WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to let the military transfer accused “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla to Miami to face criminal charges in at least a temporary victory for the Bush administration.

The justices overruled a lower court, which had attempted to block the transfer as part of a rebuke to the White House.

The high court said it would decide later whether to consider the inmate’s argument that President Bush overstepped his authority by ordering Padilla’s indefinite detention in 2002. It granted the Bush administration’s request for a transfer in a one-page order and said Padilla’s broader appeal would be considered “in due course.”

“That’s fine. It’s great,” said Donna Newman, one of Padilla’s lawyers. “Both things are good. I don’t think it’s a bad day for us.”
news.yahoo.com

AMERICA is to spend £1billion on an embassy in Baghdad “more secure than the Pentagon”.

Plans for the hi-tech complex are being kept secret because of the terrorist threat in Iraq.

The exact location is not being released until later this year but it is likely to be built in the heavily fortified Green Zone area where the Iraqi government and US military command is based.

The embassy will be guarded by 15ft blast walls and ground-to-air missiles and the main building will have bunkers for use during air offensives.

The grounds will include as many as 300 houses for consular and military officials.

And a large-scale barracks will be built for Marines who will protect what will be Washington’s biggest and most secure overseas building.
mirror.co.uk

In an extract from his explosive new book, New York Times reporter James Risen reveals the bungles and miscalculations that led to a spectacular intelligence fiasco

She had probably done this a dozen times before. Modern digital technology had made clandestine communications with overseas agents seem routine. Back in the cold war, contacting a secret agent in Moscow or Beijing was a dangerous, labour-intensive process that could take days or even weeks. But by 2004, it was possible to send high-speed, encrypted messages directly and instantaneously from CIA headquarters to agents in the field who were equipped with small, covert personal communications devices. So the officer at CIA headquarters assigned to handle communications with the agency’s spies in Iran probably didn’t think twice when she began her latest download. With a few simple commands, she sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA’s spy network. Just as she had done so many times before.

But this time, the ease and speed of the technology betrayed her. The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran.

Mistake piled on mistake. As the CIA later learned, the Iranian who received the download was a double agent. The agent quickly turned the data over to Iranian security officials, and it enabled them to “roll up” the CIA’s network throughout Iran. CIA sources say that several of the Iranian agents were arrested and jailed, while the fates of some of the others is still unknown.

This espionage disaster, of course, was not reported. It left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the US – whether Tehran was about to go nuclear.

In fact, just as President Bush and his aides were making the case in 2004 and 2005 that Iran was moving rapidly to develop nuclear weapons, the American intelligence community found itself unable to provide the evidence to back up the administration’s public arguments. On the heels of the CIA’s failure to provide accurate pre-war intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, the agency was once again clueless in the Middle East. In the spring of 2005, in the wake of the CIA’s Iranian disaster, Porter Goss, its new director, told President Bush in a White House briefing that the CIA really didn’t know how close Iran was to becoming a nuclear power.

But it’s worse than that. Deep in the bowels of the CIA, someone must be nervously, but very privately, wondering: “Whatever happened to those nuclear blueprints we gave to the Iranians?”
guardian.co.uk

What if it wasn’t bungling incompetence at all?

Clandestine nuclear deals traced to Sudan
International investigators and western intelligence have for the first time named Sudan as a major conduit for sophisticated engineering equipment that could be used in nuclear weapons programmes.

Hundreds of millions of pounds of equipment was imported into the African country over a three-year period before the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 and has since disappeared, according to Guardian sources.

Western governments, UN detectives and international analysts trying to stem the illicit trade in weapons of mass destruction technology are alarmed by the black market trade.

Madsen Jan. 2: Intelligence indications and warnings abound as Bush administration finalizes military attack on Iran.
…There has been a rapid increase in training and readiness at a number of U.S. military installations involved with the planned primarily aerial attack. These include a Pentagon order to Fort Rucker, Alabama, to be prepared to handle an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 trainees, including civilian contractors, who will be deployed for Iranian combat operations. Rucker is home to the US Army’s aviation training command, including the helicopter training school.

In addition, there has been an increase in readiness at nearby Hurlburt Field in Florida, the home of the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command. The U.S. attack on Iran will primarily involve aviation (Navy, Air Force, Navy-Marine Corps) and special operations assets.

There has also been a noticeable increase in activity at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, California, a primary live fire training activity located in a desert and mountainous environment similar to target areas in Iran.

From European intelligence agencies comes word that the United States has told its NATO allies to be prepared for a military strike on Iranian nuclear development and military installations.

On November 17, 2005, Russian President Vladimir Putin spent seven hours in secret discussions with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan during the the opening ceremonies in Samsun, Turkey for the Russian-Turkish underwater Blue Stream natural gas pipeline, festivities also attended by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

According to sources knowledgeable about the meeting, Erdogan promised Putin, who has become a close friend, that Turkey would not support the use of its bases by the United States in a military attack on Iran. That brought a series of high level visits to Turkey by Bush administration officials, including CIA chief Porter Goss, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Iran Elbows Afghanistan From Pipeline Project With Turkmenistan
Kabul, 2 January: Iran has wrested the opportunity from Afghanistan by nearing an accord with Pakistan and India on a 7bn- dollars gas pipeline project.

The opportunity for Afghanistan was in the shape of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan gas pipeline but it was snatched by Iran as the three countries have agreed in principle to implement the multi-billion dollars gas project.

Earlier, officials of the three countries had held nine meetings to reach an accord on the gas pipeline from the Central Asian state via Afghanistan to Pakistan. The US will be dismayed as its oil and gas company UNOCAL’s efforts to pass gas pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan had been delayed because India and Pakistan have opted to sign an accord with Iran, analysts say.

Almost a year after Representative Cynthia McKinney was told by Donald Rumsfeld that it was not the policy of the Bush administration to reward companies that engage in human trafficking with government contracts, the scandal continues to sweep up innocent children who are sold into a life of slavery at the behest of Halliburton subsidiaries , Dyncorp and other transnational corporations with close ties to the establishment elite.

On March 11th 2005, McKinney grilled Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers on the Dyncorp scandal.

“Mr. Secretary, I watched President Bush deliver a moving speech at the United Nations in September 2003, in which he mentioned the crisis of the sex trade. The President called for the punishment of those involved in this horrible business. But at the very moment of that speech, DynCorp was exposed for having been involved in the buying and selling of young women and children. While all of this was going on, DynCorp kept the Pentagon contract to administer the smallpox and anthrax vaccines, and is now working on a plague vaccine through the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program. Mr. Secretary, is it [the] policy of the U.S. Government to reward companies that traffic in women and little girls?”

The response and McKinney’s comeback was as follows.

Rumsfeld: “Thank you, Representative. First, the answer to your first question is, is, no, absolutely not, the policy of the United States Government is clear, unambiguous, and opposed to the activities that you described. The second question.”

McKinney: “Well how do you explain the fact that DynCorp and its successor companies have received and continue to receive government contracts?”

Rumsfeld: “I would have to go and find the facts, but there are laws and rules and regulations with respect to government contracts, and there are times that corporations do things they should not do, in which case they tend to be suspended for some period; there are times then that the – under the laws and the rules and regulations for the – passed by the Congress and implemented by the Executive branch – that corporations can get off of – out of the penalty box if you will, and be permitted to engage in contracts with the government. They’re generally not barred in perpetuity.”

McKinney: “This contract – this company – was never in the penalty box.”

Rumsfeld: “I’m advised by DR. Chu that it was not the corporation that was engaged in the activities you characterized but I’m told it was an employee of the corporation, and it was some years ago in the Balkans that that took place.”

Rumsfeld’s effort to shift the blame away from the hierarchy at Dyncorp and onto the Dyncorp employees was a blatant attempt to hide the fact that human trafficking and sex slavery is a practice condoned by companies like Dyncorp and Halliburton subsidiaries like KBR.

What else are we to assume in light of recent revelations cited in the Chicago Tribune that Halliburton subsidiary KBR and Dyncorp lobbyists are working in tandem with the Pentagon to stall legislation that would specifically ban trafficking in humans for forced labor and prostitution by U.S. contractors?
prisonplanet.com

The Israeli government is planning to give up a large slice of land to American Christian evangelicals to build a biblical theme park by the Sea of Galilee where Jesus is said to have walked on water and fed 5,000 with five loaves and two fish.

A consortium of Christian groups, led by the television evangelist Pat Robertson, is in negotiation with the Israeli ministry of tourism and a deal is expected in the coming months. The project is expected to bring up to 1 million extra tourists a year but an undeclared benefit will be the cementing of a political alliance between the Israeli rightwing and the American Christian right.
guardian.co.uk

…Only Sudan has more internally displaced citizens than Colombia, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, a human rights group that has tracked the displaced around the globe for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Although Colombia has had a large displaced population for two decades, its size has increased quickly in recent months, experts say, and a disproportionate number of them are, like Garces, Afro-Colombians. They are targeted because they lack political clout and sophistication at a time when their rural homes have become economically attractive.

Ricardo Esquivia, general coordinator of Arvidas, an advocacy group for the displaced in Sucre state, said most AfroColombians who own such land either lack full knowledge of their rights or the political power to enforce them. One factor working against Afro-Colombians is the 80% illiteracy rate in the areas where many live, said Esquivia, himself an Afro-Colombian.

“They are historically vulnerable and relegated [to a lower status] because they have never fully exercised their economic, social and cultural rights,” said Jorge Rojas, a leading advocate for human rights and the displaced in Bogota, the capital.

Those rights include a constitutional provision that guarantees land title to rural Afro-Colombian communities that have organized loosely as a group and occupied their property for 10 years or more, said Luis Murillo, a former governor of Colombia’s Choco state. Murillo, also an Afro-Colombian, estimates that 1 million Afro-Colombians, or one-third of those living in rural areas, have been forced off of their land.

The growth of the displaced has much to do with the changing logistics of Colombia’s multibillion-dollar cocaine trade. The success of U.S.-sponsored spraying programs meant to eradicate coca leaf production in Colombia’s Amazon basin has caused a shift in coca farming to more remote areas, including the coastal zone surrounding Bajo Calima, where Afro-Colombians are concentrated.
latimes.com

The DNA profiles of nearly four in 10 black men in the UK are on the police’s national database – compared with fewer than one in 10 white men, according to figures compiled by the Guardian.
guardian.co.uk

…United Nations officials first sought to highlight this matter several years ago, accusing various states (including Uganda and neighbouring Rwanda) of widespread looting of the DRC’s mineral wealth.

In addition to deploying troops in the DRC during its five-year conflict, Uganda and Rwanda also backed various ethnic, Congolese factions. Both countries used security concerns to justify their actions in the DRC — Rwanda saying its stability was threatened by the presence of genocide suspects in eastern Congo.

A number of Hutu militants who helped carry out Rwanda’s 1994 genocide fled to the then Zaire as Tutsi rebels took control of Rwanda in that year. This laid the ground for Rwanda’s first invasion of the Congo in 1996, which led to the downfall of Zairean leader Mobutu Sese Seko.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kagame, were “on the verge of becoming godfathers of illegal exploitation of natural resources” observed a report by a U.N. panel of experts in 2001.

As 2006 gets underway, the illicit trade in gold, tin, timber, diamonds, coltan and other resources continues, fueled by demand from European and south-east Asian firms that import the resources from Uganda and Rwanda.
ipsnews.net

…Although there are several federal and state social-benefit systems in the U.S., a variety of obstacles, such as the high cost of health care and the lack of adequate housing, leads people further into poverty and becomes an abuse of their human rights. Official statistics show that 12.7 percent (or 37 million) of the population in the U.S. lived in poverty in 2004, while 15.7 percent (45.8 million) lacked health-insurance coverage; 11.9 percent of households (comprising 38.2 million people, including 13.9 million children) experienced food insecurity.

It is estimated that 33 million Americans continue to live in households without an adequate supply of food. According to statistics from the Bread for the World Institute, 3.5 percent of U.S. households experience hunger (9.6 million people, including 3 million children.) Children are a disproportionate share of the poor in the U.S. Although they are 26 percent of the total population, they constitute 39 percent of the poor.

UNICEF states that although the U.S. is still the wealthiest country on Earth, with income levels higher than any other country, it also has one of the highest incidences of child poverty among the rich, industrialized nations. Denmark and Finland have child-poverty levels of less than 3 percent, and are closely followed by Norway and Sweden, thanks to higher levels of social spending. In the U.S., 17 percent of children live in poverty.

Minority young children have significantly higher poverty rates than white children. For example, the poverty rate for young black and Hispanic children under age 3 is three times higher than that of white children. Statistics show poverty levels of 24.7 among African Americans, 21.9 percent among Hispanics and 8.6 percent among non-Hispanic whites.
commondreams.org

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has suffered a “significant” stroke and is undergoing an operation, doctors at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital say.

Officials said the 77-year-old leader was unconscious and had experienced “massive” cerebral bleeding.

The Israeli leader’s powers have been transferred to his deputy Ehud Olmert.
bbc.co.uk

Increasing Calls for PM Sharon to Step Down
(IsraelNN.com) Calls directed at Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, to step down from office, are resonating from many prominent political personalities following a Channel 10 News report on Tuesday night that the prime minister received a $3 million payment from a supporter.

Labor Party Secretary Eitan Cabel and former Meretz-Yahad leader Yossi Sarid are among the more vocal elected officials, who are demanding Mr. Sharon remove himself from office in light of the latest report linking him to illegal activities.

The National Union opposition party is demanding the prime minister remove himself and declare he will not be running in the 17th Knesset election scheduled for 28 March.

To further complicate matters, police are indicating the latest investigation against Sharon will most likely not be completed ahead of the national election.