SAN DIEGO — There’s controversy over how the military is transporting the bodies of service members killed overseas, 10News reported.

A local family said fallen soldiers and Marines deserve better and that one would think our war heroes are being transported with dignity, care and respect. It said one would think upon arrival in their hometowns they are greeted with honor. But unfortunately, the family said that is just not the case.

Dead heroes are supposed to come home with their coffins draped with the American flag — greeted by a color guard.

But in reality, many are arriving as freight on commercial airliners — stuffed in the belly of a plane with suitcases and other cargo.
10news.com

Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93

…Standard operating procedures dictate that if an FAA flight controller notices anything that suggests a possible hijacking–if radio contact is lost, if the plane’s transponder goes off, or if the plane deviates from its flight plan–the controller is to contact a superior. If the problem cannot be fixed quickly–within about a minute–the superior is to ask NORAD–the North American Aerospace Defense Command–to scramble jet fighters to find out what is going on. NORAD then issues a scramble order to the nearest Air Force base with fighters on alert. On 9/11, all the hijacked airliners occurred in NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector, which is known as NEADS. So all the scramble orders would have come from NEADS.

The jet fighters at the disposal of NEADS could respond very quickly: According to the US Air Force website, F-15s can go from “scramble order” to 29,000 feet in only 2.5 minutes, after which they can then fly over 1800 miles per hour (140). (All page numbers given parenthetically in the text are to David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions). Therefore–according to General Ralph Eberhart, the head of NORAD–after the FAA senses that something is wrong, “it takes about one minute” for it to contact NORAD, after which, according to a spokesperson, NORAD can scramble fighter jets “within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States” (140). These statements were, to be sure, made after 9/11, so we might suspect that they reflect a post-9/11 speed-up in procedures. But an Air Traffic Control document put out in 1998 warned pilots that any airplanes persisting in unusual behavior “will likely find two [jet fighters] on their tail within 10 or so minutes” (141).

The First Version of the Official Story

On 9/11, however, that did not happen. Why not? Where was the military? The military’s first answer was given immediately after 9/11 by General Richard Myers, then the Acting Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Mike Snyder, a spokesman for NORAD. They both said, independently, that no military jets were sent up until after the strike on the Pentagon. That strike occurred at 9:38, and yet American Airlines Flight 11 had shown two of the standard signs of hijacking, losing both the radio and the transponder signal, at 8:15. This means that procedures that usually result in an interception within “10 or so minutes” had not been carried out in 80 or so minutes.

That enormous delay suggested that a stand-down order, canceling standard procedures, must have been given. Some people started raising this possibility.
globalresearch.ca

…DeLay’s “K Street Project,” named for the Washington street where many lobbying firms have offices, built a pipeline from congressional staffs to lucrative lobbying jobs. DeLay’s wife was among those hired by Abramoff.

Cozy relations between legislators and lobbyists are deeply rooted in Washington culture and big lobby firms often hire members of Congress who retire or are defeated. Former members have personal contacts and access that ordinary lobbyists don’t have. Their big salaries are often in gratitude for favors delivered when they were in office. Public business is decided on golf courses and yachts, bankrolled by lobbyists and their special-interests employers and campaign contributors.

Democrats and Republicans played the game, and lobbying firms covered their bases with bipartisan hiring. A form of comity was recognized by both parties.

Gingrich’s 1994 Republican “revolution” produced a different order of business in the House. Democrats were kept off some critical conference committees where key votes are taken, or were so marginalized as to be powerless.

The K Street Project punished lobbyists who retained high-profile Democratic staff. The domination of K Street by conservative Republicans has brought their clients big-time financial benefits. Now a different breed of chickens is coming home to roost, in the form of the DeLay and Abramoff scandals.

Because they were so successful at working the system, Republicans will also occupy most of the spotlight in the courtroom dramas of 2006.
commondreams.org

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia – The people of this high Andean city were ecstatic when they won the “water war.”

Enlarge This Image

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky for The New York Times
Half of the 600,000 people in Cochabamba, Bolivia, remain without water. Here, Edwin Ventura, 8, collects water from an outdoor tap.
Enlarge This Image

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky for The New York Times
Many in Cochabamba cannot depend on wells and get water through deliveries made two or three times a week by freelance water dealers.
After days of protests and martial law, Bechtel – the American multinational that had increased rates when it began running the waterworks – was forced out. As its executives fled the city, protest leaders pledged to improve service and a surging leftist political movement in Latin America celebrated the ouster as a major victory, to be repeated in country after country.

Today, five years later, water is again as cheap as ever, and a group of community leaders runs the water utility, Semapa.

But half of Cochabamba’s 600,000 people remain without water, and those who do have service have it only intermittently – for some, as little as two hours a day, for the fortunate, no more than 14.

“I would have to say we were not ready to build new alternatives,” said Oscar Olivera, who led the movement that forced Bechtel out.

Bolivia is just days away from an election that could put one of Latin America’s most strident antiglobalization leaders in the presidency. The water war experience shows that while a potent left has won many battles in Latin America in recent years, it still struggles to come up with practical, realistic solutions to resolve the deep discontent that gave the movement force in the first place.
nytimes.com

…a vast majority of the developing countries, whether in Latin America, Africa or Asia have, in the first 10 years of WTO, turned into food importers. Millions of farmers have lost their livelihoods as a result of cheaper imports.

If the WTO has its way, and the developing countries fail to understand the politics that drives the agriculture trade agenda, the world will soon have two kinds of agriculture systems — the rich countries producing staple foods for the world’s 6 billion plus people, and developing countries growing cash crops like tomatoes, cut flowers, peas, sunflowers, strawberries and vegetables.

This is what happened in many of the Latin American countries that were forced to dismantle food security and diversify to cash crops as part of the conditionality that came along with structural adjustment loans. The same strategy is now being legitimized for the rest of the world under the legal framework of the WTO.

As the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have repeatedly emphasized, the dollars that developing countries earn from exporting these crops will eventually be used to buy food grains from the developed nations — in reality, passing the reins of food security back into the hands of rich countries.

For India, a major farming country, that would mean going back to the days of a ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence before it struggled to achieve food self-sufficiency on the backs of hundreds of millions of small farmers.

It is the livelihoods of these farmers, as well as the food security of the people they fed for decades, that is at stake at Hong Kong.
commondreams.org

Indian environment activist Vandana Shiva and French anti-globalisation crusader Jose Bove Wednesday launched a campaign against US food and seed giant Monsanto on the sidelines of the global trade talks here.

The duo also handed a petition to officials of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to oppose the trade dispute filed by the US, Argentina and Canada under the rules of the multilateral organisation on genetically modified (GM) food.

The petition – which Shiva claimed has been signed by 135,000 citizens from over 100 countries and 740 organisations representing 60 million people – was to be given to WTO Director General Pascal Lamy, who instead sent a representative.

“The petition asks the World Trade Organisation not to undermine the rights of countries like the European Union to take appropriate measures to protect their ecology and environment from GM Food,” Shiva said.

The backdrop for the short event were placards and posters that read, “WTO: Hands Off Our Food” and “Monsanto Plunders and Kills Peasants and the Planet”.
commondreams.org

Review: Aristide and the Endless Revolution. 2005. Baraka Productions. 83 min. Movie site:aristidethefilm.com Available from firstunfeatures.com

Each fact is disputed. Haiti’s President, Jean Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown in a coup and kidnapped by the United States on February 29, 2004, says Aristide himself. Aristide left voluntarily, say US officials Colin Powell and Roger Noriega.

Despite the cliché that journalists seek ‘balance’, to get ‘both sides of the story’, the voices of Aristide and his Lavalas political party and movement, whose leaders have been exiled or jailed or massacred since his ouster, have been left out of most coverage of Haiti since that 2004 coup.

The world is expected to understand the events unfolding in Haiti since 2004 without hearing from the victims. Aside from skewing global opinion, the disinformation campaign in Haiti has prevented supporters of Lavalas inside Haiti from being able to talk openly about the issues. Outside of the country, supporters of democracy are left to talk on listerves and Web sites, where their words can be ignored.

For these reason, Nicolas Rossier’s film, ‘Aristide and the Endless Revolution’, is a real journalistic service to the community.
zmag.org

Seydou, dressed in a ripped T-shirt that hangs off his shoulders, looks blank when questioned about the effects of United States subsidies on his only source of income, cotton farming.

“I don’t know about cotton in the US but I know cotton prices have fallen here in Burkina Faso,” he says solemnly. The farmers working in the cotton fields of Burkina Faso, often in remote locations, have little knowledge of the intricacies of world markets. What they do know is the price they receive for their cotton harvests, essential for basic necessities such as medicines and school fees, is dropping fast.

The end of cotton farming in Burkina Faso and other cotton-producing west African countries is rapidly approaching. World cotton prices have dropped to a historic low because of the EU and US trade subsidies which have artificially distorted world markets.

…World cotton prices are in decline due to global over-production, fuelled by the agricultural subsidies. EU and US taxpayers and consumers pay farmers billions of dollars to overproduce products for a stagnant market. These surpluses are then dumped overseas, often in developing countries, destroying their markets and driving down world prices. The livelihood of West Africa’s 12 million cotton farmers will soon be destroyed if subsidies are not slashed.
independent.co.uk

A former cabinet minister and close personal friend of George Bush may be appointed head of Russia’s leading state oil company, it was reported yesterday.

Donald Evans, who was until early this year US commerce secretary, has been offered the position of head of the board of directors of Rosneft by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the respected business daily, Kommersant, reported yesterday.

If the appointment is confirmed, Mr Evans would be the second former senior foreign official to join the Kremlin’s expanding energy empire. Last week, the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder accepted a job as chairman of the North European Gas Pipeline, a project to ferry gas between Russia and Germany that he helped broker.
guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 – Texas prosecutors in the criminal case against Representative Tom DeLay revealed in subpoenas made public Tuesday that they were investigating ties between Mr. DeLay and a lobbyist who is at the center of a bribery scandal that prompted another House Republican to resign from Congress last month.

The subpoenas sought documents from the lobbyist, Brent Wilkes, a California businessman whose lawyers have confirmed that he is one of four unnamed co-conspirators listed in the criminal charges against former Representative Randy Cunningham, the California Republican who pleaded guilty to taking at least $2.4 million in bribes.

Mr. Wilkes was close to several Republican members of Congress, including Mr. Cunningham and Mr. DeLay, Republican of Texas, who traveled as Mr. Wilkes’s guest in a private jet he partly owned. There is no accusation in the subpoenas of any other tie between Mr. DeLay and Mr. Cunningham, who is facing a long prison sentence.
nytimes.com

Democrat Returning Donations From Abramoff’s Tribal Clients

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 – The ranking Democrat on the Senate committee investigating the Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff announced on Tuesday that he was returning $67,000 in political contributions from Mr. Abramoff’s former partners and Indian tribe clients.

The lawmaker, Senator Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, has been accused of hypocrisy by Republicans for having not acknowledged the contributions from Mr. Abramoff’s clients while at the same time sharply criticizing him in hearings of the Senate panel, the Indian Affairs Committee.