…It’s bad enough that Bush’s monumentally illegal, immoral, and brazenly imperialist occupation of Iraq is actually quite bad for Andrew’s country, not to mention the Iraqis and the cause of global peace. This miserable, mass-murderous conflict drains tens of billions of dollars from desperately needed domestic programs. It is helping fuel the nation’s skyrocketing fiscal and trade deficits. It is encouraging extremist Islamic terrorism, worsening America’s terrible image abroad, and further de-stabilizing a region of critical strategic
significance in the world economic and state system.

But the really despicable thing is the way local television news makes the maddening loss of American life in the criminal war on Iraq into a routine, acceptable, and practically banal fact of daily experience.
zmag.org

CAMP NACHSHONIM, Israel, Dec. 6 (UPI) — The United States Tuesday delivered a sprawling storage base it has built for the Israeli army.

The base, Nachshonim, will store equipment for an Israeli armored division.

Nachshonim, which covers almost 400 acres, is the third base the United States has built for Israel under an agreement reached during the 1998 Wye River talks with the Palestinian Authority.

Israel then undertook to turn West Bank areas to the Palestinian Authority and the Clinton administration undertook to provide $1.2 billion to implement the agreement. That included several camps to replace facilities Israel would be vacating in the West Bank.

The United States has since delivered a training base for Israel’s paratroop brigade opposite the southern West Bank, another for the Golani infantry brigade opposite the northwestern West Bank, and Tuesday it delivered the storage facility for the Idan reserve division east of Tel Aviv.
upi.com

Santiago, Cuba –” Twenty-five Christians in the nonviolent tradition of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker arrived in Cuba last evening and plan to set out from Santiago today on a solemn fifty-mile march to the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They seek to defend human dignity by visiting with the hundreds of detainees who have been held for more than three years under horrific conditions by the U.S. government.

As a Christian, I feel compelled to reach out across national boundaries to perform one of the most basic acts of faith as described in the gospel of Matthew 25, I was in prison and you visited me, explained Catholic Worker Matthew Daloisio. We want our fellow Americans to see the shameful acts of torture and abuse taking place in this and other illegal prisons hidden across the globe. We pray that others will join us in urging our government to allow us to perform this act of Christian faith.”
infoshop.org

12/07/05 “VVAW” — — I became aware of torture as a U.S. policy in 1969 when I was serving as a USAF combat security officer working near Can Tho City in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. I was informed about the CIA’s Phong Dinh Province Interrogation Center (PIC) at the Can Tho Army airfield where supposedly “significant members” of the VCI (Viet Cong infrastructure) were taken for torture as part of the Phoenix Pacification Program. A huge French-built prison nearby was also apparently utilized for torture of suspects from the Delta region. Many were routinely murdered.

Naive, I was shocked! The Agency for International Development (AID) working with Southern Illinois University, for example, trained Vietnamese police and prison officials in the art of torture (“interrogations”) under cover of “public safety.” American officials believed they were teaching “better methods,” often making suggestions during torture sessions conducted by Vietnamese police.

Instead of the recent euphemism “illegal combatants,” the United State in Vietnam claimed prisoners were “criminal” and therefore exempt from Geneva Convention protections.

The use of torture as a function of terror, or its equivalent in sadistic behavior, has been historic de facto U.S. policy.

Our European ancestors’ shameful, sadistic treatment of the indigenous inhabitants based on an ethos of arrogance and violence has become ingrained in our values. “Manifest destiny” has rationalized as a religion the elimination or assimilation of those perceived to be blocking American progress—at home or abroad—a belief that expansion of the nation, including subjugation of natives and others, is divinely ordained, that our “superior race” is obligated to “civilize” those who stand in the way.
informationclearinghouse.info

The CIA last month emptied two secret prisons in Eastern Europe of terrorist suspects in a frantic effort to defuse the “rendition” controversy ahead of Condoleezza Rice’s visit to Europe, sources in the agency have claimed.

Eleven leading al-Qa’eda suspects were transferred to a new CIA facility in North Africa, current and former officers told ABC television.
news.telegraph.co.uk

Rice speaks out against torture of detainees

The US appeared to bow to international pressure yesterday by declaring it would respect international laws against cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners.

After being bombarded with questions about alleged secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe while in Ukraine, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, said: “As a matter of … policy, the United States’ obligations under the [UN convention against torture] which prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment extends to US personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the US or outside the US.”

Ms Rice’s use of words represented at least a rhetorical shift. Until yesterday, the White House was resisting draft Senate legislation promoted by John McCain, suggesting international legal restraints on all American interrogators.

In Egyptian myth, Apophis was the ancient spirit of evil and destruction, a demon that was determined to plunge the world into eternal darkness.

A fitting name, astronomers reasoned, for a menace now hurtling towards Earth from outerspace. Scientists are monitoring the progress of a 390-metre wide asteroid discovered last year that is potentially on a collision course with the planet, and are imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it.

Nasa has estimated that an impact from Apophis, which has an outside chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. Thousands of square kilometres would be directly affected by the blast but the whole of the Earth would see the effects of the dust released into the atmosphere.
guardian.co.uk

Apophis is not a ‘demon’ or the ‘spirit of evil’. Apophis is the great serpent through which souls who are seeking union with the divine must pass. So really, the vehicle of purification. Not being Christian/apocalyptic here, it’s just interesting and ironic.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Survivors from New Orleans told a congressional panel on Tuesday they felt abandoned by government at all levels after Hurricane Katrina hit the city and had been subjected to racial slurs and menaced by guns when they sought food and water.

“We were abandoned. City officials did nothing to protect us,” Patricia Thompson, a New Orleans evacuee now living in Texas, told a House of Representatives panel investigating the response to the storm.

“We saw buses, helicopters and FEMA trucks but no one stopped to help us. We never felt so cut off in all our lives,” Thompson said.

She described “demoralizing and inhumane” treatment by police telling the panel: “We were cursed when we asked for help for our elderly. We had guns aimed at us by the police who were suppose to be there to protect us.”

Thompson said her 5-year-old granddaughter cried in terror when a policeman pointed a gun at her and she worried about whether she had put up her hands correctly.

“I know the police were scared, but they had no right to treat everyone like criminals,” she said.

The witnesses blamed local, state and federal officials for inadequately responding to victims in New Orleans and told the committee they thought racism was the root cause of their harsh treatment after the storm caused massive flooding in the city more than three months ago.

Of the five African Americans who testified, only Terrol Williams, a former federal worker, said he did not think the botched response was rooted in racial attitudes. He said authorities were unprepared and a mandatory evacuation should have been ordered sooner.

Leah Hodges, a community activist, recalled trying to help a group of stranded senior citizens. The military took them to an evacuation point on a highway where they spent the night, awakening to a “bunch of hard red necks scowling and growling at us in military uniforms … pointing guns at us and treating us worse than prisoners of war,” she said.

Hodges described waiting in the burning sun in conditions she likened to a concentration camp. Rep. Jeff Miller, a Florida Republican, asked her to stop making that comparison.

“I’m going to call it what it is. If I put a dress on a pig, a pig is still a pig,” she responded heatedly.
reuters.com

Katrina’s Emotional Damage Lingers
Mental Health Experts Say Impact Is Far Beyond What They’ve Ever Faced

Black people three times as likely to be in mental hospital (UK)

Strong antiwar comments in recent days by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have opened anew a party rift over Iraq, with some lawmakers warning that the leaders’ rhetorical blasts could harm efforts to win control of Congress next year.

Several Democrats joined President Bush yesterday in rebuking Dean’s declaration to a San Antonio radio station Monday that “the idea that we’re going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong.”
washingtonpost.com

Children were buried in their homes after a powerful earthquake hit central Africa yesterday, with reports suggesting there had been a number of deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The number of deaths and the extent of the damage was still unclear last night, but local people reported that the earthquake had toppled flimsy houses in the town of Kalemie, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in eastern Congo.

“Residents told us that some people had died and others were injured but we do not have any figures yet,” said Michel Bonnardeaux, a UN spokesman in the capital Kinshasa, 1,000 miles from the epicentre of the earthquake.

The UN spokesman said most of the casualties were struck by falling zinc and steel roofs. “Dozens of houses have collapsed, several children were buried by the roofs of their houses,” local aid worker Dr Jean-Donne Owali told AP.

He said children had been rushed to his clinic bleeding from head wounds suffered when their mud-and-thatch homes collapsed.

A community leader in Kalemie said he had also heard of casualties. “I have heard of at least one death and many injuries, but we need to check more [in poor neighbourhoods] where houses have been damaged,” Fidel Muteba told Reuters.

Francois Xavier, a local journalist, said he had seen buildings shaking. “Yes, it was very strong, everything shook for about 10 seconds,” he said.

There are a number of refugee camps in the region, sheltering people displaced by Congo’s long-running civil war.
guardian.co.uk

MILAN — In March 2003, the Italian national anti-terrorism police received an urgent message from the CIA about a radical Islamic cleric who had mysteriously vanished from Milan a few weeks before. The CIA reported that it had reliable information that the cleric, the target of an Italian criminal investigation, had fled to an unknown location in the Balkans.

In fact, according to Italian court documents and interviews with investigators, the CIA’s tip was a deliberate lie, part of a ruse designed to stymie efforts by the Italian anti-terrorism police to track down the cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian refugee known as Abu Omar.

The strategy worked for more than a year until Italian investigators learned that Nasr had not gone to the Balkans after all. Instead, prosecutors here have charged, he was abducted off a street in Milan by a team of CIA operatives who took him to two U.S. military bases in succession and then flew him to Egypt, where he was interrogated and allegedly tortured by Egyptian security agents before being released to house arrest.
washingtonpost.com