Democratisation is an ugly word, bearing about as much relationship to real democracy as does a forced marriage to romantic love. The idea was the brainchild of political scientists and lawyers, who used it to describe the successive waves of countries that emerged from authoritarianism to liberal democracy during the postwar period and the constitutional alternatives available to help them on their way.
In the last couple of years, however, it has been press-ganged into service by the American government. The argument of the neo-conservatives who surround the Republican administration – and one that occasionally puts in an appearance in the speeches of George Bush – is that planting the seeds of democracy in the Middle East might make the place more resistant to virulent strains of Islamist extremism.

That theory is now under attack. Writing in the latest issue of the prestigious American journal Foreign Affairs, F Gregory Gause III, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, argues that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that democracy snuffs out terrorism.

Far from it, he argues. Gause produces statistics to show that between 1976 and 2004 there were 400 terrorist incidents in democratic India and only 18 in non-democratic China. There is, Gause concludes in his survey, “no solid empirical evidence for a strong link between democracy, or any other regime type, and terrorism, in either a positive or a negative direction”. The problem is that democracy is inherently destabilising – if it were a technology, it might be called disruptive – which is why ruling elites have traditionally tried to keep it under control. The most democratic decade in Britain of the previous half-century was probably the 1970s, but few of us want to return there anytime soon.

The situation is doubly fraught in Iraq, where there are fledgling democratic institutions but little evidence of any real enthusiasm for popular sovereignty. The transitions to democracy that we are used to – from Spain in the mid-70s to South Africa in the early 90s – were, at least in part, responses to the will of the people. Unlike previous “waves of democratisation”, however, this new one has been conceived from without and in strictly instrumental terms – not as a good in itself, but because it might open up a more benign kind of politics in the Middle East and help marginalise Islamist extremism.

The Bush administration is now in a bind. If it backtracks on its democratising mission in Iraq and throws in its lot with a local Iraqi strongman – and there are plenty to choose from – it will be accused of toppling Saddam in favour of a kind of Saddam-lite. But if it presses ahead with its attempts at democratisation, it seems likely to end up with a bastard democracy whose very shapelessness becomes an invitation to sectarian rivalries and a red rag to the terrorists who want to provoke it into revealing its authoritarian colours. Whichever direction its takes, America’s wave of democratisation has already slowed into a trickle, and may yet go into reverse.
guardian.co.uk

The cast of administration characters with known connections to the outing of an undercover CIA agent:
Karl Rove
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby
Condoleezza Rice
Stephen Hadley
Andrew Card
Alberto Gonzales
Mary Matalin
Ari Fleischer
Susan Ralston
Israel Hernandez John Hannah
Scott McClellan
Dan Bartlett
Claire Buchan
Catherine Martin
Colin Powell
Karen Hughes
Adam Levine
Bob Joseph
Vice President Dick Cheney
President George W. Bush
thinkprogress.org

In the weeks ahead, a dangerous eruption is again threatening to shake the Bush family’s image of legitimacy, as the pressure from intersecting scandals builds.

So far, the mainstream news media has focused mostly on the white-collar abuses of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay for allegedly laundering corporate donations to help Republicans gain control of the Texas legislature, or on deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove for disclosing the identity of a covert CIA officer to undercut her husband’s criticism of George W. Bush’s case for war in Iraq.

Both offenses represent potential felonies, but they pale beside new allegations linking business associates of star GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff – an ally of both DeLay and Rove – to the gangland-style murder of casino owner Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2001.

These criminal cases also are reminders of George H.W. Bush’s long record of unsavory associations, including with a Nicaraguan contra network permeated by cocaine traffickers, Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s multi-million-dollar money-laundering operations, and anti-communist Cuban extremists tied to acts of international terrorism. [For details on these cases, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq .]

Now, George W. Bush is faced with his own challenge of containing a rupture of scandals – involving prominent conservatives Abramoff, DeLay and potentially Rove – that have bubbled to the surface and are beginning to flow toward the White House.

Mobbed Up

On Sept. 27, 2005 – in possibly the most troubling of these cases – Fort Lauderdale police charged three men, including reputed Gambino crime family bookkeeper Anthony Moscatiello, with Boulis’s murder. Boulis was gunned down in his car on Feb. 6, 2001, amid a feud with an Abramoff business group that had purchased Boulis’s SunCruz casino cruise line in 2000.

As part of the murder probe, police are investigating payments that SunCruz made to Moscatiello, his daughter and Anthony Ferrari, another defendant in the Boulis murder case. Moscatiello and Ferrari allegedly collaborated with a third man, James Fiorillo, in the slaying. [For more on the case, see Sun-Sentinel, Sept. 28, 2005 .]

The SunCruz deal also led to the August 2005 indictment of Abramoff and his partner, Adam Kidan, on charges of conspiracy and wire fraud over a $60 million loan for buying the casino company in 2000. Prosecutors allege that Abramoff and Kidan made a phony $23 million wire transfer as a fake down payment.

In pursuing the casino deal, the Abramoff-Kidan group got help, too, from DeLay and Rep. Robert W. Ney, R-Ohio, the Washington Post reported. Abramoff impressed one lender by putting him together with DeLay in Abramoff’s skybox at FedEx Field during a football game between the Washington Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys.
globalresearch.ca

The Bush administration pledged yesterday to veto legislation banning the torture of prisoners by US troops after an overwhelming and almost unprecedented revolt by loyalist congressmen.

…The administration’s extraordinary isolation was underlined when the Senate Republican majority leader, Bill Frist, supported the amendment.

The man behind the legislation, Republican Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner in Vietnam, said the move was backed by American soldiers. His amendment would prohibit the “cruel, inhumane or degrading” treatment of prisoners in the custody of America’s defence department.

The vote was one of the largest and best supported congressional revolts during President George W Bush’s five years in office and shocked the White House.

“We have put out a Statement of Administration Policy saying that his advisers would recommend that he vetoes it if it contains such language,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan warned yesterday.

The administration said Congress was attempting to tie its hands in the war against terrorism.
telegraph.co.uk

I’d like to do a lot more than tie their hands…

LAVACA – In an increasingly familiar scene along the Texas coast, black smoke and flames streamed from a Point Comfort industrial plant Thursday, following an explosion that injured at least 11 workers.

…The blast at the Formosa plant was the third to strike a Texas industrial facility this year and the second to hit one of the Taiwan-based company’s U.S. facilities in 17 months.

…Diane Wilson, an activist and local shrimper who has protested against the company — a campaign that culminated in August 2002, when she chained herself to one of the plant’s towers — said a serious incident was bound to happen.

“When Formosa was building this plant we had so much evidence about the shoddy way it was put together and the poor quality of the work,” said Wilson, who was in New York City promoting her first book An Unreasonable Woman, about her fight against large petrochemical companies. “I’m not surprised at all.”

Last April, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality fined the facility $150,000 for violations of air pollution laws that included releases of toxic chemicals such as vinyl chloride.
commondreams.org

NEW ORLEANS — They clear rotten seafood from stinking restaurant freezers, wash excrement from the floors of the Superdome, rip out wads of soaked insulation. The work is hot, nasty and critical to the recovery of New Orleans.

And yet, many of the workers are not actually from New Orleans. Many of those engaged in the huge cleanup and reconstruction effort here — nobody has an exact count — are immigrants, both legal and illegal, from Mexico and Central America.

Meanwhile, as many as 80,000 New Orleanians sit idle in shelters around the country. They are out of work, homeless and destitute. That irks some civic and union leaders.

“I’ve got nothing against our Hispanic brothers, but we have a whole lot of skilled laborers in shelters that could be doing this work,” said Oliver Thomas, president of the City Council. “We could put a whole lot of money in the pockets of New Orleanians by doing this reconstruction work.”
washtimes.com

Crazy ain’t it? What are they making, 5 bucks an hour?

Republicans in Congress Propose Budget Cuts to Fund Storm Relief
…“As usual, the prime targets are the poor and others who rely on federal programs for their health, education, disability, agriculture, and veterans’ benefits,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the senior Democrat on the Agriculture Committee.

When our daughter Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza strip on March 16 2003, an immediate impulse was to get her words out to the world. She had been working in Rafah with a nonviolent resistance organisation, the International Solidarity Movement, trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes and wells. Her emails home had had a powerful impact on our family, making us think about the situation in the Middle East in ways we had never done before. Without a direct connection to Israel and Palestine, we had not understood the devastating nature of the Palestinians’ situation. Coming from the US, our allegiance and empathy had always been with the people of Israel.
guardian.co.uk

Romanian authorities called for all farm birds in the southeastern Danube delta to be kept indoors after the country’s first three cases of bird flu were detected in the region.

“The virus has been identified in three ducks in the village of Ceanurlia de Jos (southeastern Romania),” Agriculture Minister Gheorghe Flutur said.

“We have already imposed quarantine measures in the village and the health authorities in the Danube delta have been put on alert,” he told a press conference.

“The virus was probably carried into Romania by migrating birds from Russia,” Flutur said.

The Romanian test results were to be sent to a European Union-approved laboratory in Britain for further analysis.
breitbart.com.news

1918 Killer Flu Was From Birds, Shares H5N1 Gene Mutations
From Patricia Doyle, PhD BBC News
The Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people in 1918-19 was probably a strain that originated in birds, research has shown. US scientists have found the 1918 virus shares genetic mutations with the bird flu virus now circulating in Asia.

Writing in Nature, they say their work underlines the threat the current strain poses to humans worldwide. A second paper in Science reveals another US team has successfully recreated the 1918 virus in mice. The virus is contained at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] under stringent safety conditions. It is hoped to carry out experiments to further understand the biological properties that made the virus so virulent.
www.nature.com

Plane Carrying Viruses Crashes in Canada

Bush Plan Shows U.S. Is Not Ready for Deadly Flu
A plan developed by the Bush administration to deal with any possible outbreak of pandemic flu shows that the United States is woefully unprepared for what could become the worst disaster in the nation’s history.

A draft of the final plan, which has been years in the making and is expected to be released later this month, says a large outbreak that began in Asia would be likely, because of modern travel patterns, to reach the United States within “a few months or even weeks.”

If such an outbreak occurred, hospitals would become overwhelmed, riots would engulf vaccination clinics, and even power and food would be in short supply, according to the plan, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The 381-page plan calls for quarantine and travel restrictions but concedes that such measures “are unlikely to delay introduction of pandemic disease into the U.S. by more than a month or two.”

Authorities briefly closed part of Penn Station on Friday and commuters headed to work under the watchful eyes of police after a newly disclosed terror threat against the New York subway system.

A discarded soda bottle filled with an unidentified green liquid was found at the station during morning rush hour, Amtrak officials said. The substance did not pose a threat to passengers and was removed for testing.
breitbart.com

Yeah I hear it’s called…Mountain Dew.

Veteran UK broadcaster Sir David Frost is to join Arabic-language TV station al-Jazeera, the network has confirmed.

Sir David is to appear on al-Jazeera International, the pan-Arab news network’s new English-language channel, due to be launched next spring.

The Qatar-based channel said Sir David, who broadcast his final Breakfast with Frost programme for the BBC in May, would be among the “key on-air talent”.

Sir David was quoted as saying he felt “excitement” about his new role.

“Most of the television I have done over the years has been aimed at British and American audiences,” he said.

“This time, while our target is still Britain and America, the excitement is that it is also the six billion other inhabitants of the globe.”
bbc.co.uk