LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — South American leaders scrambled to avert a regional crisis over Bolivia’s nationalization of its natural gas sector as Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez flew with Bolivian President Evo Morales to a hastily arranged summit in Argentina on Thursday.

Morales had announced Monday that he had nationalized Bolivia’s natural gas reserves and will reduce foreign participants to minority players — giving the companies six months to sign contracts or leave Bolivia.

The socialist Chavez, a political mentor and ally of the leftist Morales, said he came to Bolivia late Wednesday not to give advice but to offer ”congratulations and learn from Bolivia’s wisdom.”

”With good will, Morales will reach the agreements he needs to make with the foreign companies,” Chavez said after arriving in the capital of La Paz.

Chavez spoke after Brazil — Bolivia’s biggest gas client — summarily announced it would cut off all new petroleum investment in Bolivia, where it has invested $1.6 billion to boost production over the last decade.

The European Union, meanwhile, expressed concern over Morales’ order for army troops to guard more than 50 natural gas installations, most operated by foreign companies since Bolivia privatized petroleum production in the mid-1990s.

Morales and Chavez flew to the Argentine city of Puerto Iguazu along the border with Brazil to join Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Argentine President Nestor Kirchner.

Foreign companies now face audits of their Bolivian operations by authorities ahead of the contract negotiations, Hydrocarbons Minister Andres Soliz told a news conference Wednesday in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, where most foreign oil companies have their Bolivian headquarters.

Morales has long claimed that Bolivia’s natural gas resources have been ”looted” by multinational companies.

While Silva said he believes he can negotiate a solution to the controversy, he asserted he will defend contracts giving Brazil rights to Bolivian gas. ”The fact that Bolivia has rights does not deny the fact that Brazil has rights in the matter as well,” Silva said.

Morales and Chavez also planned to discuss Chavez’s idea to construct a 5,600-mile pipeline linking Venezuela’s vast natural gas reserves through Brazil to Argentina, Chavez said.

The pipeline, estimated at $25 billion, would also branch to Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay — though experts have predicted it could cost more and environmentalists say the plan could damage the Amazon.

Chavez confirmed that Venezuela’s state petroleum company PDVSA will help finance, with an unspecified amount of money, the construction of an ethane, methalene and propane plant in Bolivia.

Morales reiterated his determination to proceed with the nationalization.

”We’ve received many telephone calls, been faced with some threats by some companies, but others wanting to cooperate and support this profound transformation process in the country,” Morales said late Wednesday, without naming specific companies.

While Morales wants Bolivia’s cash-strapped state-owned Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos petroleum company to dominate gas production as part of the nationalization plan, the company has functioned as little more than a bureaucracy for a decade since the Bolivia’s gas industry was privatized. Experts say it would take a huge infusion of cash to transform the company into a capable operation.

Bolivia wants the company to oversee all aspects of gas production, refining and sales — but it’s not clear how it can come up with the money and expertise it needs to wrest control of the industry from the foreign companies now managing it.

Morales, a populist who won a landslide victory in December, has long vowed to take back control of Bolivia’s natural resources. While Bolivia has vast mineral and forestry wealth, the country’s most valuable asset is its natural gas reserves — the continent’s second-largest after Venezuela.

Under Monday’s decree, foreign companies must sell a majority stake of their participation to YPFB. Yet it remains unclear how Bolivia will come up with the several billion dollars needed for that deal.
nytimes.com

MOSCOW, May 4 – Vice President Dick Cheney today delivered the Bush administration’s strongest rebuke of Russia to date, saying the Russian government “unfairly and improperly restricted” people’s rights and suggesting that it sought to use the country’s vast oil and gas resources as “tools of intimidation or blackmail.”
nytimes.com

The leader of a U.N.-backed transitional government that is trying to assert control over Somalia said Wednesday he believes the United States is funding an alliance of warlords fighting radical Islamic militias in his country and should be working directly with his administration instead.

The United States has said only that American officials have met with a wide variety of Somali leaders to try to fight international terrorists in the country.

Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed told The Associated Press during a two-day visit to Stockholm that he believes Washington is supporting the warlords-turned-politicians as a way of fighting several top al-Qaida operatives who are being protected by radical clerics.

“They really think they can capture al-Qaida members in Somalia,” he said. “But the Americans should tell the warlords they should support the government, and cooperate with the government … We are the legitimate government, and we will help you fight terrorism.”

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said he did not know “the origin of these remarks in terms of what he has in mind.”

“Our interest is purely in seeing Somalia achieve a better day,” McCormack said. “It’s a real concern of ours, terror taking root in the Horn of Africa … We don’t want to see another safe haven for terrorists created.”
forbes.com

Israel Our Home Chairman Avigdor Lieberman said that the law should be enforced on Arab Knesset Members who travel to Arab countries and meet with representatives of Hizbullah and Hamas.

“All those inciters and collaborators who sit in this house should bear the full punishment. The Second World War ended when the heads of the Nazi regime were executed, and I hope that is the fate of the collaborators in this fate,” he said.
ynetnews.com

The noose is tightening around George Bush and his gang of White House crooks and liars, with prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald reportedly getting closer to an indictment of Karl Rove, and now with the Illinois and California state legislatures considering resolutions that would have those states submit bills of impeachment to the U.S. House of Representatives–an alternative means of bringing an impeachment case against a president when, as now, the sitting members of Congress don’t have the courage or conviction to do so themselves.

These are dangerous times, because the Bush family history, and the Rove M.O., are to attack viciously and without restraint when cornered.
counterpunch.org

Expect things to literally blow up.

… In Iraq, our descent into hell, our “Apocalypse Now” moment, has begun. First there was Gitmo, then the global rendition program, then Abu Ghraib, then the pulverizing of Fallujah, and now trigger-happy raids that are filling multitudes of sandy graves with men, women and children. Has “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” become the mission in Babylon? Can’t anyone remember Vietnam, where we left behind more than a million dead civilians? In Iraq, we’ve way past the half-million mark, probably the million mark, if you count the 1990s sanctions. Are the American people as blind and deaf as they seem? Don’t we see ourselves walking through the gates of hell and can’t we hear the doors clanging shut on our country?

Who am I to say all this, you might ask. Fair enough, I reply. So let me tell you a story about monstrous crimes and tragedies from my generation about to be repeated in Iraq in front of the whole world. First, understand that a single soldier can’t be expected to grasp the total criminality of war because his whole universe is a tiny place right in front of his nose. So he can stay alive. If he knew everything that was going on, he would be heartbroken, and if he also knew why, he would go insane.
counterpunch.org

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 4 Ñ In the video released last week by the terrorist Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, he is seen firing long bursts from a heavy automatic rifle, his forearms sprouting from beneath black fatigues as he exudes the very picture of a strong jihadist leader.

In out-takes from the same video, Mr. Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, cuts an altogether different figure:

As the camera rolls, Mr. Zarqawi is flummoxed by how to fire the machine gun until an aide walks over and fiddles with the weapon so it discharges. Another scene shows Mr. Zarqawi hand the weapon off to several other insurgents, who absent-mindedly grab it by its scalding hot barrel.

And after his shooting scene, Mr. Zarqawi walks away from the camera to reveal decidedly non-jihadist footwear: Comfortable white New Balance sneakers.

Turning the tables of propaganda on the most hunted man in Iraq, the American military released the video out-takes today, which they said troops had discovered amongst a trove of information about Mr. Zarqawi last month in the dangerous town of Yusifiyah, just south of Baghdad.
nytimes.com

The lifts in the New York Hilton played CNN on a small screen you could not avoid watching. Iraq was top of the news; pronouncements about a “civil war” and “sectarian violence” were repeated incessantly. It was as if the US invasion had never happened and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians by the Americans was a surreal fiction. The Iraqis were mindless Arabs, haunted by religion, ethnic strife and the need to blow themselves up. Unctuous puppet politicians were paraded with no hint that their exercise yard was inside an American fortress.

And when you left the lift, this followed you to your room, to the hotel gym, the airport, the next airport and the next country. Such is the power of America’s corporate propaganda, which, as Edward Said pointed out in Culture and Imperialism , “penetrates electronically” with its equivalent of a party line.

The party line changed the other day. For almost three years it was that al-Qaeda was the driving force behind the “insurgency”, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a bloodthirsty Jordanian who was clearly being groomed for the kind of infamy Saddam Hussein enjoys. It mattered not that al-Zarqawi had never been seen alive and that only a fraction of the “insurgents” followed al-Qaeda. For the Americans, Zarqawi’s role was to distract attention from the thing that almost all Iraqis oppose: the brutal Anglo-American occupation of their country.

Now that al-Zarqawi has been replaced by “sectarian violence” and “civil war”, the big news is the attacks by Sunnis on Shia mosques and bazaars. The real news, which is not reported in the CNN “mainstream”, is that the Salvador Option has been invoked in Iraq. This is the campaign of terror by death squads armed and trained by the US, which attack Sunnis and Shias alike. The goal is the incitement of a real civil war and the break-up of Iraq, the original war aim of Bush’s administration. The ministry of the interior in Baghdad, which is run by the CIA, directs the principal death squads. Their members are not exclusively Shia, as the myth goes. The most brutal are the Sunni-led Special Police Commandos, headed by former senior officers in Saddam’s Ba’ath Party. This unit was formed and trained by CIA “counter-insurgency” experts, including veterans of the CIA’s terror operations in central America in the 1980s, notably El Salvador. In his new book, Empire’s Workshop (Metropolitan Books), the American historian Greg Grandin describes the Salvador Option thus: “Once in office, [President] Reagan came down hard on central America, in effect letting his administration’s most committed militarists set and execute policy. In El Salvador, they provided more than a million dollars a day to fund a lethal counter-insurgency campaign . . . All told, US allies in central America during Reagan’s two terms killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands and drove millions into exile.”

Although the Reagan administration spawned the current Bushites, or “neo-cons”, the pattern was set earlier. In Vietnam, death squads trained, armed and directed by the CIA murdered up to 50,000 people in Operation Phoenix. In the mid-1960s in Indonesia CIA officers compiled “death lists” for General Suharto’s killing spree during his seizure of power. After the 2003 invasion, it was only a matter of time before this venerable “policy” was applied in Iraq.
informationclearinghouse.info

Thirty Deaths Reported In Violence Across IraqAt least 13 people were killed on Thursday in an air assault by US forces on a house in Iraq’s restive city of Ramadi, according to medics.

“US planes bombed a house in Aziziyah area of Ramadi city centre, killing 13 civilians,” Ali al-Obeidi, a medic at the Ramadi hospital told AFP, adding that four people were wounded.

The US military confirmed it had conducted the assault but did not give casualty figures.
abc.net.au

18 dead bodies found in Iraqi cities of Babylon, Tikrit
BAGHDAD, May 4 (KUNA) — Iraqi police said on Thursday that they had found 18 unidentified dead bodies in the cities of Tikrit and Babylon.

A police source said all dead bodies had been shot in different places in their bodies.

KARACHI – Across the jihadi world, there is a strong conviction that by the end of this year Taliban leader Mullah Omar will be back in power in Afghanistan, from where he was driven by US-led forces in 2001.

Realistically, eight months is likely to be too ambitious a time frame for a Taliban victory, if victory is achievable at all.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Taliban movement is poised to enhance its nuisance level significantly in the United States’ strategic back yards in the region – notably Afghanistan and Pakistan.
atimes.com