DETROIT — Once trumpeted as one of the Justice Department’s significant triumphs against terrorism, the case targeting the so-called “Detroit sleeper cell” began less than a week after the attack on the World Trade Center. It was only after a jury convicted two men of supporting terrorism that the flimsiness of the government’s case became clear.

As hidden evidence spilled out and the Justice Department abandoned the effort, federal investigators began to wonder whether the true conspiracy in the case was perpetrated by the prosecution.

Now a federal grand jury in Detroit is investigating whether the lead prosecutor, Richard Convertino, or anyone else should be indicted for unfairly tipping the scales.

It is a highly unusual case. No charges have been brought and many details remain secret, but information in public documents and testimony in U.S. District Court in Detroit suggest an effort by federal prosecutors and important witnesses to mislead defense lawyers and deceive the jury. U.S. District Judge Gerald E. Rosen said the government acted “outside the Constitution.”
washingtonpost.com

…In September 2002, nearly a year after an American-led coalition deposed the Taliban, the United States launched what would become an aggressive effort to build or refurbish as many as 1,000 schools and clinics by the end of 2004, documents show. However, design flaws and construction errors caused the initiative to fall far short.

By September 2004, congressional figures show that the effort’s centerpiece — a $73 million U.S. Agency for International Development program — had produced only 100 finished projects, most of them refurbishments of existing buildings. As of the beginning of this month, only about 40 more had been finished and turned over to the Afghan government.

Internal documents and more than 100 interviews in Washington and Kabul revealed a chain of mistakes and misjudgments: The U.S. effort was poorly conceived in a rush to show results before the Afghan presidential election in late 2004. The drive to construct earthquake-resistant, American-quality buildings in rustic villages led to culture clashes, delays and what a USAID official called “extraordinary costs.” Afghans complained that the initial design for roofs made them too heavy to build in rural areas without a crane, and the corrected design made them too light to bear Afghan snows. Local workmen unfamiliar with U.S. construction methods sometimes produced shoddy work.

At the outset, USAID and its primary contractor, New Jersey-based Louis Berger Group Inc., failed to provide adequate oversight, documents state. Federal audits show that USAID officials in Kabul were unable to “identify the location of many Kabul-directed projects in the field.” Officials at contracting companies and nonprofit groups complain that they were directed to build at sites that turned out to be sheer mountain slopes, a dry riverbed and even a graveyard.

Employees of a Maryland-based nonprofit relief agency hired to monitor construction quality demanded a $50,000 payoff from Afghan builders — a scene captured in a clandestine videotape obtained by The Washington Post.
washingtonpost.com

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — The U.S. government will spend $500 million over five years on an expanded program to secure a vast new front in its global war on terrorism: the Sahara Desert.
Critics say the region is not a terrorist zone as some senior U.S. military officers assert. They add that heavy-handed military and financial support that reinforces authoritarian regimes in North and West Africa could fuel radicalism where it scarcely exists.

The Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) was begun in June to provide military expertise, equipment and development aid to nine Saharan countries where lawless swaths of desert are considered fertile ground for militant Muslim groups involved in smuggling and combat training.

“It’s the Wild West all over again,” said Maj. Holly Silkman, a public affairs officer at U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, which presides over U.S. security and peacekeeping operations in Europe, former Soviet bloc countries and most of Africa.
washingtontimes.com

Yeah, a whole bunch of ‘Indians’ are going to get killed.

China Wages Classroom Struggle to Win Friends in Africa
…The classes are one element in a campaign by Beijing to win friends around the world and pry developing nations out of the United States’ sphere of influence. Africa, with its immense oil and mineral wealth and numerous United Nations votes, lies at the heart of that effort.

…”Soft power is said to be coercive, persuading people to do what you’d like them to do, as opposed to hard power, which means forcing them to do what you want to do,” said Qin Yaqing, vice president of the Foreign Affairs University, a state-run school that trains China’s own diplomats and works with foreign trainees. “In traditional Chinese philosophy we have something similar to this, and it is called moral attraction.”

…Behind the daily reports of suicide bombings and attacks on coalition forces is a far more shadowy struggle, one that involves tortured prisoners huddled in dungeons, death-squad victims with their hands tied behind their backs, often mutilated with knives and electric drills, and distraught families searching for relations who have been “disappeared”.
independent.co.uk

FLASHBACK JAN. 10,2005: Is the U.S. Organizing Salvador-Style Death Squads in Iraq?
As violence in Iraq continues into 2005, the U.S. government is considering setting up assassination squads to target leaders of the Iraqi resistance. Newsweek Magazine is reporting that the Pentagon is drawing up possible proposals to send special forces teams to advise, support and train hand-picked Iraqi squads to target Sunni rebels.
Within the Pentagon, the tactic is named “The Salvador option” after the strategy that was secretly employed by Ronald Reagan’s administration to combat the guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. The U.S.-backed death squads hunted down and assassinated rebel leaders and their supporters.

The current US ambassador in Iraq is John Negroponte. As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the Contras who targeted civilians in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras.

The Newsweek report says the Iraqi squads would most likely be made up of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen and could even operate across the Syrian border. It is also still unclear whether Pentagon or the CIA would take responsibility for the squads.

…’He came here when he needed votes,’ Peggy Logue tells us as the family prepares to go to Lima Company’s homecoming to be reunited with their son, Mike. ‘When the marines were killed, there was no sign of him and if he should come now I’d be sickened. Does he think we give up our young so cheaply? He wasn’t here for the death and the pain, why should he be here for the glory?’

Not that there was ever much chance of Bush appearing at the homecoming. He doesn’t do those either. Nor does this Commander-in-Chief, unlike many of his predecessors, greet the flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers that traditionally arrive back at Dover air force base. In fact, for the war dead from Iraq he tried to impose a total news blackout, banning the release of pictures taken by the military’s own photographers.
observor.guardian.co.uk

Thrill of the Kill: The Other Tragedy in Iraq
The Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright was embedded with the first marines to go into Iraq, hard men who punched the skies with their fists when American helicopter gunships flew overhead, shouting: “Get some!”

In Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War, Wright vividly describes the confusion and raw brutality of executing a military strategy in a civilian landscape.

In one story, after a bloody expedition through an Iraqi town, a marine who was excited at the death and mayhem pants: “I was just thinking one thing when we drove into that ambush. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I felt like I was living it when I seen the flames coming out of windows, the blown-up car in the street, guys crawling around shooting at us. It was f—ing cool.”

Fisk: The Betrayed Mothers of America

Across the plains of Kansas, destroyed, radioactive Abrams tanks, perched on railroad flatcars, rolled towards an uncertain future. Only one thing was certain. They would be radioactive forever. This would be their everlasting death mask. The Pentagon deceptively calls it “depleted uranium.”

The Abrams tanks are constructed with a layer of radioactive uranium metal plates. The big tanks fire a giant uranium dart at 2,100 mph, much faster than an F-16 fighter aircraft, mach III to airplane pilots and very, very fast to the rest of us.

American taxpayers paid to ship the tanks to Iraq and to return them for disposal or re-building in the United States. The tanks are 12 feet wide and weigh a stout 70 tons, or 140,000 pounds.

The enduring vigorous stupidity of the U.S. military pretends that radiation is one of those things that if you can’t see it, it can’t hurt you. They are thoroughly delusional, of course. A National Academy of Sciences report released June 30, 2005, finds that there is no safe level of radiation. Any radiation is bad.

From America to Iraq and back, these giant radioactive hulks can only sicken and kill Americans. On top of the sheer, unrelenting stupidity of playing with radiation with unsuspecting soldiers, now the neo-con government is involving everyday Americans in their radiation madness.

The Pentagon can’t even follow simple radiation hazard mitigation instructions. Their own rules and regulations have the force of law throughout the world. Yet they are ignored in the United States.
sfbayview.com

We must be willing to face the fact that the presence of US combat troops is itself a major inspiration to the forces attacking our troops. Moreover, we must be willing to acknowledge that the forces attacking our troops are able to recruit suicide attackers because suicide attacks are largely motivated by revenge for the loss of loved ones. And Iraqis have lost so many loved ones as a result of America’s two wars against Iraq.

In 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said on CBS that the lives of 500,000 children dead from sanctions were “worth the price” of containing Saddam Hussein. When pressed to defend this reprehensible position she went on to explain that she did not want US Troops to have to fight the Gulf War again. Nor did I. But what happened? We fought a second gulf war. And now over 2,000 American soldiers lie dead. And I expect the voices of concern for Iraqi civilian casualties, whose deaths the Pentagon likes to brush aside as “collateral damage” are too few, indeed. A report from Johns Hopkins suggests that over 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, most of them violent deaths and most as “collateral damage” from US forces. The accuracy of the 100,000 can and should be debated. Yet our media, while quick to cover attacks on civilians by insurgent forces in Iraq, have given us a blackout on Iraqi civilian deaths at the hands of US combat forces.

Yet let us remember that the United States and its allies imposed a severe policy of sanctions on the people of Iraq from 1990 to 2003. UNICEF and World Health Organization studies based on infant mortality studies showed a 500,000 increase in mortality of Iraqi children under 5 over trends that existed before sanctions. From this, it was widely assumed that over 1 million Iraqi deaths for all age groups could be attributed to sanctions between 1990 and 1998. And not only were there 5 more years of sanctions before the invasion, but the war since the invasion caused most aid groups to leave Iraq. So for areas not touched by reconstruction efforts, the humanitarian situation has deteriorated further. How many more Iraqi lives have been lost through hunger and deprivation since the occupation?

And what kind of an occupier have we been? We have all seen the photos of victims of US torture in Abu Ghraib prison. That’s where Saddam used to send his political enemies to be tortured, and now many Iraqis quietly, cautiously ask: “So what has changed?”

A recent video documentary confirms that US forces used white phosphorous against civilian neighborhoods in the US attack on Fallujah. Civilians and insurgents were burned alive by these weapons. We also now know that US forces have used MK77, a napalm-like incendiary weapon, even though napalm has been outlawed by the United Nations.
informationclearinghouse.info

CAIRO, Egypt – Shiite and Kurdish delegates stormed out of an Iraqi reconciliation conference Saturday, infuriated by a speaker who branded them as U.S. sellouts, but they were persuaded to return after an apology.
news.yahoo.com

…On October 16, for example, a group of adults and children gathered around a burned Humvee on the edge of Ramadi. There was a crater in the road, left by a bomb that had killed five US soldiers and two Iraqi soldiers the previous day. Some of the children were playing hide and seek, and others laughing while pelting the vehicle with stones, when a US F-15 fighter jet fired on the crowd. The US military said subsequently it had killed 70 insurgents in air strikes, and knew of no civilian deaths.

Among the “insurgents” killed were six-year-old Muhammad Salih Ali, who was buried in a plastic bag after relatives collected what they believed to be parts of his body; four-year-old Saad Ahmed Fuad; and his eight-year-old sister, Haifa, who had to be buried without one of her legs as her family were unable to find it.

US forces increasingly use air strikes to reduce their own casualties. They also work with Iraqi forces on search-and-destroy missions to retaliate after a successful attack on their troops, or to intimidate the population ahead of a US-choreographed political process.

Most Iraqis are indifferent to the political timetable imposed by the occupiers – from the nominal handover of sovereignty to the bizarre three months of sectarian and ethnic wrangling about the interim government and the declaration of a “yes” vote on the draft constitution by Condoleezza Rice within hours of the ballot boxes closing. They think the whole process is intended to divert their attention from the main issues: the occupation, corruption, pillaging of Iraq’s resources, and the interim government’s failure on human rights.
informationclearinghouse.info

It is a secularist article of faith to maintain that religion will soon be eliminated as a by-product of “progress”. Since there is no reason to suppose that life has some overarching meaning, the notion of a benevolent God who intervenes in history on our behalf is basically nonsense and should be abandoned.

Atheists complain that religion proposes unprovable accounts of life and death. But this is uninteresting. Death is obviously a fact, but how we make sense of that fact is not the sort of question that could be subject to “proof” any more than a painting could be judged “wrong”. Insights into human nature derived from the plays of Shakespeare may be equally “unprovable”, but that doesn’t mean they’re not meaningful, useful or true. The atheist’s first mistake, then, like the fundamentalists they often object to, is that they completely miss the point. Faith has nothing to do with certainty: it is not a set of closed answers, but rather a series of open questions with which to engage.

As it happens, I acknowledge the possibility that the universe may be meaningless and human life pointless. But this leads me to draw quite the opposite conclusion regarding religion. Rather than rejecting it – on the basis that it must be manifestly untrue for claiming that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, life does in fact have a meaning and a purpose after all – I recognise that life’s potential for meaninglessness requires us to give it a meaning it would not otherwise have. This is the function of religion. Indeed, even at a mundane everyday level, everything we do is done for a supposed reason, and fits into a story about what we are doing and why we are doing it. In short, we cannot just “do” or “be”, like sheep wandering aimlessly across a field with no sense of where they are going or why. To be self-aware is to be intentional, it is to attribute significance to our actions; and that implies explanation, the notion of a reason or a purpose to account for the experience of that awareness. The alternative is nihilism. If we truly believed that life was meaningless, we would have no reason to get up in the morning – ultimately, the most rational thing to do would be to jump over the edge of a cliff. In other words, religion is our way of making sense out of nonsense, necessary precisely because life, in and of itself, may well be meaningless. To be religious is simply our way of expressing what it means to be human; we could no more cease being religious than cease being artistic or political.

The second mistake secularists make is that they fail to acknowledge the foundational assumptions – “dogmas” by any other name – underpinning their own worldview. As John Gray has argued in Heresies, many secular ideologies, such as Marxism and liberal humanism, are essentially theological narratives in structure and function, though arguably less coherent. Marxist notions of historical inevitability, or the assumption that democracy is a universal norm, are just forms of Christian soteriology dressed in secular clothing. When it comes to ethics, secularists are forced to assert that we behave morally and responsibly because it is “human nature” to do so. But what do they mean by human nature? This abstract notion is no different from a religious absolute, and performs exactly the same role in the sentences in which it is used as “God” does in the sentences in which He features.

Secularism has a more worrying implication, however. Without religion’s insight that human beings are essentially flawed, we lose all checks on our hubristic pride, and risk making a false god of our own scientific genius, even though there is no evidence to support the belief that society advances in tandem with science. While I don’t deny the reality of religiously motivated violence, the fact is that for much of the last century, atheist regimes pursuing enlightenment ideals inflicted massive suffering on their own people. Perhaps we’d actually be better off if we were all a bit more, rather than less, religious.
guardian.co.uk

This article highlights the diseased nature of Western discourse, under the sway of a religious tradition that assumes human nature to be evil and fallen and dependent on redemption from a supernatural entity, catapulting violently to the polar opposite ‘humanistic’ idea that humanity is all powerful. O yeah, and that human existence is meaningless so hey, anything goes.

This article defines the word ‘essentialism.’ These cranky Western constructs are universalized as ‘human’ ideas. There are many humans who reject them utterly.