Developments in Iraq, March 18
* KIRKUK - The U.S. military said in a statement that the head of the Iraqi armed forces was in a convoy struck by a roadside bomb near Kirkuk on Thursday, but escaped injury. In the initial report on Thursday, Iraqi police said General Babakir Zebari, Iraq's chief of staff, was not in the motorcade, although it was comprised of vehicles he normally used. Three Iraqi soldiers were wounded in the attack, the U.S. military said on Saturday.
BAGHDAD - The bodies of 16 victims of shootings were found in different areas of the capital, police said.
BAQUBA - Two gunmen were killed and 18 suspects arrested when the Iraqi army launched a search operation near Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, the Iraqi military said.
DUJAIL - Two civilians were found dead inside their car near Dujail, 50 km north of Baghdad on Saturday. The bodies of two brothers were also found in the same area on Friday, police said.
BAIJI - A police officer and his brother were killed by gunmen in Baiji, 180 km north of Baghdad, police said.
TIKRIT - Two U.S. soldiers were killed and another wounded in an attack northwest of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, on Thursday, the U.S. military said.
BAGHDAD - Five Iraqi soldiers were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near their patrol in Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - Three policemen were wounded when a roadside bomb struck their patrol in northern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - Two pilgrims walking to the Shi'ite holy city of Kerbala were killed and eight wounded by a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad, police said.
alertnet.orgBombs, bullets meet Shiite pilgrims in Iraq BAGHDAD, Iraq — The Muslim pilgrims' road to the holy city of Karbala was a highway of bullets and bombs for Shiites on Friday.
Drive-by shootings and roadside and bus bombs killed or injured 19 people, ratcheting up the sectarian tensions gripping Iraq.
Security forces, including U.S. armored reinforcements, girded for more bloodshed leading up to Monday's Shiite holiday. And north of Baghdad, in the Sunni Triangle, a two-day-old operation involving 1,500 U.S. and Iraqi troops swept through an area near Samarra in search of insurgents.
It was in Samarra that the insurgent bombing of a Shiite shrine last month ignited days of violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. More than 500 people died.
Authorities had feared new attacks as tens of thousands of Shiites, many dressed in black and carrying religious banners, converge on Karbala, 50 miles south of the capital, for Monday's 40th and final day of mourning for Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson.
The U.S. military announced this week it was dispatching a fresh battalion of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, about 700 troops, to Iraq from its base in Kuwait to provide extra security for Shiite holy cities and Baghdad during this period.
Friday's bloodshed in Baghdad began as groups of faithful, many of them parents with children in tow, trekked down city streets headed for the southbound highway to Karbala.
Four U.S. Soldiers Die, Four Others Wounded in Explosion in Iraq
rootsie on 03.19.06 @ 08:22 AM CST [
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Saturday, March 18th
Eduardo Galeano: Abracadabra, Uruguay's Desaparecidos Begin to Appear
Every 14 of March Uruguayans who were prisoners of the dictatorship celebrate the Day of the Liberated.
It's something more than a coincidence.
The disappeared, who are beginning to appear, Ubagesner Chaves, Fernando Miranda, call us to struggle for the liberation of memory, which continues to be imprisoned.
Our country wants to stop being a sanctuary of impunity, the impunity of murderers, the impunity of thieves, the impunity of liars, and we're turning this direction, at last, after so many years, taking the first steps.
This is not the end of the road. It is the beginning. It was costly but we are beginning the hard and necessary transit to the liberation of memory in a country that seemed to be condemned to a state of perpetual amnesia.
All of us who are here share the hope that sooner, rather than later, there will be memory and there will be justice because history teaches us that memory can stubbornly survive all its prisons and that justice can be more powerful than fear when people give it aid.
The dignity of memory, the memory of dignity.
In the unequal combat against fear, in that combat that each one of us fights every day, what would become of us without the memory of dignity?
The world is suffering an alarming disparagement of dignity. The undignified, those who rule in this world, say that the undignified are the prehistoric, nostalgic, romantic, those who deny reality.
Every day, everywhere, we hear the eulogy to opportunism and the identification of realism with cynicism; the realism that requires elbowing and forbids the embrace; the realism of screw everything and fix it as you can and if not screw you.
The realism, too, of fatalism. This is the worst of the many ghosts seen today in our progressive government, here in Uruguay, and in other progressive governments of Latin America. The fatalism, perverse colonial inheritance, which forces us to believe that reality can be repeated, but it can't be changed, that what was is, and will be, that tomorrow is nothing more than another name for today.
But could it be that they weren't real, these men and women who have struggled and who struggle to change reality, those who have believed and believe that reality doesn,t demand obedience? Aren't they real, Ubagesner Chaves and Fernando Miranda and all the others who are arriving from the bottom of the earth and time to testify to another possible reality? And all those who hoped and wished with them, weren't they, and don't they continue to be, real? Were the hangmen not real, were the victims not real, were the sacrifices of so many people in this country that the dictatorship turned into the greatest torture chamber of the world not real?
Reality is a challenge.
We are not condemned to choose between the same and the same.
Reality is real because it invites us to change it and not because it forces us to accept it. Reality opens spaces of freedom and doesn't necessarily enclose us in the cages of fatalism.
The poet has well said that a single rooster doesn't weave the morning.
This Creole with a strange name, Ubagesner, wasn't alone in life nor is he alone in death; today he is a symbol of our land and our people.
This militant worker embodies the sacrifice of many compatriots who believed in our country and our people and risked their lives for this faith.
We have come to tell them it was worth the effort.
We have come to tell them that, dead, they will never die.
We are gathered today to tell them that the tangos we hear tell us that life is short but there are lives that are startlingly long because they continue in others, in those who will come.
Sooner or later we, walkers, will be walked on by the steps of others, just as our steps are taken in the footprints other steps left behind.
Now when the owners of the world have forced us to repent of all passion, now when style makes life so cold and barren, now is a good time to recall that little word that we all remember from childhood tales, "abracadabra," the magic word that opened all the doors, that word, abracadabra which meant in ancient Hebrew, "Send your fire to the end."
Today, more than a funeral, this is a celebration. We are celebrating the living memory of Ubagesner and all those generous men and women who, in this country, sent their fire to the end; those who continue to help us to not lose our way and not to accept the unacceptable and not to ever resign ourselves and never to step down from the beautiful little horse of dignity.
Because in the most difficult hours, in those days of enmity, in the years of the grime and fear of the military dictatorship, these people knew how to live and give themselves entirely and they did so without asking for anything in exchange, as if their lives sang that old Andalucian copla that said, and still says and will always say, "My hands are empty, but they are mine."
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 10:18 AM CST [
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Latin America Unchained
For decades the International Monetary Fund (IMF) served as one of the key pillars of the "Washington Consensus." Dominated by the White House, the Fund allowed successive administrations to control the economic policy of poorer countries in this hemisphere and beyond. Those nations wishing to buck a U.S. agenda of corporate globalization risked having their access to international loans cut off. The brutish IMF not only handled its own funds but also played gatekeeper for money from other creditors, such as the regional development banks. This power made the institution as hated throughout the global South as it was celebrated inside the Beltway.
Maybe it's not surprising, then, that an increasingly progressive Latin America is starting to say good riddance.
tompaine.com
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 10:14 AM CST [
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Cuba Demands America Return Guantanamo Bay
ON February 7, 1901, [Cuban] President Tomás Estrada Palma [] signed the agreement ceding Cuban territory to the United States in order for it to construct a naval base in Guantanamo.
Guantanamo Bay is one of the country's deepest and largest bays. Christopher Columbus discovered it during his second voyage to the New World on April 30, 1494. It has some very special natural characteristics: it is extremely deep, it is secure and it has the capacity to receive large ships.
For centuries, it was virtually abandoned, as the Spanish colonizers were incapable of appreciating its virtues.
After an attempt by the British to occupy the Bay in July, 1741, in the hope of establishing a base of operations there, the colonial government finally understood the site's strategic importance.
U.S. REFOCUSSES ON CUBA
In the early 19th century, when it realized the value of the island's geographic location, natural resources, its historical, economic and social characteristics, as well as those of its population, the United States publicly expressed its interest in taking over Cuba.
Attempts to buy the island from Spain were made in 1805, 1807 and 1808, but according to the Central Report of the First Congress of the Communist Party, "if Spanish obstinacy ever served Cuba's cause, it was in its systematic refusal to agree to the buying and selling that the United States had repeatedly proposed during the last century."
In 1823, John Quincy Adams, the U.S. secretary of state, articulated the "ripe fruit" thesis, holding that Cuba would inevitably fall into U.S. hands as soon as it was no longer a Spanish colony. And that same year, President James Monroe developed the doctrine that bears his name, warning the European powers that America was reserved solely and exclusively "for the Americans." At the same time, for years his country obstructed and discouraged attempts by the Cuban people to achieve independence.
In 1895, U.S. investments on the island totaled some 50 million pesos, particularly in the sugar and tobacco industries, along with iron, chrome and manganese deposits.
Thus, in 1898, the Americans understood that the imminent end of Spanish colonial rule and before the unstoppable advance of the Liberation Army was a propitious time to intervene in the Spanish-Cuban war.
Taking advantage of the growing sympathy among North Americans for Cuba's cause, the U.S. Congress in April 1898 approved a Joint Resolution that brought about the Northern giant's intervention in the conflict.
The Spanish-Cuban-U.S. War, described as the first imperialist war of pillage, was centered primarily in the eastern provinces of Cuba and the Guantanamo region. On July 16, 1898, the terms of surrender were signed, and on December 10 of that same year, the Treaty of Paris was signed. The United States took control of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam; Cuba remained as "special territory," from which the Americans were to withdraw after the "appeasement."
The administrative government, with General Leonard Wood at the head, convened a Constituent Assembly charged with drawing up the Constitution for the future republic. But in order to firmly establish relations between Cuba and the United States, the occupying forces brought heavy pressure to bear and imposed the notorious Platt Amendment, with two clauses that atrociously encroached on Cuba's national sovereignty and which had serious implications for the nascent republic's self-determination.
Clause 3 of the Amendment reserved the right of the United States to intervene for the preservation of Cuba's independence and the support of a government appropriate to its interests, while Clause 7 forced Cuba to cede part of its territory for the establishment of naval bases or coaling stations [for the loading of coal into rail cars].
Historian Miguel D'Estéfano Pissani, in his book Derecho de Tratados (Treaty Law), explains: "The Platt Amendment became a Sword of Damocles, whose edges were the naval and coaling concessions. The strength of the Constitutional appendix was based, precisely, on the military base clause."
On November 8, 1902, the U.S. government asked for a permanent lease of land in the bays of Nipe, Honda, Cienfuegos and Guantanamo. But due to the violent reaction of the people, it was limited to the Honda and Guantanamo Bays.
One of the most outstanding individuals of our independence struggle, Juan Gualberto Gómez, made his voice heard, warning that Articles 3 and 7 of the Platt Amendment "... were the same as handing the keys of our house over to the Americans, so that they could come in at any hour ... day or night, with good or bad intentions ..." and that "... its purpose is none other than to reduce the power of future Cuban governments and the sovereignty of our Republic."
Finally, after a series of negotiations, on December 10, 1903, the United States took possession of the territory for its naval base in Guantanamo. Via a supplementary agreement signed on July 2, 1903, the U.S. government promised to pay 2,000 pesos per year in U.S. gold (about $4,085 at today's prices), a laughable sum that Washington would continue to deposit, but which Cuba has refused to accept or cash since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.
According to Doctor Fernando Alvarez Tabío, in his article "La Base Naval de Guantanamo y el derecho Internacional" (The Guantanamo Naval Base and International Law"), the leasing contract for the naval base lacks legality and juridical validity because it is marred in its essential elements: ... due to the inability of the Cuban government to cede a piece of its national territory in perpetuity ... and because the consent was snatched via irresistible and unjust moral violence...
Rejecting Honda Bay, the United States concentrated on Guantanamo. That choice was due to a strategic objective. Because of its exceptional value and geographic characteristics, it made it possible to assure military predominance in the Caribbean and fix its eyes on Panama's inter-ocean canal, for which it had obtained the construction rights that year as well, in 1903.
A CENTURY OF INFAMY
During its century of existence, the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo has been the scene of shameful episodes and events.
Once the base was established, U.S. capital investment rose, first with the construction of the base's vital water supply, and then in the sugar industry, railroads and electrical power. Gambling, prostitution and contraband proliferated with the arrival of the Marines, and became lucrative businesses for the national bourgeoisie.
The enclave's presence also had repercussions on the region's political life. In 1917, 1919 and 1922, the Marines were sent out from the base to "protect" the sugar mills and other U.S. economic interests in response to the revolt by the Partido Independiente de Color (Colored Independence Party), the Chambelona uprising and that of the liberals against the Menocal government.
During the final liberation war led by Fidel and the Rebel Army, the base was used as a supply point for the Batista dictatorship's air force, which indiscriminately bombed and fired on farmers and other civilians in the liberated zones. The base was also a launching point for U.S. troops invading other countries, like Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1918.
After the revolutionary triumph in January 1959, the base became a refuge for the old regime's murderers and torturers, and has been used as a platform for aggression against Cuba, including infiltration by enemy agents; the protection of counterrevolutionary bands; pretexts for justifying direct aggression against the island; a center of radio-electronic espionage and a point of concentration for ships and planes enabling sudden naval blockades to be imposed on the island.
Throughout these years, the military enclave has been the center of provocations and violations of our nation, and against the Border Guards responsible for patrolling the outer perimeter. According to official figures, from 1962 to August 1992, more than 13,000 such incidents have been registered, including shots fired with rifles and pistols (taking the lives of two Cuban Border Guards); aiming with machine guns, tanks and cannons; the throwing of objects; obscene gestures; breaking through the border fence and violating air and maritime space with ships, planes and helicopters.
The most recent ugly episode in the base's history is its use as a prison, where more than 500 detainees accused of being terrorists or having links to terrorism have been held and subject to physical and psychological torture, without the right to legal assistance or a decent trial. The world has been shaken by the spine-chilling images of chained men being subject to extreme degradation and force fed after waging a hunger strike to protest conditions in the prison, where they are denied access to their lawyers, humanitarian organizations or the United Nations.
The Constitution of the Republic of Cuba, approved by the people on February 24, 1976, says in Article 11 that our country "... rejects and considers null and void the treaties, pacts or concessions agreed to under unequal or unknown conditions or that diminish its sovereignty or territorial integrity."
Thus, Cuba demands the return of that territory because, as Fidel affirmed, "... That base is in their possession against the will of our people ... it is a dagger thrust into the heart of Cuba's land ..."
watchingamerica.com
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 10:11 AM CST [
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Two U.S. Soldiers Die in Honduras Accident
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - A speeding bus crashed into a small van carrying a group of U.S. soldiers in northern Honduras, killing two and injuring one, authorities said Thursday.
The accident happened Wednesday near the village of Agua Caliente, on the Atlantic coast 220 miles north of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, Transport Police Commissioner Jose Luis Flores said.
The U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa declined to confirm the identities of the victims pending notification of next of kin.
Flores said the driver of the bus was speeding before he crashed into the van carrying the soldiers. The soldier driving the van was unable to avoid the collision.
The bus driver was uninjured but was immediately detained by police.
The soldiers were traveling from La Ceiba to the industrial city of San Pedro Sula, Flores said. They had been participating in joint military exercises with their Honduran counterparts for the past month.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 10:05 AM CST [
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Not '68, but French Youths Hear Similar Cry to Rise Up
PARIS, March 16 — Once again, students are on the barricades in France, evoking comparisons to the uprising of May 1968. But this is not a revolt. It is not 1968 revisited.
Certainly, students are taking to the streets and shutting down universities, and tear gas penetrated the heart of Paris.
On Thursday, hundreds of thousands of protesters, most of them students, filled the streets and marched in cities throughout France. With teachers, workers, labor union leaders, the jobless, even retirees beginning to join in, an even larger nationwide protest is planned for Saturday.
And the images of cheering students occupying the 17th-century Sorbonne, the birthplace of the 1968 revolt, last Friday night called forth memories of that exhilarating, romantic leftist youth movement 38 springs ago.
But the students' goal this time is far more modest. They want the abolition of a new law, the First Employment Contract, which aims to increase hiring by allowing employers to fire new workers without cause in their first two years.
"We're not back there in '68," said Nadjet Boubakeur, a 26-year-old history major at a public university here and a leader of the student movement UNEF. "Our revolt is not to get more. It's to keep what we have."
nytimes.com
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 10:00 AM CST [
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The time for accounting
Tony Blair's announcement that he will henceforward account only to God for the Iraq war makes perfect sense. Every secular reason he has concocted for the catastrophe has turned out to be the reverse of the truth: there were no weapons of mass destruction, we are less safe from terrorism, the Iraqi people themselves do not want us in their country. No more of his excuses for this epic man-made disaster stand an earthly chance of being believed.
As the third anniversary of the calamity draws close, the final argument used by what little remains of the brave army of pro-war punditry that set out with the prime minister in 2003 has gone belly up. Far from preventing a civil war, the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq is provoking one. It is doing so through its divide-and-rule strategy, which has entrenched and inflamed the Sunni-Shia divide beyond anything in Iraq's history, and through its refusal to afford Iraqis the unfettered exercise of national sovereignty, which is the only framework for overcoming such differences.
There is scarcely even a pretence that Iraq is permitted such sovereignty at present. Both Jack Straw and the US ambassador to Baghdad have recently been instructing the Iraqis as to what sort of government they must form - three months after the supposedly decisive national elections took place.
And all this to the accompaniment of unabated violence. Reliable estimates for violent civilian deaths under the occupation range well over 100,000. Faik Bakir, the director of the Baghdad morgue, has had to flee the country after revealing that more than 7,000 people had been killed, often after torture, by officers of the US-supervised interior ministry. The carnage continues: more families will be burying their dead this morning after yesterday's 50-warplane assault on Samarra by the US - the biggest yet and clearest possible demonstration of the occupation's brutality and failure.
It defies common sense to suppose that the only torture and degradation of civilians carried out by US and British troops has been that caught on camera at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. No wonder Iraqi local authorities now refuse to deal with the British army in the south.
The pledge that all this suffering would at least assist a solution to the Palestinian question has proved painfully hollow, with the Israelis ram-raiding a Palestinian prison in Jericho - just like British troops in Basra. But still the war junkies seem to believe one more hit - this time against Iran - will lead to the breakthrough to the docile Middle East they desire. Straw's assertion that it is "inconceivable" has found no echo in Washington or Jerusalem. Almost every Iranian agrees that aggression will consolidate support for the regime in Tehran. It will certainly cost many more lives and inflame Muslims everywhere.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 09:57 AM CST [
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Poll: Americans slightly favor plan to censure
A new poll finds that a plurality of Americans favor plans to censure President George W. Bush, while a surprising 42% favor moves to actually impeach the President.
A poll taken March 15, 2006 by American Research Group found that among all adults, 46% favor Senator Russ Feingold's (D-WI) plan to censure President George W. Bush, while just 44% are opposed. Approval of the plan grows slightly when the sample is narrowed to voters, up to 48% in favor of the Senate censuring the sitting president.
Even more shocking is that just 57% of Republicans are opposed to the move, with 14% still undecided and 29% actually in favor. Fully 70% of Democrats want to see Bush censured.
More surprising still: The poll found fully 43% of voters in favor of actually impeaching the President, with just 50% of voters opposed. While only 18% of Republicans surveyed wanted to see Bush impeached, 61% of Democrats and 47% of Independents reported they wanted to see the House move ahead with the Conyers (D-MI) resolution.
The poll, taken March 13-15, had a 3% margin of error.
rawstory.com
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 09:52 AM CST [
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The Israel Lobby
For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.
Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.
Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.
Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.
This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.
Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.
The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.
Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by ‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.
‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.
lrb.co.uk
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 09:49 AM CST [
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Braids of Faith at Baba's Temple: A Hindu-Muslim Idyll
VARANASI, India — They came to banish ghosts, find a cure for eczema, seek succor for a cheating husband or an unruly child. Their feet bare, their heads covered, the believers, both Hindu and Muslim, entered the shrine in droves, stopping only to kiss each stair.
That was the scene March 9 at the tomb of Hazarat Syed Baba Bahadur Shahid, a Muslim, two days after homemade bombs tore through a Hindu temple and a railway station here in Hinduism's holiest city, raising the specter of Hindu-Muslim violence.
But such violence did not come to pass. Indeed, the scene at the Bahadur Shahid shrine served as a reminder of a fact often obscured by the spasms of ruthless sectarian violence that strike India: that after living cheek by jowl here for so many centuries, Hindus and Muslims often find themselves quietly braided together in worship as in daily life.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 09:43 AM CST [
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US-Iraqi assault seeks out rural rebels, but finds few
...Pentagon officials said the air assault, part of Operation Swarmer, was the largest since April 2003 when the 101st Airborne Division launched an air assault from Iskandiriya to Mosul, shortly after the US-led invasion of Iraq.
On Friday, US and Iraqi troops could be seen purposefully moving through fields sown with winter wheat, searching isolated farm buildings US officials say may harbor scores of insurgents, including foreign fighters linked to Al-Qaeda.
While 48 people were detained and six weapons caches found, no insurgents have yet been encountered, US forces said.
But the deputy governor of Salaheddin province, Abdullah Hussein, suggested at least one key insurgent leader, whom he named as Jaish Mohammed, had been apprehended.
"The rebels in the area are a mix of local nationals and foreign fighters," Hussein added. "We have their voices recorded along with their names and pictures."
"There has been no contact with the insurgents," admitted Major John Calahan of the 101st Airborne Division, a unit specializing in helicopter-borne air assaults that spearheaded the sweep.
"The aim of the operation is to dissuade anti-Iraqi forces from taking sanctuary here," he said, adding that 60 helicopters were involved in the operation.
bakutoday.netCrazy crazy crazy AL-SADR FORMS SHADOW GOVERNMENT IN BAGHDAD STRONGHOLD Erbil, 16 March (AKI) - A Kurdish source in Baghdad has told a Kurdish national daily that the Mahdi Army, the militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, " has set up a shadow government in Sadr City in the centre of Baghdad". The source told the Aso daily: "this group was tasked with carrying out the affairs of the city in the place of the Iraqi government and institutions." The source explained that the Mahdi Army, accused of kidnappings and sectarian killings, has transformed the rundown Sadr city into an independent district with its security forces and its own courts which do not only judge local residents but also Shiites from other areas of the capital.
The source alleged that "the health and transport ministers, which both are headed by minsiters from the Sadr faction, have been completely monopolised by followers of this movement" adding that "in Sadr City the police forces, for example the local police, take their orders from Moqtada al-Sadr and not from the interior ministry."
The Cultural Network of Iraq, an internet site which publishes news on the Shiite community, has said that "the peoples courts in Sadr City have condemned to death terrorists who carried out massacres in the city."
The former government of Iyad Allawi and the movement of al-Sadr,. who has headed two lengthly revolts against the US-led coalition forces, clashed over these courts, which have special police forces and prisons. When the authorities in Baghdad tried to close them down and disband the militias they failed.
The power of Sadr's militia and his huge constituency of loyal Shiite voters have made him a growing force in Iraq.
America Switches Sides in Iraq War While President Bush was threatening Iran on Monday, he blamed the Iraqi Shiites and Iran for the insurgency. According to the AFP, Bush said that:
"Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices in Iraq."
I know what you're thinking: President Bush is so stupid that giant mistakes like this should just be taken with a grain of salt. Even if he's lashing out at Iran for intervening in the affairs of the Iraqi Shia, surely he's not blaming the "improvised explosive devices" that are killing American soldiers and Marines in Iraq on the Shia. ... Wrong. That's exactly what he was doing.
"Asked about the linkage to Shiite forces, two US officials who declined to be named pointed to previously reported ties between the government of Iran and radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr."
The first problem is that the next day General Pace said he had no evidence whatsoever to back up the president's false assertions and Secretary Rumsfeld just dissembled. The second is that the last time al-Sadr's Mahdi Army was in violent conflict with the US was back in August of 2004 and the roadside bomb was not their tactic, those have been the tool of the home-grown Sunni insurgency which is led by the ex-Ba'athists and the recently under fire foreign fighter jihadist types.
Though al-Sadr has openly threatened war if America were to bomb Iran, he had been known as the leader of the least Iran-loyal faction among the Iraqi Shia, denouncing the federalism in the new constitution, and insisting on Iraqi nationalism regardless of religion and ethnicity. Recently, his political fortunes have been said to be on the rise, and though that may be in conflict with some genius's plan to spread the war, a leader of the Iraqi insurgency he is not.
The U.S.'s natural allies would be Saddam's Baathists, of course. Did the glorious liberators of 3 years ago ever seriously believe that the Shia would just curl up and hand the country over to Americans, of all people? Of course not. Maybe this Iran scenario was on the drawing board then.Seven days in Iraq An American hostage is murdered. Car bombs kill 58 at a street market. Police discover 29 bodies in a mass grave. And the US launches its biggest assault since the invasion. On the eve of its third anniversary, Audrey Gillan pieces together just another week in a war zone.
Sectarian violence leads to displacement in capital BAGHDAD, 16 March (IRIN) - Dozens of families in the capital, Baghdad, have been displaced from their neighbourhoods due to the sectarian violence that has come in the wake of the Samarra shrine bombing in February and subsequent attacks.
"The explosions at the Samarra mosque and the attack on a market in the Sadr district [of Baghdad] have frightened minority communities in some neighbourhoods," said Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) spokeswoman Ferdous al-Abadi. "They're afraid they could become victims of sectarian violence."
On 22 February, the bombing of a revered Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, about 100 km northwest of the capital, left more than 75 people dead and sparked sectarian reprisal attacks countrywide.
On Thursday, the Ministry of Interior announced that at least 630 people had been killed as a result of sectarian violence since the Samarra bombing.
Many families in Baghdad, lacking essential supplies, have preferred to camp outside their neighbourhoods rather than risk being killed in their homes by armed sectarian groups.
According to the IRCS, more than 300 families from different areas of the capital have been displaced, many of them Sunni residents of majority Shi'ite neighbourhoods.
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 09:30 AM CST [
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Kurds Destroy Shrine in Rage at Leadership
HALABJA, Iraq, March 16 — For nearly two decades, Kurds have gathered peacefully in this mountainous corner of northern Iraq to commemorate one of the blackest days in their history. It was here that Saddam Hussein's government launched a poison gas attack that killed more than 5,000 people on March 16, 1988.
So it came as a shock when hundreds of stone-throwing protesters took to the streets here Thursday on the anniversary, beating back government guards to storm and destroy a museum dedicated to the memory of the Halabja attack.
The violence, pitting furious local residents against a much smaller force of armed security men, was the most serious popular challenge to the political parties that have ruled Iraqi Kurdistan for the past 15 years. Occurring on the day the new Iraqi Parliament met for the first time, the episode was a reminder that the issues facing Iraq go well beyond fighting Sunni Arab insurgents and agreeing on cabinet ministers in Baghdad.
Although Kurdistan remains a relative oasis of stability in a country increasingly threatened by sectarian violence, the protests here — which left the renowned Halabja Monument a charred, smoking ruin — starkly illustrated those challenges even in Iraq's most peaceful region.
nytimes.comKurds take out anger on Halabja monument ...Just two years ago, the then top US administrator in Iraq L Paul Bremer stood at the Halabja Monument with Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, who is now president of Iraq.
Mr Bremer said the town served as proof that the US-led invasion of Iraq was justified, and that the coalition would establish a $1m fund for Halabja. Mr Talabani urged people to "come to Halabja to see how mass destruction arms (were) used."
Now, the people of the town are saying that officials have used the atrocities for their own political ends, but they have seen little in return.
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 09:15 AM CST [
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In the heart of Pipelineistan
TEHRAN - Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki may have captured all the headlines when he announced that Iran would not use the oil weapon in the event it was slapped with sanctions by the UN Security Council. But in the world of Pipelineistan, the nuclear row waged by the US, the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany), the United Nations and Iran is just a detail.
The heart of Pipelineistan itself has been transposed to Tehran for the International Conference on Energy and Security: Asian
Vision, organized by the Institute of International Energy Studies and the Institute for Political and International Studies. There could not be a better place to meet and discuss oil-and-gas geopolitics with an array of scholars and executives from Iran, China, Pakistan, India, Russia, Egypt, Indonesia, Georgia, Venezuela and Germany.
And their overall message is unmistakable: the interdependence of Asia and "Persian Gulf geo-ecopolitics", as an Iranian analyst put it, is now total; the nuclear row should be solved diplomatically in the next few months; and Asian integration has everything to gain from Pipelineistan linking the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, South Asia and China.
It's a gas, gas, gas
The heart of Iran's gas strategy lies in the gigantic South Pars field, responsible in itself for 50% of Iran's and 8% of the world's natural-gas reserves. South Pars is strategically located between Bushehr to the west (where Russia is helping Iran to build its first civilian nuclear power station) and the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas to the east.
atimes.com
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 09:08 AM CST [
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India, Iran, Pakistan's talks end with no deal on pipeline
TEHRAN (AFP) - Talks between India, Iran and Pakistan on building a new gas pipeline to Southeast Asia ended without any agreement and a new round of negotiations scheduled for late April.
"Iran made a proposal on the price (of gas) that we must examine," India's Petroleum Secretary M.S. Srinivasan told reporters in televised remarks on Thursday.
Iran's state news agency confirmed Tehran had proposed a price for gas, but India and Pakistan said they needed time for consultations.
The next round of talks are scheduled for Islamabad on April 30, state television reported.
The sides had hoped to settle on the framework for the project that would see Iranian gas travel by pipeline through Pakistan to India. They have yet to sign a memorandum to set the long- stalled project in motion.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 09:03 AM CST [
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China Pays Dearly for Kazakhstan Oil
ALMATY, Kazakhstan — China, which for more than a century turned its back on Central Asia, has reached out to Kazakhstan, Central Asia's biggest country, for one major reason: oil.
In 2005, the China National Petroleum Corporation bought Petrokazakhstan, a Canadian-run company that was the former Soviet Union's largest independent oil company, for $4.18 billion and spent another $700 million on a pipeline that will take the oil to the Chinese border.
Petrokazakhstan was the largest foreign purchase ever by a Chinese company, in this case a state-owned one. Chinese oil producers were already operating four smaller oil fields in Kazakhstan.
"China is being increasingly dependent on Middle East oil and it wants a supply that would be blockade-proof in case of a conflict over Taiwan," said Thierry Kellner, a specialist in China's relations with Central Asia at the Free University of Brussels.
But the Chinese are paying a high price.
Shortly after the sale, Kazakhstan forced the Chinese company to resell a third of its new acquisition to KazMunaiGaz, the state oil company and industry regulator — and be paid in future revenue. A spokesman for KazMunaiGaz, Mikhail Dorofeyev, has said the deal is expected to be completed by the end of March.
Kazakhstan authorities are also believed to be easing the way for Lukoil of Russia to acquire the other half of Turgai Petroleum, which it now jointly owns with Petrokazakhstan. In addition, a local court recently awarded Lukoil a $200 million judgment against Petrokazakhstan in a dispute over how to share the oil in a common deposit. Both developments are unmistakable signals that Chinese ownership is no guarantee of a smooth ride.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 09:00 AM CST [
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Quenching Mexico City's thirst
With a population of more than 20 million people, and dwindling water supplies, the Mexican capital is a stark example of the severe water supply issues facing many of the world's rapidly developing mega-cities.
The parched ground crunches beneath your feet as you walk through the Texcoco area on the outskirts of the city. The bleached, cracked terrain stretches out in all directions. Nothing can grow here.
It is very difficult to imagine that, just 70 years ago, this area was filled with water. This was one of five lakes that used to enrich the Mexico City valley.
Today, in a prime example of what more than a century of water mismanagement can do, they have all but disappeared.
Population growth, the over-exploitation of subterranean aquifers, and a failure to recycle limited water supplies have turned a once-fertile region into a barren desert.
Many of Mexico City's inhabitants get by on just one hour of running water per week.
And, most people consider the city's tap water to be undrinkable - though water officials say it is now safe to drink - so Mexico has become the second-highest consumer of bottled drinking water in the world.
bbc.co.ukThe world's water hotspots
rootsie on 03.18.06 @ 08:55 AM CST [
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Friday, March 17th
Evo Morales: Bolivia, a Homeland for All
Today our government celebrates its first month, the first 30 days of the democratic and cultural revolution that we are heading, with the overwhelming popular mandate of December 18, 2005, when Bolivians from the countryside and cities decided to turn the page on a history full of injustice and discrimination.
We have named a cabinet that is representative of the social movements, business owners, the middle classes, indigenous peoples, intellectuals and women. We are dealing with a cabinet never before seen in Bolivian history that tries to fully express a multicultural, dignified, sovereign Bolivia. I want to say, with a lot of pride, that this is the first cabinet formed as a result of an autonomous decision, without pressure from international bodies.
We have named a military high command that is a break with the past of the subordination of our armed forces to external interests. Instead, it privileges professionalism, discipline and the respect of our sovereignty as a country. We need to recuperate our sovereignty in the heart of the state, in the security bodies, in the military institutions and in the policing bodies.
For some it has been novel that this president begins work at 5am — like the majority of Bolivian workers and campesinos [peasants] — and that he has renounced 57% of his wage. However this measure has been a marker defining the spirit of our government: I am president, not to win more money, but to work more for the homeland. With this measure [which reduced the wages of other elected officials, who cannot be paid more than the president] the executive power has saved 13.9 million bolivianos [US$1.7 million], which will be our contribution towards obtaining 3500 new items in the education area, a sector that received for the first time in years a 7% increase in salaries, without marches, blockades nor other acts of pressure.
axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 08:46 AM CST [
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Widening Minority Wealth Gap
Recently released data from the Federal Reserve provide a stark reminder of the extent of racial and ethnic economic gaps in our economy, particularly regarding wealth.
The Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances allows us to compare both income and net worth (assets minus debts) between white (non-Hispanic) and non-white families (the sample sizes are too small to break non-whites into component groups). The data in the report reveal that in 2004, minority incomes were about 56% that of whites. However, a far larger gap exists when we compare net worth: minorities' net worth was about 27% of whites, about half the size of the income ratio .
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 08:43 AM CST [
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Ecuador tries to control growing Indian protest
QUITO, Ecuador, March 15 (Reuters) - Ecuador struggled to contain growing protests by Indians demanding the government abandon U.S. free-trade talks and accused protest leaders of trying to oust President Alfredo Palacio on Wednesday.
Thousands of Indians have blocked roads with burning tires and rubble in nine central provinces since Monday to demand the government end free-trade talks with the United States. The protests have crimped the Andean nation's economy.
"Their demands are not possible to address, so it appears that what they want is to destabilize democracy," presidential spokesman Enrique Proano told reporters.
alertnet.orgIndigenous revolution in Ecuador? It appears that Ecuadorians are about to explode again against their government’s renewed involvement in the U.S.-spawned, “Free Trade Agreement”. All of the central mountain chain running through Ecuador and all Ecuadorian Amazonia are paralyzed by the mobilizations of indigenous people against the Free Trade Agreement. The capital city of Quito has been brought to a standstill. The Interior Minister has already resigned in the face of social protest, destabilization and repression currently ruling throughout the country.
President Palacio wants to sign the Free Trade Agreement with the US instead of calling for a Constituent Assembly as he promised a year ago. The indigenous peoples have paralyzed 11 or 22 provinces and are marching on Quito. Teachers and public employees are on strike. They all want Occidental Petroleum (OXY) out of the country. The President of the Congress indicated that the government could fall, stating that the country is approaching a “true convulsion”. The powerful Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, CONAIE is heading this movement, refusing to compromise on the government’s negotiations with the United States. President Alfredo Palacio has threatened to meet the protests with “maximum authority”
Rebelión reports that new provinces and students added their weight to the indigenous protests with blockades of the highways. These same tactics were used to overthrow the government of Bolivia last summer, leading to the election of Evo Morales as the first indigenous president of that Latin American nation. Wilfrido Lucero, President of the Congress stated that the country is facing a 'true convulsion'. In the Amazon province of Pastaza, television news shows strong clashes between soldiers and demonstrators when they tried to block petroleum exploitation of the foreign company Agip Oil and occupy it by the force. The protest in Pastaza is primarily motivated by the demand for the government to deliver economic resources to the people.
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 08:40 AM CST [
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Feds Schedule $385 Million Concentration Camp To Be Built By Halliburton Subsidiary
...Then your eye falls on a barely-noticed article in a local Southern California newspaper. You call the reporter, and he guides you to his reputable source. And the stomach-tickling fears start all over again, especially when--coincidentally--a Germanophile friend researching in the archives digs up the following from a Munich newspaper dated 1933.
First, the American news item:
The federal government has awarded a $385 million contract for the construction of 'temporary detention facilities' inside the United States as part of the Immigration Service's Detention and Removal Program. The contract was given to Kellogg, Root & Brown, a subsidiary of Halliburton. The camps would be used in the event of an "emergency", said Jamie Zuieback, an Immigration service official.
The following article appeared in a Munich newspaper in 1933 to mark the "grand opening" of Dachau, Germany's first concentration camp. This month marks the 73d anniversary:
Münchner Neueste Nachrichten,
Tuesday, March 21, 1933
A Concentration Camp for Political Prisoners in the Dachau Area
In a statement to the press, Himmler, Munich's Chief of Police announced:
On Wednesday the first concentration camp will be opened near Dachau. It has a capacity of 5000 people. Here, all communist and-so far as is necessary- Reichsbanner and Marxist officials, who endanger the security of the state, will be assembled. In the long run, if government administration is not to be very burdened, it is not possible to allow individual communist officials to remain in court custody. On the other hand, it is also not possible to allow these officials their freedom again. Each time we have attempted this, the result was that they again tried to agitate and organize. We have taken these measures without concern for each pedantic objection encountered, in the conviction that we act to calm the concerns of the nation's people, and in accordance with their aims.
Himmler gave assurance that in each individual case, preventive custody will not be maintained longer than necessary. It is obvious, however, that the astonishingly large quantity of material evidence seized will take a long time to be examined. This police will only be delayed, if they are continually asked when this or that person in preventive custody will be released. The incorrectness of rumors frequently spread regarding the treatment of prisoners is shown by the fact that for those prisoners who requested it, for example, Dr. Gerlich and Frhr. v. Aretin, counseling by priests is supported and approved without hesitation.
counterpunch.orgA Cell for Kissinger and Haig ...Of course, if one listens to Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger--two architects of the last major US foreign disaster in Vietnam--they might think that the only way to get out of Iraq is by blowing the country and its inhabitants to hell. Indeed, Mr. Haig, who was a general, Secretary of State under Reagan, and an advisor to Richard Nixon (even serving as his Chief of Staff during the final months of Nixon's presidency), told an audience of a conference on the Vietnam War at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, ``Every asset of the nation must be applied to the conflict to bring about a quick and successful outcome, or don't do it." This is from a man, who helped engineer (among other things) the Christmas bombings of 1972, the mining of Haiphong harbor and the bombing of Hanoi and the dikes of northern Vietnam, and the invasion of Cambodia. What does he suggest the US do in Iraq? Break out some tactical nuclear weapons? The mindset that Haig represents seriously believes that the US military was restrained in Vietnam and that a similar situation exists in Iraq. This is despite the fact that more ordnance has been dropped on those two countries than on any other country in history.
His fellow panel member, Henry Kissinger, would probably like that idea. After all, it was Mr. Kissinger who considered the use of nuclear weapons against northern Vietnam in 1969, but was convinced such an idea might be a bad move after hundreds of thousands of US residents filled the streets of DC and several other cities on November 15, 1969 in a national mobilization to end the war in Vietnam.
Both of these men should be in adjoining cells in the Hague. Instead, they are guests of honor at the JFK Library. It's not that they were besmirching Kennedy's legacy by being there. Indeed, Mr. Kissinger said he admired the Kennedys--a statement that should not surprise any serious student of US history given Kissinger's tenure as a consultant on security matters to various U.S. agencies from 1955 to 1968. Indeed, Kissinger's treatise on nuclear weapons and foreign policy was a major influence on the strategic policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Given that treatise's emphasis on the use of tactical nuclear weapons together with conventional forces and the current discussion of just such a policy, one could say that Kissinger's influence continues to steer US war policy.
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 08:28 AM CST [
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U.S. Seeks Reversal of Moussaoui Ruling
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - Fighting for a death penalty in a 9/11 case, prosecutors are beseeching a federal judge to reconsider her decision to exclude half the government's case against confessed al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.
They acknowledge their only hope of obtaining the death penalty for the 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent is to persuade U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema she punished the government too harshly for tampering with trial witnesses and lying to defense attorneys.
Brinkema did not immediately respond to the motion for reconsideration that prosecutors filed Wednesday evening. But she had indicated earlier she had time available Thursday to hear such a motion if it were filed.
The jury has been sent home until Monday to give prosecutors time for their next step.
Brinkema barred prosecutors from submitting any witnesses or exhibits about aviation security. Prosecutors responded in their motion that this evidence ``goes to the very core of our theory of the case.''
At the very least, the prosecutors argued, they should be allowed to present a newly designated aviation security witness who had no contact with Carla J. Martin, the Transportation Security Administration lawyer responsible for the government's misconduct. This would ``allow us to present our complete theory of the case, albeit in imperfect form.''
``The public has a strong interest in seeing and hearing it (aviation security evidence), and the court should not eliminate it from the case, particularly not ... where other remedies are available,'' they wrote Brinkema.
Brinkema ruled Tuesday that Martin violated federal rules when she sent trial transcripts to seven aviation witnesses, coached them on how to deflect defense attacks and lied to defense lawyers to prevent them from interviewing witnesses they wanted to call. The judge said Martin's actions and other government missteps had left the aviation evidence ``irremediably contaminated.''
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 08:24 AM CST [
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US backs first-strike attack plan
The US will not shy away from attacking regimes it considers hostile, or groups it believes have nuclear or chemical weapons, the White House has confirmed.
In the first restatement of national security strategy since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US singles out Iran as the greatest single current danger.
The new policy backs the policy of pre-emptive war first issued in 2002, and criticised since the Iraq war.
But it stresses that the US aims to spread democracy through diplomacy.
The new strategy also highlights a string of other global issues of concern to the US, such as the spread of Aids, the threat of pandemic flu and the prospect of natural and environmental disasters.
National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley is due to make a speech launching the new strategy on Thursday.
Other key points include:
-Stressing US preference for "transformational diplomacy" and coalition building, but not necessarily within United Nations or Nato frameworks
-Criticising the lack of democratic freedoms in Russia and China
-Branding Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez a "demagogue" aiming to destabilise the region
-Urging Palestinian radical group Hamas to recognise Israel, renounce violence and disarm.
The substance of the revised strategy focuses on the challenges facing the cUS in the wake of the Iraq war.
In a nod to previous high-level foreign policy statements, which singled out individual countries as potential enemies of the US, the new document highlights seven "despotic" states.
They are: North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Belarus, Burma and Zimbabwe.
The policy of the US, according to the opening words of the 49-page document, is "to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world".
bbc.co.uk
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 08:17 AM CST [
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Rice steps up rhetoric against ‘troubled state’ Iran
Condoleezza Rice on Thursday raised the diplomatic temperature over the nuclear stand-off with Iran, accusing the country of lying about its activities and again calling it a “central banker to terrorism”.
The US secretary of state was speaking in Sydney at the start of a three-day official visit to Australia, which will include talks with Canberra and Japan over the vexed Iranian issue.
Ms Rice described Iran as a “troubled state” where an “unelected few repress the desires of its population”.
ft.comah sweet irony...
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 08:10 AM CST [
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Afghan Taliban chief vows "unimaginable" violence
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar vowed a ferocious offensive against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, saying on Thursday they would soon face unimaginable violence.
An insurgency that has killed more than 1,500 people since the start of last year has intensified in recent months with a wave of suicide bombings, including at least 12 this year.
Ten U.S. troops have been killed in combat this year and U.S. commanders have said they expect violence to increase in coming months as the weather warms, snow on mountain passes melts, and Afghanistan's traditional fighting season begins.
"With the arrival of the warm weather, we will make the ground so hot for the invaders it will be unimaginable for them," Omar said in his message, read by Taliban spokesman Mohammad Hanif over the telephone from an undisclosed location.
The fugitive Taliban leader, who carries a $10 million reward, also said a stream of young Afghans were volunteering for suicide missions, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency said.
reuters.com
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 08:07 AM CST [
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Iraq's Turn for the Worse Brings U.S. and Baathists Closer
...The ongoing dialogue between the U.S. and the Sunni insurgency is based on a shared wariness about the influence of Iran and its supporters in Iraq. U.S. officials are now saying bluntly that it's time to bring back the Baath Party, excluding only those that are guilty of specific crimes. That reflects a growing acceptance among U.S. officials that the military and bureaucratic know-how in the Sunni community is badly needed, even to help run the security forces that the U.S. is standing up.
Senior Baathist insurgent commanders are responding positively to the U.S. outreach on the political and military level. One senior commander I spoke to praised the U.S. for the release of some key Baathist officers who had been imprisoned, and later, when I asked a senior U.S. intelligence officer about the releases, he said the men had been freed as part of a calculated effort to demonstrate good faith in dealing with the insurgents. Of course, both sides share the objective of avoiding a civil war.
time.comyeah of courseU.S. launches largest air assault since invasion of Iraq BAGHDAD, Iraq — In a well-publicized show of force, U.S. and Iraqi forces swept into the countryside north of the capital in 50 helicopters today looking for insurgents in what the American military called its "largest air assault" in nearly three years.
The military said the assault — Operation Swarmer — detained 41 people, found stolen uniforms and captured weapons including explosives used in making roadside bombs. It said the operation would continue over several days.
There was no bombing or firing from the air in the offensive northeast of Samarra, a town 60 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. All 50 aircraft were helicopters — Black Hawks, Apaches and Chinooks — used to ferry in and provide cover for the 1,450 Iraqi and U.S. troops.
Residents in the area reported a heavy U.S. and Iraqi troop presence and said large explosions could be heard in the distance.
Operation Swarmer came as the Bush administration was attempting to show critics at home and abroad that it is dealing effectively with Iraq's insurgency and increasingly sectarian violence.
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 08:04 AM CST [
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U.S. Votes Against U.N. Human Rights Council
UNITED NATIONS -- The U.S. stood nearly alone today as it voted against the creation of a new U.N. Human Rights Council, saying the reform did not go far enough in keeping abusers off the panel.
However, U.S. officials did not carry through on a threat to block the new body's funding, and pledged to work with other nations to make the council "as strong as it can be."
Jan Eliasson, president of the General Assembly called the vote "a historic moment for human rights" as 170 member-states backed the new council. Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau joined the U.S. in voting against, while Iran, Venezuela and Belarus abstained.
After the applause faded in the General Assembly hall, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said that the assembled diplomats had missed an historic opportunity to help those most in need.
latimes.com
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 07:56 AM CST [
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Warmer Seas Creating Stronger Hurricanes, Study Confirms
...In the 1970s, the average number of intense Category 4 and 5 hurricanes occurring globally was about 10 per year. Since 1990, that number has nearly doubled, averaging about 18 a year.
Category 4 hurricanes have sustained winds from 131 to 155 mph. Category 5 systems, such as Hurricane Katrina at its peak, feature winds of 156 mph or more. Wilma last year set a record as the most intense hurricane on record with winds of 175 mph.
While some scientists believe this trend is just part of natural ocean and atmospheric cycles, others argue that rising sea surface temperatures as a side effect of global warming is the primary culprit.
According to this scenario, warming temperatures heat up the surface of the oceans, increasing evaporation and putting more water vapor into the atmosphere. This in turn provides added fuel for storms as they travel over open oceans.
livescience.com
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 07:53 AM CST [
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Kauai has six times more rain than usual for all of March
Four back-to-back storms over the last three weeks have dumped more rain on parts of the islands than they normally would have seen in months, and drenched Kauai with up to six times more rain than normal for all of March, the National Weather Service said yesterday.
...Over the last three weeks, Mount Waialeale has seen more than 106 inches, and Lihue Airport has gotten 28.9 inches.
"Kauai has taken the brunt of the most widespread, excessive rainfall," the weather service said. "Even the normally drier leeward sides have been much wetter than normal."
On Oahu, Poamoho saw the biggest rainfall total over the three-week period, with 63 inches. Wilson Tunnel got 39.1 inches -- a far second, but a more than six-fold increase from 2005. Punaluu, Luluku and the Waihee Pump rounded out the top five rainfall totals for Oahu.
Waiakea Uka and Glenwood topped the totals for the Big Island, getting 43.6 inches and 42.9 inches, respectively -- up to four times higher than normal. Mountain View saw 37.8 inches, compared with 4 inches last year.
starbulletin.com
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 07:49 AM CST [
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Canadian baby boomers prefer television over sex: poll
A new study suggests Canadian baby boomers are more likely to fall asleep watching television than after having sex with their partner at night.
The Ipsos-Reid survey published Thursday found Canadians between 40 and 64 years old dedicate an average of just 15 minutes a day to sex and romance.
They said they were too stressed or too tired or simply did not have enough time for a romp in bed.
But, the protagonists of the 1960s sexual revolution said they spent about four or five hours per day watching television or surfing the Internet, more than 30 hours per week in total.
Almost half found sex intimate and tender, maybe a bit predictable now, but 80 percent agreed it made them feel "loved and appreciated" and said it deepened intimacy in their relationship.
A majority also said sex is no less enjoyable now than in their twenties. Only 28 percent of those surveyed said their sex life was not as "wild and hot" or less fun.
breitbart.com
rootsie on 03.17.06 @ 07:43 AM CST [
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Thursday, March 16th
AFRICA'S NEW OCEAN
Normally new rivers, seas and mountains are born in slow motion. The Afar Triangle near the Horn of Africa is another story. A new ocean is forming there with staggering speed -- at least by geological standards. Africa will eventually lose its horn.
Geologist Dereje Ayalew and his colleagues from Addis Ababa University were amazed -- and frightened. They had only just stepped out of their helicopter onto the desert plains of central Ethiopia when the ground began to shake under their feet. The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter. And then it happened: the Earth split open. Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up. After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history. For the first time ever, human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean.
PHOTO GALLERY: HIGH-SPEED GEOLOGY IN AFRICA
service.spiegel.de
rootsie on 03.16.06 @ 08:19 AM CST [
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Howard Zinn 1991: Machiavellian Realism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Means and Ends
Interests: The Prince and the Citizen
About 500 years ago modern political thinking began. Its enticing surface was the idea of "realism." Its ruthless center was the idea that with a worthwhile end one could justify any means. Its spokesman was Nicolo Machiavelli.
In the year 1498 Machiavelli became adviser on foreign and military affairs to the government of Florence, one of the great Italian cities of that time. After fourteen years of service, a change of government led to his dismissal, and he spent the rest of his life in exile in the countryside outside of Florence. During that time he wrote, among other things, a little book called The Prince, which became the world's most famous hand book of political wisdom for governments and their advisers.
Four weeks before Machiavelli took office, something happened in Florence that made a profound impression on him. It was a public hanging. The victim was a monk named Savonarola, who preached that people could be guided by their "natural reason." This threatened to diminish the importance of the Church fathers, who then showed their importance by having Savonarola arrested. His hands were bound behind his back and he was taken through the streets in the night, the crowds swinging lanterns near his face, peering for the signs of his dangerousness.
Savonarola was interrogated and tortured for ten days. They wanted to extract a confession, but he was stubborn. The Pope, who kept in touch with the torturers, complained that they were not getting results quickly enough. Finally the right words came, and Savonarola was sentenced to death. As his body swung in the air, boys from the neighbor hood stoned it. The corpse was set afire, and when the fire had done its work, the ashes were strewn in the river Arno.
In The Prince, Machiavelli refers to Savonarola and says, "Thus it comes about that all armed prophets have conquered and unarmed ones failed."
Political ideas are centered on the issue of ends (What kind of society do we want?) and means (How will we get it?). In that one sentence about unarmed prophets Machiavelli settled for modern governments the question of ends: conquest. And the question of means: force.
Machiavelli refused to be deflected by utopian dreams or romantic hopes and by questions of right and wrong or good and bad. He is the father of modern political realism, or what has been called realpolilik. "It appears to me more proper to go to the truth of the matter than to its imagination...for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation."
It is one of the most seductive ideas of our time.
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 03.16.06 @ 08:12 AM CST [
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American security contractor briefly held in Iraq
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi police detained an American private security contractor working at a U.S. military base in northern Iraq for several hours on Tuesday, a U.S. military spokesman said.
The spokesman said the man was arrested at a checkpoint in the northern town of Tikrit. He denied initial reports that explosives were found in the car, but said two AK-47 assault rifles were in the vehicle.
"He was picked up by Iraqi police after being detained at a checkpoint in Tikrit," the spokesman said, adding police later released him. "We are looking at why he left the base unescorted."
Abdullah Jebara, deputy governor of Salahaddin province, earlier told Reuters the man was arrested in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit on Monday and that U.S. forces removed him from the provincial government building on Tuesday.
The man was stopped by police for violating a daytime curfew in Tikrit, a security source said. American security personnel rarely travel alone.
A spokesman for the major crimes unit in Tikrit said he was first brought to their headquarters but they refused to take him into custody, adding police were told to take the man to the provincial council building.
yahoo.comA pretty euphemism, calling a paid mercenary a 'security contractor.'Mass grave find fuels sectarian tension in Iraq Iraq moved closer to sectarian civil war as police found the bodies of 87 men killed in Baghdad, many of them showing signs of torture. The dead appear to be Sunni Muslims killed in retaliation for the bombs that slaughtered 58 people and wounded 200 when they exploded in crowded markets in the strongly Shia area of Sadr City.
Some 29 dead men were found yesterday buried in a pit in a playing field. "Some children were playing soccer and they smelt something strong and the police were notified," said a police spokesman. Members of a Shia militia dug in a pit to unearth the bodies. They found that the men had been gagged and bound and were in their underwear. Many of them had been tortured before being shot dead.
The Interior Ministry spokesman, Lt-Col Falah al-Mohammedawi, said that the men appeared to have been killed in Kamaliyah, a mostly Shia district in east Baghdad, about three days ago. Local residents offered sheets to cover the bodies as they were dragged from the earth.
A photographer for the Associated Press agency who took pictures of the grave was warned not to publish them. The location of the grave suggests that the dead men were Sunni.
The fear now in Baghdad is that the bombs detonated by Sunni insurgents in Shia neighbourhoods are leading to immediate retaliation against Sunnis.
Until a bomb attack destroyed the holy Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, Shias had been restrained in their reaction to repeated attacks on them since 2003. They were also cautioned against being provoked into seeking vengeance by influential Shia clerics such as the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Since the Samarra bomb the Shia willingness to heed his calls for patience is much reduced.
In another atrocity, 15 bodies of men who had been strangled were found in an abandoned minibus parked between two Sunni districts in west Baghdad. In Sadr City, a further four men were shot in the head and their bodies hanged from electricity pylons. Elsewhere in Baghdad another 40 bodies, both Shia and Sunni, were found said Lt-Col Mohammedawi.
..."May God damn you," said Mr Sadr of Mr Rumsfeld. "You said in the past that civil war would break out if you had to withdraw, and now you say that in face of civil war you won't interfere."
Humanitarian situation remains critical in Kirkuk as ethnic tensions rise BAGHDAD, 14 March (IRIN) - The oil-rich city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq has been the scene of ongoing displacement and rising ethnic tensions in the past six months, according to local officials.
"The humanitarian situation in the city is very bad and thousands of innocent people are still displaced," said Nuri al-Salihi, a spokesman for the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS). "But nothing has been done to help them because of a recent increase in sectarian violence that has delayed the work of many local NGOs."
According to IRCS officials in Kirkuk, located some 255 km north of Baghdad, little aid has come from the main IRCS branch in the capital in the past eight months. This, they say, is due to major displacements in the western Anbar governorate and recent flooding there that forced thousands of residents to flee their homes.
Ahmed Mashhdanny, a senior Kirkuk governorate official, said that more than 200,000 Kirkuk residents have been displaced since 2003 and more than 300 have been killed in ethnic fighting over land. "The return of the Kurds to the city left thousands of Arabs displaced in deteriorating conditions and has increased ethnic aggression between the two groups," he said.
Under an "Arabisation" programme initiated under the former regime of Saddam Hussein, tens of thousands of Kurds and other non-Arabs were driven out of the city, to be replaced with pro-government Arabs from the impoverished south. After Hussein's ouster by coalition forces in April 2003, however, Kurds began returning to the area to reclaim their property.
This, in turn, led to the displacement of thousands of Arabs, Mashhdanny explained. "Thousands of displaced people from different ethnic groups – mainly Arabs – can now be seen in improvised camps on the outskirts of Kirkuk, as well as in abandoned government buildings and schools," he said. "Kurds, Arabs and Turcomans are suffering because measures haven't been taken to secure their rights."
Iraqis say US raid on home killed 11 family members TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a U.S. raid on Wednesday, police and witnesses said. The U.S. military said two women and a child died during the bid to seize an al Qaeda militant from a house.
Television pictures showed 11 bodies in the Tikrit morgue -- five children, two men and four women. A freelance photographer later saw the bodies being buried in Ishaqi, the town 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad where the raid took place.
The U.S. military said in a statement its troops had attacked a house in Ishaqi early on Wednesday to capture a "foreign fighter facilitator for the al Qaeda in Iraq network".
"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," U.S. spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. "Coalition Forces returned fire utilising both air and ground assets.
"There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed."
Keefe said the al Qaeda suspect had been captured and was being questioned.
US 'may want to keep Iraq bases' he United States may want to keep a long-term military presence in Iraq to bolster moderates against extremists in the region and protect oil supplies, the army general overseeing US operations in Iraq has said.
While the Bush administration has downplayed prospects for permanent US bases in Iraq, General John Abizaid told a House of Representatives subcommittee on Tuesday he could not rule that out.
Abizaid said that policy would be worked out with a unified, national Iraqi government if and when that is established, "and it would be premature for me to predict".
Many Democrats have pressed President George Bush to firmly state that the United States does not intend to seek permanent military bases in Iraq, a step they said would help stem the violence there.
Abizaid also told the Appropriations subcommittee on military quality of life that while an Iraqi civil war was possible, "I think it's a long way from where we are now to civil war".
Electricity Hits Three-Year Low in Iraq BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Electricity output has dipped to its lowest point in three years in Iraq, where the desert sun is rising toward another broiling summer and U.S. engineers are winding down their rebuilding of the crippled power grid.
The Iraqis, in fact, may have to turn to neighboring Iran to help bail them out of their energy crisis - if not this summer, then in years to come.
The overstressed network is producing less than half the electricity needed to meet Iraq's exploding demand. American experts are working hard to shore up the system's weaknesses as 100-degree-plus temperatures approach beginning as early as May, driving up usage of air conditioning, electric fans and refrigeration.
If the summer is unusually hot, however, ``all bets are off,'' said Lt. Col. Otto Busher, an engineer with the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division.
rootsie on 03.16.06 @ 08:02 AM CST [
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Russia warns US on Caspian buildup
Moscow, March 14 - Russia cautioned the United States on Tuesday against raising its military presence in the strategic Caspian sea region bordering Iran, saying buildup of forces from "outside" would destabilize the region, Itar-Tass news agency said.
Russia "is opposed to the presence of third-party military forces on the Caspian," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at the start of a meeting among representatives of the five countries that border the sea: Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
His comments were seen as directed at the United States, which has stationed military advisors in Azerbaijan and is helping that country upgrade its naval forces and two powerful radar stations.
Itar-Tass also quoted Lavrov however as saying that Russia was not calling for withdrawal of all military forces from the Caspian sea region, which is known to hold vast oil and gas resources.
iribnews.ir
rootsie on 03.16.06 @ 07:44 AM CST [
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Israel starts work on new settlement
The Israeli government has begun to develop facilities for what eventually could be the largest settlement project in the West Bank since 1967.
On Monday, Israeli officials confirmed that Israel was building a police headquarters and "other facilities" in what it calls the E-1 area, extending from East Jerusalem to the settlement of Maali Adomim, the largest in the West Bank.
In addition to 3550 settler units, the planned development would include a road network, six hotels and a park.
Non-Jews would not be allowed to live or buy land in the settlement.
aljazeera.net
rootsie on 03.16.06 @ 07:40 AM CST [
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Abbas condemns Israel raid as unforgivable crime
JERICHO, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday condemned Israel's raid on a West Bank prison and seizure of a militant leader as a crime that would not be forgiven.
Across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Palestinians went on strike over an Israeli operation that has boosted interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ahead of March 28 general elections.
Israeli security forces were on high alert after Ahmed Saadat's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Islamist militant group Hamas promised retaliation.
Israeli forces used tanks and bulldozers to tear apart the Jericho jail on Tuesday to grab Saadat, accused by Israel of overseeing the 2001 assassination of Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi claimed by the PFLP.
Speaking at the destroyed jail, Abbas accused British and U.S. monitors supervising the incarceration of Saadat and five other militants who were detained of complicity with Israel.
"What happened is an ugly crime which cannot be forgiven and a humiliation for the Palestinian people and a violation of all the agreements. Their arrest by Israel is illegal," Abbas said.
The United States and Britain, citing security concerns, withdrew the monitors on Tuesday and Israeli forces moved in minutes later. Both Washington and London denied cooperating with Israel.
reuters.comBlair defends withdrawal of monitors from Jericho jail Tony Blair today laid the blame squarely at the door of the Palestinian Authority for yesterday's outbreak of violence across the Gaza Strip and the withdrawal of British monitors from a prison in Jericho.
The prime minister told the Commons that he had personally warned the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, that the British personnel would be withdrawn unless security agreements were met.
During prime minister's questions, Mr Blair said there could be no long-term peace in the region until the Palestinian authorities were able to maintain law, and the incoming Hamas government recognised Israel's existence and put an end to violence.
"If people want progress towards a two state solution, which we have championed in this country - an independent viable Palestinian state living side by side with Israel - then the security within the Palestinian area is of prime concern," Mr Blair said. "We have done everything we can to support them. But we need some help back."
Just answer the question, Mr. Blair.U.S. may veto bid for UN condemnation of jail siege The threat of a U.S. veto hovers over planned closed-door deliberations Wednesday over Qatar's bid for a UN Security Council to condemn Israel's Jericho jail siege and its capture of the killers of former cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi.
A draft statement by Qatari Ambassador Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, representing Arab nations, would have condemned "Israel's violent incursion" in besieging the Jericho jail, and would have demanded that Israel return the prisoners it seized "and to return the situation to that which existed prior to the Israeli military attack."
Security forces went on high alert Tuesday fearing Palestinian reprisal attacks after Israel Defense Forces troops laid siege to the Jericho prison and arrested six wanted inmates.
A tense, gunfire-punctuated nine-hour IDF siege of a Jericho prison complex ended after dark on Tuesday with the abrupt surrender of Ahmed Sa'adat and five other Palestinian militants.
Sa'adat, leader of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine, is believed to have ordered the assassination of cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi in a Jerusalem hotel in 2001.
One of the other militants was Fuad Shobaki, the alleged mastermind of an illegal mass weapons shipment to the Palestinian Authority in 2002.
The six arrested wanted militants are to be held in prison in Israel, officials said.
The PFLP threatened
that "Israel will pay a heavy price for the operation."
rootsie on 03.16.06 @ 07:36 AM CST [
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Fox Announces Major Mexico Oil Find
VERACRUZ, Mexico - President Vicente Fox climbed aboard a drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday to formally announce a new deep-water oil discovery he said could eventually yield 10 billion barrels of crude oil.
An exploratory well dubbed Noxal 1 was drilled at a depth of 3,070 feet below the water, and is seeking a depth of 13,125 feet.
"With Noxal we will begin a new era of oil exploration in our country," Fox said aboard the "Ocean Worker 6 Britania" platform.
Government estimates say the find could exceed reserves at the giant offshore field Cantarell, Mexico's largest oil field, which has seen its production decline but is still expected to yield 1.9 million barrels a day this year.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 03.16.06 @ 07:26 AM CST [
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Chalmers Johnson: Coming to Terms with China
...The major question for the twenty-first century is whether this fateful inability to adjust to changes in the global power-structure can be overcome. Thus far the signs are negative. Can the United States and Japan, today's versions of rich, established powers, adjust to the reemergence of China -- the world's oldest, continuously extant civilization -- this time as a modern superpower? Or is China's ascendancy to be marked by yet another world war, when the pretensions of European civilization in its U.S. and Japanese projections are finally put to rest? That is what is at stake.
tomdispatch.com
rootsie on 03.16.06 @ 07:22 AM CST [
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Russian Communist leader sees U.S. behind bird flu outbreak
MOSCOW. March 14 (Interfax) - Russian Communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov has blamed the United States for the spread of avian influenza, or bird flu, in a number of European countries, including Russia.
"The forms of warfare are changing. It's strange that not a single duck has yet died in America - they are all dying in Russia and European countries. This makes one seriously wonder why," Zyuganov said at a press conference at the Interfax main office on Tuesday.
Zyuganov said that he has good knowledge of war gases as he dealt with them during his army service.
"I tested all kinds of war gases at a range myself," he said.
Asked to be more precise as to whether he believes the bird flu outbreak could be a deliberate attack by the U.S., Zyuganov answered positively.
"I not only suggest this, I know very well how this can be arranged. There is nothing strange here," he said.
interfax.ru
rootsie on 03.16.06 @ 07:18 AM CST [
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Dominican Rep. Seeks $80M for U.S. Dumping
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Dominican Republic is looking to Washington for help recovering at least $80 million in damages from a U.S. utility it accuses of dumping thousands of tons of coal ash on the country's beaches, sickening residents and harming the tourism industry.
The Dominican government has hired a Washington lawyer to attempt to open settlement talks with the company, AES Corp., or failing that, to file a lawsuit in U.S. courts against AES before a two-year statute of limitations expires late next week.
The government says 82,000 tons of coal ash were shipped from an AES plant in Guayama, Puerto Rico, and left on beaches in Manzanillo and the Samana Bay port town of Arroyo Barril between October 2003 and March 2004 without proper government permits.
``It's had a devastating impact upon the economy of these two communities. Their tourist traffic is off 70 percent in Samana and down sharply in Manzanillo as well,'' said Bart Fisher, the Washington attorney hired by the Dominican government. ``It's had a devastating impact on the health of the people living near the toxic dumps in terms of respiratory problems and asthma, and some have died in fact.''
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.16.06 @ 07:14 AM CST [
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Feingold Accuses Democrats of 'Cowering'
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold accused fellow Democrats on Tuesday of cowering rather than joining him on trying to censure President Bush over domestic spying.
''Democrats run and hide'' when the administration invokes the war on terrorism, Feingold told reporters.
Feingold introduced censure legislation Monday in the Senate but not a single Democrat has embraced it. Several have said they want to see the results of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation before supporting any punitive legislation.
Republicans dismissed the proposal Tuesday as being more about Feingold's 2008 presidential aspirations than Bush's actions. On and off the Senate floor, they have dared Democrats to vote for the resolution.
''I'm amazed at Democrats ... cowering with this president's numbers so low,'' Feingold said.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 03.16.06 @ 07:10 AM CST [
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Tuesday, March 14th
"You Have Left Home to Come Home": Memories of Ali Farka Touré
by Corey Harris
I first heard Ali Farka Touré perform at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1994. At that time many North American audiences were beginning to learn about the man and his music, often through Ry Cooder, one of his early American collaborators. I remember crowds flocking to hear their set, the fans talking about some African guy who plays with Ry Cooder. Seeing the two perform onstage together, it was immediately obvious who was the teacher and who was the student. Cooder, thrilled to play with Ali Farka, backed him up dutifully, supporting each song with carefully placed licks and riffs tossed from his slide guitar like small bombs. In his long boubou, Ali Farka carried himself like the royalty that he was, striking to behold yet immensely approachable. With his easy smile and humble, gracious manner, he was at home in the world.
After his performance, he attended a question and answer session. American audiences had heard of this African bluesman and repeatedly asked him questions about his encounters with blues music and how he began to play. His responses often surprised, like when he answered that blues meant nothing to him, since it is only a color. Even though he was continually typecast as the Malian bluesman who learned guitar listening to John Lee Hooker, this was far from the truth. In fact, Ali Farka's music sounded like blues because it came way before the blues, spirituals, slavery, and the European conquest of the Americas. He embodied the deep roots of centuries of African music; many couldn't see the tree for the leaves, fixated as they were on the record company's marketing of him as the African John Lee Hooker. When asked about his main profession, he would simply say that he was a farmer. To him, music seemed to be something one did anyway, in addition to living one's life and going to work. Many recognized him as a great musician, but it was not his music that made him great, but rather his commitment to others, his town, his country, and his roots which made him great. Even his middle name, Farka, evokes the donkey that carries everyone's burdens on his back. Ali was always ready to help his fellow man, or to make a stranger feel welcome in his desert home. This star did not shine in some far away galaxy, but right here among us, as one of us.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 07:58 AM CST [
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Bolivia: A revolutionary process that is different
by Hugo Blanco
I was in Bolivia when the presidential mandate was transferred to Evo Morales. I was invited by comrade Evo. An atmosphere of revolutionary process floated in the air and imbued the people. It could be seen by the numbers who assembled and by the revolutionary fervour of people on the occasion of the big rallies.
You felt it on the occasion of the fighting speeches of Evo, who referred to Che and to the expression of Sub-commandant Marcos: "command by obeying". Evo spoke clearly against neo-liberalism. This atmosphere is also reflected in the fact that the Ministry of Justice is headed by a woman domestic servant who suffered physical, psychological and sexual abuse, which are a sort of "custom" in our countries.
It can be seen by the fact that the Ministry of Labour, is occupied by a trade unionist, it is expressed by the fact that a large number of generals have been dismissed, etc.
Here, I want to concentrate on only one aspect: the type of revolution.
Obviously, we greatly respect the Cuban Revolution and its principal instrument, the guerrilla army. In the same way we greatly respect the Venezuelan process. There we had an officer who made a coup d’etat against a corrupt government and who subsequently won against the bourgeois parties in the elections, faced with these parties that had disgusted people.
We recognize that what they did is good and that it was the right road to follow.
The Bolivian revolutionary process is completely different. It is marked by a rise of progressive and combative popular struggles, without a centralized organization. Part of the combatants decided to organize in order to conduct the struggle on the enemy’s terrain: the elections. This fraction built a party: the Political instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (IPSP). Since the government set legal traps against this party being registered, this fraction decided to enter an organization which had a legal status: the MAS. That is why today we refer to the MAS-IPSP.
In the Bolivian revolutionary movement, including in the MAS, there is a great diversity of points of view. It is in a completely natural way that people express differences with Evo. But there are no expulsions, as there are in the PT in Brazil. Evo affirms: "I can make mistakes, but I won’t betray". He adds: "If I stop, push me!"
Cuba and Venezuela each have their commander. Not Bolivia. Evo systematically speaks of the re-founding of Bolivia. He mentions that during the first founding of Bolivia, the indigenous populations were excluded from it.
In this re-founding, these populations will be present. But not only they will be present, the entire Bolivian people will also be present.
axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 07:54 AM CST [
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Opening Space for Popular Movements: A Conversation with Samba Boukman and Samba Mackandal
...SJC: We wanted to ask a few questions about the elections that just happened. A number of officials and the top electoral monitors [from the Canadian government] have described this election as being the best that Haiti has ever had. What is your response to that?
SB: As the popular movement of poor disenfranchised people known as Lavalas, we have always had only one weapon: the Democratic Weapon, which is one man, one vote.
After 200 years of independence, on Dec 16th,1990, Haiti held the first democratic election in its entire history. That is when we, the people from poor neighbourhoods, got to elect Jean Bertrand Aristide, the poor priest, as a president who could represent us. So in 1991 there was a clear threat to democracy when some countries like France, United States and Canada joined to a minority of people - who now have organized themselves as the Group 184 – who organized a coup against Aristide and all of the people of Haiti. But because of the support and help of real friends of Haiti, what we call Bon Blans, the people had a chance to get through it [when Aristide was returned to power in 1994]. So with the solidarity from the Black Caucus, the Clinton administration, and the mobilization of people here in Haiti, the people finally got the return of the president they had elected.
So the return of democracy helped relieve a lot of problems in poor neighbourhoods because it gave us access to food, health care, potable water, and different other basic needs. But that didn’t stop the international community and also a minority of the wealthy people in Haiti, from again organizing a coup [in 2004] against the needs of Haiti, causing suffering in the poor neighbourhoods, and bloodshed all over again.
As a people descended from African slaves, we believe in the democratic way. We believe that there is one way to take power, and this is by voting someone that we trust in. So after the coup of Feb 29 we have been mobilizing for a very long time, protesting in the streets peacefully, in order to call for the respect of our vote.
But we have been mobilizing also against exclusion, the social exclusion that people in poor neighbourhoods are victims of. Because when we talk about social exclusion, it’s because the wealthy people in Haiti – joined with some of the wealthy countries – they wanted to have elections but without the people of the poor neighbourhoods.
So when we say that the wealthy countries and the wealthy people in Haiti tried to stop the people in poor neighbourhoods from voting, that’s clear because we have a lot of evidence of it. They committed killings very often in the poor neighbourhoods, so that the people would move away. They didn’t have polling centers in the poor neighbourhoods so people would be discouraged from voting. They called our neighbourhoods no-man’s-lands so that people would not visit and find out about our suffering and our struggles. Many people here do not have food to eat and potable water to drink but they do have the idea that their votes should be respected. They remember September 16th 1990 and they wanted this to occur again through the new elections that just happened.
For us, the vote of February 7th 2006 has a real meaning: it is a clear answer to the coup of 2004. We wanted to show to the wealthy people, who organized themselves as the Group 184, that we will not let them exclude us from the political decision making process and that they cannot take everything for themselves. We wanted to show that we are still part of the country. It was a slap in the face of the defacto Gerard Latortue/Boniface Alexander government to have so many poor people vote.
But compare this slap in the face to the repression that we have been subjected to. We have been imprisoned just because of our political affiliation. We have been victims of different massacres, but we still decided to organize against all of this oppression.
Some people seem to think that the people who live here are all illiterate and that we don’t deserve to have the same vote as everyone else. So that is why we gave them this response – to show that we know what we need and we know how to get it. So while people may say that we are illiterate and that we don’t know anything about democracy, our vote was a clear response to tell them that we know politics better then they do. It was quite a lesson for them because it was above their understanding, what the people accomplished on Feb 7th. Even part of the international community shares the opinion of the elite here – thinking that people in poor neighbourhoods are just dumb and crazy and don’t know what to do.
So our vote on February 7th was a clear response to them too. Our vote was a vote for the release of all political prisoners. We voted for a real national reconciliation through a dialogue of the people which will allow us to move towards peace in Haiti. The vote was not the only step. We will be voting again for the senate so that Preval will be in a strong position to help the people. We will also be mobilizing for a general amnesty which will help the country get the reconciliation that it needs so that we can move against the social exclusion that is going on right now in Haiti.
haiti.nspirg.org
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 07:50 AM CST [
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La Via Campesina women occupy a farm in South Brazil
About 2000 women from La Via Campesina occupied the plantation of Aracruz Celulose, in Barra do Ribeiro, Rio Grande do Sul (sur de Basil), early this wednesday morning. The purpose of the mobilization is to denounce the social and environmental impact of the growing green desert created by eucalyptus monocuture. The Barba Negra farm is the main production unit of seedslings of eucalyptus and pines of Aracruz. It also has a laboratory for seedlings cloning.
"We are against green deserts, the enormous plantations of eucalyptus, acácia and pines for cellulose, that cover t housandas of hectares in Brazil and Latin América. 'When the green desert advancesm biodiversity is destroyed, soils deteriorate, rivers dry up. Moreover cellulose plants pollute air and water and threaten human health", say the woman protestors.
zmag.org
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 07:45 AM CST [
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Rest Easy, Bill Clinton: Slobo Can't Talk Any More
Slobodan Milosevic is characterized in the obituaries as the "Butcher of the Balkans." If that is the story you want to read about, please go to almost any other media outlet and read it again and again. Some are now suggesting that death is Milosevic's final revenge, that he "ended up cheating history" by dying before judgment was passed. But the world has already passed judgment on Milosevic and what is being cheated by his death is history itself.
What the corporate media overwhelmingly ignores in Milosevic's death is what they ignored in his life as well--his intimate knowledge of US war crimes in Yugoslavia. While Milosevic was undoubtedly a war criminal who deserved to be tried for his crimes, he was also the only man in the unique position of being able to expose and detail the full extent of the US role in the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In fact, that is precisely what he was fighting to do at his war crimes trial when he died.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 07:40 AM CST [
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Moussaoui Death Penalty Case May Be Tossed
ALEXANDRIA, Va. - The federal judge in the Zacarias Moussaoui case is considering ending the death-penalty prosecution of the al-Qaida conspirator after learning that a federal lawyer apparently coached witnesses on upcoming testimony.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said Monday it was "very difficult for this case to go forward" after prosecutors revealed that a lawyer for the Transportation Security Administration had violated her order barring witnesses from any exposure to trial testimony.
Brinkema sent the jury home until Wednesday while she considers her options.
If she bars the government from pursuing the death penalty, the trial would be over and Moussaoui would automatically be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of release. The government likely would appeal that ruling.
A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday to determine the scope of the problem. The TSA lawyer, Carla Martin, and most of the seven witnesses — past or present employees of the Federal Aviation Administration who received e-mails from Martin — are expected to testify.
The judge said she had "never seen such an egregious violation of a rule on witnesses," and prosecutor David Novak agreed that Martin's actions were "horrendously wrong."
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 07:35 AM CST [
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Robertson Finds Radical Muslims 'Satanic'
Television evangelist Pat Robertson said Monday on his live news-and- talk program "The 700 Club" that Islam is not a religion of peace, and that radical Muslims are "satanic."
Robertson's comments came after he watched a news story on his Christian Broadcasting Network about Muslim protests in Europe over the cartoon drawings of the Prophet Muhammad.
He remarked that the outpouring of rage elicited by cartoons "just shows the kind of people we're dealing with. These people are crazed fanatics, and I want to say it now: I believe it's motivated by demonic power. It is satanic and it's time we recognize what we're dealing with."
breitbart.com
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 07:28 AM CST [
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More Pro-Israel Than Israel
In a letter to the editor of The New York Times last week, retired Israeli general Shlomo Gazit could not have been more clear: "This is not the time for politicians from your country or ours to offer knee-jerk counterproductive declarations or legislation to cater to their electorates."
Gazit is not your run-of-the-mill retired general. He was Israel's first coordinator of government operations in the Palestinian territories and served afterward as head of military intelligence. And he says: This is not a time for posturing. This is a time to "wait and see what unfolds within the Hamas-led Palestinian government."
Come Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Tom Lantos and offer a bill that was almost surely on Gazit's mind when he wrote, a bill that could be a poster-child for knee-jerk reaction. Ros-Lehtinen is chair of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia of the International Relations Committee of the House of Representatives, and Lantos is its ranking minority member.
What they have offered, and what at least 70 of their colleagues have by now endorsed, is a draconian measure that would forbid any and all contact between the American government and Hamas — and similarly, between the United States and any Palestinian government in which any member of Hamas has any part at all. According to the language of the bill, for example, if the Palestinian Authority were to employ a postman who is a member of Hamas, any and all relationship between any American government agency and the P.A. would have to cease. No contact.
The bill, as written, is a piece of meddlesome foolishness, but it's exactly the sort of thing that most members of Congress are reluctant to oppose for fear of seeming "anti-Israel." That's been the case in Congress for many years now, and the result has done Israel no service at all.
forward.com
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 07:25 AM CST [
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Syria, Iran to set up oil pipeline across Iraq
(MENAFN) Syria and Iran are intending to set up an Iranian strategic oil pipeline across Iraq, the official al-Thawra newspaper reported.
According to an official, the pipeline will run across Iraq, Syria to the Mediterranean Sea.
Syrian-Iranian Joint Committee have discussed ways to improve work on building an oil pipeline in cooperation with the Iraqi government, said the paper, adding that Syria, Iran and Iraq would all benefit from the project.
The deal was under a MOU inked between the Syria and Iran in the field of oil, gas and petrochemicals in a bid to continue and develop cooperation in this regard, according to the paper.
The committee also discussed the possibility of building a strategic gas line across Iraq and Syria to link it to the Arab Gas Line which is under construction to transport the Egyptian gas through Syria and Jordan.
The oil pipeline project comes amid Syria and Iran are boosting bilateral economic ties recently, marked by high-level officials visits between the two countries.
menafn.com
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 07:21 AM CST [
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Revealed: UK develops secret nuclear warhead
BRITAIN has been secretly designing a new nuclear warhead in conjunction with the Americans, provoking a legal row over the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
The government has been pushing ahead with the programme while claiming that no decision has been made on a successor to Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent. Work on a new weapon by scientists at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire has been under way since Tony Blair was re-elected last May, and is now said to be ahead of similar US research.
The aim is to produce a simpler device using proven components to avoid breaching the ban on nuclear testing. Known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), it is being designed so that it can be tested in a laboratory rather than by detonation.
“We’ve got to build something that we can never test and be absolutely confident that, when we use it, it will work,” one senior British source said last week.
timesonline.co.ukFocus: Britain's secret nuclear blueprint Two weeks ago a group of Britain’s brightest young physicists gathered at the US nuclear test site in the Nevada desert and headed for Control Point 1. There they waited for a test codenamed Operation Krakatoa to erupt.
A thousand feet beneath the desert scrub, components for a new British nuclear warhead were ready for detonation. Though it was not to be an earthquaking full nuclear blast — since Britain is a signatory to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty — the physicists were about to witness only the second “sub-critical” test Britain has conducted in nearly a decade.
The controlled detonation, measuring the effect of conventional explosives on a small piece of plutonium, was ostensibly to help ensure that the UK’s nuclear warheads, deployed on Trident submarines, remain effective. But that was only half the story.
As The Sunday Times reveals today, the data produced by the test were part of a much wider, secret research programme to build a new nuclear weapon that some experts say will breach the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT).
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 07:18 AM CST [
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Nuclear expert: Too late to stop Iran
A former top UN and US arms inspector on Iraq has said it may be too late to stop a nuclear-weapons determined Iran, noting that there is no consensus on taking military action against Tehran.
"I'm afraid that we probably are past the point where there is any meaningful alternative other than military action to stop the Iranians if they are determined to go ahead. And I don't see that as a possibility," David Kay, who led the US search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq following the 2003 invasion, said on Sunday.
aljazeera.netMcCain: If Iran Gets Nukes, U.S. 'In Trouble' Where Iran is concerned, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, believes President Bush was right in keeping military leverage on the table and considering U.N. sanctions.
"Iran may be the greatest single threat to America since the end of the Cold War,"McCain told an audience at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Memphis, Tenn. "If the Iranians acquire nuclear weapons, then my friends, we are in trouble.”
Bush ties Iran to roadside bombs in Iraq US President George W. Bush directly linked Tehran to roadside bombings against US forces in Iraq, stepping up his criticisms of Iran amid a tense standoff over its nuclear program.
"Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices in Iraq," Bush said in a speech.
He cited recent congressional testimony from John Negroponte, the US director of national intelligence.
The president's comments came as he launched a public relations offensive to bolster support for the war in Iraq some three years after he ordered the US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.
Bush also charged that "some of the most powerful IEDs we are seeing in Iraq today include components that came from Iran."
U.S. denies asking for Iranian help in Iraq BAGHDAD, March 12 (Reuters) - The U.S. ambassador in Baghdad denied on Sunday seeking Iran's help to calm violence in Iraq and said there were still concerns about the Islamic Republic's links with militias in Iraq.
Britain's Sunday Times newspaper said journalists in Tehran had been shown a letter by a senior Iranian intelligence agent that was purportedly from U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, and which invited Iran to send representatives to talks in Iraq.
The newspaper said the letter was written in Farsi, which the Afghan-born ambassador speaks.
Khalilzad told CNN there had been no meetings between Iranian and U.S. officials.
"We have concerns about their relations with militias and extremists," said Khalilzad.
Earlier, the U.S. embassy denied such a letter existed.
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 07:12 AM CST [
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Detainee in Photo With Dog Was 'High-Value' Suspect
When Army Sgt. Michael J. Smith faces a court-martial today on charges that he used his military working dog to harass and threaten detainees, one of the prime examples of that alleged misconduct will be a photograph of Smith holding the dog just inches from the face of a detainee. It is one of the notorious images to emerge from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Although officials characterized the other detainees who appeared in the Abu Ghraib photographs as common criminals and rioters, the orange-clad detainee seen cowering before the dog was different. Detainee No. 155148 was considered a high-value intelligence source suspected of having close ties to al-Qaeda. According to interviews, sworn statements from soldiers and military documents obtained by The Washington Post, Ashraf Abdullah Ahsy was at the center of a military intelligence "special project" designed to break him down, and was considered important enough that his interrogation was mentioned in a briefing to high-ranking intelligence officials at the Pentagon.
Although Ahsy -- also identified in documents by the tribal last name of al-Juhayshi -- was described without his name in an Abu Ghraib military investigation as a "high value" detainee, he has largely remained a mystery. Ahsy's story, and his months of intense interrogations, contrast with statements by U.S. officials that the images of abuse at Abu Ghraib depicted malfeasance of a few soldiers randomly selecting victims on the night shift.
Ahsy could become a central figure in Smith's trial because attorneys for the Abu Ghraib dog handlers have said that military intelligence (MI) directed the soldiers to use their animals as part of an interrogation regimen, one that top officers approved in December 2003. Unlike others implicated in the Abu Ghraib abuse, the dog handlers can point directly to approvals of the technique in question from top commanders.
In a Jan. 25 sworn statement to investigators after he was granted immunity, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who ran the Abu Ghraib operation, said he approved the use of dogs for a few detainees in the days before the picture of Ahsy was taken, though he said he did not remember signing off on using dogs with Ahsy. Army officials confirmed that Ahsy is the one in the photograph.
"The preponderance of the evidence suggests the photo was the only photo [depicting Abu Ghraib abuse] which had anything to do with interrogations because the detainee was considered a high-value detainee," an Army official said Friday in response to questions about the case. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is part of an ongoing court-martial.
Ahsy was interrogated dozens of times by military intelligence soldiers, civilian contractors, and members of other government agencies (OGA), a common euphemism for the CIA, according to the documents. The newly discovered accounts reveal that the military working dog in the photograph was being used in conjunction with a coordinated effort to get Ahsy to talk, an effort that continued for months.
Smith, who has been charged with dereliction of duty and maltreatment of detainees, is scheduled to be tried at Fort Meade this week. He is also accused of using his dog to threaten two other detainees and for allegedly engaging in a contest to make detainees urinate and defecate out of fear. Smith's military attorney declined requests to comment.
Smith told abuse investigators in 2004 that military intelligence and military police requested Marco, his black Belgian shepherd, for use in interrogations and to control detainees, and that he complied.
washingtonpost.com
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 07:02 AM CST [
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IRAQ: NGO warns of rise in violence against women
According to the study, released on 9 March, the most worrying trend was the large number of kidnappings of women, many of whom reported being sexually abused or tortured. While such occurrences were largely unknown during the Saddam Hussein regime, more than 2,000 women have been kidnapped in Iraq since April 2003, the report noted.
"Money has become more important than lives, and kidnapping women – easy targets because of their weakness – is a quicker way to get a good ransom," said Muhammad.
The report also noted that many Iraqi Women were also being sold as sex workers abroad, mainly to the illicit markets of Yemen, Syria, Jordan and the Gulf States. Victims usually discover their fate only after they have been lured outside the country by false promises.
alertnet.org
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 06:59 AM CST [
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Shia cleric blames US forces for Sunday massacre
BAGHDAD: Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held the US forces responsible on Monday for the bombings in Sadr city, one of the poorest districts of Baghdad, that claimed over 40 lives.
"I hold the occupying forces responsible for orchestrating this event," Muqtada told a press conference in Najaf.
He said terrorists carried out the bombing "under US air cover" arguing that the halt of telephone connections before the incident was proof of the cooperation between the terrorists and the occupier to "destabilise the security of this Shia region.
indiatimes.com Iraq: Permanent US Colony Why does the Bush Administration refuse to discuss withdrawing occupation forces from Iraq? Why is Halliburton, who landed the no-bid contracts to construct and maintain US military bases in Iraq, posting higher profits than ever before in its 86-year history?
Why do these bases in Iraq resemble self-contained cities as much as military outposts?
Why are we hearing such ludicrous and outrageous statements from the highest ranking military general in the United States, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace, who when asked how things were going in Iraq on March 9th in an interview on "Meet the Press" said, "I'd say they're going well. I wouldn't put a great big smiley face on it, but I would say they're going very, very well from everything you look at."
I wonder if there is a training school, or at least talking point memos for these Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because Pace's predecessor, Gen. Richard Myers, told Senator John McCain last September that "In a sense, things are going well [in Iraq]."
General Pace also praised the Iraqi military, saying, "Now there are over 100 [Iraqi] battalions in the field."
Wow! General Pace must have waved his magic wand and materialized all these 99 new Iraqi battalions that are diligently keeping things safe and secure in occupied Iraq. Because according to the top US general in Iraq, General George Casey, not long ago there was only one Iraqi battalion (about 500-600 soldiers) capable of fighting on its own in Iraq.
During a late-September 2005 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Casey acknowledged that the Pentagon estimate of three Iraqi battalions last June had shrunk to one in September. That is less than six months ago.
I thought it would be a good idea to find someone who is qualified to discuss how feasible it would be to train 99 Iraqi battalions in less than six months, as Pace now claims has occurred.
rootsie on 03.14.06 @ 06:55 AM CST [
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Monday, March 13th
Morales gives Rice coca leaf-inlay guitar
VALPARAISO, Chile (Reuters) - Condoleezza Rice knew coca would top the agenda in her meeting with Bolivia's new president, but she likely wasn't expecting to get the real thing.
At the end of their 25-minute meeting, President Evo Morales presented the U.S. secretary of state with an Andean guitar that bore a coca-leaf inlay.
"The gift was well received. We will just have to check with our customs to see what rules apply. We certainly hope we can bring it back (to Washington)," said a senior State Department official who attended the meeting.
Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, came to prominence as a leader of coca farmers who want more freedom to grow coca, which is the main ingredient in cocaine but is also used legally for traditional medicines and in teas.
The fight against cocaine is the main source of bilateral friction between the United States and Bolivia, the world's third-biggest cocaine producer.
Rice told Morales, "I'm a musician you know," and strummed the instrument, a typical Bolivian lacquered handicraft with five pairs of strings.
It was unclear whether she immediately realized what adorned it.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 03.13.06 @ 10:26 AM CST [
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Paramilitaries Forgo Guns In Colombia
BOGOTA, Colombia, March 10 -- The last large Colombian right-wing paramilitary force gave up its guns Friday as part of a peace deal negotiated with the government.
Rodrigo Tovar, alias "Jorge 40," the paramilitary leader on Colombia's Caribbean coast, led 2,500 of his troops in the demobilization ceremony.
About 28,000 right-wing fighters have accepted the government's offer of reduced jail terms for such crimes as massacre, torture and cocaine smuggling.
The ceremony in the northern town of La Mesa was attended by indigenous leaders whose people have been caught for decades in the cross-fire between the paramilitary fighters and left-wing rebels.
The paramilitaries have committed some of the worst atrocities of Colombia's guerrilla war, in which they have collaborated with members of the army to fight the rebels.
Opposition politicians and human rights groups say the demobilization is a smokescreen that allows the paramilitaries to secure benefits from the government without being forced to dismantle their cocaine-smuggling and extortion networks.
washingtonpost.com
rootsie on 03.13.06 @ 10:22 AM CST [
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Watching the Detectives
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, James Risen, Free Press, 256 pages
James Risen’s State of War has opened a Pandora’s Box for the Bush administration that no amount of howling, scowling, or bogus terrorist-attack warnings will be able to close. Risen’s revelations on pervasive National Security Agency warrantless spying on Americans shred the final pretenses to legality of the Bush administration. Now the debate is simply whether, as Bush and his supporters claim, the president is effectively above the law and the Constitution during a time of (perpetual) war.
Risen has been a national security reporter for the New York Times for many years. He was not one of the Times reporters who simply recycled hokum from the White House Iraq Group. In October 2002, he wrote a piece shooting down the Bush administration’s claims that Mohammad Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, one of the favorite neocon justifications for attacking Iraq.
Risen had the story on NSA wiretapping before the 2004 election, but the Times, under pressure from the administration, sat on the piece for at least 14 months. The paper’s timidity may have awarded George W. Bush a second term as president. After the Times finally published Risen’s story in mid-December, Bush seized upon the exposé to portray himself as heroically rising above the statute book to protect the American people. The administration has been boasting about its “terrorism surveillance program” ever since.
Bush announced that “the NSA program is one that listens to a few numbers called from the outside of the United States and of known al Qaeda or affiliate people.” Except that the program also listens to calls from inside the United States to abroad. And, in some cases, it has wiretapped calls exclusively within the United States. No one knows how flimsy the standard may be that the administration is using for associating people with terrorist suspects—consumption of more than a pound of hummus a week?
Risen revealed that the “NSA is now eavesdropping on as many as five hundred people at any given time” in the United States. Bush’s “secret presidential order has given the NSA the freedom to peruse ... the email of millions of Americans.” The NSA’s program has been christened the “J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner.”
In 1978, responding to scandals involving political spying on Americans in the name of counterespionage, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The act prohibited wiretapping of domestic phone calls without a warrant. The special FISA court, however, sets a much lower standard for securing search warrants than is required by other federal courts.
The FISA court has approved almost every one of the more than 17,000 search warrant requests the feds have submitted since 1978. Federal agencies can even submit retroactive requests up to 72 hours after they begin surveilling someone. The number of FISA-approved wiretaps has doubled since 2001. Yet the Bush administration whines that FISA makes the U.S. government a helpless giant against terrorists.
Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales claim that the warrantless wiretaps are based on Congress’s authorization to use military force against the people who attacked the United States. But if that measure actually nullified all domestic limits on the president’s power, then Americans have been living under martial law since Sept. 18, 2001, when Congress passed the resolution. Bush and Gonzales also assert that the president has inherent power to tap phone calls, thanks to Article II of the Constitution. This is the same “commander-in-chief override” that Gonzales invoked after the Abu Ghraib scandal to justify the Bush administration ignoring the federal Anti-Torture Act.
americanconservativemag.com
rootsie on 03.13.06 @ 10:19 AM CST [
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Heart failure blamed but former Serb leader said doctors were killing him
The death of Slobodan Milosevic was shrouded in mystery and deepening controversy last night as Dutch pathologists examined his corpse and it emerged that he had claimed he was being slowly killed by doctors.
Milosevic's body was removed from the detention centre at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague to the Netherlands forensic institute for a postmortem examination and toxicological testing.
Last night a preliminary postmortem report said that he had died of heart failure. His remains were to be released to his family today.
Yesterday the 64-year-old former Serbian and Yugoslav president's lawyer revealed a six-page letter - dated last Friday, 24 hours before his death - that Milosevic wrote to the Russian government alleging he was being deliberately administered the wrong drugs for his illnesses.
"Persons that are giving me the drug for the treatment of leprosy surely cannot be treating me. Especially those persons against whom I have defended my country in the war and who also have an interest in silencing me can likewise not be treating me," Milosevic said in a handwritten letter to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
Milosevic had a long history of heart disease, hypertension and high blood pressure. He was also found to be ignoring Dutch medical advice while on trial for the past four years and to be taking drugs other than those prescribed. His family has a history of suicide; his parents and a favourite uncle killed themselves.
Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor in The Hague, said yesterday that Milosevic, found dead in his cell on Saturday morning, might have killed himself. "According to our valuations, [the trial] would have ended with a verdict requesting he be shut away for life. Perhaps he wanted to avoid all that," Ms Del Ponte told the Italian paper, la Repubblica. But tribunal sources said the most likely explanation for his death was natural causes.
While Milosevic claimed in his letter that he was being deliberately administered the wrong medicine, he also has a record of taking unprescribed drugs and refusing treatment advised by his Dutch doctors.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.13.06 @ 10:09 AM CST [
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Ousted PM eyes revenge as Orange Revolution sours
Fifteen months after he was denied high office by the youthful protesters of Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Viktor Yanukovich is on the brink of an extraordinary comeback.
The pro-Moscow candidate, whose presidential ambitions were dashed after the disputed December 2004 poll, scents victory in the parliamentary elections in two weeks. Arguing that Ukraine made a terrible mistake by turning its back on its traditional ally, Russia, to woo the European Union, his Party of the Regions looks set to win the most seats - making him the king-maker in an expected new coalition government.
Mr Yanukovich, who was acting prime minister from November 2002 until December 2004, is too cautious to lay claim openly to the office again, but his message is clear: he is back.
"We aim to get power and overcome Ukraine's crisis and stabilise the country with a team of able and talented people," he said at his campaign headquarters, a 19th-century mansion in the Ukrainian capital.
In a swipe at President Victor Yushchenko, who seeks links with the EU and Nato, he said: "The government talks about European integration and the benefits that it will bring at a time when many people in Ukraine wonder why their standards of living are deteriorating. The country is living in a state of permanent crisis."
telegraph.co.uk
rootsie on 03.13.06 @ 10:04 AM CST [
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Israel’s new iron man plans ‘axis of hope’ in Middle East
THE man likely to become Israel’s next defence minister does not shy away from talking about his past.
“I killed many Arabs, probably more than Hamas fighters killed Jews, and more than anybody else, but all in order to secure Israeli lives,” said Admiral Ami Ayalon, the Labour party’s candidate for the most difficult portfolio in Israeli politics.
There are two weeks before the general election, and victory for either Labour or the Kadima party is expected to ensure that the former commando and head of Shin Bet, the internal security service, will take over from Shaul Mofaz, the incumbent, in a coalition.
Ayalon is considered a dove despite his 32 years of military service and his near five-year stint at the helm of the intelligence agency. He is a straight talker, and wants a comprehensive peace settlement with the Palestinians even under a Hamas leadership.
“I’d be willing to negotiate with Hamas if the organisation accepts the idea of a two-state solution,” he said in an interview last week.
Ayalon, 61, is regarded as a fresh thinker: he believes Israel should establish an “axis of pragmatism” with the regional countries that have full diplomatic relations with Israel — Morocco, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey.
“This is the whole idea — to create this pragmatic axis which will be supported by the European Union and the international community,” he said. It is part of his strategy to woo the Palestinians from the more extremist policies of Hamas. “Seventy per cent of those who voted for Hamas were not Hamas believers but voted against the corruption in the Palestinian authority,” he said. “If we establish this axis it will break Hamas and we will see the pragmatist forces among the Palestinians.”
Ayalon is also open-minded on the controversy over the division of Jerusalem, which he envisages as an “open city” and capital of two states. Jerusalem should be shared between Arabs and Jews. “Arab neighbourhoods will come under Palestinian sovereignty, Jewish ones under Israeli sovereignty,” he said. He has even suggested that if a common solution could be agreed with Hamas on the future of the West Bank, the hated security wall currently under construction could be taken down.
timesonline.co.ukPeretz: We'll pass law to pay settlers to leave voluntarily Labor Chairman Amir Peretz declared Saturday that a government controlled by his party would not waive the negotiating stage of West Bank withdrawal, and would begin its term by passing a law that would pay West Bank settlers who volunteer to leave the territories, in order to reduce the number of settlers prior to any evacuation plan.
Peretz was responding to an interview in Friday's Haaretz with Acting Prime Minister and Kadima head Yossi Olmert, who promised to draw permanent borders for the state.
"In contrast to Olmert, we do not intend to waive the negotiations stage," Peretz said. "Kadima and Olmert say that Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas] is irrelevant and sanctify unilateralism. We prefer to hold negotiations and to use unilateralism as a last resort. A unilateral step on the West Bank will not achieve international support either, since there won't be a return to the 1967 borders and the world will view it as an attempt to set boundaries unilaterally."
Peretz emphasized that a government led by him would bring about the rapid evacuation of the illegal West Bank outposts and the completion of the separation fence. In parallel, it would pass an "evacuation-compensation" law to pay settlers who leave the West Bank voluntarily. The idea is to thin out the settler population even before a disengagement plan is approved.
Police: Hamas is seeking control of East Jerusalem villages Hamas is attempting to turn the Arab villages in East Jerusalem into "Hamas villages," according to Jerusalem police.
Police officials said Hamas is seeking to increase its control of these villages in order to hold coordinated demonstrations there, among other things. This is only one of a series of measures being taken by the organization in order to heighten its presence in the capital in light of its election victory.
The Jerusalem police are already planning to counter Hamas intentions to establish an "alternative Orient House" in the Arab eastern city. Orient House, which had served as a Palestinian Authority government center, was closed by the Israeli government a few years ago for breaking the law.
"Hamas is a terror organization," Jerusalem Police Chief Ilan Franco said last week. "It is still classified as a terror organization, and that is how the Jerusalem Police relates to it. Hamas' activities in general, and in Jerusalem in particular, are prohibited."
Franco said the police would not permit the reestablishment of Orient House or the creation of Hamas villages in East Jerusalem.
rootsie on 03.13.06 @ 09:59 AM CST [
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Kurdish conference opens in Turkey under tight security
ISTANBUL (AFP) - Turkish and Kurdish intellectuals have gathered under tight security for a major conference to discuss a peaceful resolution to the 22-year-old Kurdish conflict in the country's southeast.
Police imposed strict security measures after nationalists threatened to disrupt the two-day event, designed to promote ways of ending a conflict that has long impeded Turkey's efforts to join the European Union.
Officers searched participants at the entrance of the venue Saturday, the private Bilgi University, and several dozen riot police were on guard outside the campus.
More than 45 Turkish and Kurdish intellectuals, politicians and journalists of various political convictions were taking part in the conference, entitled "The Kurdish question in Turkey: ways for a democratic settlement".
Organizers said the conference could adopt a final declaration on Sunday, appealing to the government for more reforms to resolve the conflict, which has claimed some 37,000 lives since the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) began fighting for self-rule in the mainly Kurdish southeast in 1984.
The conflict has led to allegations of gross human rights violations on both sides, ravaged the already meager economy of the region and forced hundreds of thousands of already poor peasants to migrate into urban slum areas.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 03.13.06 @ 09:50 AM CST [
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As Syria's Influence in Lebanon Wanes, Iran Moves In
BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 6 — Nearly a year ago, not long after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, who was twice prime minister of Lebanon, Syrian troops withdrew from Lebanon, unleashing a wave of patriotism here that prompted many to say that the Lebanese might finally be able to take control of their destiny.
But the intensity of the moment and the rush of emotions eclipsed at least one important and largely unanswerable question: With Syria gone, or at least its troops gone, who would fill the power vacuum?
At the time, Iran did not appear to be the answer. But that is what is happening, according to government officials, political leaders and political analysts here.
Iran, long a powerful player in Lebanon, has been able to increase its influence, partly through its ties to the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah. That has given Tehran a stronger hand to play in its confrontation with the United States and Europe over its nuclear program.
Should the nuclear showdown go badly for Iran, the government could rely on its surrogates in Lebanon as well as its influence in Iraq, or use oil for a weapon. In Lebanon, the Iranians could contribute to the kind of retribution they have promised as a payback, from a strike across the border into Israel, to a more forceful flexing that could paralyze the Lebanese government, political analysts and government officials said.
nytimes.comThe Times is war pimpin'.Syria ignores US sanction on its bank Syria on Friday brushed aside the U.S. decision to sever links to the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria (CBS).
The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday barred American financial institutions from opening or maintaining an account for or on behalf of CBS because the bank "has been used by terrorists" to move funds and has laundered money from the "illicit sale of Iraqi oil".
In a statement to the official SANA news agency, CBS Director General Dureid Dorgham said the U.S. decision "was taken for political reasons to affect Syria" without "logical evidence".
Dorgham pointed out that it has been a "binding decision" to the U.S. banks even before the official announcement.
Meanwhile, he expressed confidence in some other friendly banks which had rejected the U.S. decision to sanction the Syrian bank, noting that these banks would not submit to it.
"Those banks consider the U.S. decision as a political one and is binding to the U.S. banks," he said.
Syria switched state institutions' foreign currency from U.S. dollar to the euro for all transactions a month ago in case Washington imposes more sanctions on it, Dorgham said.
Regarding money laundering, Dorgham said that the bank has formed a specialized committee for this matter and applied all procedures accredited in different countries of the world.
On the Iraqi money, Dorgham said: " The bank has performed its work in this regard and we consider that the Iraqi official circles are the only authorized party to discuss such issue for they are careful on their interests."
Washington seeks explanation for Spain's Syria talks MADRID (AFP) - Washington is demanding to know why Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos held a meeting in Damascus with his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Mouallem.
El Pais quoted "diplomatic sources" as saying US ambassador in Madrid Eduardo Aguirre and another high-ranking US diplomat, Shirin Tahir Kheli, had expressed concern about the rare visit by a senior member of a Western government to Syria.
The Spanish government responded by saying it was "opposed to the strategy of isolating Damascus", El Pais reported Saturday.
"Washington seeks explanation...Washington is demanding to know why..."
rootsie on 03.13.06 @ 09:46 AM CST [
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Bomb kills 4 US soldiers in Afghanistan
ASADABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Four U.S. soldiers were killed on Sunday after a blast ripped through their armoured vehicle in Afghanistan, the U.S. military said.
The soldiers were killed during a patrol in the eastern province of Kunar, which lies close to the border with Pakistan, in an attack claimed by Taliban insurgents.
"The extremists that initiated this senseless attack create a significant danger and threat to the Afghan people," said Major General Benjamin C. Freakely for the U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.
The attack marked the U.S. military's single biggest loss in a day in the country for several months and brought to 10 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year.
reuters.comAfghan president survives suicide attack A FORMER Afghan president who heads a government commission seeking to encourage Taliban defections has survived a suicide car bomb attack today that killed two bombers and two civilians, officials said.
Sibghatullah Mojadidi, who also chairs the upper house of parliament, or senate, was in a car being driven on a busy main road when attackers detonated a car laden with explosives near his vehicle.
"The aim of the attack was Mr Mojadidi," Zalmai Oryakhel, the senior police officer for the area, said.
Witnesses said two vehicles in Mojadidi's convoy were damaged but an official of President Hamid Karzai's office said Mojadidi was not injured.
Pakistan accused of Afghan terror attack The head of the upper-house of the Afghan parliament has accused the Pakistani secret service of being behind a suicide bombing which injured him and killed four other people in Kabul. The attack came during a weekend of violence in which four US servicemen died in the deadliest roadside bomb attack on Americans in a month and six Afghan policemen were killed, two of them beheaded, after being abducted from their homes. Elsewhere an armed gang abducted four Albanians working for a German company and their four Afghan bodyguards.
The charge against Pakistan by Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, a former president of the country, who is now leading a reconciliation programme with the Taliban, is the latest round in bitter feud between the two countries over insurgent attacks in Afghanistan.
President Hamid Karzai has claimed that senior Taliban figures, including the former head Mullah Mohammed Omar, are living in Pakistan and using the country as a base to infiltrate fighters across the border. His officials accuse the Pakistani intelligence serevice, ISI, of recruiting and training suicide bombers.
Pakistan Army Kills 30 Militants on Border ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistani soldiers backed by helicopter gunships attacked a suspected militant hideout in Pakistan's volatile tribal region near the Afghan border and killed about 30 fighters, an army spokesman said Saturday.
But residents and hardline clerics disputed the military's claim, saying most of the dead were local villagers, including women and children.
rootsie on 03.13.06 @ 09:33 AM CST [
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Developments in Iraq, March 12
* BAGHDAD - At least 40 people were killed and 95 wounded in three car bombs that exploded almost simultaneously in two markets in the Shi'ite Sadr district of Baghdad on Sunday. Police dismantled a fourth bomb in the same area, they said.
* LATIFIYA - Gunmen ambushed and killed a local football player (Mohammad Najah) in Latifiya 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, local police said.
* BAGHDAD - Two civilians were killed and four wounded when a mortar round landed on a paint shop in central Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - Eight bodies were found with their hands tied and gun shot wounds to the head in Rustamiya, a suburb in eastern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - Six people were killed and 14 wounded, including policemen, when a roadside bomb exploded as a U.S convoy passed by in southern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed two police officers in separate incidents in Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - Two soldiers were killed and four wounded when a roadside bomb went off near their patrol in central Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - Five soldiers were wounded when a roadside bomb went off near an Iraqi army patrol in eastern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad received at least twenty bodies overnight, some with gun shot wounds, a source in the hospital said.
DHULUIYA - Gunmen killed two army officers who work in the Joint Coordination Centre in Dhuluiya, 40 km (25 miles) north of Baghdad, the Joint Coordination Centre of Dhuluiya said.
alertnet.orgExplosion rocks market in Shiite slum, killing at least 39 in Baghdad; parliament to convene Thursday BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A suicide bomber and a car bomb ripped apart a market Sunday in a Shiite slum in Baghdad, killing at least 39 people and wounding more than 100. The carnage came shortly after Iraqi politicians decided to convene parliament three days earlier than planned, suggesting some progress in efforts to form a unity government.
The death toll in Sadr City was sure to rise as residents, many firing Kalashnikov rifles into the air, raced to and fro to collect charred corpses from among burning vehicles and shops.
Angry residents kicked the head of the suicide bomber, apparently an African, as it lay in the street of the al-Hay market in the east Baghdad neighborhood.
US vows no permanent bases in Iraq BAGHDAD (AFP) - US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad said that his country did not want permanent military bases in Iraq and that he was willing to talk to Iran about the war-torn country's future.
"We want Iraq to stand on its own feet, we have no goal of establishing permanent bases here," he said in an interview with Iraq's Ash-Sharqiya television, according to a transcript obtained by AFP.
"Our goal is a working, a workable government, so that we can leave Iraq and let Iraqis handle all their circumstance themselves. That's our goal, and were very serious about this, we mean it," he said.
LiarsU.S. Has No Immediate Plans to Close Abu Ghraib Prison WASHINGTON, March 9, 2006 – The United States always has planned to transfer authority for all detention facilities in Iraq to the Iraqis, but announcements regarding the imminent closure at the Abu Ghraib prison are premature, defense officials said today.
News reports that the U.S. military intends to close Abu Ghraib within the next few months and to transfer its prisoners to other jails are inaccurate, officials said.
There's no specific timetable for that transfer or for closure of the Baghdad prison, they said. Decisions regarding Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq will be based largely on two factors: the readiness of Iraq's security forces to assume control of them and infrastructure improvements at the facilities.
The War Dividend: The British companies making a fortune out of conflict-riven Iraq British businesses have profited by at least £1.1bn since coalition forces toppled Saddam Hussein three years ago, the first comprehensive investigation into UK corporate investment in Iraq has found.
The company roll-call of post-war profiteers includes some of the best known names in Britain's boardrooms as well many who would prefer to remain anonymous. They come from private security services, banks, PR consultancies, urban planning consortiums, oil companies, architects offices and energy advisory bodies.
Among the top earners is the construction firm Amec, which has made an estimated £500m from a series of contracts restoring electrical systems and maintaining power generation facilities during the past two years. Aegis, which provides private security has earned more than £246m from a three-year contract with the Pentagon to co-ordinate military and security companies in Iraq. Erinys, which specialises in the same area, has made more than £86m, a substantial portion from the protection of oilfields.
The findings show how much is stake if Britain were to withdraw military protection from Iraq. British company involvement at the top of Iraq's new political and economic structures means Iraq will be forced to rely on British business for many years to come.
rootsie on 03.13.06 @ 09:18 AM CST [
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Sunday, March 12th
Wailers' bassist sues Marleys for '£60m royalties
Would Bob Marley have made it without his distinctive bouncy basslines? The question will be put to a judge this week as a protracted legal wrangle between the Marley family and the bassist in his backing band, the Wailers, finally comes to the High Court.
Aston 'Family Man' Barrett is suing the Marleys and the Universal Island record label, claiming that neither he nor his deceased brother Carlton, the band's drummer, have received any royalties since Marley's death in 1981. If he is successful, Barrett, now in his sixties and father to 52 children, could receive a payout of up to £60 million.
Barrett claims that he and his brother signed a contract, alongside Marley, with Island in 1974, which entitled them to royalties as 'partners' in the group. Barrett also co-wrote several songs with Marley, for which he claims he was never paid publishing fees.
Lawyers for Universal Island and the Marley family, headed by the singer's widow Rita, are expected to argue that Barrett gave up his right to royalties when he signed a legal settlement for several hundred thousand dollars in 1994.
observor.guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.12.06 @ 11:15 AM CST [
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Pinochet-Era Police Center to Become Allende Museum
SANTIAGO, Chile -- The mansion was used as a domestic spying center by the feared secret police of former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Now it will house artwork and be dedicated to the Marxist foe overthrown by the general's bloody 1973 coup.
The Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum, due to open next month, will exhibit work by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Roberto Matta and Joan Miro.
"This is Salvador Allende's revenge," said Jose Balmes, the Spanish-born director of the museum.
The remodeling of the mansion was a journey through the inner workings of the shadowy agency responsible for many of the dictatorship's worst abuses. Workers found passports, papers with instructions to agents, and diagrams of places under surveillance or targeted for operations.
"In the basement, we found a communications center used to tap telephones around the country," Balmes said. "There was evidence many phones were tapped."
Some of the rooms in the big, two-story house in a middle-class neighborhood near downtown Santiago were used for interrogating detainees, although the place was not a jail, Balmes said.
The mansion served as the Spanish Embassy in the 1950s but then stood empty until the secret police took it over in 1973.
Another large house, Villa Grimaldi, served as a detention and torture center. That site, in a southern suburb of the capital, has been turned into a memorial to victims. Among those held there were Chile's incoming president, Michelle Bachelet, and her mother, Angela Jeria.
The mansion converted into the Allende museum was purchased and remodeled with financial support from the Chilean government and European countries including Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden.
Spy equipment found there is being left untouched, as a reminder of what the house was before, said Balmes, 79, who came to Chile in 1939 to get away from Francisco Franco's dictatorship in Spain. "The place is a memorial," he said.
Documents that the workers found were turned over to Hugo Dolmetsch, one of several judges investigating human rights abuses under Pinochet.
Many of the artworks to be exhibited come from a museum established by Allende in 1972. Artists and intellectuals from around the world, such as Ecuadoran painter Oswaldo Guayasamin and Argentine author Julio Cortazar, contributed.
After the coup, the art disappeared. It was not until civilian rule was restored in 1990 that the collection was traced to a basement at another Santiago museum.
washingtonpost.comO'Higgins the Liberator Is Reclaimed From the Military SANTIAGO, Chile, March 9 — Not long after seizing power in 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet built an Altar of the Fatherland and had the remains of Bernardo O'Higgins, the hero of Chilean independence, moved there. Chilean democrats have been struggling ever since to wrest O'Higgins from the military and restore his legacy to the entire nation, and on Thursday they finally succeeded.
In an emotional one-hour ceremony at a downtown square just off a boulevard named for O'Higgins and barely a stone's throw from the presidential palace, President Ricardo Lagos symbolically reclaimed "the Father of the Nation" for Chile's 15 million people.
He did so, he said, in the name of "Chile re-encountering its democratic values and traditions" and establishing "a new relationship between civilians and the military."
After delivering speeches beneath a statue of O'Higgins on horseback, Mr. Lagos and Gen. Emilio Cheyre, the armed forces commander, visited the new mausoleum, still smelling faintly of fresh paint and damp granite before it opens to public visits. It was as if the tomb of George Washington were returned to Mount Vernon after being sequestered at the Pentagon for 30-odd years.
The restoration of O'Higgins's tomb to civilian control is the culmination of a series of symbolic gestures that Mr. Lagos, a Socialist who leaves office on Saturday, has made during his six years in office. He began by reopening a side entrance to the palace that had often been used by Salvador Allende, the only other Socialist to govern Chile, and allowed the public to move through the main entrance and courtyard.
Then, just before the 30th anniversary of the Pinochet coup, a statue of Mr. Allende was unveiled on the main square that is just behind the palace, known as La Moneda, where he committed suicide on Sept. 11, 1973, after air force planes bombed it. As a parting gesture, Mr. Lagos plans this week to dedicate a small plaque inside the palace to officials killed with Mr. Allende in the coup.
"A lot of my friends died, either there or a few days later," Mr. Lagos said during an interview last weekend, asked about his fondness for such symbolic acts. The common thread, he said, is "to be able to recover a piece of the nation's history" but in a way that "does not divide Chileans again, but unites them."
rootsie on 03.12.06 @ 11:10 AM CST [
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Haiti's Preval Calls on Brazil-Led Forces to Stay
March 10 (Bloomberg) -- Haitian President-elect Rene Preval called on Brazil-led peacekeeping forces to remain in the country to help provide security as it restores democracy and order.
Preval, speaking at a news conference in Brasilia, said Brazilian troops have also helped provide education and health to Haiti's poor population. He said the Caribbean country will need time to reinforce its own police and justice system.
``Our justice system and police are extremely frail,'' Preval, a former ally of ousted leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide, said. ``The presence of the forces should continue and be renewed.''
Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest county, is trying to reorganize a government two years after a rebellion drove Aristide from power and the country into chaos, calling for the United Nations to send forces to help restore security.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim on Feb. 16 said Brazil will maintain support for Haiti, though he declined to say how long Brazil plans to keep its 1,222 soldiers there, where the UN has about 9,000 troops.
Haiti's daily average income is about $1.
bloomberg.com
rootsie on 03.12.06 @ 11:04 AM CST [
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Peru president gives poll warning
Peru's president has warned against damaging the country's stability, ahead of presidential elections in April.
"If you are not interested in building economic, political, legal stability then we will not have investment," Alejandro Toledo told the BBC.
His warning came amid polls showing rising support for nationalist former army officer Ollanta Humala.
In January Peru withdrew its ambassador to Venezuela after "interference" by President Hugo Chavez in its election.
Peruvian authorities were outraged when Mr Chavez praised Mr Humala and hit out at the conservative front-runner in the poll, Lourdes Flores, who he said was the candidate of the Peruvian oligarchy.
The diplomatic row erupted when Mr Humala attended a news conference in Caracas with the Venezuelan leader and Bolivia's President-elect Evo Morales.
Mr Chavez praised Mr Humala for "joining the battle" against the Free Trade Area of the Americas backed by Washington and a number of countries in the region.
bbc.co.uk
rootsie on 03.12.06 @ 11:01 AM CST [
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U.S. More Intent on Blocking Chavez
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is stepping up efforts to counter leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as he builds opposition to U.S. influence in Latin America.
U.S. diplomats have sought in recent years to mute their conflicts with Chavez, fearing that a war of words with the flamboyant populist could raise his stature at home and abroad. But in recent months, as Chavez has sharpened his attacks — and touched American nerves by increasing ties with Iran — American officials have become more outspoken about their intention to isolate him.
Signaling the shift, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Congress last month that the United States was actively organizing other countries to carry out an "inoculation strategy" against what it sees as meddling by Chavez.
U.S. officials believe Chavez uses his oil wealth to reward governments that share his anti-American views and to foment change in those that don't.
"We are working with other countries to make certain that there is a united front against some of the things that Venezuela gets involved in," said Rice, who called Venezuela a "sidekick" of Iran.
Rice leaves today on an eight-day trip to Latin America, Indonesia and Australia, including a stop in Chile for the inauguration of President-elect Michelle Bachelet. Rice said pointedly Thursday that she did not plan to see Chavez, who is expected to attend the inauguration Saturday.
As part of the administration's new view of Venezuela, U.S. defense and intelligence officials have revised their assessment of the security threat Venezuela poses to the region. They say they believe Venezuela will have growing military and diplomatic relationships with North Korea and Iran, and point with concern to its arms buildup. Of equal worry to them is Venezuela's overhaul of its military doctrine, which now emphasizes "asymmetric warfare" — a strategy of sabotage and hit-and-run attacks against a greater military power, much like that used by Iraqi insurgents.
latimes.com
rootsie on 03.12.06 @ 10:57 AM CST [
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Nigeria: Militants Kill 13 Soldiers
The Nigerian Armed forces yesterday recorded heavy casualties in two separate battles with Ijaw militias along the waterway of Warri, Delta State with 13 soldiers feared dead.
This comes as the Chief of Naval Staff (CNS), Vice Admiral Ganiyu Adekeye, yesterday advised the Federal Government to adopt a proactical political measure to the current crisis threatening to tear down the Niger Delta region.
Defence Headquarters, however, confirmed the death of four of its personnel in yesterday's renewed hostilities with militants in the region.
Speaking with THISDAY in Abuja, Acting Director of Defence Information, Group Captain Eniola. O. Akinduro, said, "Four soldiers were killed and an unspecified number of militants were equally killed in the exchange of firearms in the Niger Delta yesterday."
Akinduro, who could not disclose the actual cause of yesterday's shoot out, however, assured Nigerians that, "investigations is currently being carried out to determine the possible cause of the shooting."
He denied claims that the military was re-enforcing troops in the region, stating that, "Movement of military troops from one end of the area to the other are often construed to mean military re-enforcement. But I can tell you that there is no military re-enforcement in the area now."
allafrica.comJoin The ExxonMobil War Boycott - Buy Citgo - ExxonMobil has been selected for boycott because of its apparent active involvement in U.S. policy in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular, and its power to help change these policies.
Campbell Soup, Carlson Companies (Radisson Hotels, TGI Friday's), Corning Inc., Metlife, Novartis, Pfizer, Verizon, Wells Fargo and Wyeth are also selected for boycott because these firms can influence ExxonMobil through board members they share in common with ExxonMobil.
When governments and/or corporations perpetrate gross injustice and war - or do nothing to stop it - we, the people, must take action to end the violence and exploitation.
Through the power of information and boycott, Consumers For Peace offers you a non-violent way, every day, to act on behalf of justice and peace. Our focus is the Iraq War.
We propose a boycott of ExxonMobil Corporation products and the products and services of nine firms that are in a position to influence ExxonMobil through its board of directors to achieve these goals:
Immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries from Iraq; and reparations for the loss of Iraqi lives and property.
Impeachment of George W. Bush; and criminal prosecution of executive branch officials who have lied to congress about the war and/or have commited war crimes and crimes against humanity.
What about Angola and Nigeria?
rootsie on 03.12.06 @ 10:54 AM CST [
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The Israeli Wall, the Javits Center and the Bullying of an Architect
Richard Rogers, the noted British architect, was recently summoned to the offices of the Empire State Development Corp. to explain his connection to a group called Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine. Empire State is overseeing the redesign of New York's $1.7-billion Javits Convention Center, and Rogers is the architect on the job.
According to media reports, Rogers has sparked the anger of various New York politicians and Jewish organizations for what he now claims was only a fleeting association with Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine. The group has taken the "outrageous" position that Israel's West Bank barrier (sometimes referred to euphemistically as a "security fence") is, well, problematic--because most of it is built not on Israel's 1967 border but within the West Bank; because it violates international law; because it separates farmers from their land, one town from another, people from their doctors, children from their schools; and because it generally wreaks havoc on Palestinian life.
Members of the group have proposed a boycott of Israeli architects and construction companies working on the barrier, saying their involvement in such a project makes them "complicit in social, political and economic oppression" and is "in violation of their professional code of ethics."
Apparently anyone associated with such a position--in other words, anyone taking a principled stand in favor of human rights and international law--may have to count himself out of a contract for the Javits Center.
This is only the most recent example of Israel's American defenders--who will not tolerate any criticism of Israel--using their political clout to punish or silence dissident voices. Last month, the New York premiere of a play based on the words of Rachel Corrie, a young American who was crushed by an Israeli Army bulldozer while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian home, was indefinitely postponed for fear that some might find her words "offensive."
Naturally, Rogers has been desperately trying to distance himself from anything that might stand in the way of his retaining the Javits project, including severing his ties with the group and stating that he does not back a boycott.
Israel's barrier is fine, Rogers now says. In fact, he's now in favor of it. Further, "Hamas must renounce terrorism," he told the New York Post. "Hamas must recognize Israel's right to exist. Just making a statement is not enough. They have to back it up."
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.12.06 @ 10:47 AM CST [
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West Bank tours reveal the grim reality of Israeli occupation
On the top floor of a commandeered Palestinian home in the West Bank city of Hebron, Yehuda Shaul, a former Israeli soldier, stood at the centre of a group of rapt German tourists and told them about the time he unleashed his grenade launcher on local gunmen.
"I was tra 