Iran’s hard-line president called for the Bush administration to be tried on war crimes charges related to Iraq and denounced the West for its stance on Iran’s controversial nuclear programme, state-run television reported today.

“You, who have used nuclear weapons against innocent people, who have used uranium ordnance in Iraq should be tried as war criminals in courts,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in an apparent reference to the US.

Ahmadinejad didn’t elaborate, but he was apparently referring to the US military’s use of artillery shells packed with depleted uranium, which is far less radioactive than natural uranium and is left over from the process of enriching uranium for use as nuclear fuel.

Since the 2003 start of the Iraq war, US forces have reportedly fired at least 120 tons of shells packed with depleted uranium, which is an extremely dense material used by the US and British militaries for tank armour and armour-piercing weapons. Once fired, the shells melt, vaporise and turn to dust.

“Who in the world are you to accuse Iran of suspicious nuclear armed activity?” asked the Iranian president during a nationally televised ceremony marking the 36th anniversary of the establishment of the volunteer Basij paramilitary force.
breakingnews.ie

BRASÍLIA – With his country sitting on top of some of the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, and with his constant talk of socialist revolution and criticism of the Bush administration, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has acquired a certain notoriety in Washington and with some of his Latin American neighbors.

But he has seldom sent eyebrows so high as when he recently announced plans to start a nuclear energy program with the help of Brazil and Argentina. Coupled with his talk of a spending binge on weapons like rifles, ships and combat aircraft, and his support of Iran’s right to develop a nuclear program, his moves have set off a debate about his motives.

Mr. Chávez and his government dismiss the concerns, saying the world should worry less about what is happening in Caracas than in Washington.

“It cannot be that the countries that have developed nuclear energy prohibit those of the third world from developing it,” Mr. Chávez argued recently. “We are not the ones developing atomic bombs, it’s others who do that,” he added in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper.
nytimes.com

…Williams’ link to the entertainment world was cemented with the biographical movie shown on TV and at film festivals, including Robert Redford’s Sundance. Several of those involved in “Redemption,” including Foxx and co-star Lynn Whitfield, have become backers.

“If Stan Tookie Williams had been born in Connecticut in the same type of situation, and was a white man, he would have been running a company,” Foxx told the AP when the film aired last year on FX. “But, born a black man who has the capability of having brute strength and the capability of being smart in the ways of the world, he’s going to get into what he gets into.”

Williams’ support is particularly deep among blacks but extends much further, said Farrell. Working with Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Farrell gathered signatures from more than 100 religious leaders, lawmakers and others of prominence for a clemency request that went to the governor Monday. Among those whose names are attached: NAACP Chairman Julian Bond; U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa; Harry Belafonte; Bonnie Raitt and Russell Crowe.
washingtonpost.com

SAN FRANCISCO radio listeners now have a new source for information about the Middle East. By tuning their dials to KPOO public radio station 89.5 FM on Thursdays at 2 p.m., listeners can hear Palestinian-Americans Jess Ghannam and Jamal Dajani deliver up-to-date Middle East news and lively interviews with a wide variety of guests.

The July 28 debut of their one-hour program, “Arab Talk with Jess and Jamal,” featured Washington Report staff photographer (and husband of this reporter) Phil Pasquini as their first interviewee.

Dajani began by questioning Pasquini—a veteran Middle East traveler for 20 years—about his article “Farrek Ta’sud” (divide and conquer), on his experiences of crossing through Israel’s apartheid wall and numerous checkpoints during a June visit to the occupied Palestinian territories, including Jerusalem.

“First, I was overwhelmed by the length, height and dynamics of the wall and how it impacted people’s lives,” Pasquini observed. “It was apparent that if people could become divided they could become conquered and pushed out of the scene.”

Jerusalem-born Dajani, a producer at San Francisco’s LinkTV who travels regularly to the area, shared his guest’s horror at seeing the enormous wall on what used to be a beautiful landscape.

Deploring the wall’s disastrous effect on Palestinians’ day-to-day lives, Pasquini went on to describe the dire situation of his elderly friends in Bethlehem, who as residents of the occupied West Bank cannot travel to Jerusalem for any reason—including medical treatment—and subsequently have trouble obtaining necessary medication.

He also recounted crossing the Kalandia checkpoint with a student friend to visit Birzeit University, and the frustrating and humiliating harassment they experienced from Israeli soldiers.

Ghannam, chief of medical psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, and a frequent traveler to Gaza, also discussed the ways Palestinians’ lives have been disrupted, particularly in the village of Qalqilya, which is completely enclosed by the wall.
wrmea.com

The former Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, has called for immediate action against human rights abuses.

Such abuses are as bad today as they were under Saddam Hussein, Mr Allawi told Britain’s Observer newspaper.

Militias are operating within the Shia-led government, torturing and killing in secret bunkers, he said.

His comments come two weeks after 170 detainees were found at an interior ministry centre, some allegedly suffering from abuse and starvation.

Mr Allawi – who was displaced earlier this year by Shia factions – said the militias had infiltrated the police, and warned that their influence could spread throughout the government.
bbc.co.uk

Shiite Urges U.S. to Give Iraqis Leeway In Rebel Fight
BAGHDAD — The leader of Iraq’s most powerful political party has called on the United States to let Iraqi fighters take a more aggressive role against insurgents, saying his country will only be able to defeat the insurgency when the United States lets Iraqis get tough.

“The more freedom given to Iraqis, the more chance for further progress there would be, particularly in fighting terror,” said Abdul Aziz Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shiite Muslim religious party that leads the transitional government and whose armed wing is the most feared of Iraq’s many factional forces.

Instead, Hakim asserted in a rare interview late last week, the United States is tying Iraq’s hands in the fight against insurgents. One of Iraq’s “biggest problems is the mistaken or wrong policies practiced by the Americans,” he said.

See the monsters they create. If only the Americans weren’t such a bunch of softy humanitarian types…

When Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales announced last week that Jose Padilla would be transferred to the federal justice system from military detention, he said almost nothing about the standards the administration used in deciding whether to charge terrorism suspects like Mr. Padilla with crimes or to hold them in military facilities as enemy combatants.

“We take each individual, each case, case by case,” Mr. Gonzales said.

The upshot of that approach, underscored by the decision in Mr. Padilla’s case, is that no one outside the administration knows just how the determination is made whether to handle a terror suspect as an enemy combatant or as a common criminal, to hold him indefinitely without charges in a military facility or to charge him in court.

Indeed, citing the need to combat terrorism, the administration has argued, with varying degrees of success, that judges should have essentially no role in reviewing its decisions. The change in Mr. Padilla’s status, just days before the government’s legal papers were due in his appeal to the Supreme Court, suggested to many legal observers that the administration wanted to keep the court out of the case.
nytimes.com

Pentagon Expanding Its Domestic Surveillance Activity

The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world.

The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts — including protecting military facilities from attack — to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.

The Pentagon has pushed legislation on Capitol Hill that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies, as long as the data is deemed to be related to foreign intelligence. Backers say the measure is needed to strengthen investigations into terrorism or weapons of mass destruction.

There are two torture debates going on in America today: One is about fantasy, and the other is about reality.

For viewers of TV shows such as “Commander in Chief” and “24,” the question is about ticking bombs. To find the ticking bomb, should a conscientious public servant toss the rulebook out the window and torture the terrorist who knows where the lethal device is? Many people think the answer is yes: Supreme emergencies demand exceptions to even the best rules. Others answer no: A law is a law, and a moral absolute is a moral absolute. Period. Still others try to split the difference: We won’t change the rule, but we will cross our fingers and hope that Jack Bauer, the daring counterterrorism agent on “24,” will break it. Then we will figure out whether to punish Bauer, give him a medal, or both. Finally, some insist that since torture doesn’t work — that it doesn’t actually unearth vital information — the whole hypothetical rests on a false premise. Respectable arguments can be made on all sides of this debate.

Real intelligence gathering is not a made-for-TV melodrama. It consists of acquiring countless bits of information and piecing together a mosaic. So the most urgent question has nothing to do with torture and ticking bombs. It has to do with brutal tactics that fall short — but not far short — of torture employed on a fishing expedition for morsels of information that might prove useful but usually don’t, according to people who have worked in military intelligence. After Time magazine revealed the harsh methods used at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility to interrogate Mohamed Qatani, the so-called “20th hijacker,” the Pentagon replied with a memo describing the “valuable intelligence information” he had revealed. Most of it had to do with Qatani’s own past and his role in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Other parts concerned al Qaeda’s modus operandi. But, conspicuously, the Pentagon has never claimed that anything Qatani revealed helped it prevent terrorist attacks, imminent or otherwise.

The real torture debate, therefore, isn’t about whether to throw out the rulebook in the exceptional emergencies. Rather, it’s about what the rulebook says about the ordinary interrogation — about whether you can shoot up Qatani with saline solution to make him urinate on himself, or threaten him with dogs in order to find out whether he ever met Osama bin Laden. And the trouble is that this second debate is so wrapped up in legalisms, jargon and half-truths that it is truly hard to unravel.
washingtonpost.com

“We don’t know the course of our own struggle will take [sic], or the sacrifices that might lie ahead.”
GW Bush, November 11, 2005.

“Akers said his son is burned on more than 75 percent of his body. . . . ‘We’ve been talking to the doctors in Germany. It’s just a case of if he can get through the infection,’ Don Akers said. ‘The biggest part of the burn is his face. The odds are not in his favor’. “
Cadillac News, November 24, 2005.

On November 24 the number of US dead in Iraq for the month reached 75. In October, 96 Americans were killed. The corpse total is over 2100. More than 7,000 of the 15,804 wounded (as at November 24) have lost limbs or minds or will bear hideous disfigurement to their graves.

What for? Why have they died or been maimed? What righteous cause has made it imperative for thousands of young Americans to have their lives cut short or be horribly mutilated?
counterpunch.com

After Blair’s threat to jail any editor who reports the Bomb Al-Jazeera memo, we thought there would be an outcry. Who would stand up for press freedom, or at least the freedom not to be bombed to buggery?

One man has come out fighting. Boris Johnson:

“The Attorney General’s ban is ridiculous, untenable, and redolent of guilt. I do not like people to break the Official Secrets Act, and, as it happens, I would not object to the continued prosecution of those who are alleged to have broken it. But we now have allegations of such severity, against the US President and his motives, that we need to clear them up.
If someone passes me the document within the next few days I will be very happy to publish it in The Spectator, and risk a jail sentence. The public need to judge for themselves. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If we suppress the truth, we forget what we are fighting for, and in an important respect we become as sick and as bad as our enemies.”
blairwatch.co.uk

11/25/05 “Lew Rockwell” — — The US Air Force’s senior officer, Gen. John Jumper, stated US warplanes would remain in Iraq to fight resistance forces and protect the American-installed regime “more or less indefinitely.”

Gen. Jumper let the cat out of the bag. While President George Bush hints at eventual troop withdrawals, the Pentagon is busy building four major, permanent air bases in Iraq that will require heavy infantry protection.

Jumper’s revelation confirms what this column has long said: the Pentagon plans to copy Imperial Britain’s method of ruling oil-rich Iraq. In the 1920’s, the British cobbled together Iraq from three disparate Ottoman provinces to control newly-found oil fields in Kurdistan and along the Iranian border. The Sunni heartland in the middle was included to link these two oil regions.
informationclearinghouse.info