by Tariq Ali
…The NGOs are no substitute for genuine social and political movements. In Africa, Palestine and elsewhere, NGOs have swallowed the neoliberal status quo. They operate like charities, trying to alleviate the worst excesses, but rarely question the systemic basis of the fact that 5 billion citizens of our globe live in poverty. They may be NGOs in Pakistan, but on the global scale they are western governmental organisations (WGOs), their cash flow conditioned by enforced agendas: Colin Powell once referred to them as “our fifth column”.

A few of them are doing good work, but the overall effect of NGO-isation has been to atomise the tiny layer of progressives and liberals in the country. Most of these men and women struggle for their individual NGOs to keep the money coming. Petty rivalries assume exaggerated proportions; politics in the sense of grassroots organisation becomes virtually nonexistent. The salaries, in most cases, elevate WGO executives to the status of the local elites, creating the material basis for accepting the boundaries of the existing system.
guardian.co.uk

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) – Two suicide attackers exploded car bombs in separate assaults on U.S. and Afghan forces Friday, slightly wounding two U.S. military members and one U.S. civilian contractor, officials said.

Both bombings, the latest in a wave of suicide strikes, occurred around 11:30 a.m. in the southern province of Helmand, a hub of Afghanistan’s drug trade and Taliban rebellion. Both attackers died.
newspress.com

President Bush has not fired any of the architects of the Iraq war. In fact, a review of the key planners of the conflict reveals that they have been rewarded – not blamed – for their incompetence.
thinkprogress.org

BAGHDAD, Iraq The U-S ambassador to Iraq says a conflict that could affect the entire Middle East might emerge if efforts to build an Iraqi government don’t succeed.

Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad tells the BBC that the political contacts between Iraq’s groups are improving, but the country faces the possibility of sectarian civil war if the government formation doesn’t work.

He says that the role of armed militias is in part to blame for the intensifying “polarization along sectarian lines.”

Khalilzad says the best way to prevent a conflict is to form a government that includes representatives of all groups — an effort that has stalled because of opposition to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

Khalilzad says the international community must do everything possible “to make this country work.”
kristv.com

Apparently Mr. Khalilzad is not in the loop. The country he represents doesn’t want the country to work.

Summit may be Iraq’s last chance for peace
WASHINGTON — As Iraq teeters on the brink of civil war and remains unable to form a government of national unity more than four months after the elections, Jordan said it would host a conference aimed at defusing the volatile situation across its eastern border.

The Iraqi Islamic Reconciliation Summit will be held in the Jordanian capital, Amman, on April 22. The intent of the ‘summit’ is to gather a large number of Iraq’s top religious and tribal leaders representing Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds, in an effort to seek an agreement based on common religious principles. The first hurdles the conference will tackle will be to find a way to end the violence that is claiming dozens of lives every day and to achieve a political solution that will put an end to Iraq’s current strife.

The Iraqi Islamic Reconciliation Summit will be held under the patronage of King Abdullah II, and is expected to draw a large number of senior Iraqi religious and tribal leaders from all sects and walks of life. The conference organizers, Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought and the Arab League, say they hope the meeting “will provide a forum for Iraqi leaders to take a crucial step towards stemming the violence in Iraq.”

BAGHDAD, April 7 — Shiite Muslim militias pose the greatest threat to security in many parts of Iraq, having killed more people in recent months than the Sunni Arab-led insurgency, and will likely present the most daunting and critical challenge for Iraq’s new government, U.S. military and diplomatic officials say.
washingtonpost.com

That’s how we want it to seem, anyway.

Mosque Explosion Kills 79 in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Suicide attackers wearing women’s robes blew themselves up Friday in a Shiite mosque, killing 79 people and wounding more than 160, police said. It was the deadliest single attack in Iraq this year and the second major bombing of a Shiite target in as many days.

Police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi said the blasts were caused by two suicide attackers wearing black abayas at the Buratha mosque, which is affiliated with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the main Shiite party.

Jalal Eddin al-Sagheer, the preacher at the mosque and one of the country’s leading politicians, said there were three assailants. One came through the women’s security checkpoint and blew up first, he said. Another raced into the mosque’s courtyard while a third came to his office before detonating his bomb, said al-Sagheer, who was not injured.

He accused Sunni politicians and clerics of waging “a campaign of distortions and lies against the Buratha mosque, claiming that it includes Sunni prisoners and mass graves of Sunnis.”

“Shiites are the ones who are targeted as part of this dirty sectarian war waged against them as the world watches silently,” he told Al-Arabiya television.

Three US troops killed in Iraq
BAGHDAD – The US military announced Friday the death of three of its troops across Iraq over the past 24 hours.

U.S. Marines say can keep Iraq levels indefinitely
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Marine Corps can sustain indefinitely its current troop level in Iraq, the No. 2 Marine general said on Thursday, despite concerns about the 3-year-old war breaking the all-volunteer military.

Gen. Robert Magnus, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, also said the Marines do not plan to prohibit troops from having commercial body armor while deployed, as the Army did last week. Some troops and their families have bought body armor because of concern that what the military was providing was insufficient.

There are about 24,500 Marines serving in the U.S. force of about 132,000 in Iraq, defense officials said.

AT LAST, there’s consensus on who’s to blame for the mess in Iraq: the Iraqis!

From the beginning, there were ominous signs that the Iraqis weren’t going to play the game right. More than a few neocon hearts were broken by the Iraqi refusal to greet us with flowers and champagne as we marched into Baghdad, and the snub still hurts. Just this week, Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum and an unrepentant hawk, complained about “the ingratitude of the Iraqis for the extraordinary favor we gave them: to release them from the bondage of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny.”

What really rankles most politicos these days is the Iraqis’ refusal to get cracking on the formation of a multiethnic government. Four months after the elections, Iraqi factions still haven’t come up with a power-sharing arrangement that satisfies all constituencies.

In Baghdad on Monday for a joint appearance with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Condoleezza Rice suggested that we’ve now given the Iraqis all the help a liberated people can reasonably expect: We “have forces on the ground and have sacrificed here,” she told reporters, so we have “a right to expect that this process [of government formation] will keep moving forward.”

Chiming in, Straw called on the Iraqis to shape up and select a prime minister, pronto: “The Americans have lost over 2,000 people [in Iraq]. We’ve lost over 100…. And billions — billions — of United States dollars, hundreds of millions of British pound sterlings have come into this country. We do have, I think, a right to say that we’ve got to be able to deal with Mr. A or Mr. B or Mr. C. We can’t deal with Mr. Nobody.”

The “after all we’ve done for you!” theme is more than a little jarring, coming as it does from the architects of the war. The Iraqis didn’t beg us to invade their country. We invaded Iraq for reasons quite unrelated to the welfare of the Iraqi people (and, it turned out, for reasons unrelated to the welfare of the American people as well).
informationclearinghouse.info

There’s no good time in the school day to give bad news about a friend’s death.

So administrators at Franklin Elementary School waited until just before the school day’s end yesterday to let a first-grade class know that the Fort Campbell soldier they “adopted” died after a recent mission in Iraq.

“We want to give them a little time to absorb it,” Assistant Principal Marcella Crenshaw said. “It’s a lot to absorb for 5- and 6-year-old children. Children are very resilient, but it depends on their personal lives and what they’ve dealt with like this before.”
tennessean.com

I would be ripped if I were the parent of one of these children. Adopt a soldier?? Tell them he’s dead and then send them home for their parents to deal (or not) with the confusion and grief they have set the children up for?

Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago.

Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action – like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds.

As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power.

Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, said: “Our emergence on to the land is one of the more significant rites of passage in our evolutionary history, and Tiktaalik is an important link in the story.”

Tiktaalik – the name means “a large, shallow-water fish” in the Inuit language Inuktikuk – shows that the evolution of animals from living in water to living on land happened gradually, with fish first living in shallow water.

The animal lived in the Devonian era lasting from 417m to 354m years ago, and had a skull, neck, and ribs similar to early limbed animals (known as tetrapods), as well as a more primitive jaw, fins, and scales akin to fish.

The scientists who discovered it say the animal was a predator with sharp teeth, a crocodile-like head, and a body that grew up to 2.75 metres (9ft) long.
guardian.co.uk

Washington — Under increasing pressure from House Democratic leaders, Rep. Cynthia McKinney took to the House floor Thursday to apologize for an incident in which she allegedly assaulted a Capitol police officer at a security checkpoint.

Since the incident last week, not one of McKinney’s fellow 200 House Democratic colleagues had publicly defended her conduct in the incident, in which the African American representative from Georgia claims she was the victim of racial profiling at an entrance to the Longworth House Office Building.

The House’s top Democrat, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, distanced herself from McKinney and publicly expressed increasing exasperation Thursday just before McKinney issued her apology. McKinney’s case had become a distraction for Democrats, who want to keep the focus on what they see as a corrupt and ineffective Republican-led Congress symbolized by former Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who announced his resignation earlier this week.

The incident with McKinney began when she tried to go around a security checkpoint, as members of Congress are entitled to do. She wasn’t wearing her members’ lapel pin, and it appears an officer did not recognize her.

She was challenged, but didn’t stop. When an officer tried to stop her, and apparently touched her, McKinney allegedly struck the officer in front of witnesses.

As the furor over the incident mounted in recent days, a federal grand jury was convened to consider possible charges against McKinney involving assaulting an officer. Witnesses to the incident, including an aide to Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, testified Thursday before the grand jury.

McKinney, who has been embroiled in other controversies in her six House terms, tried to defuse the latest incident with Thursday’s remarks.

“There should not have been any physical contact in this incident,” McKinney said in a one-minute statement on the House floor. “I am sorry that this misunderstanding happened at all, and I regret its escalation and I apologize,” she added, surrounded by a small group of Democrats, including Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland.

Just an hour earlier, Pelosi made it clear that McKinney — who since the incident has appeared daily on TV talk shows to publicize her claims of racial prejudice by the Capitol police — wasn’t getting sympathy from the Democratic leadership.

“I don’t see any conceivable reason why anyone would strike a Capitol police officer. I have the greatest respect for the Capitol police,” Pelosi told reporters.

Pelosi said the 535 members of the House and Senate have to help the police on Capitol Hill, where security has increased so much since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that officers toting long-barrel assault weapons patrol the grounds. “Members have a responsibility to help protect the Capitol, Congress and our constituents who visit us here,” she added.

It also didn’t help McKinney that House members from both parties and all races said they have also been challenged by police when they weren’t wearing their lapel pins.

Baby-faced 31-year-old Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., said some officers just can’t believe he’s a congressman. McKinney’s fellow Georgian and Democrat, civil rights pioneer Rep. John Lewis, has also been stopped, and reportedly told her to stop making an issue out of the incident.

Rules Committee chairman Rep. David Dreier, R-San Dimas (Los Angeles County), said he often doesn’t wear his pin and gets stopped, especially when he enters on the Capitol’s Senate side.

After the vote, another of the members who stood with McKinney when she apologized said he hoped the storm had passed. “It’s what a lot of members hoped she would do. It takes us toward putting this to rest,” said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio.

Pelosi’s deputy, House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., agreed. “Hopefully this will put it to rest. This was a small item. We have huge crises facing our country,” Hoyer said.

There was no reaction from federal prosecutors on whether McKinney’s apology will have any effect on the grand jury proceedings.
sfgate.com

400 years of history, telescoped into a single event.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff has testified that President Bush authorized him to disclose the contents of a highly classified intelligence assessment to the media to defend the Bush administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq, according to papers filed in federal court [PDF] on Wednesday by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case.

Lewis “Scooter” Libby testified to a federal grand jury that he had received “approval from the President through the Vice President” to divulge portions of a National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein’s purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to the court papers. Libby was said to have testified that such presidential authorization to disclose classified information was “unique in his recollection,” the court papers further said.

Libby also testified that an administration lawyer told him that Bush, by authorizing the disclosure of classified information, had in effect declassified the information. Legal experts disagree on whether the president has the authority to declassify information on his own.

The White House had no immediate reaction to the court filing.
nationaljournal.com