BUENOS AIRES — South American leaders from Venezuela to Argentina are proposing to build the world’s largest fuel pipeline across Latin America, and they hope it will deliver much more than natural gas: They portray the plan as the first blueprint for a new era of regional cooperation, greater independence from international markets and a more prominent voice on the world stage.

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has labeled the proposal a 5,000-mile symbol of diminishing U.S. influence in Latin America. Enthusiastic support for the project from regional heavyweights, including Brazil and Argentina, has prompted others to describe the project as the first true joint venture of a political coalition determined to forge a new South American identity.

“This is the end of the Washington consensus,” Chavez told reporters in Caracas last month, using the term for the market-driven economic policies that many Latin American countries adopted in the 1990s with U.S. encouragement. “It’s the beginning of a South American consensus.”
washingtonpost.com

WARRI, Nigeria — Militants launched a wave of attacks across Nigeria’s troubled delta region today, blowing up oil installations and seizing nine foreigners, including three Americans. The violence cut the West African nation’s crude oil exports by at least 16 percent.

A fire was quickly put out on a Royal Dutch Shell platform that loads the company’s tankers in the western delta, but the Forcados terminal’s normal operations could not continue, halting the flow of 400,000 barrels a day.

“We can’t load because there is some damage to the loading platform,” Shell official Donald Boham said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Nigeria is Africa’s leading oil exporter and the United States’ fifth-largest supplier, normally producing 2.5 million barrels a day.

On Friday, Shell shut down a facility pumping 37,800 barrels of crude daily after an unexplained blaze at a nearby oil well. And the firm has yet to restore 106,000 daily barrels lost when a major pipeline supplying the Forcados terminal was hit in a similar wave of attacks and hostage takings last month.

Oil prices jumped more than $1 and settled near $60 a barrel Friday on supply concerns sparked by a militant threat to wage war on foreign oil interests.

In an e-mail to The Associated Press today, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta claimed responsibility for the attacks, including the raid in which militants abducted three Americans, two Egyptians, two Thais, one Briton and one Filipino.

The group, which claims to be fighting for a greater local share of the country’s oil wealth, said the attacks were carried out in retaliation for assaults this week by military helicopters. The militants threatened more violence would follow on “a grander scale.”
latimes.com

US demands release of abducted Nigeria oil workers
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States called for the unconditional release of three American oil workers abducted in Nigeria on Saturday and said it was working with Nigeria’s government to try to secure their freedom.

Militants seeking more local control over the vast oil wealth of the Niger Delta region stormed an offshore barge operated by U.S. oil services company Willbros Group Inc. in predawn attacks and abducted nine workers — three Americans, one Briton, two Thais, two Egyptians and a Filipino.

“We can now confirm reports that three American oil workers have been taken hostage in Nigeria. We call for their unconditional release and are working with the Nigerian government on this,” said State Department official Noel Clay.

Michael Collier, vice president of investor relations for Willbros, said he could not release the identities of the employees involved until they were confirmed and their families notified.

“We have a crisis management team already in action,” he said by telephone from Houston. The company was gathering information and could not discuss details, he said.

Willbros said later it had no plans to move any of its 3,000 employees out of the country. Royal Dutch/Shell Group said it withdrew its staff from its EA oilfield in Nigeria.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has joined in the growing chorus of condemnation of America’s Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
He said the detention camp was a stain on the character of the United States as a superpower and a democracy.

He also attacked Britain’s 28-day detention period for terror suspects, calling it excessive and untenable.

His comments follow a UN report calling for the closure of the camp where some 500 “enemy combatants” have been held without trial for up to four years.

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, Archbishop Tutu said he was alarmed that arguments used by the South African apartheid regime are now being used to justify anti-terror measures.

“It is disgraceful and one cannot find strong enough words to condemn what Britain and the United States and some of their allies have accepted,” he said.

The respected clergyman said the rule of law had been “subverted horrendously” and he described the muted public outcry – particularly in America – as “saddening”.
bbc.co.uk

Democracy Now! interview

A new expose gives an account of the CIA’s secret efforts to develop new forms of torture spanning fifty years. It reveals how the CIA perfected its methods, distributing them across the world from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, uncovering the roots of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture scandals. The book is titled “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror.”

Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Author of “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror” and also “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.”
democracynow.org

Israel’s cabinet has approved punitive sanctions on the Palestinian Authority, now led by militant group Hamas.
Israel will withhold an estimated $50m (£28m) in monthly customs revenues due to the PA, and will tighten borders for people and food crossing into Gaza.

Before the cabinet meeting, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the Hamas-led PA a “terrorist authority” and ruled out direct talks.

Israel would allow humanitarian aid to reach the Palestinians, Mr Olmert said.

“It is clear that in light of the Hamas majority in the PLC and the instructions to form a new government that were given to the head of Hamas, the PA is – in practice – becoming a terrorist authority,” Mr Olmert said.

“Israel will not hold contacts with the administration in which Hamas plays any part – small, large or permanent.”
bbc.co.uk

Israeli troops kill 2 Palestinian stone-throwers
NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) – Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinians during confrontations with stone throwers in the West Bank refugee camp of Balata on Sunday, witnesses and medics said.

They said soldiers were searching Balata, near the city of Nablus, for suspected militants when they came across stone-throwing youths and opened fire. Two 18-year-olds were killed. A third youth was wounded in the incident, medics said.

The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the incident.

KABUL: Taliban claimed to have killed seven Afghan troops in southeastern Afghanistan.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousaf told Radio Tehran that the Taliban blew up a vehicle of the Afghan troops with a remote controlled landmine in Ghazni province that resulted in killing of seven Afghan troops.
paktribune.com

6 Killed in New Taleban Attacks
KANDAHAR, 17 February 2006 — Suspected Taleban rebels killed four policemen in Afghanistan while a bomb blast claimed the lives of two militia soldiers working with security forces, officials said yesterday. About 60 suspected Taleban rebels armed with machine-guns and rockets raided a police post in southwestern Nimroz province on Wednesday, killing at least one policeman and injuring four others, the provincial governor said.

Some Taleban fighters also appeared to have been killed in the almost two-hour gunfight, judging by blood and ripped clothes and shoes left at the scene, Gov. Ghulam Dastagir Azad said.

…A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population – the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit’s streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.

Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.
guardian.co.uk

More than 100 inmates at a Los Angeles County jail were ordered to strip naked, had their mattresses taken away and were left with only blankets to cover themselves for a day as Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department officials tried to quell racially charged violence that has plagued the jail system for nearly two weeks.

The tactics — defended Friday by jail officials as necessary to stop the fighting — were immediately criticized as dehumanizing and highly inappropriate by civil rights activists and the Sheriff’s Department’s independent overseer.

“I have no problem taking privileges away…. It comes to a different level of basic human rights if you take away clothing and dignity,” said Michael Gennaco, chief of Sheriff Lee Baca’s office of independent review. “I don’t know if it is consistent with the sheriff’s core values.”
latimes.com

A Half-Dozen Questions About 9/11 They Don’t Want You to Ask
By WERTHER

The events of September 11, 2001 evoke painful memories, tinged with a powerful nostalgia for the way of life before it happened. The immediate tragedy caused a disorientation sufficient to distort the critical faculties in the direction of retrospectively predictable responses: bureaucratic adaptation, opportunism, profiteering, kitsch sentiment, and mindless sloganeering.

As 9/11, and the report of the commission charged to investigate it, fade into history like the Warren Commission that preceded it, the questions, gaps, and anomalies raised by the report have created an entire cottage industry of amateur speculation–as did the omissions and distortions of the Warren Report four decades ago. How could it not?

While initially received as definitive by a rapturous official press, the 9/11 Report has been overtaken by reality, not only because of unsatisfying content–like all “independent” government reports, it is fundamentally an apology and a coverup masquerading as an exposé–but because we now know more: more about the feckless invasion of Iraq, more about the occupation of Afghanistan and the purported hunt for Osama bin Laden, more about the post-9/11 stampede to repeal elements of the Bill of Rights, more about the rush to create the Department of Homeland Security, an agency to “prevent another 9/11,” which, in retrospect, is plainly about cronyism, contracts, and Congressional boodle.

Many of the amateur sleuths of the 9/11 mystery have based their investigations on microscopic forensics regarding the publicly released video footage, or speculations into the physics of impacting aircraft or collapsing buildings. But staring too closely at the recorded traces of subatomic phenomena involved in a one-time event can deceive us into finding the answer we are looking for, as Professor Heisenberg once postulated. Over 40 years on, the Magic Bullet is still the Magic Bullet: improbable, yes, but not outside the realm of the possible.

But there is surprisingly little discussion of the basic higher-order political factors surrounding 9/11, factors that do not require knowledge of the melting point of girder steel or the unknowable piloting abilities of the presumed perpetrators. Let us proceed, then, in a spirit of detached scientific inquiry, to ask questions the 9/11 Commission was unprepared to ask.
counterpunch.org
(more…)

Vice President Dick “Buckshot” Cheney kept his word to the inmates at California’s maximum security Folsom State Prison. He played a one hour set with his band “Dickie and The Trigger Happy Birdie Killers”. The set received a luke warm reception until Cheney launched into his new, as yet unreleased, single “Go F*** Yourself”. During the guitar solo the Vice President thrilled the assembled audience by producing a rifle and opening fire. “He seems angry. Very angry” one inmate said “I mean, I always thought that the American people didn’t like to vote for angry people but…Man, that dude is angry!” I managed to obtain a tape of the performance and am proud to present it here….
huffingtonpost.com