t do.

Since I was one of the few blacks to publicly disagree with Cosby, I ended up in numerous media outlets arguing in snippets, sound bites, or ripostes to contrary points of view. In The New York Times a few days after his remarks, I offered that Cosby’s comments “betray classist, elitist viewpoints rooted in generational warfare,” that he was “ill-informed on the critical and complex issues that shape people’s lives,”
and that his words only “reinforce suspicions about black humanity.”

Still, I don’t consider Cosby a traitor, and I said so to Zahn. In fact, I defended his right to speak his mind in full public view. After all, I’d been similarly stung by claims of racial disloyalty when I wrote my controversial book on Martin Luther King, Jr. I also said that while Cosby is right to emphasize personal behavior (a lesson, by the way, that many wealthy people should bone up on), we must never lose sight of the big social forces that make it difficult for poor parents to do their best jobs and for poor children to prosper. Before going on Zahn’s show, I’d already decided to write a book in response to Cosby’s relentless assault. But my appearances in the media, and the frustrating fragmentation of voice that one risks in such venues, pushed me to gain a bigger say in the issues Cosby has desperately if clumsily grabbed hold of. This book is my attempt to unpack those issues with the clarity and complexity they demand.

Of course, the ink and applause Cosby has won rest largely on a faulty assumption: that he is the first black figure to stare down the “pathology” that plagues poor blacks. But to believe that ignores how figures from black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois to civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, in varying contexts, with differing results, have spoken controversially about the black poor. Equally intriguing is the leap of faith one must make in granting Cosby revered status as a racial spokesman and critic. He has famously demurred in his duties as a racial representative. He has flatly refused over the years to deal with blackness and color in his comedy. Cosby was defensive, even defiant, in his views, as prickly a racial avoider as one might imagine for a man who traded so brilliantly on dimensions of black culture in his comedy. While Cosby took full advantage of the civil rights struggle, he resolutely denied it a seat at his artistic table. Thus it’s hard to swallow Cosby’s flailing away at youth for neglecting their history, and overlooking the gains paid for by the blood of their ancestors, when he reneged on its service when it beckoned at his door. It is ironic that Cosby has finally answered the call to racial leadership forty years after it might have made a constructive difference. But it is downright tragic that he should use his perch to lob rhetorical bombs at the poor.

For those who overlook the uneven history of black engagement with the race’s social dislocations and moral struggles-and who conveniently ignore Cosby’s Johnny-come-lately standing as a racial critic-Cosby is an ethical pioneer, a racial hero. In this view, Cosby is brave to admit that “lower economic people” are “not parenting” and are failing the civil rights movement by “not holding up their end in this deal.” Single mothers are no longer “embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband.” A single father is no longer “considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father” of his child. And what do we make of their criminal children? Cosby’s “courage” does not fail. “In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison…. I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol?” Before he is finished, Cossby beats up on the black poor for their horrible education, their style of dress, the names they give their children, their backward speech and their consumptive habits. As a cruel coda, Cosby even suggests to the black poor that “God is tired of you.”
zmag
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