WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld likened Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Adolf Hitler, reflecting continuing tension in relations between the United States and the Latin American government.

Rumsfeld, asked during a National Press Club appearance Thursday about indications of a deteriorating general relationship between Washington and parts of Latin America, said he believes such a characterization “misses the mark.”

“We saw dictatorships there. And then we saw most of those countries, with the exception of Cuba, for the most part move towards democracies,” he said. “We also saw corruption in that part of the world. And corruption is something that is corrosive of democracy.”

The secretary acknowledged that “we’ve seen some populist leadership appealing to masses of people in those countries. And elections like Evo Morales in Bolivia take place that clearly are worrisome.”

“I mean, we’ve got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money,” Rumsfeld added. “He’s a person who was elected legally — just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally — and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others.”
msnbc.msn.com

The ‘worrisome’ thing in US history has been when corrupt dictatorships, which the US government takes to like pigs to mud, do their inevitable crumbling and the aspirations of the people are finally heard. Hey but we don’t know much history around here. I think the lid needs to be blown on this whole ‘democracy’ thing. A sham, right from the start. Do regular people in the US have anything to say about the actions of this government? No. Will they stop this coming war? No. Where is democracy then.

The Pentagon has set up a special unit complete with robots to conduct forensic tests in the event of a nuclear attack on the US, with the aim of identifying attackers for possible retaliation, a Pentagon official said yesterday.
guardian.co.uk

Tony Blair told President George Bush that he was “solidly” behind US plans to invade Iraq before he sought advice about the invasion’s legality and despite the absence of a second UN resolution, according to a new account of the build-up to the war published today.

A memo of a two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House on January 31 2003 – nearly two months before the invasion – reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme.
guardian.co.uk

BAGHDAD — A mortar attack set ablaze a major petroleum facility in the northern city of Kirkuk on Thursday, stopping refining at the plant and further damaging Iraq’s beleaguered oil industry.

Iraqi oil workers were still fighting the fire late Thursday, and U.S. officials held high-level meetings in Baghdad to assess the damage. An Iraqi executive with the North Oil Co. called the incident the “most severe attack we have ever faced on an oil installation.” The mortar rounds also hit an important pipeline to Turkey that was already out of commission and was being repaired, the executive said.

The cessation of production forced the shutdown of an electricity plant that ran on petroleum supplied by the refinery.

U.S. officials said they had not yet determined how severely the attack would hamper oil production in Iraq, which fell 8% last year to half the 3 million barrels a day envisaged by American officials at the time of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Violence swept through the nation Thursday, taking the lives of at least 26 Iraqis. The U.S. military also announced the deaths of seven American servicemen since Wednesday.

In Shiite Muslim-dominated east Baghdad, car bombs detonated at a gas station and a popular market, sending up towers of fire that killed 16 people and injured 90.
latimes.com

As the European press asserted its right to publish hostile cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed, anger in the Arab world reached boiling point in Gaza where gunmen converged on European Union offices and gave the Danish, Norwegian, French and German governments 48 hours to apologise.

In the West Bank city of Nablus, a German citizen was seized – and later released – after armed militants roamed hotels threatening to kidnap nationals of European countries in which the cartoons – one of which shows the Prophet wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb with a burning fuse – have been published.

Newspapers in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands reprinted one or more of the Danish cartoons that have caused the storm.

Yesterday’s incidents prompted the EU to review the security of its representatives in the occupied Palestinian territories, where armed militants warned the staff at its Technical Assistance Office in Gaza City that they were demanding that all French citizens leave Gaza.

“Any citizen of these countries [that printed the cartoon] who are present in Gaza will put themselves in danger,” a gunman in a Fatah-linked armed unit said at the site.
independent.co.uk

This is not a matter of press freedom or church and state; it’s rabid jingoism, ‘yellow journalism’ as part of the lead-up to a full-on war. Just flip the script: what if al Jazeera published a cartoon of Jesus on the cross with an AK-47?

VIENNA — European and U.S. diplomats expressed confidence Thursday that they would win the votes necessary to report concerns about Iran’s nuclear research program to the United Nations Security Council.

With the support of oncereluctant Russia and China, there was little doubt that the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors would approve the resolution. All countries with veto power on the Security Council — the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China — now support the measure.

Diplomats worked into the night to achieve unanimity on the 35-member IAEA board, a stand they said would make the resolution’s message stronger. Syria, Cuba and Venezuela appeared to be inclined to vote no, sources said.
latimes.com

Tough talk from Tehran
t is another sign of the escalating crisis over Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions that the Islamic republic’s foreign minister has warned of swift retaliation if, as expected, it is reported to the United Nations security council. Manouchehr Mottaki uses an interview with the Guardian today to threaten “severe consequences,” including an end to snap inspections and other co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Mr Mottaki said something similar to Jack Straw yesterday. Like the threat by the commander of the revolutionary guard that Iran would fire missiles if attacked, this was, to put it mildly, extremely unhelpful.

The decision to report Iran to the UN has been made by all five permanent members of the security council, which is as good as things get in terms of international legitimacy. The IAEA is the UN’s nuclear watchdog. President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is being dishonest when he accuses the west of acting like the “lord of the world” in denying his country the peaceful use of the atom. Russia and China, hardly American vassals, are on the same side. This is not a replay of the Iraq crisis. Not yet anyway.

The Threat of Nuclear War
Any intelligent, informed person will have realized by now that the sabre-rattling warmongers in Washington DC and 10 Downing Street are planning a military attack against Iran in the near future.

The Israelis are noisy enough in their threats to conduct an air-strike on Iran by the end of next March and since June 2005 US strategic forces have been prepared to launch an attack using not only conventional weapons but so-called ‘tactical’ nukes and nuclear ‘city-busters’ .

If the planned attack is launched, it will be the first time since the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan that the USA will have again used nuclear weapons. The first time they did this it was against a country with which they were already at war. In the case of Iran, they will do so against a non-nuclear country which in no way has committed an aggression against any other country, least of all the US.

All the huffing and puffing presently going on about Iran’s contravention of the International Atomic Energy Authority’s regulations is not only patently untrue , it hides a much more machiavellian purpose. It will give the USA the legal semblance for making a nuclear attack.

By now, most Palestinians recognize Israel’s entrenched system of colonialism, racism and denial of basic human rights as a form of apartheid. In fact, Palestinians are far from alone in holding this view of Israel

By Omar Barghouti

02/02/06 “PACBI” — — Leading South African intellectuals, politicians and human rights advocates subscribe to the same school of thought. For instance, in an article in the Guardian tellingly entitled “Apartheid in the Holy Land,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote:

“I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. […] Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon?”[1]
In fact, many Jews have not forgotten. Inside Israel, some Jewish politicians and journalists have made clear analogies between Israel and South Africa. Roman Bronfman, Chair of the Democratic Choice faction in the Yahad party, criticized what he termed “an apartheid regime in the occupied territories,” adding, “The policy of apartheid has also infiltrated sovereign Israel, and discriminates daily against Israeli Arabs and other minorities. The struggle against such a fascist viewpoint is the job of every humanist.”[2]

Esther Levitan, the Jewish grandmother once condemned to indefinite solitary confinement without trial in apartheid South Africa for her activism in the ANC, admitted in an interview with Ha’aretz that she considered Israel appallingly racist, saying: “Israelis have this loathsome hatred of Arabs that makes me sick. […] They will create a worse apartheid here.”[3]
informationclearinghouse.info

Open Letter: ‘Just Be Fair With Us’
Feb. 6, 2006 issue – My message to the West—to America, to Europe, to everybody—is this: Hamas wants peace. We hate bloodshed and killing. We don’t want to fight. There is a verse in the Qur’an that says whoever kills one soul kills all souls. And whoever brings life to people brings life to a nation.

…Venezuelan authorities said last week they had “confidential evidence” that U.S. Embassy staff were involved with a group of Venezuelan military officers accused of passing state secrets to the U.S. Defense Department.

A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman said they had received a letter from authorities demanding Correa appear before investigators earlier this week and on Thursday another ordering him out.

Venezuela has 65 military officials in the United States and Washington has 21 officials in Venezuela.
yahoo.com

President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who came to power pledging to tackle corruption, has sacked the entire staff of Liberia’s finance ministry.

Weeks after taking over from a postwar transitional government, Africa’s first elected female president went to the ministry to deliver the news personally. Ms Johnson-Sirleaf, a former finance minister, said all the dismissed employees would be allowed to reapply for their jobs, but called on those involved in graft to “disappear.”
guardian.co.uk

Airport workers blocked the main approach road to New Delhi’s domestic airport yesterday as a strike entered its second day, hitting cargo and hospitality services at airports across the country. Police and paramilitary forces were deployed at key airports to ensure flights took off and landed on time.

Some 22,000 airport workers, mostly cleaners and administrators, are protesting against the government’s decision to privatise New Delhi and Mumbai airports. The two airports handle almost 65% of India’s international traffic – about 19 million passengers a year.
guardian.co.uk