RIYADH – Twenty-six Saudi detainees are to be released from Guantanamo Bay and transferred to Saudi Arabia in the coming weeks, the Saudi daily Al Watan reported on Saturday.

Saudi authorities have been notified that the US has started procedures to release the Saudi nationals and hand them over to the kingdom, the report quoted an anonymous source as saying.

The detainees awaiting release are the third group of Saudis to leave Guantanamo. Saudi Arabia admitted five detainees in 2004 and three in July 2005.

US authorities are currently holding 124 Saudi nationals captured during US strikes on formerly Taleban-governed Afghanistan and the period following US occupation.

Lawyers for the detainees in Guantanamo said their clients had been working in humanitarian and charitable organizations before they were detained by the US in Pakistan and moved to the Cuba detention camp.
khaleejtimes.com

It’s all in who you know–and who you kiss on the mouth in a romantic garden in Texas.

History repeats itself, but always with new twists. We are back to the good old days when a Declaration of War preceded the start of a war. Such declaration occurred on March 16th, 2006. Reversing the old order, we are now in the “Sitzkrieg”, to be followed shortly by an aerial “Blitzkrieg” in the coming days.

In the old days, Congress declared war, and directed the Executive to take action. In the new millenium, the Executive declared war last March 16th, then Congress will pass H.R. 282, “To hold the current regime in Iran accountable for its threatening behavior and to support a transition to democracy in Iran.” This bill and previous ones like it are in direct violation of the legally binding Algiers Accords[pdf] signed by the United States and Iran on January 19, 1981, that states “The United States pledges that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs”; however, this is clearly of no interest to the 353 policymakers sponsoring the bill.

The US promised Russia and China that the UN Security Council statement just approved will not be a trigger for military action after 30 days; true to its promise, the US will attack before the 30-day deadline imposed by the UNSC for Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment activity, i.e. before the end of April. The “justification” is likely to be an alleged threat of imminent biological attack with Iran’s involvement.
antiwar.com

Iranian militiamen were brought in by Britain
MILITIAMEN from an Iranian-backed force were deliberately recruited by Britain to join the new Iraqi security services after Saddam Hussein was overthrown, the Government has admitted.

The sectarian Badr organisation, trained in exile by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, is suspected of violently pursuing its own agenda after being allowed to enlist in national units. John Reid, the Defence Secretary, disclosed in a Commons written answer to the Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price that it had been official policy to welcome the Shia gunmen. “Following the end of the conflict in Iraq, the Coalition Provision Authority sought to reintegrate militia members into civil society,” Mr Reid said. “This process included members of the Badr organisation, formerly known as the Badr Corps, among others.”

Sunnis have accused the Badr organisation of torturing prisoners, a claim rejected by the Shia-dominated Government. Bayar Jabor, the Interior Minister, was a member of the militia. The organisation’s stronghold is southern Iraq, where British troops have been based since the war.

Did Oprah Pick Another Fibber?
When in trouble, head for Auschwitz, preferably in the company of Elie Wiesel.

…hardly had Frey been cast down from the eminence of Amazon.com’s top bestseller before he was replaced at number one by the new pick of Oprah’s Book Club, Elie Wiesel’s Night, which had the good fortune to see republication at this fraught moment in Oprah’s literary affairs. Simultaneous with the Night selection came news that Oprah Winfrey and Elie Wiesel would shortly be visiting Auschwitz together, from which vantage point Oprah, with the lugubrious Wiesel at her side, could emphasize for her ABC-TV audience that there is truth and there is fiction, that Auschwitz is historical truth at its bleakest and most terrifying, that Night is a truthful account and that Wiesel is the human embodiment of truthful witness.

The trouble here is that in its central, most crucial scene, Night isn’t historically true, and at least two other important episodes are almost certainly fiction. Below, I cite views, vigorously expressed to me in recent weeks by a concentration camp survivor, Eli Pfefferkorn, who worked with Wiesel for many years; also by Raul Hilberg. Hilberg is the world’s leading authority on the Nazi Holocaust. An expanded version of his classic three-volume study, The Destruction of the European Jews, was recently reissued by Yale University Press. Wiesel personally enlisted Hilberg to be the historical expert on the United States Holocaust Commission.

If absolute truth to history is the standard, Pfefferkorn says, then Night doesn’t make the grade. Wiesel made things up, in a way that his many subsequent detractors could identify as not untypical of his modus operandi: grasping with deft assurance what people important to his future would want to hear and, by the same token, would not want to hear.
counterpunch.org

…I went to the passport control and a big group of tourists were there, everyone got their visa in less that 5 minutes. When was my turn, I saw a familiar face, the woman in the control office was the same that last year, the same that after gave me one month visa told me “if you don’t like it go back to Chile, we don’t want more Palestinians here!!!!”

Everything was normal, she asked me for my passport, and checked my name at the computer…. she was looking at it for more that 2 minutes, at that moment I knew that my name was there, but which information they have, I don’t know…, she called a guy, after another woman, after another guy… all of them were talking in Hebrew, looking at me sometimes, reading again, i don’t know for how long, I was so nervous.

A new guy came to me and starts to speak in Arabic with me, I told him that i don’t understand, he continues speaking in Arabic…. after that he told me “Good luck” and asked me to go to the check room again. Well, he didn’t asked me, he order me, he told me “Move now.”

I entered in the check room and I had all the Israeli security with me, more than 15 persons, all of them not more than 22, playing an important game in their life, with power in their hands and with a terrorist in front of them, I saw excited eyes, waiting for the orders of the oldest man, the guy with the biggest M16 in his hand.

They open all my bags, they put everything on a table and start to check it, everything… After a young woman told me that she need to check my body, and with a smile on my face I answered, “OK, no problem”, when she was checking me she told me whispering “I am sorry, but is my work, can you take of all your clothes?”, I answer yes, but I want to keep my t shirt (I didn’t want to show my tattoo), well, she checked me all, open your legs, close your legs, sit here, up and open your legs again, etc… like last year.

After the woman from last year came and asked me if I was in Israel before, I answer yes. Why you are coming again. I have friends here. Arabic friends, she asked? No, Israeli friends, Israelis????? (her face changed). Yes, Israeli friends. She asked me their names and I gave to her.

After asked me for my other passport, passport that I don’t have of course, asked me about Gaza, about Nablus, about other Arab countries, about my name again…

Well, she left me alone, I check the time, was 10:30 am, I was thinking that my future in Palestine will depend on what she decided, and I wanted to smoke, of course I was not allowed to do it, sit there and wait!!!!

The time running, I was nervous but quiet at the same time, I wait for this moment since I was refused from my homeland last year, 6 long months, and I was there again, ready for that.

I checked the time again, was 12:15, I asked if I can use the bathroom, they told me no, sit and wait!!! After 10 minutes the women came to me, I wanted to cry, I knew that she has my dreams in her hands and she gave me back my passport, I take my bags (after put everything inside) and I start to walk.

I walk, with tears in my eyes, full of emotions inside me, all my memories from Palestine were in my head, in my heart, I remember in this 5 or 10 minutes every person that I met in Nablus, how much I wanted come back, how near I was.

One man stopped me and told me something that I didn’t want to hear, something that was only in my nightmares, something that I listened before: “Welcome to Jordan.”

I am in Aqaba again, with Palestine in front of me but more far than ever.
axisoflogic.com

LOS ANGELES (March 30) – Teachers and students are turning the walkouts that have emptied high schools across Southern California into a real-life civics lesson about national immigration policy and even the nuances of civic duty itself.

In Christian Quintero’s social studies classroom, the conversation flowed easily from English to Spanish – but the topics his students discussed didn’t have easy answers.

“So do you think yesterday was a good thing or a bad thing?” Quintero asked of Monday’s walkout, which involved an estimated 36,000 students in Los Angeles County, including many from Belmont High School where he teaches.

“A good thing!” a boy in the back shouted.

“Why?”

“Because we let them know what’s up,” the boy said.

Indeed, the protests landed the Los Angeles Unified School District – the nation’s second largest, and 73 percent of its students Hispanic – in the debate on congressional proposals to crackdown on immigration.

Wednesday was relatively quiet after two days of protests that began with blocked freeways and pleas from the mayor to go back to class, and escalated Tuesday to school lockdowns and truancy citations. On the popular Web site MySpace.com, where many students have said they went for protest instructions, the word was wait until Friday for the next mass protest.

Meanwhile, in classrooms and hallways some students have turned to reflection – were the protests effective? were they the right thing to do?

Some teachers seized the opportunity to make the connection between the textbook and real life. Some offered lessons on how a bill becomes law. In one school, lunchtime morphed into an organized forum on immigration policy.
axisoflogic.com

…Whenever asked, Mr. Straw said the protesters were a small minority, and he even belittled them, saying at one point that he “could have done better” during his youthful days as a peace advocate. He added, “I can’t say I am embarrassed in the least” by the reception his hometown gave to Ms. Rice. “If you did an opinion poll, you’d find that the vast majority of people in Blackburn agree with this trip.”

On Friday, Ms. Rice had to content herself with a visit to the Liverpool school where Paul McCartney studied instead of meeting him — and had to face a short line of students wearing T-shirts that said: “No torture. No compromise.” During a visit to a school in Blackburn, she was greeted with chants of “Condi Rice go home!”

Mr. Straw had advised Ms. Rice that she would probably be greeted by protesters on the trip, officials said, and she told him that such confrontations would not bother her. She gave several interviews to the British press, and almost every one was dominated by questions about her rough reception.

“People can say whatever they wish,” she told The Lancashire Evening Telegraph. “I know where I stand. We made the right decision” in Iraq. “I was fully supportive of the decision.”

During the news conference in Blackburn on Saturday, the boos and jeers rose to greet the secretaries as they spoke. Referring to the protesters at one point, Ms. Rice said, “They make my point. A democracy is the only system of government that allows people to be heard peacefully.”
nytimes.com

Heard peacefully and ignored studiously. Ra! democracy.

There has been much resistance among inhabitants to the closure of the 148 camps six months after the 8 October quake, which killed 75,000 people and made millions more homeless. The sites were managed by the army and some of the soldiers cried as they broke the news of the closure. The government argues it is necessary to prevent people becoming so dependent on handouts that the camps will never shut. Many of the aid agencies in the relief effort agree.
observer.guardian.co.uk

Jean Kirkpatrick’s recent intervention in Nicaragua’s internal politics is a helpful reminder that US government foreign policy is marked not just by hypocrisy and sadism but also by delusional stupidity. Take this quote from an interview Kirkpatrick gave to the publication “Religion and Liberty” (1) :

“I don’t think that Fidel Castro knows how to run a government that must provide the necessities in a society. He is quintessentially a revolutionary, committed to world revolution. Since that’s his profession, I don’t think he can last.”

Despite decades of US economic blockade promoted hard by Kirkpatrick, Cuba’s people enjoy better education, better healthcare and better disaster prevention and relief services than most people in the United States. This truth was dramatically highlighted last year by the contrast between the US government’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the Havana government’s response to a series of equally devastating hurricanes in Cuba. Jean Kirkpatrick’s views on Cuba are absurdly counterfactual. Her policy advocacy on Cuba has been a complete failure.

Try this anti-historical gem from the same interview:

“… no authoritarian state has ever evolved out of a democratic welfare state, nor has a democratic welfare state ever evolved into an authoritarian state.”

Even given the limited relevant historical period she corners in this foolish remark one has to assume that Kirkpatrick’s European history studies wound up just before the Weimar Republic, to name only the most obvious example. Yet this person is a leading guru of the United States foreign policy elite. No wonder the Bush regime’s criminal aggression against Iraq has involved the people of the United States in their country’s worst foreign policy debacle since Vietnam.

Nicaragua at the UN. Kirkpatrick’s career nadir?

Perhaps the most embarrassing diplomatic debacle of Kirkpatrick’s career was the bungled attempt by US diplomacy to prevent the election of Nicaragua to the UN Security Council in 1982. Kirkpatrick and her colleagues desperately struggled to promote the candidacy of the Dominican Republic in order to prevent Nicaragua’s election. She and her team failed dismally. Nicaragua’s Chancellor at the time, Padre Miguel D’Escoto remembers,

“I spoke with all the foreign ministers of the world gathered there in the context of bilateral exchanges of about half an hour with each. But I was not alone. I could count on a marvellous support team from our foreign ministry and on Nora Astorga. But it was our heroic people under arms and Daniel (Ortega) who most accompanied us and made possible our victory thanks to the admiration and respect the world feels towards people of consequence.”(2)

The vote was a personal triumph for D’Escoto and an almost unprecedented blow to US prestige. By rejecting the Reagan administration supported candidate, the vote indicated the contempt most of the world felt for the Reagan government’s advocacy of vicious terror regimes and groups around the world at that time. For that flop, blame Kirkpatrick first.

Continuities : from El Salvador to Palestine and Iraq

Just as the career of Kirkpatrick’s fellow death squad promoter John Negroponte spans from the Reagan government’s crimes in Central America to the Bush regime’s crimes in Iraq so too do the echoes of Kirkpatrick’s pro-terror rhetoric from the early 1980s. When the US-trained Salvadoran army murdered three US nuns and a US woman lay missionary in 1982, Kirkpatrick notoriously tried to justify the killings by accusing the women of being political activists working for the Salvadoran guerrillas. What a contrast with the US government’s reaction to the killing of four US mercenaries in Fallujah which led to the destruction of the city by thousands of troops backed up by artillery, armour and air-power.
zmag.org

This article analyzes the role of militarization as a part of the control of territory, natural resources and people, and raises doubts about the so-called war on drug trafficking in mining districts. A comparison is drawn between Plan Colombia and the current situation in the gold mining region of San Marcos, Guatemala.

In San Marcos, the same region where the People of Sipakapa maintain their resistance to Canadian-US company Glamis Gold’s Marlin gold mine, the participation of United States military forces in searches for weapons and opium poppy crop fumigations has recently been announced as part of the Plan Maya Jaguar.

Just as terrorism apparently abounds around oil fields, it seems as though the worst hotbeds of drug trafficking are located where powerful mining interests are to be found. Whatever the pretext, the recent news from the highlands of San Marcos in Guatemala should be cause enough for reflection about what really lies behind militarization and the so-called regional integration initiatives, which amount to nothing more than the continuation of the historic process of exploitation and control in Mesoamerica: control of territory, control of resources and control of Peoples.
upsidedownworld.org

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe hopes to sign an agreement to import oil from Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s third-largest producer.

Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Nguema is visiting Zimbabwe two years after the authorities there helped foil a plot to oust him.

Zimbabwe is suffering chronic fuel shortages, the result of a foreign exchange crisis.

Mr Obiang said his country was ready to forge stronger links with Zimbabwe.

“I can assure you that you can always count on the support of the government and people of Equatorial Guinea to do their best,” he said at a dinner hosted by Mr Mugabe.

Mr Mugabe himself accused western governments and media of vilifying Zimbabwe.

“The born-again democrats in London and Washington would like to hoodwink the world on the situation in Zimbabwe in the very same manner they have done on Iraq,” he said.

Simon Mann, the British leader of the alleged coup plot against Mr Obiang, is still serving a jail sentence in Harare after the plane on which he was travelling landed there in 2004, on its way to Equatorial Guinea.
bbc.co.uk