12/08/05 “ICH” — — On December 10th the world celebrates the 57th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet our government is ignoring the most terrible violations of these rights in the killing and enslavement of the people of Darfur, Sudan.

Last year the United States branded the Janjaweed killings in Darfur as genocide.

This year the Congress eliminated all of the $59 million in support for the African Union peacekeepers from the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, giving the appearance of complicity in genocide.

The United States encouraged the peace settlement between Khartoum and the southern Juba government of divided Sudan that ended the civil war. Why then are we not actively supporting the peace effort in Darfur?

The U.S. Government appears to be changing its policy toward Sudan. The U.S.-controlled World Bank is supplying $20 million in emergency aid to the Juba government in southern Sudan, while the State Department has allowed the genocidal Khartoum government to hire a lobbyist in Washington!

Since 1999 China has invested $3 billion to build the oil pipeline that connects the oil fields of southern Sudan with the Red Sea port in the north. Sudan is estimated to have 563 million barrels of reserves. Is this the reason we are courting the Khartoum government at the expense of millions of refugees from the Darfur region?
informationclearinghouse.info

WASHINGTON – White House officials are telling associates they expect Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to quit early next year, once a new government is formed in Iraq, sources said yesterday.
Rumsfeld’s deputy, Gordon England, is the inside contender to replace him, but there’s also speculation that Sen. Joe Lieberman – a Democrat who ran against Bush-Cheney in the 2000 election – might become top guy at the Pentagon.

That’s not as farfetched as it might first appear.

The Daily News has learned that the White House considered Lieberman for the UN ambassador’s job last year before giving the post to John Bolton, a Bush adviser said.
nydailynews.com

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 (UPI) — U.S. federal agents may retry or seek to deport to the Middle East a former Florida professor who was acquitted on terrorism charges.

A Tampa, Fla., jury on Tuesday acquitted Sami al-Arian on some of the criminal counts and remained deadlocked on others. If he is retried, it could be on all or some of these counts, reports The New York Times.

If he is not retried, law enforcement officials, still stunned by the acquittal, told the newspaper they may bring separate immigration charges leading to his deportation.

The trail lasted five months but the jury could not reach any guilty verdicts against Arian or three co-defendants on accusations that they ran a North American front for Palestinian terrorists. Arian’s vocal support for militant Palestinian causes had put him under U.S. surveillance since the early 1990’s. Muslims in Florida and around the country celebrated the verdicts.
upi.com

Seems like those Muslims care more about the rule of law than the average American.

12/08/05 “Salon.com” — — Condoleezza Rice’s contradictory, misleading and outright false statements about the US and torture have taken America’s moral standing – and her own – to new depths. The metamorphosis of Condoleezza Rice from the chrysalis of the protégé into the butterfly of the State Department has not been a natural evolution but has demanded self-discipline. She has burnished an image of the ultimate loyalist, yet betrayed her mentor, George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor Brent Scowcroft. She is the team player, yet carefully inserted knives in the back of her predecessor, Colin Powell, climbing up them like a ladder of success. She is the person most trusted on foreign policy by the president, yet was an enabler for Vice President Cheney and the neoconservatives. Now her public relations team at the State Department depicts her as a restorer of realism, builder of alliances and maker of peace.
informationclearinghouse.info

America’s ‘moral standing’ huh? This is as ridiculous as applauding the UK’s ‘principled stance’ against torture. Morals and principles have eluded the West for centuries now.

No torture, please, we’re British!

12/08/05 “ICH” — — “(I)t will take much more than the death of a few thousand soldiers and the addition of a few hundred billion to the U.S. government debt (200B adds 2.5% to America’s debt load) to make them walk away from access to the hundreds of trillions of dollars, at current prices, worth of hydrocarbons that the region will extract over the next 50 years. (likely thousands of trillions at future prices)

Their financial if not moral calculus becomes even more understandable when you consider that even this amount is literally tiny when you compare it to the economic multiplier effect that having oil and gas allows to the industrialized world. The money multiplier is nothing to it. Consider. By some calculations every barrel of oil carries the equivalent of 23,200 man-hours of work in the physics sense of the term. Oil and natural gas are like air, water or soil, in that they are easy to take for granted until you lack them. (1) . . . Jeff Berg, Canadian political and peak oil analyst.

Using this thought provoking analysis for George’s motivations, it is easy to see why George relegated Afghanistan to second place in “The War on Terror”. Raising poppies for illegal heroin production, as profitable as it may be, is no match for the long-term profitability of Middle Eastern Oil. So, while we are counting bodies in the thousands, George, Dick and Donald may be preparing for body bags in the tens of thousands and may be in the process of reducing the Iraqi ownership of this oil using genocide. With fortunes this size at stake, it is no wonder the Iraqis needed a “good dose of democracy”. It is no wonder Iran and Syria are suddenly found to be in the sights of our “democratic” leader. It is no wonder George doesn’t appear to feel much remorse over the loss of a relatively small number of American soldiers nor pangs of guilt in asking Congress for relatively modest sums to maintain his war machine – and pay off campaign debts.

The reader may well ask, “Where will the military come up with the manpower necessary to maintain and/or supplement our present military force since recruitment is down to perilous levels for even the Pentagon’s present comparatively modest troop requirements – to say nothing of expanding or prolonging our manpower requirements? Of course the obvious answer is another military draft. However, that avenue is not without its perils to the Administration if one considers the rebellion of the American people toward the draft during Viet Nam and their actually having stopped the Viet Nam War partly because of the draft. Today, there is a vast difference in the American environment. Today, thanks to George’s war effort and its hysteria, America has set in place an atmosphere of “security” or suppression of freedom that was unknown during Viet Nam. George has now set in motion a precedent for suppressing dissent unparalleled in our American history.

Another expanding source of manpower might be the use of mercenaries – even considering their cost. If money is no object and monies spent on war are to be considered a long-term investment, then American and third world mercenaries present a virtually limitless supply of fighting personnel.

It has been calculated that our present American economic life style involves importing 6.36 million barrels of oil per day at a cost to our GNP of $426 million dollars per day – calculated on $67 per barrel oil. If oil goes to $100 per barrel, soldiers’ lives become even cheaper. We see how cheap life becomes if we consider:

”Its (Iraq’s) oil reserves were equal to those of Saudi Arabia; its reconstruction was estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars to American firms; while its strategic position made it an ideal place from which to project U.S. military power to the oil-rich Gulf and to a vast region beyond”.( 2)

This is the view that drove the Bush Administration to “retaliate” against Iraq for its non-existent participation in the 9/11 attacks on the US. However, it is unlikely that this is the view that allowed the Pentagon to send our troops into Iraq without body armor or proper vehicle armor. This unpreparedness of our troops for battle points to a much deeper weakness (or sickness) within our country’s defense establishment. One wonders if even corruption is sufficiently comprehensive to describe what should surely be considered a national disgrace, a national tragedy and a war crime. One wonders if even “politics” is a sufficiently offensive word to describe these “oversights”. If “stupidity” is the proper descriptive for what we have seen, we Americans are in even worse trouble than we thought.
informationclearinghouse.info

7 December 2005 — The Iraqi government imposed emergency legislation in two predominantly Sunni Muslim provinces for the 30 days and closed the borders with Syria until further notice.
rferl.org

Art, Truth, and Politics

…The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what’s called the ‘international community’. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally – a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they’re interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. ‘We don’t do body counts,’ said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. ‘A grateful child,’ said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. ‘When do I get my arms back?’ he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn’t holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you’re making a sincere speech on television.
informationclearinghouse.info

I want to take a moment to remind you of where we have come from.

For the first three million years of human history, we lived according to circumstance. Our lives were ruled by the happenstances of ecology. We existed, as all animals do, in fear of hunger, predation, weather and disease.

For the following few thousand years, after we had grasped the rudiments of agriculture and crop storage, we enjoyed greater food security, and soon destroyed most of our non-human predators. But our lives were ruled by the sword, the axe and the spear. The primary struggle was for land. We needed it not just to grow our crops but also to provide our sources of energy – grazing for our horses and bullocks, wood for our fires.

Then we discovered fossil fuels, and everything changed. No longer were we constrained by the need to live on ambient energy; we could support ourselves by means of the sunlight stored over the preceding 350 million years. The new sources of energy permitted the economy to grow – to grow sufficiently to absorb some of the people expelled by the previous era’s land disputes. Fossil fuels allowed both industry and cities to expand, which permitted the workers to organise and to force the despots to loosen their grip on power.

Fossil fuels helped us fight wars of a horror never contemplated before, but they also reduced the need for war. For the first time in human history, indeed for the first time in biological history, there was a surplus of available energy. We could keep body and soul together without having to fight someone else for the energy we needed. Agricultural productivity rose 10 or 20 fold. Economic productivity rose 100 fold. Most of us could live as no one had ever lived before.

And everything you see around you results from that.
zmag.org

NEW ORLEANS — Three months after the epic flood, we are specimens of congressional torture. Network celebrities who swept through for disaster backdrops are gone. The suffering in the Superdome and Convention Center is old footage. Torturing a city is tougher coverage for soft newsbodies.

Galatoire’s restaurant will open in January. Come for Mardi Gras. Catch a night parade. Tour our dead neighborhoods. See Fats Domino’s dead home. Picnic on the levee of our Pompeii.
boston.com

Report from the Devastated Front Lines of the Lower Ninth Ward – New Orleans

…We spoke to many people. Most seemed to be in shock. All were polite and grateful. This neighborhood has flooded many times because of breeches in the levee in the Industrial canal nearby.

The people were told a barge broke the canal. Several people related the same story that early in the morning, they heard an explosion. Then the water poured in–before the rains came.

Many believe the levee was dynamited to drain the canal into the Lower Ninth Ward rather than the wealthier neighborhoods. This is not paranoia. The levees have been dynamited before for just that reason. In the 1920s the levees were intentionally dynamited to save other areas of New Orleans and many people still suspect the same thing happened in the 1960s when there were many unexplained levee breaks.

Ridge to FEMA critics: ‘Stop whining’

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 (UPI) — Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge says critics of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Hurricane Katrina response should “quit whining.”

Ridge’s outspoken comments are the first time he has responded in public to criticisms of the way FEMA was incorporated into his new department in 2003.

“They ought to quit whining about what happened in the past — that had absolutely nothing to do with what happened in Katrina,” he told United Press International.

The people of the Arctic filed a landmark human rights complaint against the United States, blaming the world’s No. 1 carbon polluter for stoking the global warming that is destroying their habitat. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), representing native people in the vast, sparsely-populated region girdling the Earth’s far north, said they had petitioned an inter-American panel to seek relief for Canadian and US Inuit.

“For Inuit, warming is likely to disrupt or even destroy their hunting and food-sharing culture as reduced sea ice causes the animals on which they depend to decline, become less accessible, and possibly become extinct,” said Robert Corell, who spearheaded an Arctic climate impact assessment.
breitbart.com