Archive for September, 2005

In Iraq, they KNOW Zarqawi does not exist

Friday, September 30th, 2005

The Anglo-American goal of “federalism” for Iraq is part of an imperial strategy of provoking divisions in a country where traditionally the communities have overlapped, even inter-married. The Osama-like promotion of al-Zarqawi is integral to this. Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, he is everywhere but nowhere. When the Americans crushed the city of Fallujah last year, the justification for their atrocious behaviour was “getting those guys loyal to al-Zarqawi”. But the city’s civil and religious authorities denied he was ever there or had anything to do with the resistance.

“He is simply an invention.” said the Imam of Baghdad’s al-Kazimeya mosque. “Al-Zarqawi was killed in the beginning of the war in the Kurdish north. His family even held a ceremony after his death.” Whether or not this is true, al-Zaqawi’s “foreign invasion” serves as Bush’s and Blair’s last veil for their “war on terror” and botched attempt to control the world’s second biggest source of oil.

On 23 September, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, an establishment body, published a report that accused the US of “feeding the myth” of foreign fighters in Iraqi who account for less than 10 per cent of a resistance estimated at 30,000. Of the eight comprehensive studies into the number of Iraqi civilians killed by the “coalition”, four put the figure at more than 100,000. Until the British army is withdrawn from where it has no right to be, and those responsible for this monumental act of terrorism are indicted by the International Criminal Court, Britain is shamed.
informationclearinghouse.info

HUD chief foresees a ‘whiter’ Big Easy

Friday, September 30th, 2005

A Bush Cabinet officer predicted this week that New Orleans likely will never again be a majority black city, and several black officials are outraged.
Alphonso R. Jackson, secretary of housing and urban development, during a visit with hurricane victims in Houston, said New Orleans would not reach its pre-Katrina population of “500,000 people for a long time,” and “it’s not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.”
Rep. Danny K. Davis, Illinois Democrat and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, quickly took issue.
“Anybody who can make that kind of projection with some degree of certainty or accuracy must have a crystal ball that I can’t see or maybe they are more prophetic than any of us can imagine,” he said.
Other members of the caucus said the comments by Mr. Jackson, who is black, could be misconstrued as a goal, particularly considering his position of responsibility in the administration.
washtimes.com

Housing for Storm’s Evacuees Lagging Far Behind U.S. Goals

Friday, September 30th, 2005

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 – After Hurricane Katrina left hundreds of thousands of people homeless, the Federal Emergency Management Agency signed contracts for more than $2 billion in temporary housing, including more than 120,000 trailers and mobile homes. But the agency has placed just 109 Louisiana families in those homes.

A month after the disaster, the federal government’s temporary housing effort is stumbling.

The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday that FEMA was freezing many orders for trailers, although the agency disputes that. Members of Congress, complaining that a $236 million deal to lease three ships to house evacuees was far too expensive, are calling for an investigation. And under an alternative FEMA program to give victims cash to find their own housing, 332,000 households have been approved in just a week.
nytimes.com

Come on, this is not incompetence, it’s deliberate. Keep people in a desperate situation with NOTHING waiting long enough, and they’ll settle for $2000. Sick.

US trying to understand Iraq insurgency: Negroponte

Friday, September 30th, 2005

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. intelligence is still struggling to understand the nature of Iraq’s insurgency more than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte said on Thursday.

ADVERTISEMENT

Negroponte, a former ambassador to Iraq who became director of national intelligence five months ago, said not enough had been done to come to grips with the insurgents who by some estimates have killed more than 5,000 Iraqi civilians and security forces.

Some 1,780 U.S. troops have also died in Iraq since U.S. President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations.

“It’s a very, very difficult issue,” Negroponte told an audience of intelligence officials in Washington.

“There’s no analytical issue that is more important, no intelligence issue more important, than understanding the nature of the insurgency in all of its aspects.

“There’s a desirability, a thirst really, to get as much fidelity about what is happening within the insurgency, and I think also a feeling that much more could still be done in terms of finding out now what the nature of that insurgency is,” he said.
news.yahoo.com

A ‘desirability, a thirst’ for ‘fidelity.’ Too funny. ‘Geez, we just don’t understand this’… It would be slightly more believable if they weren’t orchestrating it.

Bolton, left-liberals, and the imperial UN

Friday, September 30th, 2005

So all the left-liberals who thought that the nomination of Bolton to the UN would mean the death of that organization — that it would unleash the U.S. to dominate the world — should consider Bolton’s latest move: opposing a bill to withhold funds to the UN.

Hmmm. When will left-liberals learn that the United Nations is a fig leaf and puppet for U.S. imperialism, and that, while conservative politicians sometimes attack the UN’s superficial check on U.S. militarism, most of them are perfectly fine using the organization as an instrument of, and excuse for, U.S. global hegemony?

The UN is a threat not just to American sovereignty, but world peace, and has been since it was conceived by the U.S. working with the Soviet Union. When the UN tells the U.S. it can’t bomb, it does so anyway. When it sanctions U.S. aggression, the empire proceeds with the façade of international diplomacy. What a sham the whole thing is. Bolton is right at home with the UN.
antiwar.com

The U.S. Has Plans to Invade Iran Before Bush’s Term Ends

Friday, September 30th, 2005

Bill Gertz is a right-wing national security reporter for the Rev. Sun Yung Moon’s neo-fascist newspaper, The Washington Times. He’s also a spigot from which flows much classified information illegally leaked by like-minded “patriots” seeking to advance their hawkish agenda in the military-industrial-congressional complex. And, frankly speaking, that’s the only reason I pay any attention to him.

So I was hardly surprised when, on September 16, 2005, Gertz reported on the Bush administration’s “computer slide presentation.” which was aimed at persuading whoever would listen that Iran is working feverishly to build nuclear weapons.

According to Gertz, the report claims: “Iran’s nuclear program is well-scaled for a weapons capability, as a comparison to [Pakistan’s] nuclear weapons infrastructure shows…When one also considers Iran’s concealment and deception activities, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.”

The report also states that “Iran’s uranium ore resources are insufficient for Tehran to produce enough fuel for civilian electrical power generating reactors. ‘However, Iran’s uranium resources are more than sufficient to support a nuclear weapons capability.'” [U.S. Report Says Iran Seeks To Acquire Nuclear Weapons,” Washington Times, 16 September 2005]

Unlike the Washington Post’s article on the subject two days earlier, Gertz predictably failed to mention that the slide show “dismisses ambiguities in the evidence…and omits alternative explanations under debate among intelligence analysts.” He also failed to mention that several diplomats “said the slide show reminded them of the flawed presentation on Iraq’s weapons programs made by then-secretary of state Colin L. Powell to the UN Security Council in February 2003” [“US Deploys Slide Show to Press Case Against Iran,” Washington Post, 14 September 2005]

Moreover, in order to serve as water boy for the Bush administration, Gertz had to ignore (or discount) the recent report from Britain’s prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies, which concluded that Iran “was at least five years away from producing sufficient material for ‘a single nuclear weapon,'” Instead, Gertz obediently and dutifully noted that the Bush administration “is pressing the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] to refer the issue… to the United Nations Security Council,” which “could then impose economic sanctions against Iran or possibly a future authorization for the use of force.” [Ibid.] Ah yes, “authorization for the use of force”—the source of many a neocon and chickenhawk wet dream.

But much more disconcerting than Gertz’s piece was one written by Claude Salhani on 22 September 2005 for the same loony “Moonie” scandal sheet. Salhani shamelessly reintroduced the tactics, which proved so successful in inflaming a frightened American public about the threat posed by Iraq. He invoked the words of an Iranian dissident (today’s Ahmad Chalabi), as well as former U.S. government officials (seeking to “empower resistance” inside Iran), to make the claim the Iran is, in fact, “gearing for war” with the United States.
informationclearinghouse.info

African migrants die in quest for new life

Friday, September 30th, 2005

Spanish border police armed with riot gear and rubber bullets faced hundreds of sub-Saharan Africans prepared to risk their lives yesterday to get across the razorwire-topped perimeter fence around a Spanish enclave in north Africa in an attempt to claim immigrant status.

Two would-be immigrants died on the Spanish side of Ceuta’s frontier and the bodies of three more were found on the Moroccan side after they tried to storm over the border shortly before dawn.

One bled to death after his neck was caught on the razorwire and another was trampled and suffocated during the stampede, Spanish media reports said.

According to unconfirmed reports, Moroccan police fired into a crowd of 500 people trying to scale the double, three-metre (10ft) high fence using scaling ladders made from branches and string. One of the three victims on the Moroccan side was reportedly a baby.
guardian.co.uk

Nothing reveals the true colors of a ‘leftist’ European regime than confronting the legacy of its colonial past. Why is there a ‘Spanish enclave’ in Ceuta?
Ceuta

More Abu Ghraib Photos Ordered Released

Friday, September 30th, 2005

NEW YORK, Sept. 29 — A federal judge ordered the release Thursday of dozens more pictures of prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib, rejecting government arguments that the images would provoke terrorists and incite violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said that terrorists “do not need pretexts for their barbarism” and that suppressing the pictures would amount to submitting to blackmail.

“Our nation does not surrender to blackmail, and fear of blackmail is not a legally sufficient argument to prevent us from performing a statutory command. Indeed, the freedoms that we champion are as important to our success in Iraq and Afghanistan as the guns and missiles with which our troops are armed,” he said.
washingtonpost.com

Oh brother.

Pentagon analyst to plead guilty to leaking data

Friday, September 30th, 2005

ALEXANDRIA, Va – A Pentagon analyst charged with providing classified information to an Israeli official and members of a pro-Israeli lobbying group will plead guilty, according to the U.S. District Court clerk’s office.

Lawrence A. Franklin, 58, of Kearneysville, W.Va., was indicted in June on charges of leaking classified materials — including information about potential attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq — to two members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and an Israeli official.
msnbc.msn.com

Jewish Groups Press for Iran Sanctions

What Israeli Disengagement Sounds Like

Thursday, September 29th, 2005

In the last days, Gaza was awakened from its dreams with horrible explosions which have shattered our skies, shaken our buildings, broken our windows, and installed feelings of panic.

We suddenly felt helpless, under the control of the Israelis and at their mercy. The new method of exploding sound bombs in our skies is now available to the Israeli army who would not use it before the disengagement because they were careful not to alarm or hurt the Israeli settlers who were in Gaza. This new method was used by the Israeli army since Friday day and night. Usually between 2-4 in the morning, between 6:30 and 8 in the morning school going time, and in the afternoon or early evening. The explosions are heard and felt all over the Gaza Strip with the same intensity. These explosions were used alongside the usual routine of bombing and killing which the Israelis forces are familiar with.
counterpunch.org