BILIN, West Bank (AFP) – “I came to Bilin because when Jews are with Palestinians there is less violence,” says Jonathan Sivin as he joins a weekly demonstration against Israel’s security fence in this West Bank village.

But this day Sivin’s words have an ominous echo, coming days after acting premier Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party won the Israeli general election on a platform of turning the “barrier” into the Jewish state’s eastern border.

Palestinian leaders, who call the barrier “an apartheid fence”, have said such a move will only lead to further conflict, and this ragtag band of 300 left-wing Israelis, Palestinian villagers and foreign peace activists agree.

“Olmert means there will be no peace in this land,” says demonstrator Yussef Karaja. “I don’t know what we can do but we refuse his way. They are killing us without shooting, by lack of food, lack of work, lack of services.”

Once completed, the 670-kilometre (415-mile) mix of concrete, steel and razor wire will effectively confiscate eight to 10 percent of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Some 49,400 Palestinians living in 48 villages will find themselves on the Israeli side of the barrier.
news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Iran’s test-firing of what it called a highly destructive torpedo, atop tensions over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, is a “concern”, a State Department spokesman said.

“The fact that in three days you’ve had the test of a missile, as well as the reported test of a torpedo of new capability, demonstrates a weaponization program by Iran that does nothing to reassure Iran’s neighbors or the international community,” deputy spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters.

“It certainly is of concern.”

But Ereli said the US is committed to resolving through diplomacy the issue of Iran’s uranium enrichment operation — which the US believes masks a nuclear weapon program.

“The United States has made it clear … that we are committed to a diplomatic solution because we believe a diplomatic solution can work,” he said.
news.yahoo.com

An exercise in bravado
…The US has repeatedly declined to rule out military action if coercive diplomacy fails to resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear activities. And if the issue at hand is relative US-Iranian military might, it is really no contest. Total US defence-related spending will rise this year to around $550bn (£315bn); Iran allocated $4.4bn to defence in 2005. It cannot begin to match US weapons, technology and expertise.

Iran’s great strength is its manpower: an army numbering 350,000 soldiers, plus 125,000 Revolutionary Guards, says the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Yet such an imposing host will be of little use if any future attack on Iran’s suspect nuclear facilities is directed, as is thought likely, from the air.

Because of western sanctions, ostracism and a lack of spare parts, Iran has few modern fighter aircraft, although Russia recently proposed a $1bn sale of 29 Tor-M1 missile systems for anti-aircraft defence. The air force still relies in part on Iraqi MiGs flown to Iran for safety by Saddam Hussein at the start of the Gulf war in 1991 and never returned. Michael Knights, writing in Jane’s Intelligence Review, said Iran was likely to try to repel any attack though a mobile defence of “highly integrated local networks of interceptor aircraft and ground-based Sams [surface-to-air missiles]”. This would provide “layered protection” for strategic locations such as the Isfahan and Bushehr facilities and Bandar Abbas at the mouth of the Gulf.

While Great Prophet may have failed to predict Iranian military success, it has made a number of discomfiting points to the US and its allies. By focusing on the Strait of Hormuz, Iran reminded the west that up to one third of the entire world’s exported oil supply must pass through a channel that American strategists call a “global chokepoint”. The exercises alone have driven up crude oil prices.

American planners, trying to anticipate Iran’s likely response to an attack, say it could block the strait using mines. Un-named intelligence officials told the Washington Post this week that there was a “growing consensus” that, if attacked, Iran would also resort to terrorism against civilian targets in the US and Europe, and would use Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad to foment trouble in Israel-Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. No evidence was cited for these claims.
guardian.co.uk

Britain and other Western nations are using huge debt write-offs to Iraq to boost development aid statistics and give a misleading impression of their generosity to the Third World, campaigners say.

The UK, France, Germany and Italy have all bracketed debt cancellations to Iraq as part of their assistance to the world’s poorest nations.

Figures released today by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development are expected to show that most, if not all, of the 15 nations in the EU before its 2004 expansion increased aid contributions.

But the statistics will include massive write-offs to Iraq in 2005 when the UK cancelled €499m (£350m) of debt to Baghdad, France €1.6bn, Germany €1.28bn and Italy €925m.

A report released yesterday by non-governmental organisations said that, while the countries were not breaking international rules, they were misleading the public.
independent.co.uk

Condoleezza Rice went to Baghdad to tell the Iraqis to ‘get governing.’ What she did was highlight the disconnect between the Green Zone and the rest of the country.

April 3, 2006 – There’s nothing like roaring into Baghdad aboard a Rhino. A Rhino is a giant, heavily-armored bus that can withstand IEDs (small ones), and it is now the favored means of keeping Western visitors from getting blown to bits by these homemade bombs on the dangerous road between Baghdad International Airport and the secure Green Zone at the city’s center. “Rhino” is an appropriately Disney-ish name for these wheeled monstrosities, adding to the surreal feeling one gets in moving from the howling chaos outside the Green Zone into the theme park-like confines within. You drive through several checkpoints, leaving behind tracts of litter and rubble and the desperate, dark faces of ordinary Iraqis trying to earn a few dinars. There, behind high concrete blast walls and razor wire, you find quiet streets and the heart of the American occupation: a double-sized Olympic pool with a palm-fretted patio restaurant, food courts and a giant coffee lounge where lessons in belly dancing and martial arts are offered. All these are huge improvements from the last time I was in Baghdad, two years ago. And all are intended for the Westerners who dwell in increasing comfort here.

CAIRO, Egypt – Terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has sharply lowered his profile in recent months, halting his group’s Internet claims as the number of big suicide bombings in Iraq — his infamous signature form of attack — has fallen.

Now, a man with close ties to Iraqi insurgent groups claims al-Zarqawi was shunted aside as political leader of a recently formed coalition of militants because they were angry at his propaganda efforts and embarrassed by his group’s deadly attack on hotels in Jordan.
news.yahoo.com

Well no. It’s that we don’t need a Sunni ‘insurgent’ anymore. Since we fabricated him it’s easy to disappear him.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 4 — The Iraqi court trying Saddam Hussein announced Tuesday that it had charged him with genocide, saying he sought to annihilate the Kurdish people in 1988, when the military killed at least 50,000 Kurdish civilians and destroyed 2,000 villages.
nytimes.com

Not that this bothered us back then, when we were friends.

Tehran faces growing Kurdish opposition
MOUNT QANDIL, Iraq — A little-known organization based in the mountains of Iraq’s Kurdish north is emerging as a serious threat to the Iranian government, staging cross-border attacks and claiming tens of thousands of supporters among Iran’s 4 million Kurds.

Kurdish protests toll rises to 15 after bus blaze
ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Hundreds of Kurds clashed with police in southeast Turkey on Monday and in Istanbul three people were killed as they fled a bus set ablaze by protesters, bringing the death toll in violence over the past week to 15.

The latest violence added to a week of unrest triggered by the funerals of 14 rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) who were killed in clashes with security forces.

It marked some of Turkey’s worst civil unrest since the PKK took up arms against the state in 1984 in an insurgency which has killed more than 30,000 people, and fueled fears of an escalation of the conflict.

the Kurds are being groomed as a US secret weapon.

Police fought running battles with rioters in central Paris last night as youths attacked officers with bangers, bottles and concrete at the end of a mass demonstration against a youth employment law that has caused a political crisis for Jacques Chirac’s ruling party.

Trade unionists and student leaders said up to three million people took to the streets across France yesterday – the second time in eight days that the country has seen its biggest street demonstrations in almost 40 years. The protests, including one by hundreds of thousands of students and scholars who marched through central Paris, were mainly peaceful.
guardian.co.uk

It’s an intense and traumatic glimpse inside the 9/11 hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 – and it’s too much, too soon for some New York moviegoers.
At least one theater on the upper West Side has yanked the harrowing trailer for Universal Pictures’ upcoming “United 93,” saying it reduced one patron to tears.

“I personally received a couple of complaints. Some people were pretty upset,” said a manager at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 12 theater on Broadway. “We pulled the trailer last weekend.”

The new $15 million feature-length film dramatizes events onthe doomed United flight from takeoff through the courageous revolt by passengers to the eventual crash outside Shanksville, Pa.
nydailynews.com

The first data to document the effect of President Bush’s tax cuts for investment income show that they have significantly lowered the tax burden on the richest Americans, reducing taxes on incomes of more than $10 million by an average of about $500,000.

An analysis of Internal Revenue Service data by The New York Times found that the benefit of the lower taxes on investments was far more concentrated on the very wealthiest Americans than the benefits of Mr. Bush’s two previous tax cuts: on wages and other noninvestment income.
nytimes.com

The United States hoped sending a heavily armed brigade of several thousand troops to Barahona, a small city on the southern coast of the Dominican Republic 50 miles from the Haitian border, would go unnoticed.

But the progressive movement in the Dominican Republic held a series of demonstrations in late February exposing this potential threat to Cuba, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico, to the elections scheduled for Haiti and to progressives in the Dominican Republic itself.

The U.S. and the Dominican army put out the cover story that the U.S. troops were there to provide medical assistance. Oscar Moreta, a member of the Patriotic Anti-Imperialist Committee of Barahona, told the Cuban News Agency Prensa Latina, “Those of us who live in Barahona have been able to confirm that they have tanks, armored vehicles, attack helicopters, radar and many weapons, and we understand that those are not things used to build clinics.”

There are rumors circulating in Bara hona that the troops are the advanced guard of an eventual 14,000, designed to pose a major threat to any U.S. opponents in the region.

Although René Préval is Haiti’s president-elect, after a massive popular struggle, he can’t take office until the Haitian parliament is seated. The second round of parliamentary elections is currently scheduled for April 21-23, which means that the votes won’t be counted and the victors seated until some time in May.
workers.org