Executive Summary

This Minority Report has been produced at the request of Representative John Conyers, Jr., Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee. He made this request in the wake of the President’s failure to respond to a letter submitted by 122 Members of Congress and more than 500,000 Americans in July of this year asking him whether the assertions set forth in the Downing Street Minutes were accurate. Mr. Conyers asked staff, by year end 2005, to review the available information concerning possible misconduct by the Bush Administration in the run up to the Iraq War and post-invasion statements and actions, and to develop legal conclusions and make legislative and other recommendations to him.

In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war with Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and other legal violations in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their Administration.

There is at least a prima facie case that these actions by the President, Vice-President and other members of the Bush Administration violate a number of federal laws, including (1) Committing a Fraud against the United States; (2) Making False Statements to Congress; (3) The War Powers Resolution; (4) Misuse of Government Funds; (5) federal laws and international treaties prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; (6) federal laws concerning retaliating against witnesses and other individuals; and (7) federal laws and regulations concerning leaking and other misuse of intelligence.

While these charges clearly rise to the level of impeachable misconduct, because the Bush Administration and the Republican-controlled Congress have blocked the ability of Members to obtain information directly from the Administration concerning these matters or responding to these charges, more investigatory authority is needed before recommendations can be made regarding specific Articles of Impeachment. As a result, we recommend that Congress establish a select committee with subpoena authority to investigate the misconduct of the Bush Administration with regard to the Iraq war detailed in this Report and report to the Committee on the Judiciary on possible impeachable offenses.
axisoflogic.com

WASHINGTON, Jan 1 (IPS) – Arab and Middle East civil society groups are accusing a United Nations agency of collaborating with Egyptian police in action which caused the deaths of at least 25 Sudanese refugees in a downtown Cairo park on Friday.

The refugees, including women and children, have been staging a public sit-in for the past three months protesting their treatment by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and were demanding relocation to a third country.

But Friday evening, a police force of nearly 4,000 officers cordoned off the Sudanese encampment, fired water cannons at them and beat them indiscriminately. Hundreds were dragged into buses and transferred to unknown destinations.

Some 25 people died in the clashes and a stampede, while dozens were injured. Eyewitnesses told the local press that the refugees abandoned their belongings and suitcases in the park as they fled the crackdown.

Egyptian civil society groups decried the use of force in a statement on Saturday and called what happed a “massacre” and “a full-blown crime committed by Egyptian security forces in collaboration with UNHCR against unarmed refugees, most of whom are women, children and elderly”.

Some 2,500 Sudanese refugees have been gathered at the park since Sep. 29 saying they would not leave until the UNHCR agreed to resettle them in European countries, as reportedly promised. They had fled Sudan after years of civil war.
ipsnews.net

Egypt to Deport 654 Sudanese Refugees

Last week’s publication by Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth on Israeli companies winning contracts with the Kurdish government to train and equip Kurdish security forces in northern Iraq has caused tension in the relations between Israel and Turkey, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Sunday.

The affair received widespread coverage on the website of Turkey’s popular newspaper Zaman, which reported that the new information revealed has caused tension between the two countries.

Foreign Ministry officials, aware of the fact that they were dealing with a very complex and sensitive issue, hastened to send calming messages to Turkey over the weekend.

The main message conveyed by the ministry was that the Israeli companies acted on their own initiative and that the official State of Israel does not operate in the discussed areas.
ynetnews.com

This is not the story that broke over a year ago, that said Israeli forces were working there…

…Currently, the resource war is concealed behind a propaganda smokescreen created by the establishment media. Their task is to characterize the conflict as a war on terror and to limit their coverage to the random incidents of violence by fanatical jihadis. It’s rare when the media reports on the guerilla war that has subsumed Iraq and which threatens a worldwide economic downturn.

There’s simply no way that the Bush administration can prevail in its original intention of controlling Iraq’s oil if a small army of guerillas focus their energies on disrupting production. Millions of dollars of infrastructure can be destroyed in a flash by one determined fighter with a bomb or a Kalashnikov.

The success of the armed resistance is quantifiable in terms of the reduction in oil exports. In 1990, Saddam was exporting 3.5 million barrels per day. During the 1990s, there was a gradual decline due to sanctions and neglect. Since the invasion of 2003, the oil sector has taken a nosedive directly attributable to the blowing up of pipelines. Production is now at an all time low, less than half of what it was just prior to the invasion. The development of oil fields and the transport of petroleum are proving to be incompatible with the unpredictable outbursts of violence.
informationclearinghouse.info

…Abbas al-Bayati of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a key member of the United Iraqi Alliance, agreed that while Chalabi overestimated his influence at the polls, “elections are not the end.”

“In all, he managed to wield momentum and accumulated experience that qualify him to play a vital role in the political process,” al-Bayati said.

Although Chalabi fell out of favor with Washington after the pre-war intelligence he supplied turned out to be false, lately they have indicated that he should remain in the government. In what some observers here took as a reference to Chalabi, U.S. officials have said the new government should be composed of competent people.

Al-Moussawi, the Chalabi aide, indicated that U.S. officials and his boss have mended their relationship. “On some issues there were some disagreements, and I think most of those disagreements have been resolved lately.”

Taha al-Luheibi, spokesman for the Dialogue Council, a member of the main Sunni coalition, said the record suggested that Chalabi will not be content with a minor role. “His ambition last year was to be prime minister. … Now, he’s looking to be the same thing, or at least to be a minister.”
realcities.com

Now here’s democracy in action: the guy got 1% of the vote.

The Bush administration has scaled back its ambitions to rebuild Iraq from the devastation wrought by war and dictatorship and does not intend to seek new funds for reconstruction, it emerged yesterday.
In a decision that will be seen as a retreat from a promise by President George Bush to give Iraq the best infrastructure in the region, administration officials say they will not seek reconstruction funds when the budget request is presented to Congress next month, the Washington Post reported yesterday.

The $18.4bn (£10.6bn) allocation is scheduled to run out in June 2007. The move will be seen by critics as further evidence of the administration’s failure to plan for the aftermath of the war.

A decision not to renew the reconstruction programme would leave Iraq with the burden of tens of billions of dollars in unfinished projects, and an oil industry and electrical grid that have yet to return to pre-war production levels.

The decision is a tacit admission of the failure of the US rebuilding effort in the face of a relentless insurgency. Nearly half the funds earmarked for reconstruction were diverted towards fighting the insurgency and preparations to put Saddam Hussein on trial.

At least $2.5bn earmarked for Iraq’s dilapidated infrastructure and schools was diverted to building up a security force. And funds originally intended to repair the electricity grid and sewage and sanitation system were used to train special bomb squad units and a hostage rescue force. The US also shifted funds to build 10 new prisons to keep pace with the insurgency, and safe houses and armoured cars for Iraqi judges, the Post said.
guardian.co.uk

Venezuela has produced the most unexpected of recent mass social movements. Nine years ago, before the first election of Hugo Chávez Frías, few leftists of the world looked toward Venezuela to lift our sagging spirits. Many Venezuelan radicals say the same, like a communist union leader I met in the industrial city of Valencia: “We don’t know where Chávez came from,” he said, “but he came and changed everything.” By the time a popular uprising in Caracas reversed a U.S.-backed coup in 2002, Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” had become the greatest beacon of hope for leftists around the world. Hopes have risen further with President Chávez’s increasingly socialist rhetoric and the expansion of Venezuela’s social programs, fueled by breathtaking economic growth in the country’s nationalized oil industry. Venezuela is moving.

Only, it is far from clear where Venezuela is going. Many millions of people have pinned their hopes on the Bolivarian Revolution, but they are not all hoping in the same direction. Meanwhile the right-wing opposition to Chávez is weak but persistent. The right’s boycott of recent parliamentary elections shows that the “oligarchs,” as Chávez likes to call them, may still have a few tricks up their sleeve. Revolutionary optimists have called this an act of suicide by the right, ushering in a new phase of the revolution, now that Chavistas control every seat in the national assembly. But right-wingers always know how to spoil a party, and few Chavistas’ could conceal their unease at their eerily easy victory. For good reason-the course of the Bolivarian Revolution is still less clear now than it was before the elections.

I don’t intend to predict the future. But I will reflect on the conditions of possibility for the Revolution’s success. What will it take for the “revolutionary process” to fulfill its promises, promises which grow more radical every day? What will it take to realize the hopes that have been placed in the Bolivarian Revolution, when we know that not all of these conflicting and ever-changing hopes can be realized?

Hugo Chávez has declared his opposition to capitalism and support of socialism. When I was in Venezuela this past summer, most people agreed with him, even if they did not agree on what this might mean. Theories of socialism and social justice abound in Venezuela. Some Chavistas support the new social welfare programs, while hoping for an eventual reconciliation between the rich and the poor. Others call for struggle against the “oligarchs.” The country’s small but growing Trotskyist currents call for the expropriation of bourgeois property, while the larger Communist Party of Venezuela is more cautious, prepared for a very slow transition to socialism. Meanwhile the militant Tupamaros are prepared for armed self-defense of poor communities, and possibly for guerrilla war, if need be. It is quite unclear what Chávez himself envisions, partly because he lends his support to so many different ideas and strategies, and partly because his views seem to be changing fairly quickly.

Probably the most popular strategies for building socialism in Venezuela involve the principles of “endogenous development,” “co-management,” and “cooperativism.” The first term is broad, but among other things it lends legitimacy to the process of expropriating unused land and closed factories by workers and campesinos, as a means of increasing the economic potential and self-sufficiency of Venezuela. The term also refers to the country’s burgeoning cooperative movement, which in some ways has been filling in the economic gaps left by capitalism. In state-owned enterprises, “endogenous development” has involved an attempt to tie administration more closely to the interests of the nation, with autonomy from the dictates of international capital. In some enterprises “co-management” has been introduced, giving workers control over most internal affairs of the enterprise, while the state retains a stake in the enterprises’ profits and maintains some representation in administration.

None of these strategies involves a direct confrontation with established capital. In fact, for a long time it has been Chávez’s strategy to avoid such confrontation as much as possible. Even while the monopolistic corporate media blared the most extreme anti-Chávez propaganda, Chávez never advocated the popular expropriation of the means of mediatic production. Instead, he supported grass-roots attempts to establish independent media sources throughout the country. Similarly, many Venezuelans see the cooperative movement as an alternative to capitalism-one that is clearly superior, and which will continue to grow until it could become the dominant economic force in the country. More radical socialists are quick to point out the naïveté of this view, but it is also possible that Venezuela really is not yet prepared for direct confrontation-very few workers or campesinos have attempted to occupy factories or land that is currently being put to productive use by capitalists. A more important question is not “Will the Revolution be completed today?” or “Is Chávez really a socialist?” but “Is the Revolution moving forward?” The answer to the second question is a definitive yes. But this only raises more questions. Venezuela is moving, but it has a long way to go.

The election of Chávez was the impetus to significant popular mobilization in Venezuela. Many existing left organizations rallied to his cause, while poor communities began, slowly, to build organizations in support of the revolutionary “process” that the president heralded in the vaguest of terms. But at that time the “process” mostly involved attempts by the army and government agencies to implement social welfare programs-benefiting the poor, but not usually controlled by them. Then, in April 2002, came the attempted coup. If Chávez’s first election was kindling for a camp fire around which the Venezuelan population would gather, the coup was the spark the lit a wildfire. In the words of a woman I met in a Caracas neighborhood last summer, “The coup made us realize that we had to organize ourselves.”
zmag.org

As Argentina’s Debt Dwindles, President’s Power Steadily Grows
BUENOS AIRES, Dec. 30 – Just four years ago, Argentina’s economy was prostrate and its politics in chaos, after a financial crisis resulted in bank deposits being frozen, the government defaulting on more than $100 billion in debt and five presidents holding office in two weeks. But on Tuesday, the country is expected to pay off the last of its debt to the International Monetary Fund and simply walk away from further negotiations with the group.

Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press
President Néstor Kirchner announced that his country is expected to pay its $9.8 billion debt to the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday.

Forum: Unrest in South America
Argentina still owes tens of billions to private lenders, even after a debt restructuring in March. But the $9.8 billion payment is an important symbolic milestone and just one of several recent signs that President Néstor Kirchner appears to be concentrating more power in his own hands and steering his government to the left. Since a midterm election victory in October, Mr. Kirchner has also moved to establish an alliance with Venezuela’s populist leader, Hugo Chávez, and, as a traditional Peronist, to extend the hand of the state deeper into the economy, the judiciary and the news media.

“With this payment, we are interring a significant part of an ignominious past,” Mr. Kirchner said recently, adding that the action would liberate Argentina from a supervisory body that was making “more and more demands that contradict themselves and economic growth.” That position is popular here because many Argentines believe that the I.M.F. is responsible for the policies that led to the economic crisis of 2001, and then left the country to recuperate on its own.

Mr. Kirchner, 55, took office in May 2003 having won less than a quarter of the popular vote. But he has erased memories of the crisis of 2001 and early 2002 and now enjoys record levels of public support – 75 percent or more, according to recent polls – that allow him to do largely as he pleases.

The war against Iraq, the assault on its people, the occupation of its cities, will come to an end, sooner or later. The process has already begun. The first signs of mutiny are appearing in Congress. The first editorials calling for withdrawal from Iraq are beginning to appear in the press. The anti-war movement has been growing, slowly but persistently, all over the country.

Public opinion polls now show the country decisively against the war and the Bush Administration. The harsh realities have become visible. The troops will have to come home.

And while we work with increased determination to make this happen, should we not think beyond this war? Should we begin to think, even before this shameful war is over, about ending our addiction to massive violence and instead using the enormous wealth of our country for human needs? That is, should we begin to speak about ending war—not just this war or that war, but war itself? Perhaps the time has come to bring an end to war, and turn the human race onto a path of health and healing.

A group of internationally known figures, celebrated both for their talent and their dedication to human rights (Gino Strada, Paul Farmer, Kurt Vonnegut, Nadine Gordimer, Eduardo Galeano, and others), will soon launch a worldwide campaign to enlist tens of millions of people in a movement for the renunciation of war, hoping to reach the point where governments, facing popular resistance, will find it difficult or impossible to wage war.

There is a persistent argument against such a possibility, which I have heard from people on all parts of the political spectrum: We will never do away with war because it comes out of human nature. The most compelling counter to that claim is in history: We don’t find people spontaneously rushing to make war on others. What we find, rather, is that governments must make the most strenuous efforts to mobilize populations for war. They must entice soldiers with promises of money, education, must hold out to young people whose chances in life look very poor that here is an opportunity to attain respect and status. And if those enticements don’t work, governments must use coercion: They must conscript young people, force them into military service, threaten them with prison if they do not comply.
progressive.org

DJIBOUTI – Al-Qaida is active in Somalia, but U.S. counterterrorism forces are succeeding in keeping its influence from spreading in East Africa — using shovels as their weapons, a commander said Monday.

Maj. Gen. Tim Ghormley, who assumed command of the task force in May, said his troops are focusing on humanitarian projects including drilling wells and refurbishing schools and clinics to improve the lives of residents in the region and keep them away from the terror network.

“We know that al-Qaida al-Itihaad is in Somalia,” Ghormley told reporters in an interview at his base in the impoverished nation of Djibouti. “They’d like to export that … if we weren’t there they would be.”

While the al-Qaida linked group al-Itihaad was largely destroyed or disbanded by Ethiopian troops fighting inside Somalia by 1997, some of its members have regrouped under new guises and have begun to grow in strength, according to an International Crisis Group report released in July.

Somalia, divided into warring fiefdoms and with no central government, remains fertile ground for terrorists.

The Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, set up in this former French colony in June 2002, is responsible for fighting terrorism in nine countries around the Horn of Africa: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Somalia in Africa and Yemen on the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula.
yahoo.com

so…how many U.S. ‘anti-terrorism forces’ are deployed in East Africa?

Ever since the turn of the 1990s, there has been great stress on raising the rate of economic growth. In fact, it has become the be all and end all for the governments coming to power at the centre. It has been underlined time and again that the only way to accomplish this task is by following the ten points that constitute the Washington consensus, which boil down to liberalisation, privatization and globalisation. For quite some time the votaries of this thinking and their trumpeters in the academic world as well as the media have been announcing from the housetops that the salvation of India lies in this. They blame Nehru for shackling the Indian economy and the forces of economic growth by bringing in his “disastrous socialistic ideas” and “models”! The result was, what pro-Western media and academics called “the Hindu rate of economic growth” that hovered around average 3 to 3.5 per cent per annum. Now, it is claimed that, by following the prescription of Washington consensus, India has been able to raise the annual rate of economic growth to 7-8 per cent and, very soon, it will reach 10 per cent and the day is not far when it will be ahead of China. It will then join the club of world superpowers. But here an inconvenient question arises: will it take care of India’s problems of unemployment in all its forms and manifestations, illiteracy, poverty, sickness, regional economic imbalances and so on? Before we attempt to tackle this very pertinent question, let us be clear about the connotation of economic growth.

In common parlance, seldom any distinction is made between growth and development. They are generally taken to be synonyms. In development economics, however, they do not have the same connotations. Economic growth means only a sustained increase in the volume of goods and services produced annually by a nation, generally expressed in terms of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). The total volume of goods and services may increase by employing greater amounts of labour without any change in its productivity or by raising its productivity without any change or with even a decline in the quantum of labour or by increasing both the quantum of labour and its productivity. Obviously, there is a clear-cut possibility of “jobless growth”, i.e., GDP may increase without generating new employment opportunities or throwing workers out of jobs.
zmag.org