WASHINGTON – Army Secretary Noel Harvey and vice chief of staff Gen. Richard Cody said Monday that the Army was using looser Defense Department rules that permitted it to sign up more high school dropouts and people who score lower on mental-qualification tests, but they denied that this meant it was lowering standards.

Until Army recruiters began having trouble signing up enough recruits earlier this year, the Army had set minimum standards that were higher than those of the Defense Department.
commondrams.org

…Those who still live in the reality-based community, however, may sense they’re watching the beginning of the end of something big. It’s not just Mr. DeLay, a k a the Hammer, who is on life support, but a Washington establishment whose infatuation with power and money has contaminated nearly every limb of government and turned off a public that by two to one finds the country on the wrong track.

But don’t take my word for it. And don’t listen to the canned talking points of the Democrats, who are still so busy trying to explain why they were for the war in Iraq before they were against it that it’s hard to trust their logic on anything else. Listen instead to Andrew Ferguson, of the conservative Rupert Murdoch magazine, The Weekly Standard. As far back as last December in a cover article on the sleazy lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Mr. Ferguson was already declaring “the end of the Republican Revolution.”

He painted the big picture of the Abramoff ethos in vibrant strokes: the ill-gotten Indian gambling moolah snaking through the bank accounts of a network of DeLay cronies and former aides; the “fact-finding” Congressional golfing trips to further the cause of sweatshop garment factories in the Marianas islands; the bogus “think tank” in Rehoboth Beach, Del., where the two scholars in residence were a yoga instructor and a lifeguard (albeit a “lifeguard of the year”). Certain names kept recurring in Mr. Ferguson’s epic narrative, most prominently Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, Republican money-changers who are as tightly tied to President Bush and Karl Rove as they are to Mr. Abramoff and Mr. DeLay, if not more so.
informationclearinghouse.info

…In separate statements to Human Rights Watch, Captain Fishback and two sergeants related their experiences as they recounted how members of the First Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry, had repeatedly beaten Iraqi prisoners, exposed them to extremes of hot and cold, and stacked them in human pyramids at Camp Mercury, a forward operating base near Falluja.

The abuses reportedly took place between September 2003 and April 2004, before and during the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
nytimes.com

10/04/05 “Haaretz” — — Some 46 percent of Israel’s Jewish citizens favor transferring Palestinians out of the territories, while 31 percent favor transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country, according to the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies’ annual national security public opinion poll.

In 1991, 38 percent of Israel’s Jewish population was in favor of transferring the Palestinians out of the territories while 24 percent supported transferring Israeli Arabs.

When the question of transfer was posed in a more roundabout way, 60 percent of respondents said that they were in favor of encouraging Israeli Arabs to leave the country. The results of the survey also reveal that 24 percent of Israel’s Jewish citizens believe that Israeli Arabs are not loyal to the state, compared to 38 percent who think the Arabs were loyal to the state at the beginning of the intifada.

The poll, overseen by Prof. Asher Arian, also finds that Jewish public opinion is Israel has become more extreme on issues of foreign affairs and defense as well as on possible concessions by Israel during peace talks in particular.

A representative sample of 1,264 Jewish residents of Israel were polled for the survey last month in face-to-face interviews.

Israeli-Arabs pose a threat to Israel’s security, according to 61 percent of the Jewish population, while around 80 percent are opposed to Israeli-Arabs being involved in important decisions, such as delineating the country’s borders, up from 75 percent last year and 67 percent in 2000.
informationclearinghouse.info

U.S., Israel discuss Syria regime change – Report
Senior American officials discussed with Israeli counterparts the prospects of a regime change in Syria and possible successors to President Bashar al-Assad, an Israeli newspaper reported

Government officials quoted by the Haaretz daily said the U.S. officials expressed interest in Israel’s assessment of possible successors to Assad, asking them who they thought could replace him and maintain regional stability.

The world today produces enough grain alone to provide every human being on the planet with 3,500 calories a day.’ That’s enough to make most people fat! And this estimate does not even count many other commonly eaten foods-vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. In fact, if all foods are considered together, enough is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day. That includes two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs.

Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the supply of food in the world today. Increases in food production during the past 35 years have outstripped the world’s unprecedented population growth by about 16 percent. Indeed, mountains of unsold grain on world markets have pushed prices strongly downward over the past three and a half decades. Grain prices rose briefly during the early 1990s, as bad weather coincided with policies geared toward reducing overproduction, but still remained well below the highs observed in the early sixties and mid-seventies.

All well and good for the global picture, you might be thinking, but doesn’t such a broad stroke tell us little? Aren’t most of the world’s hungry living in countries with food shortages – countries in Latin America, in Asia, and especially in Africa?

Hunger in the face of ample food is all the more shocking in the Third World. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, gains in food production since 1950 have kept ahead of population growth in every region except Africa. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) found in a 1997 study that 78% of all malnourished children under five in the developing world live in countries with food surpluses.

Thus, even most “hungry countries have enough food for all their people right now. This finding turns out to be true using official statistics even though experts warn us that newly modernizing societies invariably underestimate farm production-just as a century ago at least a third of the U.S. wheat crop went uncounted. Moreover, many nations can’t realize their full food production potential because of the gross inefficiencies caused by inequitable ownership of resources.

Finally, many of the countries in which hunger is rampant export much more in agricultural goods than they import. Northern countries are the main food importers, their purchases representing 71.2 percent of the total value of food items imported in the world in 1992. Imports by the 30 lowest-income countries, on the other hand, accounted for only 5.2 percent of all international commerce in food and farm commodities.
foodfirst institute

PRIVATE INVESTMENT MAKES AFRICA POOR
Anyone remember the pronouncements by Blair and Brown, Bono and Sir Bob, earlier this year about saving Africa? The white knights riding to the rescue were specifically named as the forces of private enterprise, as part of a package of measures that included fine-sounding phrases about aid, trade and ‘better governance’. It is only weeks later, yet this September those illusions seem so shallow — with little aid, no real debt ‘relief’, and many NGOs roundly condemning the G8/Live8 deals as enforcing further economic restructuring on poor countries.
African countries have tried in the 1990s to attract foreign investment, by de-regulating and privatising their economies. Now a UN report has been published that shows how private investment and multinational corporations can be a curse, rather than a blessing, for Africa.
The report, ‘Economic Development in Africa, Rethinking the Role of Foreign Direct Investment’, by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), September 2005, is highly critical of poverty reduction solutions that rely on attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). Such investment is usually the result of corporate involvement in a particular area, and the report says that ‘expectations have been raised that by creating jobs, transferring new technologies and building linkages with the rest of the economy, FDI will directly address the continent´s poverty challenge’.
On the contrary, FDI can sometimes mean that a country is getting poorer — a privatisation of a state owned company, for example, would show a net ‘increase’ in investment, but not necessarily result in an improved service or more jobs. ‘M&As [mergers and acquisitions] have accounted for a very high percentage of inflows in particular years, often as the outcome of privatization programmes.’ And where FDI has occured, it has often been isolated in ‘enclaves’ and oriented towards export industries. This could mean a company investing heavily in a single mine or cash crop plantation, but with little benefit to the rest of the country outside this small area of high investment. In addition, profits from this small enclave will often mostly flow overseas, back to the corporation’s home market, rather than circulating within the country or Africa itself. UNCTAD states that a balanced approach ‘will recognize that the inflow of capital from FDI may be a benefit, but that the subsequent outflow of profits earned on the investment may be so high as to make it a very substantial cost… Where the firm does not create new assets, but merely takes over existing locally owned ones, the net benefits may be particularly hard to discern.’ (pp 25-26)

10/02/05 “Los Angeles Times” — — BATON ROUGE, La. — When he could finally leave his post guarding a nuclear power plant after Hurricane Katrina struck, Richard George Reysack III sped east of New Orleans to the flooded home of his 80-year-old father. Slogging through the muck, he found his father’s corpse face-down in the hallway.

As devastating as that discovery was, at least Reysack had the body. Then even that was taken away. The authorities who moved the corpse to a temporary morgue not only won’t return it to Reysack for burial, he said, they won’t even confirm that they have it.

Reysack’s family published an obituary and held a memorial service — all without a body.

“My family has had to endure that memorial service knowing Lord knows when we’ll get my father’s body … and put this behind us,” Reysack said.

A month after Katrina upended the lives of hundreds of thousands, families of the dead have been traumatized again by the ordeal of trying to pry their loved ones’ bodies from a bureaucratic quagmire. They say they have spent weeks being rebuffed or ignored by state and federal officials at a massive temporary morgue that houses hundreds of decomposed corpses.

Many of those bodies don’t have names, the remains so badly damaged by floodwater that fingerprints and other methods of identification are useless. But although authorities have been provided with ample information to identify dozens of corpses, they are still holding onto them — to the dismay of family members scattered across the country.

The state official in charge of the morgue, Dr. Louis Cataldie, said through a spokesman that he was concerned about the flow of information from the morgue. At a news conference here last week, he acknowledged that many families were suffering.

“These are horrible times,” Cataldie said.

Even funeral home directors, who routinely retrieve bodies from authorities, say they have been turned away at the heavily guarded morgue in St. Gabriel, La.
informationclearinghouse.info

The Occupation of New Orleans
The appearance of fully-armed mercenaries on the streets of New Orleans tells us that the city is currently under occupation. Whenever foreign troops are deployed within an urban area it can only mean one thing; the loss of sovereignty. It’s no different here. Blackwater mercenaries are part of a privately owned army that has seized control of the streets from their rightful owners, the people of New Orleans. They are an integral part of a much broader plan to militarize the nation and turn America into a garrison-state.

Blackwater employees may work for the United States government, but, in fact, they represent the exclusive interests of an elite cadre of corporate globalists who are transforming America into a base for future operations. New Orleans is simply the testing-grounds for their radical theories of establishing order. It provides a pilot-program for working out the kinks that inevitably arise from revamping society from the ground up. So far, the project is moving ahead better than anyone could have expected, mainly due to the media’s skillful diversion of the public’s attention from the militarization-process to the many human-interest stories of suffering and rebirth. It is a cynical way of exploiting misery and obfuscating the truth.

Just like Iraq, the propaganda-system has been the most successful part of the entire campaign; working flawlessly to provide a storyline that runs counter to the facts as we know them.

New Orleans is the first American city to come under the direct control of the global-corporate oligarchy. By taking advantage of loopholes in the current law created by terrorist legislation, Rumsfeld has been able to insert both the military and private security organizations into a major metropolitan area without as much as a peep from his critics. There’s simply been no opposition from any quarter to a draconian move that will have sweeping affects on the future of liberty in the US.

U.S. employers added 169,000 new nonagricultural jobs in August, while the national unemployment rate declined to 4.9 percent from 5.0 percent, the Labor Department reported on September 2. Crucially the nation’s payrolls are expanding, finally, at rates of job growth similar to those 10 years ago. Yet for one group of workers in America’s labor force, there is little to cheer about.

The August jobless rate for America’s black teens (ages 16 to 19 years) was 35.8 percent, up by 2.7 percentage points from July. The over-all jobless rate for U.S. teenagers was 16.5 percent in August versus July’s 16.1 percent. Black teenagers are out of a job at more than twice the national rate for their age group. It is worth noting that the Labor Department’s August jobs data was collected before the disaster of Hurricane Katrina that affected African Americans most harshly.

Against that backdrop, employment for black teens living in urban areas across the nation is worsened by two factors. “Housing discrimination and inadequate transportation make it difficult for these youth to leave the central cities,” writes author and economist Michael D. Yates.

The under-funded U.S. public transit system is a result of over-investment in the private auto. Since skin color correlates to economic class in the U.S., it stands to reason that those who lack funds for a car would also be most reliant upon mass transit to travel to and from work.

Concerning shelter, the G.I. Bill for returning World War II veterans discriminated against blacks, adversely impacting them and their descendants. “The military, the Veterans’ Administration, the U.S. Employment Service, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) effectively denied African-American GIs access to their benefits and to the new educational, occupational, and residential opportunities,” writes author and scholar Karen Brodkin Sacks. As a result of this institutional racism, blacks’ equality has suffered. This blight on the nation continues in 2005.
counterpunch.org

There is an interesting stylized dance taking place between the White House and Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special Prosecutor in the CIA leak case.

For weeks, there have been rumors inside the Beltway that something big would be announced about the case during the last weeks of September. The silence and lack of substantial leaks were indications that a major turn of events would soon occur. Yesterday afternoon, the White House quickly swore in John G. Roberts as Chief Justice, just hours after his Senate confirmation. Rather than wait for the next morning and thus get two days of puff ball coverage by the media, the White House wanted to clear the calendar on Friday for a possible announcement by Fitzgerald. The White House, unsure of what might be coming from the prosecutor, floated the story that Bush would “definitely” name a replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor on Friday.
globalresearch.ca

Instead, Bush announced the appointment on Monday at 8am to quash the Stephanopoulos story.

Times reporter tried to cut earlier CIA leak deal
…Tate disputes Abrams’ account of that conversation. In a September 16, 2005, letter, Tate said he told Miller’s attorney more than a year ago that Libby’s waiver of confidentiality was “voluntary and not coerced.”

Tate said he believed Miller’s goal in refusing to accept that waiver was to protect other sources.

Abrams said: “She has other sources and was very concerned about the possibility of having to reveal those sources or going back to jail because of them.”

That appears to conflict with comments by attorney Robert Bennett, who also represents Miller in the case. Bennett said on Friday that “Judy is not protecting anybody else.”

England, appearing on NBC’s Dateline programme, said the pictures did not convey the full extent of the abuse that took place in the cell block.

“I know worse things were happening over there,” said the 22-year-old convict.

She said one night she heard blood-curdling screams coming from the block’s shower room, where non-military interrogators had taken an Arab detainee.

“They had the shower on to muffle it, but it wasn’t helping,” she recalled.

“They never screamed like that when we were humiliating. But this guy was like screaming bloody murder. I mean it still haunts me. I can still hear it just like it happened yesterday.”
aljazeera.net

The US intelligence apparatus has created it own terrorist organizations. And at the same time, it creates its own terrorist warnings concerning the terrorist organizations which it has itself created. In turn, it has developed a cohesive multibillion dollar counterterrorism program “to go after” these terrorist organizations.

Counterterrorism and war propaganda are intertwined. The propaganda apparatus feeds disinformation into the news chain. The terror warnings must appear to be “genuine”. The objective is to present the terror groups as “enemies of America.”

The underlying objective is to galvanize public opinion in support of America’s war agenda.

The “war on terrorism” requires a humanitarian mandate. The war on terrorism is presented as a “Just War”, which is to be fought on moral grounds “to redress a wrong suffered.”

The Just War theory defines “good” and “evil.” It concretely portrays and personifies the terrorist leaders as “evil individuals”.

Several prominent American intellectuals and antiwar activists, who stand firmly opposed to the Bush administration, are nonetheless supporters of the Just War theory: “We are against war in all its forms but we support the campaign against international terrorism.”

To reach its foreign policy objectives, the images of terrorism must remain vivid in the minds of the citizens, who are constantly reminded of the terrorist threat.

The propaganda campaign presents the portraits of the leaders behind the terror network. In other words, at the level of what constitutes an “advertising” campaign, “it gives a face to terror.” The “war on terrorism” rests on the creation of one or more evil bogeymen, the terror leaders, Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, et al, whose names and photos are presented ad nauseam in daily news reports.
globalresearch.ca