srael is deploying a terrifying new tactic against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip by letting loose deafening “sound bombs” that cause widespread fear, induce miscarriages and traumatise children.

The removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip opened the way for the military to use air force jets to create dozens of sonic booms by breaking the sound barrier at low altitude, sending shockwaves across the territory, often at night. Palestinians liken the sound to an earthquake or huge bomb. They describe the effect as being hit by a wall of air that is painful on the ears, sometimes causing nosebleeds and “leaving you shaking inside”.

The Palestinian health ministry says the sonic booms have led to miscarriages and heart problems. The United Nations has demanded an end to the tactic, saying it causes panic attacks in children. The shockwaves have also damaged buildings by cracking walls and smashing thousands of windows.
guardian.co.uk

Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, has forged an alliance with an unlikely new friend, the former footballing genius Diego Maradona. Interviewed on the Argentinian television show that Maradona presents, La Noche del 10 ” The Night of 10″ ­ President Castro praised his host for his plan to join an anti-US demonstration at a forthcoming summit. “We have struggled for various years against the United States,” said the Cuban leader. ” I’m happy you are going to be there.”

Maradona has interviewed a number of celebrities on his show, including Pele and Robbie Williams, but the interview with Mr Castro was like no other.
independent.co.uk

Anti-Bush Protesters Gather in Argentine Resort Ahead of Americas Summit

MAR DEL PLATA, Argentina (AP) – Shouting “Yankee, get out!” and singing protest songs, thousands opposed to George W. Bush held a massive rally at a basketball arena, two days before the U.S. president arrives at this seaside resort for the fourth Summit of the Americas.

After protesters in Buenos Aires set fire to a train station, Argentine Interior Minister Anibel Fernandez said the government was prepared to guarantee the summit’s security as more protesters – including jobless Argentines, teachers and labor unions – were expected to arrive later Wednesday.
Heavy security precautions were being taken in Mar del Plata, 230 miles (370 kilometers) south of Buenos Aires. More than 8,000 police and security forces were guarding the summit’s site, and surrounding streets were deserted.
“There are no weaknesses” in the summit’s security, Fernandez said.

On Tuesday, organizers of the so-called “People’s Summit” gave fiery anti-Bush speeches that echoed through a drab concrete stadium several miles (kilometers) from the luxury hotel where leaders of 34 Western Hemisphere nations will meet Friday and Saturday.

Most of the leftist protesters were young people, but also in the crowd was Argentine Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to his country’s military regime.

“We’ve had enough of Mr. Bush, who has committed crimes against humanity,” Perez told reporters on the sidelines of the rally. He called the U.S. president a “murderer” for his actions in Iraq and elsewhere.

“This is a chance for the real people to hold their own summit,” said Wayra Aru Blanco, a 33-year-old Bolivian Indian, beating a calfskin drum as brightly dressed South American Indian women played reed flutes.

In the run-up to the summit, violent protests broke out in the capital of Buenos Aires over poor commuter train service. Mobs set fire to 18 of the city’s dilapidated trains in a working class suburb, stoned and overturned police cruisers and battled with riot police who fired rubber bullets into the crowds.

NEW YORK – If Washington follows through on threats to slash aid to Mexico as punishment for its accession to the International Criminal Court (ICC), it risks further alienating key U.S. allies and drawing attention to its own increasingly shaky human rights record, say activists.
“There will be a price to be paid by the U.S. government in terms of its credibility,” Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Program, told IPS.

Mexico signed the Rome Statute of the ICC in September 2000, but did not ratify the treaty and formally deposit it with the United Nations until last week, on Oct. 28, making it the 100th nation to join the ICC.

Washington had warned Mexico that if it ratified the ICC and refused to sign an accord exempting U.S. nationals from the court’s jurisdiction, it would cut 11.5 million dollars in funding from aid programs for fighting drug trafficking, according to human rights groups. The amount is equal to almost 40 percent of the economic aid Mexico receives from the United States.

However, Foreign Relations Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez said last week that Mexico would not sign such an accord, and was willing to lose the aid rather than give the United States special status.
commondreams.org

There can be few chief executives in corporate America more uncomfortable at the moment than Lee Scott of Wal-Mart. Not that he should necessarily have our sympathy: his company, known unaffectionately as the Beast of Bentonville, after its corporate home, is the biggest single private employer in the United States. Its network of more than 3,500 discount retail stores has been lambasted repeatedly in recent years for its rock-bottom wages, which oblige thousands of its lower-end employees to resort to government subsistence, including food stamps, to make ends meet.

It has faced down critics for its reliance on overseas sweatshop labour, especially in China, to produce the goods with which it stocks its shelves. It has met community resistance to new store openings in many parts of the country because of its tendency to empty town centres of traditional family-owned businesses and foster suburban sprawl. It has been accused, in fact, of being the very emblem of everything that assails the modern American economy, as old-style industrial manufacturing jobs are outsourced overseas and are replaced with low-wage, low-security service-sector work.

All that, though, is only one of the multiple headaches confronting Mr Scott. His biggest problem is that he has been making energetic efforts to improve his company’s lousy reputation, only to have his efforts undermined by embarrassing new information unearthed about the company and by a spirited organising effort by churches, small businesses, unions, environmentalists and rich coastal liberals to stop the Wal-Martisation of America dead in its tracks.
independent.co.uk

Uneasy calm returned to Ethiopia’s capital on Thursday, a day after riot police fired guns to quell protests against Ethiopia’s disputed parliamentary elections. Police killed at least 23 people and wounded dozens more, hospital doctors and health workers said.

Doctors at five hospitals said the bodies of 23 people killed in the clashes were brought to emergency rooms and at least 150 people were treated for injuries, including a 7-year-old boy who was shot in the hip. Doctors refused to give their names for fear of reprisals.

Members of Ethiopia’s special forces, in armored personnel carriers, regular troops armed with sniper rifles and federal police patrolled the streets Thursday, the first day of calm after two days of protests.

Ethiopia’s information minister, Berhan Hailu, disputed the number of casualties, saying 11 civilians and one police officer were killed, and 54 officers and 28 civilians were injured.

Berhan said demonstrators burned several buses and destroyed four houses, but that calm was returning to the streets of the city of 3 million people later Wednesday. He said the government was ”sorry and sad” for the violence, but he blamed it on the main opposition party.

The killing of civilians was a political setback for Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, touted by the Bush administration as a progressive African leader and a key partner in the war on terror.
nytimes.com

…To date, the American Red Cross and the Justice Department are investigating some 500 fraud cases. On their list: the usual suspects of petty pickpockets and fraudulent insurance claims. But there is one glaring omission—the oil and gas industry. That industry is callously trying to use the storms as an excuse for relaxing vital environmental protections and to open up our vulnerable coastlines to drilling. But instead of being held accountable for conning the public— the industry has found an accomplice in our government.
minutemanmedia.org

…Trees that normally sag with hundreds of pounds of fruit at this time of year are largely barren, holding little more than a handful of olives, many no bigger than peas. Some trees have dried up and shriveled, their brittle leaves breaking in the wind. Others have been cut to stumps to preserve their sap in hopes they will regenerate.

The groves that have sustained this region for centuries and helped turn it into the richest source of olive oil in the world have been decimated by circumstances that few here thought possible. A record-breaking freeze last winter was followed by a drought that has been described as the worst to hit Spain in 60 years.
nytimes.com

DOD press briefing, November 1, 2005:

SEC. RUMSFELD: I guess — I’m not a doctor and I’m not the kind of a person who would be in a position to approve or disapprove. It seems to me, looking at it from this distance, is that the responsible people are the combatant commanders and the Army as the executive agent for detainees. They make — have expert medical people who make decisions of that type. And they’ve made a decision that they think it’s appropriate for them to provide nourishment to people who, for whatever reason, at various points in their detention decide they want to not provide normal nourishment to themselves. There are a number of things that one can glean from the way it’s being done. I don’t think there’s a serious risk of people — well, I shouldn’t say that, I’m not in a position to know that. But there are a number of people who go on a diet where they don’t eat for a period and then go off of it at some point, and then they rotate and other people do that. So it’s clearly a technique to try to get the attention of you folks, and they’re successful.
defenselink.mi

Every ‘decision’ made comes straight from Rumsfeld.

As Gitmo Hunger Strike Continues, Lawyers Step Up Fight for Access

…Last week, Julia Tarver, an attorney representing ten detainees at Guantánamo, obtained judicial permission to publicly release her clients’ statements. She said her clients who are currently hunger striking described the conditions under which they were force-fed as “torture.” They said their captors physically restrained them from head to toe and forcibly shoved large tubes up their noses and down into their stomachs without providing anesthesia or sedative. According to Tarver’s statement, the detainees said they vomited blood as a result of the force-feeding.

According to Tarver’s notes, in the presence of Guantánamo physicians, prison guards took tubes from one detainee and “with no sanitization whatsoever, reinserted it into the nose of a different detainee.When these tubes were reinserted, the detainees could see the blood and stomach bile from other detainees remaining on the tubes.”

The fact that they are denying UN reps access to the prisoners says it all.

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

by Jay Bookman

The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence.
The pieces just didn’t fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing.

In recent days, those missing pieces have finally begun to fall into place. As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions.

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the “American imperialists” that our enemies always claimed we were.

Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?

Because we won’t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.
informationclearinghouse.info

important article, with many links

The strategic decision by the United States to nuke Iran was probably made long ago. Tactics adjust to unpredictable events as they unfold.

There was such an event last week, when Iran’s president declared that Israel must be “wiped off” the map. The surprise was not the statement, which was an often-repeated quote by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, directed at a domestic student audience. What was surprising was both the timing (amid discussions about whether Iran should be allowed to enrich uranium) and the relatively low-key U.S. response. Tony Blair expressed “revulsion,” Chirac was “profoundly shocked,” the European Union in a joint statement “condemned [it] in the strongest terms.” Instead, Bush was quiet.

White House Spokesman Scott McClellan commented, “It underscores the concerns we have about Iran’s nuclear intentions,” and the usually vociferous U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton only said that Ahmadinejad’s remarks about Israel were “pernicious and unacceptable.” Those are uncharacteristically mild statements for this administration in the face of such a provocative statement by Iran against one of the U.S.’ closest allies. Why?

Because Iran’s intended underlying message to the U.S., which was ill-timed only in appearance, was: If you nuke us, the world will know that you did it because Iran supports the Palestinian cause.

…The real reason for nuking Iran, however, is none of the above. It was spelled out with surprising candor in the Pentagon draft document “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” [.pdf] as one of several possible reasons geographic combatant commanders may request presidential approval for use of nuclear weapons:

“To demonstrate U.S. intent and capability to use nuclear weapons to deter adversary use of WMD.”

Yes, you read it right: The U.S. is prepared to break a 60-year-old taboo on the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries – not because the survival of the country is at stake, not because the lives of many Americans or allies are at stake – just to demonstrate that it can do it.
antiwar.com

Iranian envoys sacked as hardliners’ influence grows

Five Iranian ambassadors have been sacked as the country’s hardliners tighten their grip on foreign policy following the election of the conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Iran’s ambassador to Britain, Seyed Mohammad Hossein Adeli, is among the casualties of the purge. A press spokesman for the Iranian embassy said: “The ambassador’s term has been terminated after one year of serving in London.”

Mr Adeli, an experienced hand who is close to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the unsuccessful candidate in the Iranian presidential election, is returning to Tehran. The other envoys recalled to Tehran are the ambassadors to Paris, Geneva, Berlin and Kuala Lumpur.

Western diplomats and analysts in Tehran said the decision had been brewing for some time, even though it was announced days after the new Iranian president sent shock waves across the world by declaring that Israel should be “wiped off the map”. The sacking of the five envoys “is of a piece with the more strident hardline foreign policy”, said a Western diplomat.

Even before the election in June, the hardliners in Mr Ahmadinejad’s camp had been critical of the government’s handling of the nuclear negotiations with the EU. Following Mr Ahmadinejad’s surprise victory, Iran caused the talks to break down by announcing the resumption of uranium conversion, a possible first step towards building a nuclear weapon.
independent.co.uk

Bashing Syria

It’s happening all over again. This time Syria has received the kiss of the White House don just as laid-out in the 1996 neo-con rule book “Clean Break”, conceived on the bidding of none other than the Israel far-right’s chief thug Benjamin Netanyahu.

The fact that the cabal is religiously sticking to its agenda is predictable but it’s, surely, shocking that world leaders seem bent on bowing to the Bush bullies like a bunch of sycophantic schoolboys even as the Italian premier Berlusconi is saying his mea culpas over Iraq.

…Since when has the UN been involved with investigating the demise of individuals, even ones as beloved as Hariri?

So here was a country which does not have weapons of mass destruction, was not threatening or occupying its neighbors, had cooperated with Bush’s war on terror and which has long been asking to return to the peace table with Israel offering peace in exchange for occupied Syrian territory including the strategically important Golan Heights. Ah! Here we may be onto something.

Why would the Syrian government on the brink of quitting Lebanon and in the knowledge that it was being squeezed by the White House and Downing Street itching for a fight murder a Lebanese out-of-power politician and with such dramatic fanfare entailing the use of elaborate planning and sophisticated equipment?