NAIROBI, Kenya — The United States is backing a new coalition of Somali militants fighting Islamic extremists for control of the lawless nation’s capital, a U.S. official said, as both sides prepared for a battle that could explode in widespread violence.

Clan leaders have put aside their traditional rivalries to take on the extremists, whom they describe as terrorists. The extremists, though, say they can offer unity and order after decades of chaos in Somalia.

Residents say both sides have recently received an infusion of cash and weapons as they face off for control of the country, which has had no central government since warlords divided it into clan-based fiefdoms in 1991.

The State Department said in March that the U.S. government was concerned about “al-Qaida fugitives responsible for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam (in Tanzania) and the November 2002 bombing of a tourist hotel and attack on a civilian airliner in Kenya, who are believed to be operating in and around Somalia.”

While there have been numerous reports of al-Qaida bombers hiding in the Horn of Africa nation, only recently have they been reportedly involved in fighting alongside Somali extremists.

A U.S. official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said prominent al-Qaida leaders with large cash bounties on their heads are under the protection of the extremist leaders in Mogadishu. He did not name them, but eight men wanted in the embassy bombings are on the FBI most wanted list.

The same official, who monitors the situation in Somalia, also repeated the long-standing U.S. policy of working with anyone who is ready to cooperate in the fight against al-Qaida, adding that U.S. officials had made contact with a wide range of Somalis. He declined to say what kind of support the U.S. was supplying.
chron.com

FCNL estimates the U.S. spent $783 billion in FY05 for past and present military activities. This includes funding for the Defense Department, Energy Department nuclear weapons programs, military-related activities of other agencies, foreign military financing and training, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, mandatory spending for military retirement and health care, veterans programs ($69 billion), and the estimated portion of interest paid on the national debt which can be attributed to past wars and military spending ($170 billion).
fcnl.org

‘I feel like I did in the Vietnam days – I hate to pay taxes just so they can go and bomb more people’

Florida councilman won’t swear support for US
MIAMI (Reuters) – A newly elected councilman in a tiny Florida village has refused to take an oath of office pledging support for the U.S. government because he adamantly opposes the war in Iraq.

Councilman-elect Basil Dalack, 76, a Korean War veteran, won an uncontested election to fill a vacancy on the five-person council of the southeast Florida town of Tequesta.

But he is refusing to take the oath of office — due to be administered on Thursday — because the oath requires him to “support, protect and defend” the government. His decision comes at a time when polls show ebbing support for the war.

Dalack said he believes the U.S. war in Iraq is unjust and “an abomination.” He said he could not sleep at night if he took a pledge implying blanket support for the U.S. government.

“Those dead kids in Iraq, American kids and Iraqi kids, would haunt me,” Dalack said.

The Pentagon is bypassing official US intelligence channels and turning to a dangerous and unruly cast of characters in order to create strife in Iran in preparation for any possible attack, former and current intelligence officials say.

One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being “run” in two southern regional areas of Iran. They are Baluchistan, a Sunni stronghold, and Khuzestan, a Shia region where a series of recent attacks has left many dead and hundreds injured in the last three months.

One former counterintelligence official, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the information, describes the Pentagon as pushing MEK shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The drive to use the insurgent group was said to have been advanced by the Pentagon under the influence of the Vice President’s office and opposed by the State Department, National Security Council and then-National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice.

“The MEK is run by a brother and sister who were given bases in northern Baghdad by Saddam,” the intelligence official told RAW STORY. “The US army secured a key MEK facility 60 miles northwest of Baghdad shortly after the 2003 invasion, but they did not secure the MEK and let them basically be because [then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz was thinking ahead to Iran.”
rawstory.com

SAUDI ARABIA has invited bids for the construction of a security fence along the entire length of its 900km (560mile) desert border with Iraq in a multimillion-pound project that will attract interest from British defence companies.

The barrier is part of a package to secure the Kingdom’s 6,500km of borders in an attempt to improve internal security and bolster its defences against external threats.

Saudi Arabia is concerned that the chaos in Iraq could cause an overspill of sectarian violence and terrorism. The kingdom claims to be winning the battle against al-Qaeda’s Saudi wing but wants to protect itself against Saudi insurgents returning from Iraq.

“There’s no suggestion that the border isn’t secure at the moment, so it could be a bit of an expensive white elephant,” a European diplomat in Riyadh said. Saudi militants joining the insurgency use other routes, such as Syria.
timesonline.co.uk

Despite all the sloppy and inaccurate headlines about Iran “going nuclear,” the fact is that all President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday was that it had enriched uranium to a measely 3.5 percent, using a bank of 180 centrifuges hooked up so that they “cascade.”

The ability to slightly enrich uranium is not the same as the ability to build a bomb. For the latter, you need at least 80% enrichment, which in turn would require about 16,000 small centrifuges hooked up to cascade. Iran does not have 16,000 centrifuges. It seems to have 180. Iran is a good ten years away from having a bomb, and since its leaders, including Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, say they do not want an atomic bomb because it is Islamically immoral, you have to wonder if they will ever have a bomb.

The crisis is not one of nuclear enrichment, a low-level attainment that does not necessarily lead to having a bomb. Even if Iran had a bomb, it is hard to see how they could be more dangerous than Communist China, which has lots of such bombs, and whose Walmart stores are a clever ruse to wipe out the middle class American family through funneling in cheaply made Chinese goods.

What is really going on here is a ratcheting war of rhetoric. The Iranian hard liners are down to a popularity rating in Iran of about 15%. They are using their challenge to the Bush administration over their perfectly legal civilian nuclear energy research program as a way of enhancing their nationalist credentials in Iran.

Likewise, Bush is trying to shore up his base, which is desperately unhappy with the Iraq situation, by rattling sabres at Iran. Bush’s poll numbers are so low, often in the mid-30s, that he must have lost part of his base to produce this result. Iran is a great deus ex machina for Bush. Rally around the flag yet again.

If this international game of chicken goes wrong, then the whole Middle East and much of Western Europe could go up in flames. The real threat here is not unconventional war, which Iran cannot fight for the foreseeable future. It is the spread of Iraq-style instability to more countries in the region.
axisoflogic.com

Isn’t it interesting how Iran and the U.S. are enemies made in heaven? Are they simply mirror-images of the clash of two fundamentalisms or is it something more? Are we watching theater? Was the end of all this written long ago?

A defiant Iran vowed that nothing could halt its controversial nuclear program, in a direct challenge to the UN Security Council that could risk international sanctions.

With the country basking in national pride after regime scientists successfully enriched uranium to make nuclear fuel — a milestone in its atomic drive — officials pledged to move rapidly to industrial-scale work.

“When a people master nuclear technology and nuclear fuel, nothing can be done against them,” boasted armed forces joint chief of staff, General Hassan Firouzabadi.

Iran says its nuclear drive is purely peaceful, but uranium enrichment can be extended to make the fissile core of a bomb. The Security Council had set April 28 as a deadline for Tehran to halt the ultra-sensitive work.

“The West can do nothing and is obliged to extend to us the hand of friendship,” the ISNA news agency quoted Firouzabadi as saying.
breitbart.com

Iran Could Produce Nuclear Bomb in 16 Days, U.S. Says
April 12 (Bloomberg) — Iran, defying United Nations Security Council demands to halt its nuclear program, may be capable of making a nuclear bomb within 16 days, a U.S. State Department official said.

Iran will move to “industrial scale” uranium enrichment involving 54,000 centrifuges at its Natanz plant, the Associated Press quoted deputy nuclear chief Mohammad Saeedi as telling state-run television today.

“Using those 50,000 centrifuges they could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days,” Stephen Rademaker, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, told reporters today in Moscow.

Iran Leader: Israel Will Be Annihilated
TEHRAN, Iran Apr 14, 2006 (AP)— The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was “heading toward annihilation,” just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a “permanent threat” to the Middle East that will “soon” be liberated. He also appeared to again question whether the Holocaust really happened.

“Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation,” Ahmadinejad said at the opening of a conference in support of the Palestinians. “The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm.”

Ahmadinejad provoked a world outcry in October when he said Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

Israel pressuring U.S. over Iran attack
WASHINGTON – The U.S. government is continuing to aspire for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear problem, but doubts for chances of success are growing, a Washington Post article published on Sunday said.

According to the paper, Israeli officials who visited Washington recently gave the Americans an urgent message regarding Iran: The Islamic Republic was closer to developing a nuclear bomb than Washington realizes, and the moment of decision is approaching quickly.

On Saturday, a New Yorker article said that the U.S. government is planning to massively bomb Iran, and even use nuclear bunker-busting bombs in order to destroy Iranian facilities and development sites containing nuclear weapons.

The Washington Post wrote that despite estimations by American officials that Iran would need another decade before having the bomb, Israel believes that the critical breakthrough could take place within a number of months. Israeli representatives told the Americans that Iran has begun the most advanced centrifugal experiments in a speedier manner than experts predicted in the past.

The newspaper said that Israel recently leaked its own attack plans, if the United States does not act. The Israeli plan includes aerial attacks, commando raids, a possibility of a missile attack, and even bombs carried on the backs of dogs. The newspaper quotes Israeli newspapers which said that Israel constructed an exact replica of the Natanz nuclear development facility, but the United States does not believe that the operation can succeed without using nuclear weapons.

Outside View: US-Iran Clash Ahead
MOSCOW, April 14 (UPI) — The United States and Iran seem to have firmly set on a path that leads to the hell of war.

There are hopes for the best — and I myself would be happy to be erring on the pessimistic side — but the way things look here and now, hopes are increasingly overshadowed by grim reality.

Assertive statements on the American side and Gulf war games on the Iranian side equally scream of muscle-flexing. Either side, while portraying the other as a new evil empire, is in fact perfectly aware of the danger the opponent poses to its core ideological and political values. Though neither risks thumbing its nose on third-party peacemakers, neither actually listens to whatever they say.

There are objective propositions suggesting that the Middle East is in for yet another big fight. To fit in well with a changing world, both parties are equally desperate for a qualitative leap ahead. Regrettably, both seem to think that such success comes easier through a military, rather than an intellectual or moral, breakthrough.

International aid freezes threaten to strangle the democratically elected Hamas-led government.

Young engineer Nassar Odwa from the Ministry of Local Government waits patiently for hours to meet Abdul-Aziz Duwaik, the new Hamas parliament speaker. Odwa, in charge of urban planning projects that Norway abruptly cancelled after the Hamas-led government took power, wants to hear the alternatives for desperately needed infrastructure projects that would, for one, ameliorate the raw sewage problem reeking through Gaza. And he’s not the only one in search of answers.

Indeed, tension is mounting in the Gaza Strip as Palestinians are preparing for an economic freeze after the Untied States and European Union slashed their assistance to the new Palestinian government, stocking up on food supplies and fuel in anticipation of stalled paychecks coupled with commercial borders closures by Israel. Meanwhile, sustained Israeli air raids and artillery bombardments took 15 Palestinian lives and injured dozens just over last weekend.

On Friday US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced: “Because the new Hamas-led Palestinian government has failed to accept the Quartet principles of non- violence, recognition of Israel and respect for previous agreements between the parties, the US is suspending assistance to the Palestinian government’s cabinet and ministries.” The EU followed suit on Monday suspending direct aid to the PA, including crucial budgetary funding used for infrastructure projects and to cover the salaries of over 150,000 PA employees, affecting nearly a third of the population. EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said Europe will continue to provide funds so that “basic human needs will be met”. The EU aid will remain frozen for at least a month.

Several EU nations, including Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands have already frozen their aid to the new government and more may follow. Aid from the EU and its 25 member nations averages $615 million per year, about half of which has been suspended. The EU decision to freeze payments affects an immediate instalment of $36.5 million, compounding an already dire financial situation for the Palestinian government. Canada, Norway and other non-EU member nations have also cancelled funding.

Hamas has condemned the suspension of American and European assistance. “We are being punished. Is this democracy?” Duwaik told Al-Ahram Weekly. “The results of the 25 January elections showed the world that we are not convinced with this whole process. We would like to change the rules of the game so that our national rights are recognised, our well being is recognised and our basic human rights are recognised. If we give Israel recognition, they will give us a piece a paper, just put it in water and swallow it,” he said.

Meanwhile the US will increase its basic humanitarian assistance to Palestinians by 57 per cent, bringing it to a total of $245 million. Some $65 million will be reserved for emergency food programmes, mostly distributed by the United Nations World Food Programme, $31 million for health programmes, $14 million for education programmes, and $135 million for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). More controversially, $42 million are being allocated to so-called democracy building expansion. Palestinians have largely interpreted this as an effort by the US to create an opposition to Hamas. Assistance will be administered through non-Palestinian Authority entities, including local and international non-governmental organisations. $45 million in direct assistance to the PA has been cancelled, along with the suspension of $359 million worth of other programmes.

US Consul-General in Jerusalem Jack Wallace told Palestinian journalists at his residence: “We will not have any contact with the PA or any of its ministries. However we will continue to work closely with President Mahmoud Abbas.” Assistant Secretary of State David Welch said the decision of whether to channel fund to Abbas directly or not will be made in the future. Responding to queries as to why the US has made no effort to meet Hamas to find out their intentions, he replied: “You are right. We have had no contact with them, and that is part of the policy we established. It also reflects American law.” Hamas, for its part, remains amenable to negations with the US.
weekly.ahram.org

ISRAEL’S acting Prime Minister has declared that the Jewish state will cut all ties with the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, brand it a hostile power, and rule out negotiations with the President, Mahmoud Abbas, as long as Hamas refuses to renounce violence and recognise Israel.

Ehud Olmert said he would ask his cabinet to approve measures recommended by his top security advisers on Sunday, capping days of escalating tensions.

European Union foreign ministers, meeting in Luxembourg yesterday, were expected to endorse a decision to cut direct aid to the Palestinian government.

The quartet of Middle East peace brokers – the EU, the US, Russia and the United Nations – is trying to push Hamas to meet the same requirements on violence and Israel’s right to exist, and to express clear support for the peace process.

On Friday the 25-member EU and the US announced a suspension of aid to the Palestinian Government.
smh.com.au

If Sharon can laugh, that’s what he’s doing.

Hamas: Israeli move “a declaration of war”
RAMALLAH (Reuters) – Hamas said it considered Israel’s severing of contacts with the new Palestinian government “a declaration of war” and President Mahmoud Abbas accused the Jewish state of breaking international law.

In statements issued in quick succession on Monday, election rivals Hamas and Abbas denounced Israel for branding the Palestinian Authority a “hostile entity” and suspending security coordination.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement in Gaza that Israel’s decision to sever contacts with the Palestinian Authority amounted to “a declaration of war and a failed attempt to cause internal divisions among Palestinians”.

In the West Bank city of Ramallah, Abbas said Israel’s position “completely violates the agreements we have signed with them and violates international law”.

“We demand from this Israeli government to stop such measures”, Abbas said.

With foreign ministers from the European Union poised to endorse a freeze in direct aid to the new government, thousands of Palestinians poured onto the streets of Gaza in protest.

In the West we ‘stage demonstrations’, while in Palestine people ‘pour into the streets’ like an insensible blob.

U.S. blocks UN draft pressing Israel to end attacks
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The United States on Thursday blocked a U.N. Security Council statement drafted by Arab nations and aimed at putting pressure on Israel to stop military strikes on Palestinian targets.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the draft, even after three days of intense negotiations, “was disproportionately critical of Israel, and unfairly so, and needlessly so.”

But Palestinian U.N. Observer Riyad Mansour accused Washington of “shielding and protecting Israeli activities and aggression against the Palestinian people.”

“It was obvious that many of their concerns were accommodated but yet they kept coming back and coming back for additional things. It was obvious they did not want the Security Council to have a position,” Mansour said.

Israel to boycott inquest into death of British peace activist shot in Gaza
Israel will boycott an inquest opening today in London which will investigate the death of a British peace activist shot dead in broad daylight by an Israeli soldier.
Tom Hurndall, 22, died after being shot in Rafah, Gaza, while trying to lead Palestinian children to safety after the soldier opened fire from a nearby observation tower in April 2003.

His mother, Jocelyn, told the Guardian she is angry Israel is not cooperating as she still has many questions about how her son came to be shot: “We are hoping the coroner will address the culture of impunity in which the soldier was functioning and the enormous lack of cooperation we have experienced from the Israelis.”

Mrs Hurndall said that only when the family went to Israel and for seven weeks pressured the authorities and raised the case in the media did any sort of investigation begin.

Her solicitor, Imran Khan, said Israel’s boycott of the inquest is disrespectful: “It shows their disdain for the whole process.”

Omar Barghouti: A Decisive Vote for Apartheid
“Israel votes for disengagement and final borders” and “Israelis abandon the dream of Greater Israel” were the main themes in the spin that characterized mainstream, even some progressive media coverage of the Israeli parliamentary elections which took place on March 28. In reality, the election results revealed that a consensus has emerged among Israeli Jews, not only against the basic requirements of justice and genuine peace, as that was always the case, but also in support of a more aggressive form of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and cementing Zionist apartheid.

In the 2006 Knesset elections, Israelis have indeed overwhelmingly voted for “disengagement,” not from the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), but only from the Palestinians — whether in Israel, in the OPT or in exile. Palestinian lands are clearly precluded from this disengagement. An objective examination of the election results and the political platforms of the parties represented in the new Israeli parliament will show that the celebration of the “shift to peace and realism” by Western and Israeli media pundits alike is not only unwarranted but quite deceptive as well. If anything, an avid adoption of the right’s agenda has taken place.

The war in Iraq arrives on America’s shores by gurney. More than 16,000 U.S. soldiers have been wounded — almost 400 have lost arms, legs, hands or feet. Each injury ripples through lives with its own pattern and force. And as two soldiers and their families are discovering, the war will be with them forever.

The ball was an Army tradition, celebrating a battalion’s homecoming from war. The men of the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment out of Fort Lewis — a few miles from Tacoma — had returned 10 days earlier from their yearlong tour of duty in Iraq.

Two soldiers had been looking forward to the gathering with heightened anticipation. Thirty-year-old Michael Buyas and 23-year-old Brent Bretz were sergeants in the 1-5’s Charlie Company. In December 2004, within four days of each other, bombs blew off their legs. As the company fought together in Iraq for another 10 months, Michael and Brent — like so many of the more than 17,000 American soldiers wounded in Iraq — slipped off alone to their own private wars, inside hospital rooms and physical therapy clinics, inside the intricate circles of their families, inside their own heads.
sfgate.com

Recent reports from Iraq indicate beyond doubt that the U.S. occupation army has embarked on a new “tactic” from its menu of atrocities, in an attempt to counter the burgeoning Iraqi resistance attacks against its soldiers. “Old-style” massacres of Iraqis have become so commonplace lately that even Iraqi “allies” of the U.S. were forced to unreservedly condemn them.

Among Western governments, alas, silence prevails. After all, the massacre victims are only Arabs. Not only is there an alarming apathy towards the horrifying spread of this phenomenon, but there is also a despicable aversion to calling it by its name. At the same time, many in the West go up in arms condemning the “massacre” of seals, whales, dolphins or a few white men anywhere around the world.

“Modern” massacres, that is the indiscriminate bombing — which last year included the use of phosphorus — of Iraqi civilian neighborhoods in “unruly” cities like Falluja and Qa’im, have always been a standard U.S. and British tactic. But those “clean,” remotely-executed and hi-tech acts of state terrorism were always easier for the world’s only empire and its lackeys to defend and present as “precision” targeting of “the enemy,” especially to a pathetically obedient media. The direct, messy murder of civilians, particularly by tying their hands and shooting them in the head, execution style, has not been as common, although it was practiced in several reported incidents in Iraq since the invasion [1]. Now it is being reported more often, but in language that in effect, if not always by intention, leads to sanitizing it, even to normalizing it as a nasty, yet unavoidable, part of “war.” If this evasion from using the term massacre is not deliberate, it can only reflect a deep-seated racism among western journalists who cannot use the same ethical or professional standards in reporting the killings of Arab civilians that they normally use when dealing with “white” victims in comparable situations.

Just this month, for instance, the U.S. army committed at least two massacres, killing in cold blood tens of Iraqi civilians, including four children and a six-month old baby, yet neither of them was reported as a massacre. On March 15, near Balad, the Iraqi police reported the following [2]:

“American forces used helicopters to drop troops on the house of Faiz Harat Khalaf situated in the Abu Sifa village of the Ishaqi district. The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people, including five children, four women and two men, then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals.”

A local police commander said hospital autopsies “revealed that all the victims had bullet shots in the head and all bodies were handcuffed.” It is crucial to note that the Iraqi police force is recruited, trained and assigned tasks under vigilant U.S. supervision.

A similar massacre was committed in Haditha, in November of last year, as an act of revenge after a bomb attack on a U.S. marine force. A nine-year-old survivor of that crime, who lived in a house near the site of the killings, told Time magazine that after the explosion her father began reading the Qur’an. “First, they went into my father’s room, where he was reading the Qur’an, and we heard shots. I couldn’t see their faces very well, only their guns sticking into the doorway. I watched them shoot my grandfather first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny.” All in all, 15 Iraqis were butchered in this incident.

Still, the Guardian reporter, or editor, chose not to call either “event” a massacre. He also avoided any terms of revulsion usually used to describe similar “incidents,” particularly those involving white victims.
zmag.org