01/09/06 “FT” — — Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, says that senior US military officials tried to make him a scapegoat for postwar setbacks, including the decision to disband the Iraqi army following the US invasion in 2003

In a memoir published on Monday that broke a more than year-long silence, Mr Bremer portrays himself in a constant struggle with Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and military leaders who were determined to reduce the US troop presence as quickly as possible in 2004 despite the escalating insurgency.

He also writes how Mr Rumsfeld was “clearly unhappy” that Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, had taken control of Iraq policy from the Pentagon in late 2003.

A Pentagon spokesman on Monday confirmed that Mr Bremer had sent Mr Rumsfeld a memo based on a report by the Rand Corporation consultancy that recommended 500,000 US troops would be needed to pacify Iraq – far more than were sent. But Mr Bremer’s advice was rejected by military leaders and Mr Rumsfeld.
informationclearinghouse.info

Powell says lack of troops impeded success
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday night in the Twin Cities that he harbors no regrets about the U.S. invasion of Iraq but acknowledged wartime mistakes and warned that Iraq’s eventual government might not be as broad-based as American leaders had hoped.

In a speech at Beth El Synagogue in St. Louis Park, he urged nearly 1,000 people to pray for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the people of Israel. Powell called Sharon, who suffered a major stroke last week, a man of peace.

Powell said that the world is in better shape now than at any point in his life. He said fascism and communism have been defeated and that while terrorists can blow up buildings and take hundreds and even thousands of lives, they cannot remake this country the way Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union would have.

…The mistake in Iraq was not that the U.S. invaded, he said. It was that “we didn’t have enough troops to take control on the ground” and didn’t immediately impose martial law in order to protect the various ministries and infrastructure throughout Iraq.

Yup, Sharon is a man of peace, and a million troops would have really done the trick.

WASHINGTON — The Army took initial steps Monday to expel dozens of reservists who failed to report for active duty, in effect warning hundreds of others that they, too, could be penalized if they don’t heed orders to return to active service.

The proceedings mark a turning point in the Army’s struggle to deploy thousands of soldiers from the Individual Ready Reserve, a rarely mobilized group of reservists, to war zones in which some have resisted serving.

These are soldiers who had previously served on active duty but not completed their eight-year service obligation. Unlike those in the National Guard or Army Reserve, they are not required to stay in training. Many have requested a delay in returning to service, have asked to be exempted or have ignored their orders.
seattlepi.nwsource.com

There’s more misery in people’s lives today than a decade ago – at least among those who will tell you their troubles.

So says a new study on life’s negatives from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, which conducts social science research for government agencies, educational institutions, non-profit organizations and private corporations.

The researchers surveyed 1,340 people about negative life events and found that the 2004 respondents had more troubles than those who were surveyed in 1991, the last time the study was done.

“The anticipation would have been that problems would have been down,” says Tom Smith, the study’s author. He says good economic years during the ’90s would have brought an expectation of fewer problems, not more.
news.yahoo.com

The unhappiness index is up. Go figure.

An attempt by Venezuela’s leftwing president, Hugo Chávez, to double the price that coffee producers pay farmers for a sack of beans has led to empty shelves in supermarkets throughout the country and fears of shortages of other basic foodstuffs.
President Chávez, who maintains price controls on basic foodstuffs, raised the price of coffee beans by 100% last month after weeks of protests by coffee farmers.

But most of the country’s coffee producers, who buy, roast and grind the beans, refused to sell on the coffee yesterday, claiming their margins had been cut, and began hoarding thousands of sacks of unprocessed beans.

Eduardo Bianco, a representative of the country’s coffee producers, said: “The government can’t expect us to sell our coffee if it is refusing to increase the prices for a kilo of coffee you buy over the counter in the shops.”
As coffee disappeared first from the supermarkets and then from the streets, the National Guard was sent out to confiscate coffee that had been stockpiled at private warehouses.

Two warehouses were raided, and dozens more are on government lists.

Mr Chávez said he would not tolerate the situation. “I’ve instructed the National Guard to look for the missing coffee and to find every single kilogram of it,” he said in his weekly TV and radio show, Hello Mr President. “The army has the permission to seize the coffee with the power of attorneys and judges. We will sell the coffee at prices set by us.”
guardian.co.uk

The subtext of course is that the producers are fabulously wealthy landed gentry while the growers are poor campesinos. The growers could simply develop co-ops for roasting and retail selling, but Chavez is trying to play ball with the producers, who no doubt one and all are part of the opposition to him.

Venezuela to expand fuel discounts to U.S.

BEIJING — Bolivia’s president elect invited energy-hungry China on Sunday to help develop his country’s vast gas reserves after his government carries out plans to nationalize them.

Evo Morales’ visit to China comes amid a campaign by Beijing to develop ties with nations throughout Latin America as new sources of fuel, raw materials and new markets for its export dynamo.
seattlepi.nwsource.com

01/09/06 “Counterpunch” — — President Bush’s off-hand summation last month of the number of Iraqis who have so far died as a result of our invasion and occupation as “30,000, more or less” was quite certainly an under-estimate. The true number is probably hitting around 180,000 by now, with a possibility, as we shall see, that it has reached as high as half a million.
informationclearinghouse.info

MOSUL, Iraq, Jan 9 (Reuters) – Three sewing machines in a dingy apartment were all Munna Abdul Adeem Ahmed could scrape together when she set up a tailoring co-op for poor widows. She soon realised it was not enough.

More than 1,000 women from the northern city of Mosul turned up looking for work on the first day. Ahmed finally stopped registering new names after the 1,200th widow signed up.

The women were mostly young, poor and desperate for work. Many lost their spouses during the wars, uprisings and civil conflict that have bedevilled Iraq over the past 25 years.

Now, a raging insurgency is adding to their numbers.

Behind the daily bloodshed and attacks that make headlines across the world, there is a growing population of widows.

Traditionally, Iraqi widows have been supported by their late husband’s family or other relatives, but in a country brought to its knees by violence and war, there is now little to spare for the most vulnerable members of society.
alertnet.org

…Indeed, in East Harlem, it is possible to take any simple nexus of people – the line at an A.T.M., a portion of a postal route, the members of a church choir – and trace an invisible web of diabetes that stretches through the group and out into the neighborhood, touching nearly every life with its menace.

Mr. De La Vega, a 33-year-old self-styled “sidewalk philosopher” whose murals and sidewalk chalk drawings are familiar neighborhood ornaments, has a mother with diabetes. His stepfather’s case was confirmed in March. And a number of Mr. De La Vega’s friends who occupied his chairs or sat in the bordering garden, well, they had it. Mr. De La Vega said he would probably get it, too.

In East Harlem, in fact, it seems peculiar if you don’t have it.
nytimes.com

BEYOND any shadow of a doubt, the ugliest phrase to enter the English language last year was “extraordinary rendition”. To those of us who love words, this phrase’s brutalisation of meaning is an infallible signal of its intent to deceive.

“Extraordinary” is an ordinary enough adjective, but its sense is being stretched here to include more sinister meanings that your dictionary will not provide: secret; ruthless; and extrajudicial.

As for “rendition”, the English language permits four meanings: a performance; a translation; a surrender – this meaning is now considered archaic; or an “act of rendering”; which leads us to the verb “to render” among whose 17 possible meanings you will not find “to kidnap and covertly deliver an individual or individuals for interrogation to an undisclosed address in an unspecified country where torture is permitted”.

Language, too, has laws, and those laws tell us this new American usage is improper – a crime against the word. Every so often the habitual newspeak of politics throws up a term whose calculated blandness makes us shiver with fear – yes, and loathing.

“Clean words can mask dirty deeds,” The New York Times columnist William Safire wrote in 1993, in response to the arrival of another such phrase, “ethnic cleansing”.

“Final solution” is a further, even more horrible locution of this Orwellian, double-plus-ungood type. “Mortality response”, a euphemism for death by killing that I first heard during the Vietnam War, is another. This is not a pedigree of which any newborn usage should be proud.

People use such phrases to avoid using others whose meaning would be problematically over-apparent. “Ethnic cleansing” and “final solution” were ways of avoiding the word “genocide”, and to say “extraordinary rendition” is to reveal one’s squeamishness about saying “the export of torture”. However, as Cecily remarks in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, “When I see a spade, I call it a spade”, and what we have here is not simply a spade, it’s a shovel – and it’s shovelling a good deal of ordure.
smh.com.au

A new generation of nuclear power stations would increase five-fold the amount of a lethal and long-lasting form of highly radioactive nuclear waste stored in the UK, official figures show.

The analysis, by a government-sponsored committee of experts, reveals the scale of the legacy to future generations by building nuclear plants. It comes as the nuclear industry and supporters are pressing ministers to approve reactors in the face of uncertainty over gas supplies.

The figures reveal that spent uranium fuel rods from new power stations would almost triple radioactivity in the current inventory of UK nuclear waste. They contrast with claims that new reactors would create far less waste than predecessors.
commondreams.org