Condoleezza Rice will spell out some home truths when she arrives in Germany today amid growing uproar over the US “rendition” of terrorist suspects, alleged CIA secret prisons in Europe and claims of tacit connivance by Britain and other European governments.

Far from apologising or admitting error, the US secretary of state is expected to privately tell Europe’s leaders not to make a fuss about CIA activities which, she will argue, form a key part of the post-9/11 “war on terror” to which they all signed up. Administration officials briefing at the weekend told the Washington Post that the American line will be that “we’re all in this together and you need to look at yourselves as much as us … people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”.
guardian.co.uk

Saddam Hussein’s defence team today walked out of court denying the legality of the trial.

In farcical scenes, the former US attorney-general Ramsey Clark attempted to challenge the legitimacy of the proceedings while the chief judge, Rizgar Mohammed Amin, said only Saddam’s chief lawyer could address the hearing.

Mr Clark spent 15 minutes trying to address the court in English but the judge refused to hear the application, insisting that the official language of the court was Arabic.

After the walkout, Saddam stood up with his half-brother Barazan Ibrahim and declared that the court had been appointed by US occupiers. The two men chanted: “Long live Iraq. Long live the Arab state.”

Prosecutor Jaafar al-Mousawi had earlier tried to exclude Mr Clark and other foreign lawyers from the hearing in Baghdad’s Green Zone by arguing that their documents were not issued according to law.

The defence lawyers were later allowed to address the court after a 90-minute recess.

Mr Clark argued that the levels of protection offered for defence lawyers and their families were “absurd”, and warned that the trial would collapse without improved safeguards.

“This trial can divide or heal. Unless it is seen as absolutely fair, and fair in fact, it will divide rather than reconcile Iraq,” he said.

Saddam’s defence team at one point included more than 1,500 volunteer lawyers alongside a core team of 22. But 1,100 of those walked out last month over the killings of two lawyers representing his co-defendants.

The former Qatari justice minister Najib al-Nueimi also queried whether the court was legitimate, arguing that it had been set up by the US occupation rather than the Iraqi government.
guardian.co.uk

CARACAS, Venezuela — They call themselves defenders of democracy, but President Hugo Chavez brands them conspirators, coup plotters and lackeys of the U.S. government.

Leaders of the Venezuelan vote monitoring group Sumate are at the center of a political crisis as the country’s main opposition parties boycott Sunday’s congressional elections.

The group complains there are problems with the voting system, and the government has begun running ads on state TV attacking Sumate leader Maria Corina Machado as a dark figure paid to do Washington’s dirty work.

She is facing trial next week on conspiracy charges that could bring up to 16 years in prison, but she is unapologetic about meeting with President Bush or accepting money from the National Endowment for Democracy, which receives funds from the U.S. Congress.

“We’re searching for the truth, we’re trying to defend the rights of the citizens, and we live in a country where people can be persecuted for doing that,” Machado told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday.

Chavez said the election boycott was a plot hatched in Washington and accused Sumate of conspiracy, saying: “The empire has activated its pawns; it’s moving them.”

Sumate, headquartered in wealthy eastern Caracas, is widely seen as an enemy by Chavez’s largely poor supporters. Some protesters this week carried a plastic foam tombstone bearing Machado’s photo and the painted epitaph “Sumate,” which translates as “Join Up.”
State TV ads show a photo of Machado meeting Bush at the White House in May, with cartoon dollars flowing out of Bush’s sleeve. Another cartoon shows Machado dancing in a Statue of Liberty outfit and singing: “We have money to topple the government.”
seattlepi.nwsource.com

Chavez’s Party Wins 68% of Seats in Venezuela’s Parliament

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 2 – They are the faces and voices of a city’s desperation. Stepping wearily up to a Federal Emergency Management Agency help center here, all have a similar story of ruin in the past, anxiety over the future and frustration in the present, suffered differently each time.

Young, middle-aged and old, these citizens of New Orleans, wiped out by Hurricane Katrina and now urgently seeking government assistance, spoke Friday of sleeping in a truck and on a floor, living out of a car and waiting for the help that never seems to come. Trickling into the crowded center in the Uptown neighborhood here – hoping for a trailer, a loan, cash, anything – they were grimly resigned to waiting, and waiting some more.

“You come to these FEMA centers, you sit all day,” said Myrna Guity, 43, whose import business was wiped out by the storm, along with her home in New Orleans East. “You get no answers to your questions. They’re evasive. You’re constantly ‘pending.’ What are you going to be doing, ‘pending’ for the rest of your life? I’ve lost everything.”
nytimes.com

La. Governor Seeks to ‘Set the Record Straight:’ Blanco Releases Katrina Records
“We need everything you’ve got,” Blanco is quoted in a memo as telling President Bush on Aug. 29, the day Katrina made landfall. But despite assurances from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that 500 buses were “standing by,” Blanco’s aides were compelled to take action when the FEMA buses failed to materialize, documents show. “We need buses,” Andy Kopplin, chief of staff to Blanco, said in an e-mail to Blanco staffers late on Aug. 30, the day after the storm hit. “Find buses that can go to NO [New Orleans] ASAP.”

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (UPI) — While the United States spends billions on troop support in Iraq, the people serving the meals, scooping the ice cream, and washing the dishes make as little as 50 cents an hour.

The U.S. military has paid Halliburton subsidiary KBR about $12 billion so far for so-called logistics support to U.S. military personnel in Iraq, the largest contract of its kind ever. Around 80,000 troops are served meals at dining facilities every day under the contract — the other 60,000 or so fend for themselves in field kitchens or by eating military issue “Meals Ready to Eat.”

KBR in turn hires that work out entirely to subcontractors whose job it is to recruit, transport, house, feed and pay “third-country” nationals to stock, prepare, serve and clean up at the dining facilities at 43 bases across Iraq.

Those workers are recruited from countries with already low wages, where jobs are scarce. And as pressure to keep the logistics contract cost down has increased, subcontractors have moved from country to country in search of cheaper labor markets.

That is what brought around 770 workers from Sierra Leone, Africa, to Iraq in July to work for ESS Support Services Worldwide, A British-based food service company specializing, according to its Web site, in “remote site, defense and off-shore locations.”
upi.com

…When the US State Department finally gave international weapons inspectors its “evidence” that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from the African State of Niger in 2003, they held back the one document even their own analysts knew was “funky” and “clearly a forgery”. Experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency quickly discovered that all the papers were fake, but they did this by spotting errors that had slipped passed the State Department and CIA: The fact that the US government handed over the whole bundle of what became known as the “Niger Forgeries” except the one paper they recognised as a hoax suggests they were trying to pass off documents they knew were phoney as the real thing.
theleftcoaster.com

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration and the Israeli government are preparing for a belligerent Syrian reaction to the findings of a United Nations report that is expected to accuse Damascus of masterminding the February 14 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

Israeli officials are anticipating an escalation in attacks by the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, Israel’s chief of military intelligence, Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash, disclosed during Sunday’s Cabinet meeting.

Ze’evi-Farkash told the Israeli Cabinet that Hezbollah’s heavy rocket attack last week on Israel’s northern communities — more than 300 rockets were launched — was a response to international pressure on Syria and Iran. More pressure on Syria, he said, is likely to result in more attacks.

In Washington, American officials are preparing for an increase in cross-border infiltration of jihadists into Iraq through Syria’s porous border, according to Washington insiders who have access to administration officials.

“We too will be paying a price at the Iraq-Syria border,” said Edward Walker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs who also served as America’s ambassador to Israel and as its deputy chief of mission in Damascus. Walker, now the president of the Washington-based Middle East Institute, said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has struck an increasingly antagonistic and defiant tone in response to Western attempts to isolate him.
forward.com

Sharon: Military option against Iran

sraeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni has said that the West Bank separation barrier that Israel is constructing will be a future border with the Palestinians.

The Haaretz newspaper on Thursday quoted Livni as saying at a recent conference that “one does not have to be a genius to see that the fence will have implications for the future border.”

“This is not the reason for its establishment, but it could have political implications.”

Israel has in the past contended in court that the barrier is only meant to provide security by preventing suicide bombers from entering the country. But Livni’s comments reflected a belief that the fences, walls and razor wire have political implications, as the Palestinians contend.

The barrier dips into the West Bank at several points – placing 8 % of the territory on the Israeli side to encompass Jewish settlements. Palestinians say the obstacles are intended as a land grab. They prevent tens of thousands of Palestinians from reaching their jobs, schools and farmland.
aljazeera.net

The on-the-ground reality of Israel’s moral bankruptcy in its genocidal policies towards the Palestinians remains as clear as ever

The recent revelations about the virulent spread of death squads ravaging Iraq have only confirmed for many people the lethal incompetence of the Bush Regime, whose brutal bungling appears to have unleashed the demon of sectarian strife in the conquered land. The general reaction, even among some war supporters, has been bitter derision: “Jeez, these bozos couldn’t boil an egg without causing collateral damage.”

But what if the truth is even more sinister? What if this murderous chaos is not the fruit of rank incompetence but instead the desired product of carefully crafted, efficiently managed White House policy?

Investigative journalist Max Fuller marshals a convincing case for this dread conclusion in a remarkable work of synthesis drawn from information buried in reams of mainstream news stories and public Pentagon documents. Piling fact on damning fact, he shows that the vast majority of atrocities now attributed to “rogue” Shiite and Sunni militias are in fact the work of government-controlled commandos and “special forces,” trained by Americans, “advised” by Americans and run largely by former CIA assets, Global Research reports.
chris-floyd.com

Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq by Max Fuller

Democracy Now: Is the U.S. Training Iraqi Death Squads to Fight the Insurgency?

Reuters:Israelis training Kurds in northern Iraq – report
JERUSALEM, Dec 1 (Reuters) – Private Israeli security firms have sent experts to Iraq’s northern Kurdish region to give covert training to Kurdish security forces, an Israeli newspaper reported on Thursday.
The daily Yedioth Ahronoth said that over the past year and a half the Israeli companies had set up a secret training base in northern Iraq as part of a multi-million dollar project with the Kurdish regional government.
It said dozens of Israeli specialists had been sent to teach Kurdish forces “weapons training, self-defence and counter-terror warfare”.

Leonard Peltier, one of America’s longest-serving political prisoners, turned sixty-one-years-old on September 12, 2005. Peltier has spent nearly thirty years in federal prison, the result of one of the most infamous political frame-ups in modern U.S. history. He was convicted of killing two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975. Believing he could not receive a fair trial in the U.S., he fled to Canada. The Canadian government extradited him in 1976, and he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to two life terms in 1977.

Many of today’s progressive-minded people will find themselves unfamiliar with the details as well as the significance of the Peltier case. This is a tragedy, given the widespread opposition to the Patriot Act and the heightened fear of political repression by opponents of the Bush administration. The rush of events since 9/11, instead of bringing the Peltier case back into focus, seems to have pushed it further into the margins of political consciousness, where it has unfortunately been for two decades. This is something that needs to be corrected.
counterpunch.org