An initiative led by former President Clinton to tackle poverty, climate change and other worldwide issues is launching with a gathering of political leaders and activists who are promising to pitch in _ and must put those pledges in writing.

Participants who fall short can’t come back next year, said Jay Carson, spokesman for the Clinton Global Initiative.

Among the 800 expected at a Manhattan hotel for the three-day event beginning Thursday are British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, and Clinton himself.

“This conference is not about talk, it’s about action,” Carson said. Clinton has been “very clear that if people aren’t here to make a difference, then they’re at the wrong conference.”

Some commitments have already been lined up, including establishment of a $100 million foundation to fight poverty, and others will come out at the meeting, Carson said.

Clinton’s wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, is speaking on a panel. Other notables include financier George Soros and media chiefs Rupert Murdoch and Richard Parsons. Many participants are already in the city for a summit marking the 60th anniversary of the United Nations.
washingtonpost.com

Worth reading, just for the pure crap-factor, but here is definitely the quote of the day:

“Until you have been there,” he said, “you don’t realize it is the middle of a hurricane.”
Michael D. Brown

nytimes.com

A TERRORIST mastermind has united insurgent groups in Baghdad to target the Iraqi Shia Muslim community with the aim of bringing civil war to Iraq, The Times has learnt.
According to US military intelligence sources, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man responsible for the bloodiest acts of terror in Iraq over the past two years, now commands thousands of fighters from various rival groups and is set to order further waves of bombings.

Yesterday the self-styled “emir” of Iraq was blamed for a dozen co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad that killed 152 people, the single worst death toll in the city since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Most of the dead were poor Shia labourers killed by a huge car bomb in a busy square.

“The al-Qaeda organisation in Mesopotamia is declaring all-out war on the Rafidha [a pejorative term for Shias], wherever they are in Iraq,” said the 38-year-old in an audio message released on an Islamic website. He urged Sunni Muslims to “wake up from your slumber” and joint the fight.

Last night the threat was being taken seriously by US and Iraqi officials, who have offered a $25 million reward for his capture. “We have got reason to believe that al-Zarqawi has now been given tactical command in the city over groups that have had to merge under him for the sake of survival,” an American intelligence officer in Baghdad told The Times yesterday.
timesonline.co.uk

O my goodness what a crock. There certainly are terrorists in a plot to throw Iraq into civil war. Blair and Bush are two of them–maybe ‘Zirqawi’ works for them.

An interview with Shalal el Kaissi, who has become a symbol of U.S. torture .
Translated from an article in La Repubblica, by Mary Rizzo

09/14/05 “ICH” — — “They tortured me, they humiliated me, they have destroyed me inside. I want that what has happened to me never happens again, that everyone knows what those months in Abu Ghraib were like. This is my new life: to denounce that which is happening in the Iraqi prisons, to defend the rights of those who are inside of them”. Former prisoner number 151716 of the prison of shame speaks. The man who has been recognised in one of the photo-symbols of the violence of Abu Ghraib: the hooded prisoner, standing balanced on a cardboard box, his shoulders to the wall, with his arms opened and the fingers of his hands connected to electrical wires.

Ali Shalal el Kaissi, 42 years old, was arrested in October of 2003 in a car park near the mosque of El Amariyah and was imprisoned with the accusation of being part of the guerrilla movement. In the disgusting jargon of his torturers, he was “Clawman”, due to a noticeable burn mark on his hand. He was released January of 2004 and, several months later, founded together with another 12 persons, “The association of the victims of American occupation prisons”.

Invited to speak at the Conference on Iraq organised by the Anti-Imperialist Camp this October, Hajj Ali (“Hajj is a title that is given to those who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca) knows of the American pressures on the visas which have been denied to the other Iraqis. He is still awaiting a response: “I don’t know if I will be allowed to attend,” he says. In these days he is in Amman, in Jordan, where he has frequented a formation course for humanitarian operators.

When did you see the photo of the hooded man for the first time and did you recognise yourself?
“The volunteers of an Iraqi association that deals with human rights showed me the photos taken at Abu Ghraib. It was a shock, a personal destruction. I suffered that which you see in the images: they covered my head, tortured me and made me undergo such strong pressure. They photographed me many times. But others established that that prisoner was me: human rights organisations and even journalistic investigations, one from the American broadcaster PBS, and another from a magazine, “Vanity Fair”.
informationclearinghouse.info

Iran’s top military commander accused the United States and Israel of planning the non-stop bomb attacks that killed thousands of civilians in Iraq.

Brigadier General Mohammad-Baqer Zolqadr, the deputy commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), told a gathering of senior officials, that the U.S. needs those attacks to justify the continuation of its military presence in Iraq.

“The Americans blame weak and feeble groups in Iraq for insecurity in this country. We do not believe this and we have information that the insecurity has its roots in the activities of American and Israeli spies,” Zolqadr said.

“Insecurity in Iraq is a deeply-rooted phenomenon. The root of insecurity in Iraq lies in the occupation of this country by foreigners”.

“If Iraq is to become secure, there will be no room for the occupiers”.

Zolqadr also said that the U.S. forces pursue “important and strategic goals in their continuing occupation of Iraq”.

The U.S. wanted to remain in Iraq to “plunder the country’s wealth, bring the Middle East under its control, and create security for Israel, which is on the verge of annihilation”.

Zolqadr, moreover, noted that dozens of new U.S. military are being built in Iraq “for this reason they are constantly creating insecurity”.

The U.S.-occupation authority has repeatedly claimed that the Iraqi security forces are not ready yet to protect the country against rebel attacks, with the aim of defending the continued heavy presence of U.S. troops there even after an Iraqi government was elected.

Source: Iran Focus
aljazeera.com

One of the central mysteries emerging in the Hurricane Katrina disaster is why concrete floodwalls in three canals breached during the storm, causing much of the catastrophic flooding, while earthen hurricane levees surrounding the city remained intact.

It probably will take months to investigate and make a conclusive determination about what happened, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. But two Louisiana State University scientists who have examined the breaches suggest that a structural flaw in the floodwalls might be to blame.

“Why did we have no hurricane levee failures but five separate places with floodwall failures?” asked Joseph Suhayda, a retired LSU coastal engineer who examined the breaches last week. “That suggests there may be something about floodwalls that makes them more susceptible to failure. Did (the storm) exceed design conditions? What were the conditions? What about the construction?”

Ivor Van Heerden, who uses computer models to study storm-surge dynamics for the LSU Hurricane Center, has said that fragmentary initial data indicate that Katrina’s storm-surge heights in Lake Pontchartrain would not have been high enough to top the canal walls and that a “catastrophic structural failure” occurred in the floodwalls.

Corps project manager Al Naomi said that the Corps’ working theory is that the floodwalls were well-constructed, but once topped they gave way after water scoured their interior sides, wearing away their earth-packed bases. But he said some other problem could have caused the breaches.

“They could have been overtopped. There could have been some structural failure. They could have been impacted by some type of debris,” Naomi said. “I don’t think it’s right to make some type of judgment now. It’s like presuming the reason for a plane crash without recovering the black box.”

Officials long had warned about the danger of levees being topped by high water from a storm surge. Absent topping, floodwalls are supposed to remain intact.

The floodwalls lining New Orleans canals consist of concrete sections attached to steel sheet pile drilled deep into the earth, fortified by a concrete and earthen base. The sections are joined with a flexible, waterproof substance.

Floodwalls were breached in the 17th Street Canal, at two places in the London Avenue Canal, and at two places in the Industrial Canal, Suhayda said. Naomi said last week that one of the Industrial Canal breaches likely was caused by a loose barge that broke through it.

Suhayda said that his inspection of the debris from the 17th Street Canal breach suggests the wall simply gave way. “It looks to have been laterally pushed, not scoured in back with dirt being removed in pieces,” he said. “You can see levee material, some distance pushed inside the floodwall area, like a bulldozer pushed it.”

He suggested that because the walls failed in a few spots, the flaw may not be in the design but in the construction or materials.

“Those sections in the rest of the wall should have been subjected to the same forces as that section that failed,” he said. “Why did one side fail, not the other side?”

Drainage canals typically are lined with floodwalls instead of the wider earthen levees that protect the lakefront because of a lack of space, engineers say.

“It’s a right-of-way issue,” Naomi said. “Usually, there are homes right up against the canal. You have to relocate five miles of homes (to build a levee), or you can build a floodwall.”

Constructing a more expensive earthen levee also would require building farther out into the canal itself, reducing the size of the canal – and the volume of water it could handle.

Naomi said that an earthen levee also could have been breached if the surge had pushed water over the top. “A levee failure might be more gradual than with a floodwall,” he said. “It means you may have flooded a little slower.”

The central question for engineers investigating the breaches will be whether the floodwalls were topped – and that’s still unclear.

The levee system, floodwalls included, is designed to protect against an average storm surge of 11.5 feet above sea level. The Corps adds several more feet of “freeboard” to account for waves and other dynamics.

Naomi said the Industrial Canal floodwalls were topped by water coming in from the east. But scientists don’t yet know exactly whether Katrina’s Lake Pontchartrain surge was high enough to go over the wall in the two other canals.

Many storm surge gauges stopped functioning during the storm, LSU climatologist Barry Keim, though initial data point to a mi-lake height of eight or nine feet. Heights typically are higher at the Lakefront area because wind pushes water higher against the levees.

Suhayda said the debris line on the lakefront levee adjacent to the canal was “several feet” below the top. The levees are 17 or 18 feet high in that area. The canal levees, however, average only 14 feet. Storm surges have waves and other dynamics that push water still higher than the average height.

“There are big implications for as little as a one-foot change in elevation” of the storm surge, Suhayda said.

If the water did not top the levees, the breaches could prove more mysterious. Typically, the pounding of wave action would be the most likely way to cause a breach, scientists say. But there isn’t much wave action in canals.

“Waves constantly breaking on the structure start to erode it and make it become unstable,” said LSU coastal geologist Greg Stone, who studies storm-surge dynamics. “But I don’t think that was a major factor in the canals. You just don’t have the (open area) to allow wave growth to occur.”
nola.com

by Patrick Cockburn
A suicide bomber sparked Baghdad’s worst day of slaughter since the fall of Saddam 30 months ago when he lured labourers desperate for work towards his van by offering them jobs and then detonated explosives that killed 114 and injured 156 of them.

On a day when more than a dozen co-ordinated attacks thundered across Baghdad from dawn into the late afternoon – claiming 152 lives and wounding 542 – al-Qa’ida in Iraq said it was retaliating against a US-Iraqi operation directed at the insurgents’ northern stronghold of Tal Afar. And as the hours passed with car and roadside bombs shattering the relative calm of the past few days, fears of civil war intensified.

A posting on the internet by al-Qa’ida in Iraq said: “To the nation of Islam, we give you the good news that the battles of revenge for the Sunni people of Tal Afar began yesterday.”

Today the carnage continued when 16 policemen and five civilians were killed and about 20 injured when a suicide bomber drove his car into a convoy of police vehicles in Baghdad’s southern Dora district, police said. Together with three other bombings, today’s death toll in Baghdad rose to more than 30.

Just 24 hours eariler, in Aruba Square in the Shia district of Qadimiyah, the crowd cried: “Why? Why? Why,” as the dead and dying were carried out. Severed heads and limbs were stacked beside burnt bodies inside the gates of the local hospital, its floor slippery with blood.

“We gathered and suddenly a car blew up and turned the area into fire and dust and darkness,” said Hadi, a worker who survived the blast. Along with some 1,500 others he had gone at dawn to the square where labourers traditionally wait to be hired. Most of those who died were impoverished Shia workers from Iraq’s deep south who have come to Baghdad for jobs and sleep rough or in squalid hotels around Aruba.

Oily black smoke rose into the blue sky over Baghdad as more than a dozen bombs exploded across the city throughout the morning. Terror mounted as we heard the detonations. People stayed at home to avoid being caught by the blasts.

Fearing another suicide bomb, police and soldiers stopped vehicles entering Qadimiyah, at the centre of which are the golden domes of a much venerated Shia shrine. But angry and distraught people raced on foot to the nearest hospital to see if friends or relatives were alive or dead.

“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! God is Great! God is Great! This is a terrible disaster,” chanted Sayef Ali Abed as he walked with a nervous gait as if frightened of what he would find at the hospital. “I heard what happened on the radio and came directly because I know my brother was looking for work there. I did not even tell our parents where I was going.” In the hospital, Abbas Rada Mohammed, a distraught middle-aged man, was vainly studying a list of the names of 162 injured. “I am looking for my brother. Maybe he is dead or in another hospital.”

The people torn apart were not the only ones to die in Iraq yesterday. In a Sunni village 10 miles north of Baghdad near Taji, men dressed as soldiers – and who possibly were soldiers – moved in just before first light and took away 17 men whom they handcuffed, blindfolded and shot. The dead included one policeman and several men who worked as drivers and construction workers at a US base.

One of the many reasons why Iraqis are becoming more terrified by the day is that they do not know if the policemen or soldiers who wake them in the middle of the night truly work for the government or are a death squad.
independent.co.uk

BAGHDAD – Iraq’s justice minister has condemned the U.S. military for detaining thousands of Iraqis for long periods without charge and wants to change a U.N. resolution that gives foreign troops immunity from Iraqi law.

Speaking to Reuters, Justice Minister Abdul Hussein Shandal also criticized U.S. detentions of Iraqi journalists and said the media, contrary to U.S. policy in Iraq, must have special legal protection to report on all sides in the conflict.

“No citizen should be arrested without a court order,” he said this week, complaining that U.S. suggestions that his ministry has an equal say on detentions were misleading.

“There is abuse (of human rights) due to detentions, which are overseen by the Multinational Force (MNF) and are not in the control of the justice ministry,” said Shandal, a Shi’ite judge respected for standing up to Saddam Hussein on the rule of law.

Killings and unjustified arrests of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops risked going unpunished, he said, because of U.N. Security Council resolution 1546, which granted U.S.-led forces sweeping powers following their overthrow of Saddam in 2003.

“The resolution … gives immunity to the MNF and means taking no action against the MNF no matter what happens or whatever they do against the people of Iraq,” Shandal said.

“We’re hoping to make more efforts with the Security Council and the whole United Nations to end this resolution or amend it so that anyone who violates Iraqi law or assaults any citizen is held accountable,” he said. “This is a matter of sovereignty.”
commondreams.org

by Uri Averny
…But, since now all dikes have been breached, I am prepared to say what is on my mind: from the first moment, I was sure that Arafat had been poisoned.

Most of the doctors interviewed by Haaretz testified that the symptoms point towards poisoning, and, in fact, are incompatible with any other cause. The report of the French doctors, who treated Arafat during the last two weeks of his life, states that no known cause for his death was discovered. True, the tests did not find any traces of poison in his body – but the tests were conducted only for the usual poisons. It is no secret that many intelligence services in the world have developed poisons that cannot be detected at all, or whose traces disappear in a very short time.

Some years ago, Israeli agents poisoned the Hamas chief Khaled Mash’al with a slight prick in a main street of Amman. His life was saved only because King Hussein demanded that Israel immediately provide the antidote. (As a further indemnity, Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to the release from prison of another Hamas chief, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated several years after his return to Gaza by more conventional means – an airborne missile.)counterpunch.org

And yesterday, Ariel Sharon is welcomed at the UN for his ‘brave’ deecision to ‘give peace a chance.’ Bush met privately with only two of the leaders who were in NY: Tony Blair and Ariel Sharon.

by Bill McKibben
…Over and over in the last few weeks, people have said that the scenes from the convention center, the highway overpasses and the other suddenly infamous Crescent City venues didn’t “look like America,” that they seemed instead to be straight from the Third World. That was almost literally accurate, for poor, black New Orleans (whose life had never previously been of any interest to the larger public) is not so different from other poor and black parts of the world. Its infant mortality and life expectancy rates, its educational achievement statistics mirror scores of African and Latin American enclaves.

But it was accurate in another way, too, one full of portent for the future.

A decade ago, environmental researcher Norman Myers began trying to add up the number of people at risk of losing their homes from global warming. He looked at all the obvious places – coastal China, India, Bangladesh, the tiny island states of the Pacific and Indian oceans, the Nile delta, Mozambique, on and on – and predicted that by 2050 it was entirely possible that 150 million people could be “environmental refugees,” forced from their homes by rising waters. That’s more than the number of political refugees sent scurrying by the bloody century we’ve just endured.

Try to imagine, that is, the chaos that attends busing 15,000 people from one football stadium to another in the richest nation on Earth, and then multiply it by four orders of magnitude and re-situate your thoughts in the poorest nations on Earth.

And then try to imagine doing it over and over again – probably without the buses.
commondreams.org