CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 26 (Reuters) – Venezuela’s government temporarily suspended permits for foreign missionaries on Friday, four days after the American evangelist Pat Robertson called for the assassination of President Hugo Chávez.

The chief of the Justice Ministry’s religious affairs unit, Carlos González, said Friday that authorization of permits for missionaries would be curbed while the government tightened regulations on preachers inside Venezuela.

The permits “are suspended for a short time, it could be three or four weeks, while we organize a system to see what additional data we need for people coming into the country to preach,” Mr. González said.

“We were already working on this, but these declarations have made us speed things up,” he said.

Mr. Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition, said Monday on his television program, “The 700 Club,” that if Mr. Chávez “thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.”

He added: “It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”

He retracted his comments on Wednesday, saying he spoke in frustration over Mr. Chávez’s constant accusations that the Bush administration was trying to overthrow or kill him. American officials have repeatedly dismissed those charges as wild rhetoric.

On Friday, Mr. Chávez said that President Bush would be to blame if anything happened to him after the comments by Mr. Robertson.

“He was expressing the wishes of the U.S. elite,” Mr. Chávez said at a public event. “If anything happens to me, then the man responsible will be George W. Bush. He will be the assassin.”

He said, “This is pure terrorism.”

Relations between the two countries have soured since Mr. Chávez survived a brief coup in 2002 that he says was backed by the United States. American and Venezuelan officials have since frequently traded accusations.

In a sign of deteriorating ties, Mr. Chávez recently suspended cooperation with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, accusing its agents of spying.

The United States then revoked the visas of three top Venezuelan military officers it said had been suspected of involvement in drug trafficking.
Full: nytimes.com

Robertson performed his function, which was to ignite a whole new wave of vitriol against Chavez.

I heard a thing on the BBC about the thousands of evangelical churches mushrooming in Kinshasa and the corresponding murder and abandonment of tens of thousands of Congolese children accused of ‘witchcraft’ and the ‘exorcism’ rituals that often kill them, after months of isolation and torture. The devil is loose in Congo and elsewhere for sure.

Oil Fat Cats vs. Hugo Chavez–NY Daily News
…Even more scandalous for Big Oil, Chavez is using Venezuela’s windfall not to fatten his own country’s oligarchy but to benefit the Venezuelan poor and help neighboring countries…

In recent weeks, two “revelations” of pre-9/11 US military-intelligence relationships with Al-Qaeda “terrorists” and Osama bin Laden—have are being used as cannon fodder in an intensifying power struggle between rival political factions vying to seize the “war on terrorism” agenda for their own, and deepen the cover-up of 9/11.

The furor over new stories involving alleged 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and US-bin Laden go-between Tarik Hamdi, pits spinmasters against other spinmasters, Kean 9/11 Commission supporters versus hawkish Bush-linked 9/11 Commission attackers, neocons versus neoliberals, and intelligence and law enforcement agencies at each other’s throats again, over “intelligence failures”.

While the spin has dwelled exclusively around “anti-terrorism” and various red herrings, and the supposed frustration over the tracking and arrest of Al-Qaeda members, the true evidence trail continues to be purposely ignored. This trail leads directly to high-level US government officials and US intelligence agencies themselves (and US intelligence branches such as Pakistan’s ISI), for their nurturing, guiding and placement of “Islamic terrorist” intelligence assets (including Atta, Hamdi, bin Laden and Al-Qaeda), and US complicity for 9/11.
Full: globalresearch.ca

Turkish Intelligence: Al-Qaeda a U.S. Covert Operation

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 26 – With Iraq’s new constitution still in limbo, thousands of Sunni Arabs rallied in central and northern Iraq on Friday to protest the proposed draft.

Followers of Moktada al-Sadr demonstrated peacefully in Baghdad Friday, a day after members of his militia clashed with rival Shiites.

In Kirkuk, in the north, more than 2,000 Sunnis marched in the streets after Friday Prayer, chanting “No to federalism,” “Iraq is the home of all” and “Baathists are loyal Iraqis.” In Baquba, a largely Sunni city northeast of Baghdad, several thousand people marched, some carrying pictures of Saddam Hussein, whose Baath Party kept the Sunni minority in power for years.

Sunni political leaders have refused to agree to the draft constitution in large part because a Shiite proposal would create a vast autonomous region in Iraq’s oil-rich south. The Sunnis say that proposal – which would parallel the federal zone governed by the Kurds in northern Iraq – could cripple the Iraqi state and allow neighboring Iran to dominate the Shiite south.
Full: nytimes.com

We went in there to wreck that country and by-jeezus we’re gonna do it.

A source close to the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan said it was too early to declare the UN plan dead. “Bolton wants to knock down the plan and start from scratch,” the source said. “He will find that his opinions are not shared by most of the rest of the world.”

The president of the UN general assembly, Jean Ping from the Gambia, has been working on the draft, covering issues of poverty, climate change, genocide, small arms, the creation of a permanent UN peacekeeping capability and reform of the UN management structure, for the past year.

A Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday that the UK and the European Union, of which Britain holds the presidency, “are broadly content with the summit draft. It reflects the ambitious agenda thrown up by Kofi Annan”.

The spokesman said it was “important that we do not row back from previous high-level summits”, such as the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in July and the UN millennium summit in 2000.
Full:guardian.co.uk

A source close to the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan said it was too early to declare the UN plan dead. “Bolton wants to knock down the plan and start from scratch,” the source said. “He will find that his opinions are not shared by most of the rest of the world.”

The president of the UN general assembly, Jean Ping from the Gambia, has been working on the draft, covering issues of poverty, climate change, genocide, small arms, the creation of a permanent UN peacekeeping capability and reform of the UN management structure, for the past year.

A Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday that the UK and the European Union, of which Britain holds the presidency, “are broadly content with the summit draft. It reflects the ambitious agenda thrown up by Kofi Annan”.

The spokesman said it was “important that we do not row back from previous high-level summits”, such as the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in July and the UN millennium summit in 2000.
Full:guardian.co.uk

LONDON (AFP) – Campaigners rallied outside Britain’s interior ministry in London to protest against the deportation of Iraqi nationals back to their homeland.

Around 50 demonstrators chanted slogans and waved banners as the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees handed in a petition to the Home Office.

Dashty Jamal, the group’s spokesman in London, said 33 people were removed last week and a further 43 are expected to be deported Sunday.

Britain is host to around 7,000 Iraqi asylum seekers, of which 250 are currently in detention centres, Jamal said.

“They sent them back by force, they are victims of war and terrorism,” he said.
Full: news.yahoo.com

LONDON (AFP) – Campaigners rallied outside Britain’s interior ministry in London to protest against the deportation of Iraqi nationals back to their homeland.

Around 50 demonstrators chanted slogans and waved banners as the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees handed in a petition to the Home Office.

Dashty Jamal, the group’s spokesman in London, said 33 people were removed last week and a further 43 are expected to be deported Sunday.

Britain is host to around 7,000 Iraqi asylum seekers, of which 250 are currently in detention centres, Jamal said.

“They sent them back by force, they are victims of war and terrorism,” he said.
Full: news.yahoo.com

A regional committee of the World Health Organization declared tuberculosis an emergency in Africa. Controlling the epidemic, which kills 540,000 Africans a year, will require $2.2 billion in new spending in 2006 and 2007 and a number of measures to detect cases and oversee treatment, the panel said.

Other needs include increasing the number of trained health workers and making antiretroviral drugs available to people infected with both tuberculosis and the AIDS virus. Worldwide, there are nine million cases of active tuberculosis and two million deaths each year, making tuberculosis second to AIDS as a cause of illness and death among adults.
Full: nytimes.com

Africa is just one big giant ’emergency’ to the WHO and NGO and pharmaceutical profiteers: since virtually nobody is tested for either AIDS or TB in Africa and the ‘trained health workers’ largely absent, where are all these numbers coming from? Add malaria to the mix too.

In the spring of 1993 South African photojournalist Kevin Carter was covering the famine in Sudan. While visiting a feeding station, a starving child crawling through the dust caught his eye. Behind the child stalked a large vulture.

The resulting image shocked the world. It did much to raise awareness about the plight of the Sudanese and increased the potential for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to raise money for relief and feed the starving.

Carter won the coveted Pulitzer Prize for his picture and his career seemed to be reaching its peak — but then the recriminations started. How could he photograph the child instead of helping? How could he profit from such an appalling tragedy?

The pressure eventually took its toll and Carter, who suffered from emotional problems and drug addiction, took his own life a few months later.

The debate that Carter found himself unwittingly thrust into the centre of rages to this day. When does interest become exploitation? Where do you draw the line between news and voyeurism? Do images of starving children help the victims of famine in Africa or enforce an unfair and possibly racist stereotype?
Full: socialistworker.co.uk

“Is it right to call for assassination? No, and I apologize for that statement,” Robertson said. “I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him.”

But he compared Chavez to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler and quoted German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “[That if a madman were] driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.”

Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis for his involvement in a 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.

Robertson’s rationale for his statement remained unchanged.

“I said before the war in Iraq began that the wisest course would be to wage war against Saddam Hussein, not the whole nation of Iraq,” Robertson said. “When faced with the threat of a comparable dictator in our own hemisphere, would it not be wiser to wage war against one person rather than finding ourselves down the road locked in a bitter struggle with a whole nation?”

…”We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,” he said. “We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”
Full: cnn.com

Chávez taunts US with oil offer
…In a typically robust response to remarks by the US televangelist Pat Robertson, Mr Chávez compared his detractors to the “rather mad dogs with rabies” from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and unveiled his plans to use Venezuela’s energy reserves as a political tool.

“We want to sell gasoline and heating fuel directly to poor communities in the United States,” he said.

…Venezuela, the world’s fifth largest crude exporter, supplies 1.3m barrels of oil a day to the US. It remains unclear how poor Americans might benefit from the cheap petrol offer, but Mr Chávez has set up arrangements with other countries for swapping services in exchange for oil. Cuban doctors are working in the poorer areas of Venezuela in exchange for cheap oil going to Cuba.

Jamaica yesterday became the first Caribbean country to reach an agreement with Venezuela for oil at below-market terms. The Petrocaribe initiative is a plan to offer oil at flexible rates to 13 Caribbean countries. Jamaica will pay $40 a barrel, against a market rate of more than $60.

Mr Chávez said oil importers such as the US could expect no respite from the oil market, predicting the price of a barrel would reach $100 by 2012.