Donald Rumsfeld has made a killing out of bird flu. The US Defence Secretary has made more than $5m (£2.9m) in capital gains from selling shares in the biotechnology firm that discovered and developed Tamiflu, the drug being bought in massive amounts by Governments to treat a possible human pandemic of the disease.
independent.co.uk

An oil spill discovered at Prudhoe Bay field is the largest ever on Alaska’s North Slope region, US officials say.

They estimate that up to 267,000 gallons (one million litres) of crude leaked from a corroded transit pipeline at the state’s northern tip.

The spill was detected on 2 March and plugged. Local environmentalists have described it as “a catastrophe”.

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez shipping disaster spilled 11m gallons (42m litres) of oil onto the Alaskan coast.

“I can confirm it’s the largest spill of crude oil on the North Slope that we have record of,” Linda Giguere, from Alaska’s state department of environmental conservation, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

The estimate is based on a survey conducted several days ago at the site where the leak was discovered, officials say.

The spill covers about two acres (one hectare) of the snow-covered tundra in the sparsely populated region on Alaska’s north coast, some 1,040km (650 miles) north of the state’s biggest city, Anchorage.
bbc.co.uk

The world’s great rivers are drying up at an alarming rate, with devastating consequences for humanity, animals and the future of the planet.

The Independent on Sunday can today reveal that more than half the world’s 500 mightiest rivers have been seriously depleted. Some have been reduced to a trickle in what the United Nations will this week warn is a “disaster in the making”.

From the Nile to China’s Yellow River, some of the world’s great water systems are now under such pressure that they often fail to deposit their water in the ocean or are interrupted in the course to the sea, with grave consequences for the planet.

Adding to the disaster, all of the 20 longer rivers are being disrupted by big dams. One-fifth of all freshwater fish species either face extinction or are already extinct.

The Nile and Pakistan’s Indus are greatly reduced by the time they reach the sea. Some, such as the Colorado and China’s Yellow River, now rarely reach the ocean at all. Others, such as the Jordan and the Rio Grande on the US-Mexico border, are dry for much of their length.
independent.co.uk

…Marcos: We always turn to look towards the bottom, not only in our own country, but in Latin America particularly. When Evo Morales presented this invitation for his presidential inauguration, we said that we were not turning our gaze upwards, neither in Bolivia nor in Latin America, and in that sense, we don’t judge governments, whose judgment belongs to the people who are there. We look with interest at the Bolivian indigenous mobilization, and the Ecuadorian one. In fact, they are mentioned in the Sixth Declaration.

The struggle of the Argentine youth, fundamentally, this whole piquetero movement, and of the youth in general in Argentina, with whom we strongly identify with. Also with the movement to recover memory, of the pain from what was the long night of terror in Argentina, in Uruguay, in Chile. And in that sense, we prefer to look at the bottom, exchange experiences and understand their own assessments of what is happening.

We think, fundamentally, that the future story of Latin America, not only of Mexico but for all of Latin America, will be constructed from the bottom–that the rest of what’s happening, in any case, are steps. Maybe false steps, maybe firm ones, that’s yet to be seen. But fundamentally, it will be the people from the bottom that will be able to take charge of it, organizing themselves in another way. The old recipes or the old parameters should serve as a reference, yes, of what was done, but not as something that should be re-adopted to do something new.

Bogado: What can men do, for example, to increase the representation of women anywhere in the world–from families to cultural centers and beyond?

Marcos: In that respect, well, for us and for all organizations and movements, we still have a long way to go, because there is still a really big distance between the intention of actually being better, and really respecting the Other–in this case women–and what our realistic practice is.

And I’m not only referring to the excuse of “this is how we were educated and there’s nothing we can do …” which is often men’s excuse–and of women too, who obey this type of thinking and argue for it one way or another among other women.

Something else that we’ve seen in our process is that at the hour that we [insurgents] arrived in the communities and they integrated us as part of them, we saw significant, unplanned changes. The first change is made internally among the relationship between women. The fact that one group of indigenous women, whose fundamental horizon was the home, getting married quite young, having a lot of children, and dedicating themselves to the home–could now go to the mountains and learn to use arms, be commanders of military troops, signified for the communities, and for the indigenous women in the communities, a very strong revolution. It is there that they started to propose that they should participate in the assemblies, and in the organizing decisions, and started to propose that they should hold positions of responsibility. It was not like that before.

But in reality, the pioneers of this transformation of the indigenous Zapatista woman are a merit of the women insurgents. To become a guerrilla in the mountainous conditions is very difficult for men, and for the women, it is doubly or triply difficult–and I’m not saying that they are more fragile or anything like that: it’s that in addition to the hostile mountainous conditions, they also have to be able to put up with the hostile conditions of a patriarchal system of our own machismo, of our relationships with one another.

[Another difficulty that the women face] is the repudiation of their communities which sees it as a bad thing for a woman to go out and do something else. [After passing their training] a group of insurgent women are now the ones who are superior, and when they head back down to the communities, they now are the ones who show the way, lead, and explain the struggle. At first this creates a type of revolt, a rebellion among the women that starts to take over spaces. Among the first rebellions is one that prohibits the sale of women into marriage, which used to be an indigenous custom, and it gives, in fact (even though it’s not on paper yet) the women the right to pick their partner.

We also think that while there is an economic dependence from women on men, it will be very difficult for anything else to develop. Because in the end, the women can be very rebellious, and very capable and all of that, but if she depends on a man economically, she has few possibilities. So in that sense, in the communities of the Autonomous Rebellious Municipalities, and in the Councils of Good Government, the same women that are already authorities with responsibilities at the municipal level, or on the Councils of Good Government, open spaces, projects, and economic organization for women in such a way that they construct their economic independence, and that gives more substance to [the women’s] other independence.

Nevertheless, we’re still lacking a lot in the area of domestic violence from men against women. We have gained some in other areas, for example, girls who were not going to school are now going to school. They weren’t going before because they were women, and because there weren’t any schools, and now there are schools and they go, regardless of whether they are men or women. And women are already in the highest posts of civil authority–because in the military authority, in the political organizing, we can say that women need to be included–but in matters of civil society, we [insurgents] don’t hold authority, we only advise. So in reality, the women in the communities now reach the civil authority and autonomous municipal posts, which was unthinkable for a woman to reach before. [They reach those positions] through their own struggle, not through the authority of the EZLN.
counterpunch.org

…The United States was urged to “freeze”, “desist” and “stop” actions being taken or threatened to be taken against the Western Shoshone Peoples of the Western Shoshone Nation, in a Friday decision by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The U.S. has until July 15, 2006 to provide the UN committee with information on the action it had taken.

This action challenges the US government’s assertion of federal ownership of nearly 90 percent of Western Shoshone lands.

“The mines are polluting our waters, destroying hot springs and exploding sacred mountains-our burials along with them–attempting to erase our signature on the land,” says Lalo. “We are coerced and threatened by mining and Federal agencies when we seek to continue spiritual prayers for traditional food or medicine on Shoshone land.”

According to Lalo, “We have endured murder of our Newe people for centuries, as chronicled in military records, but now we are asked to endure a more painful death from the U.S. governmental agencies — a separation from land and spiritual renewal.”

The decision expressed particular concern that the U.S.’ basis for claiming federal title to Western Shoshone land rests on a theory of “gradual encroachment” through a “compensation” process in the Indian Claims Commission.
speroforum.com

It’s official: the era of resource wars is upon us. In a major London address, British Defense Secretary John Reid warned that global climate change and dwindling natural resources are combining to increase the likelihood of violent conflict over land, water and energy. Climate change, he indicated, “will make scarce resources, clean water, viable agricultural land even scarcer”—and this will “make the emergence of violent conflict more rather than less likely.”

Although not unprecedented, Reid’s prediction of an upsurge in resource conflict is significant both because of his senior rank and the vehemence of his remarks. “The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur,” he declared. “We should see this as a warning sign.”

Resource conflicts of this type are most likely to arise in the developing world, Reid indicated, but the more advanced and affluent countries are not likely to be spared the damaging and destabilizing effects of global climate change. With sea levels rising, water and energy becoming increasingly scarce and prime agricultural lands turning into deserts, internecine warfare over access to vital resources will become a global phenomenon.

Reid’s speech, delivered at the prestigious Chatham House in London (Britain’s equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations), is but the most recent expression of a growing trend in strategic circles to view environmental and resource effects—rather than political orientation and ideology—as the most potent source of armed conflict in the decades to come. With the world population rising, global consumption rates soaring, energy supplies rapidly disappearing and climate change eradicating valuable farmland, the stage is being set for persistent and worldwide struggles over vital resources. Religious and political strife will not disappear in this scenario, but rather will be channeled into contests over valuable sources of water, food and energy.

Prior to Reid’s address, the most significant expression of this outlook was a report prepared for the U.S. Department of Defense by a California-based consulting firm in October 2003. Entitled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” the report warned that global climate change is more likely to result in sudden, cataclysmic environmental events than a gradual (and therefore manageable) rise in average temperatures. Such events could include a substantial increase in global sea levels, intense storms and hurricanes and continent-wide “dust bowl” effects. This would trigger pitched battles between the survivors of these effects for access to food, water, habitable land and energy supplies.

“Violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today,” the 2003 report noted. “Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food and water rather than by conflicts over ideology, religion or national honor.”
tompaine.com

Sounds like the neo-con Utopia…

Would you expect a European leader who has presided over a continual increase in real wages for several years, culminating in a 24% rise over the past 12 months, to be voted out of office? What if he has also cut VAT, brought down inflation, halved the number of people in poverty in the past seven years, and avoided social tensions by maintaining the fairest distribution of incomes of any country in the region?

Of course not, you would say. In Bill Clinton’s famous phrase, “it’s the economy, stupid”. Unless there are overriding issues of political or personal insecurity – incipient civil war, ethnic cleansing, mass arrests, pervasive crime on the streets – most people will vote according to their pocketbooks. And so it is likely to be in Belarus in nine days’ time.
Why, then, are western governments, echoed by most western media, developing a crescendo of one-sided reporting and comment on one of Europe’s smallest countries? Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, last year called it an “outpost of tyranny”. Stephen Hadley, the US national security adviser, recently complained that “there is not enough outrage and international attention on Belarus”. As if on cue, we now have thundering editorials and loaded reports in America and Europe claiming the imminent election is a farce and the regime deeply unpopular.

We saw similar conformism little more than a year ago in Ukraine, when one side was glorified to the skies, as if only a tiny minority of benighted Sovietera automatons did not support the pro-western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. His opponent actually got 44% of the vote, and may even emerge with the highest number of votes in Ukraine’s parliamentary elections in two weeks.
guardian.co.uk

why? My guess would be…pipeline between Black Sea and Baltic Sea.

ndia’s economic success is a modern miracle. But the dark side of the boom has been its tragic cost to the subcontinent’s most vulnerable people.
…It was dawn on 2 January 2006 when the quiet morning rituals of Kalinganagar, a village in eastern India, were drowned in a noise like the end of the world: a stream of bulldozers and excavators and khaki-painted lorries containing more than 400 armed police came grinding into the village.

…Now a group of villagers walked towards the bulldozers. Their plan, the survivors said later, was to persuade the drivers to stop, if necessary by lying down in front of them. What happened next is disputed: some of the protesters say the first injuries were caused when one of them tripped a string attached to a buried charge of dynamite or even a landmine. Enraged now, more protesters came running towards the police lines shouting abuse (the police claim they also fired arrows). And the police opened fire with tear gas, rubber bullets and live rounds. The villagers ran screaming in all directions. The police kept up the firing until the ground was strewn with bodies.

By the time silence fell again on the site, 12 local people had been shot dead and 31 injured. One policeman had been killed by the protesters. Several of the villagers had been shot in the back. Some of the casualties were a long way from the field of action. A 14-year-old boy standing outside his home was shot in the chest and killed. A 27-year-old woman was killed by a bullet on her way to bathe in the village pond.

…The uranium for India’s bombs came from Jaduguda, in Jharkhand, the only uranium mine in the country (though several more are now being opened up). The mine is located in the middle of a cluster of tribal villages. Not close to a village, with high barbed wire fences keeping the peasants well away, but in its midst. The pond at Jaduguda, we learnt, where the hazardous waste is dumped and allowed to settle, can be accessed by the men, women, children, dogs, cats and cows of the village. (The mine’s boss claims that the pond was closed to the public, and some reports suggest that villagers may have cut their way through the perimeter fence.) In the summer the pond dried out, and some villagers used it as a short cut to get home. The village children played tag on it. The mine produced no stink, no clouds of filthy smoke, did not tear up the countryside and dye everything black like an open-cast coal mine. A uranium mine was, it seemed, the sort of mine you could live with.

Then the first deformed children began to be born in the village. People of the village and the cattle they had washed regularly in the water of the pond began dying prematurely of cancer. A child was born with only one eye and one ear, mentally handicapped as well, unable to walk, and he grew bigger but no heavier. Women became infertile and their husbands abandoned them, and they began to be persecuted as witches, the true aim being to steal their land. The Uranium Corporation of India Ltd maintained that none of the village’s health problems were connected to their activities.
independent.co.uk

…Four: Feith

Nor has there been a solitary twitter about the role of the enigmatic Douglas Feith, though he deserves it as much as Cambone. Until he left in early 2005, Feith was Cambone’s opposite number at Defense as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (USD-P), a post Cambone himself held earlier.

If Cambone had the means to tamper with intelligence-gathering and interrogation, Feith had the motive.

A vocal advocate of regime change in the Middle East long before 9-11, a hard-line Zionist hawk and member of ZOA (Zionist Organization of America), Feith’s publicly expressed views are incendiary. He has stated that Oslo should be repudiated and the West Bank and Gaza reoccupied even if “the price in blood would be high” as “a necessary form of detoxification.” (10)

And his actions in government match. In 1982, he was investigated over allegations that he had handed over secret documents to the Israeli embassy and left the National Security Council under a cloud. Later, he was hired back by Richard Perle. On leaving the Pentagon in 1986, he promptly started a law firm in Israel. His partner at the time, Marc Zell, is a spokesman for the Jewish settlers’ movement on the occupied West Bank. Yes–those settlers. (11) The ones several parasangs to the right of Ariel Sharon. Naturally–that would have nothing whatsoever to do with any opinions Feith might hold on Arabs, Iraq, or the proper way to chat with a manacled Muslim.

In 2001, with the US economy in recession and financial crisis looming in the markets and neo-conservatives ensconced in power, friends began helping friends: Wolfowitz as Deputy Secretary of State brought Feith in at DOD, while Feith brought Perle to the Defense Policy Board and hired another favorite ideological hit man, Michael Ledeen, who also has a documented history of siphoning classified information to Israeli intelligence and selling sensitive military technology to China. Ledeen was hired by Feith at OSP to handle material requiring high-level security clearance. (12)

And what does this cozy arrangement have to do with Abu Ghraib? Well–for a start, it blows a hole in the theory that rounding up a few Semitic goat-herds and housewives has anything to do with national security–at least in the common meaning of that term, to wit., refraining from selling out the interests of the nation-state to which one belongs by accident of birth, choice, or lack of initiative. Because it’s quite clear from the action-packed resumes of the crew of transnational wheelers and dealers above, that national–or even international- security is the last thing on their minds.

Feith has also been up to more institutionalized shenanigans:

First, he was active in the controversial Defense Policy Board, whose former head Richard Perle resigned when conflicts of interest between his board duties and his business affairs came to light. Then, he was also boss at the Office of Special Plans, which “stove-piped” un-vetted or raw intelligence on Iraq directly (outside the normal channels, that is) to the White House. The objective was to buttress the administration’s flimsy case for war. Which means that Feith was grasping for any wisp of straw when it came to intelligence. And so, had every incentive to get it for us whole-sale where he could most easily–on the Iraqi street. (13)

And an important point. OSP, set up by Wolfowitz, had direct responsibility for detainee operations in Iraq. By dismissing the advice of Middle Eastern experts at the State Department on post-war planning, it contributed hugely to the failure of prison policy. OSP also oversaw reconstruction contracts–with all their outrageous bid-rigging and profiteering. And it did all of this through an institutional end-run around government.

Yet, at the Senate Hearings, Cambone swore up and down that Feith was in the dark about Abu Ghraib and the Taguba report, although when the report actually came out, here’s what Daniel Dunn, the top computer security officer in Feith’s office had to say in an urgent email memo to Pentagon staff:

“Information contained in this report is classified; do not go to FOX News to read or obtain a copy.” (14)

Sounds like at least one person knew that Feith had something to fear.

And Feith himself quietly resigned last year, some say, because of yet another scandal–the Larry Franklin case. Franklin, convicted of espionage this year, worked for Feith at OSP in 2002 and 2003 and was sent abroad on sensitive missions–involving Iran-Contra figures– aimed at pushing through the Iraq WMD hustle. Franklin pleaded guilty in January to passing information to Israel about U.S. policy towards Iran through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying organization in the U.S. (15)

So there you have it.

Take two rancid Christian zealots and a half-pint of frothing Zionist fanaticism. Add to it a well-curdled neo-conservative ideologue and stir until bubbling in a Middle Eastern cauldron. Top with a generous helping of psycho-sexual sadism. And voila, Torture Imperial. Serves several thousands at a time.
counterpunch.org

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) held its Policy Conference in Washington this week. There were long speeches and discussions about the problems of the day (nuclear proliferation, Iran, and the rise of Hamas), as well as about the “strong alliance” between Israel and the US.

As in the past, this strength was seen in the impressive presence of senior administration official and Congresspersons, including Vice President Richard Cheney, who praised Israel’s contribution to US security interests, and promised reciprocation in the form of constant support.

However, mingling in the crowded hallways of the Washington convention center that hosted the event gave one the impression that the threat of a mushroom cloud in Middle Eastern skies in the coming years bothered the thousands of participants far less than the clear and present danger to AIPAC: the pending trial of two senior officials, Steven J. Rosen, who was responsible for foreign affairs and was a strong figure in the lobby, and Keith Weissman, a former Middle East analyst.

Rosen and Weissman are suspected of “receiving classified information” without being authorized to do so, and passing it onto Israeli and other diplomats, as well as other crimes. They are not actually being charged with espionage, but these are still crimes could put them into federal prison for many years.

In an act of self-preservation, AIPAC fired the two men last year, shortly after they were exposed as supporting actors in a bureaucratic drama about the leak of information in the Bush administration, known as the “Pentagon mole affair”. The mole was Defense Department Iran analyst Lawrence Franklin, who leaked to Rosen and Weissman juicy details from a presidential document about Iran and the threat that Iranian agents might kill Israelis in northern Iraq.
globes.co.il