Lucrative opportunities taken away on a political whim; the danger of being locked up by an over-mighty government agency; the brick wall of protectionism – the business community expects to do battle with all these things in an emerging market.

Yet this suddenly seems to be a description of doing business in that most developed of all markets, the United States of America.

In the UK, in the cash-rich Gulf states and in fast-growing India, different incidents in the past week have made people ask the same question: is it worth doing business with the US?

Critics say the outcry over the £3.9bn acquisition of P&O by Dubai Ports World, which will transfer the running of five US ports to a state-controlled Middle Eastern company, has exposed the US Congress at its xenophobic worst. But it has also revealed more starkly than ever the protectionist tide that is waxing in America under the guise of national security.
independent.co.uk

O please…

MANAMA, Bahrain – Al-Qaida on Saturday vowed more attacks on Saudi oil facilities, a day after an attempt to bomb the world’s biggest oil processing complex showed the group still can strike inside the kingdom.

A strike on the Abqaiq complex, near Saudi Arabia’s eastern Persian Gulf coast, could have been devastating. Nearly two-thirds of the country’s oil flows through the facility for processing before export

….Analysts said it was too early to say if the Abqaiq bombing signaled a new, aggressive campaign. But the choice of oil facilities should increase concerns, they said.

“If the Saudi system goes down, then you will have a real problem, and for oil prices the sky is the limit,” Mohamedi said. “You’re attacking the absolute heart of the world oil system.”

Saudi Arabia holds over 260 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, a quarter of the world’s total. It currently puts out about 9.5 million barrels per day, or 11 percent of global consumption.
news.yahoo.com

It’s alarming when headlines scream “Al Qaida can still strike.” Maybe our fasten seat belt sign should be switched on. Events are converging, and it feels to me like somethin is about to blow, and the groundwork is being laid in stories like this…

Most of the corpses in Baghdad’s mortuary show signs of torture and execution. And the Interior Ministry is being blamed.

Hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone by death squads working from the Ministry of the Interior, the United Nations’ outgoing human rights chief in Iraq has revealed.

John Pace, who left Baghdad two weeks ago, told The Independent on Sunday that up to three-quarters of the corpses stacked in the city’s mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Much of the killing, he said, was carried out by Shia Muslim groups under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.

Much of the statistical information provided to Mr Pace and his team comes from the Baghdad Medico-Legal Institute, which is located next to the city’s mortuary. He said figures show that last July the morgue alone received 1,100 bodies, about 900 of which bore evidence of torture or summary execution. The pattern prevailed throughout the year until December, when the number dropped to 780 bodies, about 400 of which had gunshot or torture wounds.
independent.co.uk

‘The cheapest thing in Iraq is a human life’
At the city’s main mortuary yesterday corpses were piled in the corridors according to the districts where they had been discovered. Periodically a policeman would shout the name of a district to the crowd outside and take families to see if they could find their missing men.

There were no stretchers, sheets or shrouds. The bodies were simply identified, pulled from the piles, dumped into cheap coffins and removed from the building by any available transport. Some were simply tied to the roofs of taxis.

“Don’t cry,” one man told his daughter. “We’ve got to get used to this by now. The cheapest thing in Iraq is a human.”

Finally it was Mr Dulaimi’s turn. He walked slowly into the mortuary with his brother and a nephew, looking down at the long line of corpses. He stopped abruptly. Though he had feared the worst, nothing had prepared him for the sight of his dead son’s face. “Tortured!” he cried as he turned to his weeping cousin. “How can one imagine? They have pulled out his eye and teeth.”

Well that’s one problem, it is impossible to imagine, and so we dutifully pay our taxes and don’t. This filth is on our hands.

Whose Bombs were they?
02/25/06 “ICH” — — “We should stand hand in hand to prevent the danger of a civil war. We are facing a major conspiracy that is targeting Iraq’s unity.” Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

There’s no telling who was behind the bombing of the al-Askariya Mosque. There were no security cameras at the site and it’s doubtful that the police will be able to perform a thorough forensic investigation.

That’s too bad; the bomb-residue would probably provide clear evidence of who engineered the attack. So far, there’s little more to go on than the early reports of four men (three who were dressed in black, one in a police uniform) who overtook security guards at the mosque and placed the bombs in broad daylight.

It was a bold assault that strongly suggests the involvement of highly-trained paramilitaries conducting a well-rehearsed plan. Still, that doesn’t give us any solid proof of what groups may have been involved.

The destruction of the Samarra shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, has unleashed a wave of retaliatory attacks against the Sunnis. More than 110 people were reported killed by the rampaging Shia. More than 90 Sunni mosques have been either destroyed or badly damaged. In Baghdad alone, 47 men have been found scattered throughout the city after being killed execution-style with a bullet to the back of the head. The chaos ends a week of increased violence following two major suicide bombings directed against Shia civilians that resulted in the deaths of 36 people.

The public outrage over the desecration of one of the country’s holiest sights has reached fever-pitch and it’s doubtful that the flimsy American-backed regime will be able to head-off a civil war.

It is difficult to imagine that the perpetrators of this heinous attack didn’t anticipate its disastrous effects. Certainly, the Sunni-led resistance does not benefit from alienating the very people it is trying to enlist in its fight against the American occupation. Accordingly, most of the prominent Sunni groups have denied involvement in the attack and dismissed it as collaboration between American and Iranian intelligence agencies.

A communiqué from “The Foreign Relations Department of the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party” denounced the attack pointing the finger at the Interior Ministry’s Badr Brigade and American paramilitaries.

The Ba’ath statement explains:

“America is the main party responsible for the crime of attacking the tomb of Ali al-Hadi…because it is the power that occupies Iraq and has a basic interest in committing it.”

“The escalation of differences between America and Iran has found their main political arena in Iraq, because the most important group of agents of Iran is there and are able to use the blood of Iraqis and the future of Iraq to exert pressure on America. Iran has laid out a plan to embroil America in the Iraqi morass to prevent it from obstructing Iran’s nuclear plans. Particularly since America is eager to move on to completing arrangements for a withdrawal from Iraq, after signing binding agreements on oil and strategy. America believes that without the participation of “Sunni” parties in the regime those arrangements will fail. For that reason ‘cutting Iran’s claws’ has become one of the important requirements for American plans. This is what Ambassador Zalmay spoke of recently when he declared that no sectarian would take control of the Ministries of the Interior or Defense. Similarly, America has begun to publish information that it formally kept hidden regarding the crimes of the Badr Brigade and the Interior Ministry.”

Don’t blame Canada anymore, blame Iran.

While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.

Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.

But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as “enemy combatants,” military officials said.
nytimes.com

Inmates Riot at High-Security Kabul Prison
KABUL, Afghanistan – Terror convicts and hundreds of other inmates clashed with guards and took control of parts of a high-security prison in Afghanistan’s capital, officials said Sunday.

Police and soldiers surrounded the Policharki Prison on Sunday as government officials attempted to negotiate with the inmates, who include al-Qaida and Taliban militants.

An Associated Press reporter heard two bursts of gunfire about two hours apart from inside the prison Sunday. A few minutes after the first gunfire, an ambulance carrying an unidentified patient drove out of the prison.

The trouble began Saturday night when prisoners forced guards out of a prison block, said Abdul Salaam Bakshi, chief of prisons in Afghanistan. He accused al-Qaida and Taliban inmates of inciting other prisoners.

The Afghan army deployed more than 100 soldiers to surround the prison and parked eight tanks and armored personnel carriers outside the gates.

A British bastion in the heart of Taliban territory
The vast camp spreads across an unforgiving landscape, the biggest British military base since the Second World War, a potent symbol of the new British presence in Afghanistan.

Camp Bastion is being built in Helmand, the most dangerous part of this highly dangerous country. It is from this desolate spot that British operations against a resurgent Taliban and al-Qa’ida will be run.

“Please don’t call it our Dien Bien Phu”, said a senior officer, referring to the siege of French forces that brought their occupation of Vietnam to an end in 1954. But if the isolated British base in the heart of hostile country does turn into the same sort of debacle, it won’t be because the British, unlike the French, made the mistake of underestimating their enemy.

Well, they said it, not me…

…Last week, George W Bush was giving some thought to the fondness of young Indians for pizzas. As he prepares for a landmark visit to India – a trip analysts promise will bring ‘India firmly and irrevocably on to the world stage as a major player’ – it is these consumers he wants. In a speech ahead of his visit, he told US listeners: ‘India’s middle class is now estimated at 300 million people. Think about that. That’s greater than the entire population of the United States. India’s middle class is buying air-conditioners, kitchen appliances and washing machines, and a lot of them from American companies such as GE and Whirlpool.’

The Bush administration is acutely aware of India changing. With a growth rate now at 8 per cent, its economy has transformed itself in 15 years from that of a Third World nation to a powerful emerging force aspiring to rival China.

On Wednesday, the President will fly into New Delhi along with a large contingent of business leaders to secure a new relationship with India. The US wants to tap into its vast market: last year US exports grew by more than 30 per cent.

With foreign policy initiatives failing elsewhere, Bush’s advisers are reaching out in new directions. As Japan and Europe grow weaker and China stronger, the administration has seen India as a strategic priority. The world’s largest democracy is, as Bush’s aides chant endlessly, ‘a country sharing our democratic values and commitment to a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society’.
observor.guardian.co.uk

Insults to the Mahatma, ignored by India
George W Bush’s protocol handlers have notified South Block that the American President’s deep belief in his born again faith precludes his visiting Mahatma Gandhi’s Samadhi at New Delhi’s Raj Ghat — during his forthcoming visit to India.

When asked — by reporters on a recent trip aboard Air Force One — if he will be breaking a decades long tradition of foreign dignitaries visiting India paying respect to the Father of India, Mr Bush, as is his wont, was caught off guard and mumbled something about how the Gospel of Jesus Christ views cremation as a pagan practice.

A climate of fear exists in Chechnya caused in large part by “very serious shortcomings” in law enforcement, the UN Human Rights Commissioner has found.

Louise Arbour said she was particularly concerned by the use of torture to extract confessions, and intimidation of those who complained about abuses.

She was speaking after a week-long trip to Russia and the Northern Caucasus.

The region has been plagued by fighting between Russian troops and Chechen separatists for more than a decade.

Ms Arbour said she was pleased to see the attempts at physical reconstruction under way in Chechnya, as well as moves to establish a stable political system.

But Chechnya “has still not been able to move away from a society ruled by force to one governed by the rule of law”, she said.

There was much evidence that “highlight the very serious shortcomings of the law enforcement system… shortcomings that have led to a climate of fear,” she went on.

Ms Arbour also expressed serious concern about the level of abductions of civilians, which many rights groups blame on a security force headed by Chechen Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov.

Earlier in the week, Ms Arbour visited a Chechen refugee camp in neighbouring Ingushetia, where tens of thousands fled to escape the conflict.

She said she was “stunned” at the squalid conditions of the camp, and described the refugees as living in “exceptional poverty” for a long time, RIA Novosti reported.
bbc.co.uk

Several hundred IRA supporters attacked police on Dublin’s central boulevard and near the parliament building today to prevent an unprecedented Protestant parade.

In riotous scenes rarely seen in the Republic of Ireland, protesters hurled bottles, bricks and fireworks at police as they tried to clear the hostile crowd from O’Connell Street.
guardian.co.uk

Venezuela is cutting flights by US airlines as relations between the two countries continue to deteriorate.

From 1 March, flights by Delta and Continental Airlines will be cut by up to 70%, and American Airlines flights will also be affected, officials say.

They accuse the US – which imposed a similar ban on Venezuela 10 years ago – of failing to give Venezuelan carriers equal access to American soil.

Relations between the two countries have long been strained.

They have hit new lows in recent weeks after a tit-for-tat expulsion row over allegations of spying, and a fierce exchange of words between US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
bbc.co.uk

A Nigerian court has ordered oil giant Shell and its partners to pay $1.5bn to the Ijaw people of the Delta region.

The Ijaw have been fighting since 2000 for compensation for environmental degradation in the oil-rich region.

They took the case to court after Shell refused to make the payment ordered by Nigeria’s parliament.

Ijaw militants have staged a spate of attacks against Shell facilities recently and are holding seven foreign oil workers hostage.

Following the violence, Shell – the biggest oil producer in Nigeria – has halved its output from the country.

Shell says it believes there is no evidence to support the claim, and will appeal against the ruling.

A statement said: “We remain committed to dialogue with the Ijaw people.”

Lawyers for the Shell Petroleum Development Company argued in the federal court in Port Harcourt that the joint committee of the National Assembly that made the order in 2000 did not have the power to compel the oil company to make the payment.

But Judge Okechukwu Okeke ruled that since both sides had agreed to go before the National Assembly, the order was binding on both sides.

Ijaw community leader Ngo Nac-Eteli said that if Shell wanted to buy time by taking the case to the appeal court, the company would not be allowed to operate on Ijaw land until the case was settled.
bbc.co.uk

Nigerians Make Demands, With Hostage’s Support
OKERENKOKO, Nigeria Feb. 24 — Nigerian militants who last week abducted nine foreign oil workers, including three Americans, demanded Friday that their government commit to jump-starting development in their chronically poor, southern region, which derives little apparent benefit from its vast oil fields.

“We are not troublemaking people,” one of the militants told a group of reporters, “but if they want trouble, we will give them trouble.”

The militants allowed one of the American hostages to speak to the journalists. Despite the weaponry arrayed around him, Macon Hawkins, 68, of Kosciusko, Tex., appeared to be in good spirits and said he and the other hostages were safe. But he urged President Bush and the United Nations to help resolve the increasingly violent standoff between the Nigerian government and the people of this restive area.

“They get nothing out of the oil, and they produce all of the oil,” Hawkins said of the Niger Delta residents. “They’re tired of it, so they’re going to fight, and they’re going to fight until death.”

He added, “Tell President Bush we want to get this thing settled.”

Hawkins joked with the journalists about the group’s conditions in captivity, which include air-conditioned rooms to sleep in and noodles for meals. He said he had been provided with medicine to control his diabetes and that the other eight hostages were being treated so well they were getting “fat and sassy.”

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A car bomb exploded in a Shiite holy city and 13 members of one Shiite family were gunned down northeast of the capital Saturday in a surge of attacks that killed at least 30 people despite heightened security aimed at curbing sectarian violence following the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine.

At least one more Sunni mosque was attacked in Baghdad on Saturday after two rockets were fired at a Shiite mosque in Tuz Khormato, north of the capital, the previous night. Shooting also broke out near the home of a prominent Sunni cleric as the funeral procession for an Al-Arabiya TV correspondent slain in sectarian violence was passing by. Police believed the procession was the target.

The violence occurred despite an extraordinary daytime curfew in Baghdad and three surrounding provinces. Stretched security forces could not be everywhere to contain attacks that have killed more than 150 people since Wednesday’s shrine bombing and pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war.
news.yahoo.com

Death-squad “democracy” in Iraq
…Sunni leaders estimate that death squads have murdered some 1,600 Sunnis so far. This scale of killing by paramilitary groups couldn’t take place without tacit, if not outright official, support.

That means from the U.S., too. In early 2005, Pentagon war planners around Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talked of pursuing the “Salvador option”–outsourcing the work of cracking down on Sunni resistance fighters to Shiite and Kurdish paramilitary forces, as the U.S. did during its secret wars on left-wing movements in Central America. Now we have evidence that the “Salvador option” is in full swing.

Pentagon-Controlled Iraqi National Guard Implicated in Samarra Mosque Bombing
As the “non-partisan” Council on Foreign Relations assures us, Iraqi National Guard troops are trained and fully “vetted” by the Pentagon. “National guard troops receive three weeks of formal training and then on-the-job training by working with U.S. forces,” a CFR backgrounder explains. “The National Guard has replaced the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps as the largest security force in Iraq,” reports the World Tribune. “The 45,000-member force has been trained and equipped by the United States, with help from Britain and Jordan.” In short, the Iraqi National Guard is a subsidiary of the Pentagon, organized and trained to do the bidding of the Anglo-American occupation forces and their installed minions. Thus it should come as no surprise the Iraqi National Guard may play an important role in the recent bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra, according to locals.

Since it is unreasonable to expect Baghdad hotel-bound corporate media hacks to report anything beyond what is read from a Pentagon script inside the Green Zone, most Americans remain unaware of details implicating the Iraqi National Guard in the bombing. According to reports appearing on the humanitarian Iraqi League organization’s Iraqi Rabita website and translated into English by the Iraqi blogger Baghdad Dweller (see original Arabic here and here), at least two witnesses saw “unusual activities by the ING [Iraqi National Guard] in the area around the mosque.” Two mosque guards reported four men in ING uniforms had blindfolded them and planted explosives. A second witness, Muhammad al-Samarrai, the owner of an internet cafe in the area, was told to stay in his store and not leave the area. From 11 pm until 6:30 am, ten minutes before two bombs were detonated, the area surrounding the mosque was patrolled by “joint forces of Iraqi ING and Americans,” according to al-Samarrai.