UK forces 'destabilising Basra'
The governor of Basra province has accused British forces of destabilising security following the arrest of 12 people over attacks against UK troops.
The men, some of whom are police officers, are still being questioned.
...The 12 detainees, some of whom are accused of supporting radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr, are thought to include the director of Basra's state-run electricity company Odai Awad.
Employees of the company are threatening a strike unless he is released within 24 hours.
Mr al-Waili told the Associated Press news agency: "The British troops are responsible for destabilising security in the province.
"Recent random raids and arrests conducted by British forces...should have been co-ordinated with the Iraqi security forces and the governor."
bbc.co.ukIran denies British attacks link ...An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman denied the charge, saying it was a "lie" and accusing Britain of fomenting unrest in Iraq.
Speaking on Iranian TV, Hamid Reza-Asefi said: "This is a lie. The British are the cause of instability and crisis in Iraq.
"By drafting such scenarios they are trying to find a partner in their crimes."
He added: "From the very beginning, we have stated our position very clearly - a stable Iraq is in our interests and that is what the Iraqi authorities have said themselves on many occasions."
rootsie on 10.09.05 @ 02:04 PM CST [
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Poor Migrants Work in Iraqi Netherworld
Ramesh Khadka began the journey to his slaughter in this valley of rivers, where green rice terraces march up the mountains like stairs toward the heavens.
After passing among a series of shadowy, indifferent middlemen, he finished it a month later in a dusty ditch in western Iraq.
There, bound and helpless, the teenager was shot three times in the back of the head by insurgents, his execution and that of 11 of his countrymen captured on videotape.
The 19-year-old and his colleagues were on their way to jobs at a U.S. military base in Al Anbar province when they were kidnapped. The killings last year remain the worst case of violence against private contractors in the Iraq war.
The incident and its aftermath raise troubling questions about America's reliance on the world's poorest people to do the dirtiest jobs in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.
Contractors working for the United States, including KBR, a Houston-based subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., have brought tens of thousands of workers into Iraq from impoverished countries such as Nepal, the Philippines and Bangladesh to do menial jobs, from cooking and serving food to cleaning toilets.
In relying on a workforce of third-country nationals, however, the U.S. has embraced a system of labor migration rife with abuse, corruption and exploitation, according to dozens of contractors, migrant workers, labor officials and advocates interviewed in four countries.
The system revolves around so-called labor brokers, whose numbers have exploded during the last decade in the Middle East and Asia. Such agencies take advantage of porous borders and rising global demand for cheap labor to move poor workers from one country to low-paying jobs in another.
Although millions of Iraqis are desperate for jobs, the U.S. military requires that contractors such as KBR hire foreigners to work at bases to avoid the possibility of insurgent infiltration.
news.yahoo.com/latimes
rootsie on 10.09.05 @ 11:31 AM CST [
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Katrina Workers in Peril: Will We Repeat Mistakes of 9/11 Cleanup?
Federal agencies and the media have begun to pay attention to the safety and health of workers involved in the Hurricane Katrina rescue, response and cleanup. The main reason is clearly the toxic soup that has consumed the New Orleans area, but hovering in the background are the lessons learned from the cleanup operation following the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, which left thousands of workers with serious long-term health problems.
The potential hazards in New Orleans, and to a lesser extent throughout the Gulf Coast, range from the more common hurricane-related hazards – such as electrical hazards, falling tree limbs, and dust containing lead, silica and asbestos – to the unique hazards caused by the New Orleans flood: raw sewage, rotting human and animal bodies, medical waste, and chemicals such as gasoline, oil, corrosives, lead and other heavy metals. Many of these materials will persist in the soil for years to come as the city is rebuilt.
All of this brings back bad memories from the aftermath of 9/11 when police, fire, rescue, construction, utility and volunteer workers in New York were exposed to a similar array of hazards. Asbestos, glass, concrete and hazardous chemicals were pulverized when the buildings fell and then cooked for weeks while the fires sent out plumes of toxic smoke.
Dr. Stephen Levin of the Selikoff Center for Occupational & Environmental Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York estimates that of the 12,000 workers and volunteers screened by the hospital, half have persistent respiratory problems, such as asthma, inflammation and sinusitis. One emergency medical technician died recently of respiratory illness related to his exposure. Many others are so severely ill they can’t work. About 300 firefighters have retired with disabilities from injuries and illnesses they believe are related to World Trade Center work.
americanprogress.orgLa Nueva Orleans NO MATTER WHAT ALL the politicians and activists want, African Americans and impoverished white Cajuns will not be first in line to rebuild the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented, will. And when they're done, they're going to stay, making New Orleans look like Los Angeles. It's the federal government that will have made the transformation possible, further exposing the hollowness of the immigration debate.
President Bush has promised that Washington will pick up the greater part of the cost for "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen." To that end, he suspended provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act that would have required government contractors to pay prevailing wages in Louisiana and devastated parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. And the Department of Homeland Security has temporarily suspended sanctioning employers who hire workers who cannot document their citizenship. The idea is to benefit Americans who may have lost everything in the hurricane, but the main effect will be to let contractors hire illegal immigrants.
Mexican and Central American laborers are already arriving in southeastern Louisiana. One construction firm based in Metairie, La., sent a foreman to Houston to round up 150 workers willing to do cleanup work for $15 an hour, more than twice their wages in Texas. The men — most of whom are undocumented, according to news accounts — live outside New Orleans in mobile homes without running water and electricity. The foreman expects them to stay "until there's no more work" but "there's going to be a lot of construction jobs for a really long time."
rootsie on 10.09.05 @ 11:25 AM CST [
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Is This the Death of America?
This week Karen Hughes, long-time political adviser to George Bush, began her new mission as the State Department's official defender of America's image with a tour of the Middle East.
She might have been more help to her beleaguered president had she stayed at home and used her PR skills on her neighbors. At the end of a cruel and turbulent summer, nobody is more dismayed and demoralized about America than Americans.
They have watched with growing disbelief and horror as a convergence of events - dominated by the unending war in Iraq and two hurricanes - have exposed ugly and disturbing things in the undergrowth that shame and embarrass Americans and undermine their belief in the nation and its values.
With TV providing a ceaseless backdrop of the country's failings - a crippled and tone-deaf president, a negligent government, corruption, military atrocities, soaring debt, racial conflict, poverty, bloated bodies in floodwater, people dying on camera for want of food, water and medicine - it seemed things were falling apart in the land where happiness is promoted in the constitution.
Disillusioning news was everywhere. In the flight from Hurricane Rita, evacuees fought knife fights over cans of petrol. In storm-hit Louisiana there were long queues at gun stores as people armed themselves against looters.
America, which has the world's costliest health care, had, it turned out, higher infant mortality rates than the broke and despised Cuba.
Tom De Lay, Republican enforcer in the House of Representatives, was indicted for conspiracy and money laundering. The leader of the Republicans in the Senate was under investigation for his stock dealings. And Osama bin Laden was still on the loose.
Americans are the planet's biggest flag wavers. They are reared on the conceit that theirs is the world's best and most enviable country, born only the day before yesterday but a model society with freedom, opportunity and prosperity not found, they think, in older cultures.
They rejoice that "We are No.1", and in many ways they are.
But events have revealed a creeping mildew of pain and privation, graft and injustice and much incompetence lurking beneath the glow of star-spangled superiority.
Many here feel the country is breaking down and losing its moral and political authority.
"US in funk" say the headlines. "I am ashamed to be an American," say the letters to the editor. We are seeing, say the commentators, a crumbling - and humbling - of America.
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 10.09.05 @ 11:15 AM CST [
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Bush's God controversy stirs press fury
Papers in the Arabic world recoil at remarks attributed to President Bush by a Palestinian official, to the effect that God had told him to invade Iraq.
The White House denied the alleged comments were ever made, and Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian official who said the president had told him he was "driven with a mission from God", later said he never thought that Mr Bush's remarks should be taken literally.
Other papers in the region comment on Mr Bush's assertion, at a speech in Washington, that Islamic radicals were seeking to establish an empire of terror from Spain to Indonesia.
Editorial in pan-Arab Al-Quds Al-Arabi:US President Bush told his Palestinian guests that he was driven with a mission from God... Had those statements come from an ordinary person, he would have been arrested straight away and taken to a lunatic asylum for treatment... Such statements cannot be made by someone who is mentally sound.
Editorial in Saudi Arabia's Al-Jazirah:The statements attributed to US President Bush on God's message to fight terrorists in Afghanistan and end the tyranny in Iraq... indicate that America is striving to practise a series of firm ideological principles, even if this is a major source of detriment to US interests and the interests of the Middle East... The fallacy of Bush's ideology lies in the fact that Bush thinks it is America's right to decide people's fate.
Editorial in Egypt's Al-Ahram:US President Bush has warned of "a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia"... This is simply a preposterous statement... It is illogical to rely on the views of small radical groups that have neither weight nor influence to create such a phantom called "radical Islamic empire".
Editorial in Saudi Arabia's Al-Watan:Bush might have been right about the expansion of the base of the terrorist network to span from Spain to Indonesia. This corresponds with reality and the statements of the Indonesian investigator about indications the Bali bombers belonged to a new generation of terrorists. After four years of war on terrorism and two consecutive wars that Bush dragged the world into, here we are reaping the benefits of these efforts represented in a new generation of terrorists.
Commentary by Farah Maamar in Algeria's Le Soir d'Algerie:
Bush has just discovered "Islamist imperialism"! All the same, this awakening is late, all the more so since it has been more than a dozen years that Algeria has been struggling all alone against "the bogeyman" that is now being waved about by the White House!... Bin Ladin-style imperialism, we've experienced it!
bbc.co.uk
rootsie on 10.09.05 @ 11:07 AM CST [
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USVI wants action on hate crimes
St Johns, US Virgin Islands:
..."On August 30, I was raped by three white men. After they finished raping me they threw me overboard. I was bound, my lips were glued, I couldn't speak, I couldn't scream."
"Two construction workers found me and they took me to the clinic," she said.
Mrs Fretts said the men who allegedly raped her were "heavily masked" and wore gloves.
She believes she was targeted because she was the only black business owner in a certain part of the island.
Prejudice
"From the beginning when I got there, I was told that 'my kind' don't have business for long," she said. "They used to throw garbage, broken bottles, they wrote racial slurs on my door."
Dr Chenzira Kahina is a member of the group We The People For Justice which organised the weekend protest.
She explained that explained that there was a lot of racism on St John's and blamed the territory’s leadership for the situation.
"While we would like to say that we have control of our own destiny and we do have predominantly African leaders representing us, they do not focus on the needs of the people of the Virgin Islands," Dr Kahina said.
"They focus on the tourists and they also focus on the predominantly minority white investors."
bbc.co.uk
rootsie on 10.09.05 @ 10:51 AM CST [
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500 dumped in desert
Madrid: African immigrants attempting to reach Spain are being deported by Morocco to the Sahara Desert without food or drink, Spanish Press reports said yesterday.
Non-governmental organisations in Spain are critical of Madrid’s decision to start expelling illegal migrants from west and central Africa back over the Moroccan border, saying they risk dying in the desert or being mistreated by Moroccan police.
Spain expelled a first group of 70 Malians to the Moroccan city of Tangier on Thursday in an attempt to discourage Africans from storming the border fences surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast.
Six immigrants died on Thursday in an attempt by hundreds of migrants to storm the Melilla border, bringing to 14 the death toll along the borders of the two enclaves within a little over a month.Morocco said its security forces had fired in self-defence, killing some of the migrants while others were trampled to death.
More than 13,000 would-be immigrants have participated in massive, coordinated attempts to storm the Melilla border so far this year.
The Spanish government said the expelled Malians would return to their home country, but press reports said Morocco was rounding up large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans near Melilla and other places and then taking them by bus to the desert near the Algerian border.
Formerly, Morocco deported migrants to the region of Oujda, from where they returned to the border area of Ceuta or Melilla and made a fresh attempt to enter Spain, according to the daily El Pais. Morocco has now started taking illegals to the desert 500 kilometres south of Oujda, where there is no food or drink available, according to the daily.
“In front of us, there is nothing but sand, rocks, hills and a lot of sun,” Congolese Philippe Tamouneke told El Pais by telephone.
Tamouneke said he was handcuffed, put on a bus for nine hours and left in the desert. His group included a pregnant woman and three children, he added.
bahraintribune.com
rootsie on 10.09.05 @ 10:25 AM CST [
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Saturday, October 8th
How United States Intervention Against Venezuela Works
It is no secret that the government of the United States is carrying out a program of operations in favor of the Venezuelan political opposition to remove President Hugo Chávez Frías and the coalition of parties that supports him from power. The budget for this program, initiated by the administration of Bill Clinton and intensified under George W. Bush, has risen from some $2 million in 2001 to $9 million in 2005, and it disguises itself as activities to “promote democracy,” “resolve conflicts,” and “strengthen civic life.” It consists of providing money, training, counsel and direction to an extensive network of political parties, NGO’s, mass media, unions, and businessmen, all determined to end the bolivarian revolutionary process. The program has clear short, medium, and long-term goals, and adapts easily to changes in the fluid Venezuelan political process.
The program of political intervention in Venezuela is one more of various in the world principally directed by the Department of State (DS), the Agency for International Development (AID), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) along with its four associated foundations. These are the International Republican Institute (IRI) of the Republican Party; the National Democratic Institute (NDI) of the Democratic Party; the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) of the US Chamber of Commerce; and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS) of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the main US national union confederation. In addition, the program has the support of an international network of affiliated organizations.
The various organizations carry out their operations through AID officials at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas and through three “private” offices in Caracas under the Embassy’s control: the IRI (established in 2000), the NDI (2001), and a contractor of AID, a U.S. consulting firm called Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI) (2002). These three offices develop operations with dozens of Venezuelan beneficiaries to which they contribute money originating from the State Department, AID, NED, and, although no proof is yet available, most probably the CIA. The operations of the first three are detailed extensively in hundreds of official documents acquired by U.S. journalist Jeremy Bigwood through demands under the Freedom of Information Act, a law that requires the declassification and release of government documents, although many are censured when released.
Venezuelan associates of the U.S. intervention programs participated in the unsuccessful coup against President Chavez in April 2002, in the petroleum lockout/strike of December 2002 to February 2003, and in the recall referendum of August 2004. Having failed in their three first attempts, the U.S. agencies mentioned above are currently planning and organizing for the Venezuelan national elections of 2005 and 2006. This analysis seeks to show how this program functions and the danger it represents.
globalresearch.caInvasion allegation based on war game Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's claim that the United States plans to invade his country stems from a military exercise put together by Spain's armed forces. The U.S. government denied the charge.
...A document outlining the war game, obtained by The Herald from a leftist Internet website and confirmed by Spanish officials, says that the exercise is ``a product of imaginary events even though they may seem like they've been adapted from reality.''
Similarities with Venezuela clearly do exist. The exercise's map for three of the countries involved, named after colors, match exactly the maps of Venezuela, Colombia and Panama.
The country ''Brown'' is rich in natural resources but politically unstable -- just like oil-rich and unstable Venezuela -- and several of the selected targets in the war game correspond to real Venezuelan places.
The country ''Blue'' seems like the United States -- with a mighty military and a need for Brown's resources -- but the exercise map shows the outline of Austria and sets it as an island in the Atlantic.
Venezuelan Vice President José Vicente Rangel has insisted that the war game was designed ''with U.S. advice,'' but offered no evidence. Yet many Venezuelans remain convinced that there is a threat.
''You don't do a war game without any possibility of applying it,'' said Alberto Mueller, a retired army general who consults for the Venezuelan government on military matters.
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 09:54 PM CST [
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Yanna-boys v Book-men: George Weah ready for his biggest match
George Weah has been on the campaign trail for weeks, and the retired footballer who would be president of war-ravaged Liberia looks exhausted.
The convoy of four-wheel-drive cars tells the story of the journey. After setting out from the capital Monrovia last Friday with 32 vehicles, his campaign team bumped back towards the city yesterday in just five mud-spattered cars.
At a rest stop in the town of Ganta, Mr Weah clambered down from his car and walked wearily to a wooden bench in the shade. "I'm very optimistic," he said. "I want to bring the basic necessities. Light, water and education. And I can see there's a need for roads."
With a small population - 3.3 million - and an abundance of resources, Liberia ought to be an African gem. But decades of bad government and a protracted civil war have left it one of the poorest countries in the world.
After sunset, the heart of Liberia's capital is shrouded in darkness. In the dazzle of car headlights, prostitutes dance on street corners to lure customers and UN armoured cars gleam ghostly white.
The man who promises to bring light to this darkness, Mr Weah, 39, is a former world footballer of the year who grew up in a hut on reclaimed swampland in Monrovia. He is favourite to win Tuesday's presidential vote.
"Liberians are ready to move the country forward," Mr Weah told the Guardian, flanked by security men in camouflage gear. "We need stability, to reassure the world that we are ready to move forward.
"My career does not make much difference. I'm a human being that has contributed to my society."
The super-rich sports star had witnessed extreme poverty on his journey through Liberia's rainforest-clad interior. He had seen first hand the dirt roads where treacherous orange mud sucks at car tyres. On Thursday night, he slept in his car because the convoy had been unable to reach the nearest town.
"We live in Monrovia and think everything is OK, but our people in the hinterland are catching a hard time. I experienced that myself in the 1970s. Our people are still living in huts, in a country that has the resources. At least, we can get low-cost housing for our people."
Football was the springboard out of poverty for Mr Weah, who was brought up by his grandmother. He started with local teams like Young Survivor and Invincible XI, then moved to Cameroon where the national squad's coach recommended him to Arsène Wenger, then coach of Monaco.
Mr Weah became a star, playing for a string of Europe's most prestigious clubs, including AC Milan and Chelsea.
But he was more than just a sportsman. He personally funded the Liberia team through an African Nations Cup campaign and became a goodwill ambassador for Unicef, returning to Liberia to encourage child soldiers to lay down their arms.
Two former presidents of Liberia have been murdered and a third lives in exile. Mr Weah is conscious of the danger he faces. "When it comes to African politics, everyone that runs for the highest office faces danger," he said. "Life is a risk, and I'm taking a risk for my people. Anybody would be afraid. I have a beautiful life, and I'm putting it on the line for my people."
The retired footballer lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with his American wife and three children. He also has a four-bedroom house in Monrovia, where he keeps a silver Porsche Boxster.
His wealth provokes admiration rather than jealousy. Dayton Sei Boe, 32, an official with his Congress for Democratic Change party, said fondly: "The young man is a star, and stars love big cars."
Some believe his wealth and celebrity make him immune from the corruption which was rampant under Liberia's past leaders. In Ganta's marketplace, Madison Morpue, 21, a trader, said: "I will vote for George Weah because he has money of his own, and our money will be safe."
Liberia's election is a contest of the Yanna-boys and the book-men. The Yanna-boys are street traders, who overwhelmingly back Mr Weah. The book-men, the educated class, prefer Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, 66, a former World Bank economist. If elected, she will be Africa's first female head of state.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 06:16 PM CST [
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Italian journalist posing as migrant reports abuse at detention camp
Prosecutors in Sicily opened a criminal investigation yesterday following the publication of a horrific account by a journalist who disguised himself as an illegal immigrant and spent a week in detention.
Fabrizio Gatti, of the centre-left news magazine L'Espresso, said he had seen immigrant detainees being humiliated and physically and verbally abused by paramilitary carabinieri officers.
His account, published yesterday, has disturbing echoes of the scandal involving the mistreatment of prisoners by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It will anger those urging a clampdown on immigration as much as human-rights lobbyists.
After enduring seven days of dire conditions in a detention centre, he was simply let go. Despite the conservative government's tough policy on immigration, the reporter's alter ego, Bilal Ibrahim el Habib, was set free, "to go and work in any city in Europe as an illegal alien".
His journey began when he jumped into the Mediterranean off the Italian island of Lampedusa and floated back ashore on a raft. Lampedusa, midway between Malta and Tunisia, is a favourite destination for would-be immigrants from north Africa.
Mr Gatti was picked up by a passing motorist and handed over to the carabinieri. One officer, he said, amused himself by showing a pornographic video on his mobile telephone to the mainly Muslim detainees in the reception centre on the island.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 06:09 PM CST [
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Big idea: democratisation
Democratisation is an ugly word, bearing about as much relationship to real democracy as does a forced marriage to romantic love. The idea was the brainchild of political scientists and lawyers, who used it to describe the successive waves of countries that emerged from authoritarianism to liberal democracy during the postwar period and the constitutional alternatives available to help them on their way.
In the last couple of years, however, it has been press-ganged into service by the American government. The argument of the neo-conservatives who surround the Republican administration - and one that occasionally puts in an appearance in the speeches of George Bush - is that planting the seeds of democracy in the Middle East might make the place more resistant to virulent strains of Islamist extremism.
That theory is now under attack. Writing in the latest issue of the prestigious American journal Foreign Affairs, F Gregory Gause III, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, argues that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that democracy snuffs out terrorism.
Far from it, he argues. Gause produces statistics to show that between 1976 and 2004 there were 400 terrorist incidents in democratic India and only 18 in non-democratic China. There is, Gause concludes in his survey, "no solid empirical evidence for a strong link between democracy, or any other regime type, and terrorism, in either a positive or a negative direction". The problem is that democracy is inherently destabilising - if it were a technology, it might be called disruptive - which is why ruling elites have traditionally tried to keep it under control. The most democratic decade in Britain of the previous half-century was probably the 1970s, but few of us want to return there anytime soon.
The situation is doubly fraught in Iraq, where there are fledgling democratic institutions but little evidence of any real enthusiasm for popular sovereignty. The transitions to democracy that we are used to - from Spain in the mid-70s to South Africa in the early 90s - were, at least in part, responses to the will of the people. Unlike previous "waves of democratisation", however, this new one has been conceived from without and in strictly instrumental terms - not as a good in itself, but because it might open up a more benign kind of politics in the Middle East and help marginalise Islamist extremism.
The Bush administration is now in a bind. If it backtracks on its democratising mission in Iraq and throws in its lot with a local Iraqi strongman - and there are plenty to choose from - it will be accused of toppling Saddam in favour of a kind of Saddam-lite. But if it presses ahead with its attempts at democratisation, it seems likely to end up with a bastard democracy whose very shapelessness becomes an invitation to sectarian rivalries and a red rag to the terrorists who want to provoke it into revealing its authoritarian colours. Whichever direction its takes, America's wave of democratisation has already slowed into a trickle, and may yet go into reverse.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 06:01 PM CST [
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21 Administration Officials Involved In Plame Leak
The cast of administration characters with known connections to the outing of an undercover CIA agent:
Karl Rove
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby
Condoleezza Rice
Stephen Hadley
Andrew Card
Alberto Gonzales
Mary Matalin
Ari Fleischer
Susan Ralston
Israel Hernandez John Hannah
Scott McClellan
Dan Bartlett
Claire Buchan
Catherine Martin
Colin Powell
Karen Hughes
Adam Levine
Bob Joseph
Vice President Dick Cheney
President George W. Bush
thinkprogress.org
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 05:48 PM CST [
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How Rotten Are These Guys? The Bush Regime and Organized Crime
In the weeks ahead, a dangerous eruption is again threatening to shake the Bush family’s image of legitimacy, as the pressure from intersecting scandals builds.
So far, the mainstream news media has focused mostly on the white-collar abuses of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay for allegedly laundering corporate donations to help Republicans gain control of the Texas legislature, or on deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove for disclosing the identity of a covert CIA officer to undercut her husband’s criticism of George W. Bush’s case for war in Iraq.
Both offenses represent potential felonies, but they pale beside new allegations linking business associates of star GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff – an ally of both DeLay and Rove – to the gangland-style murder of casino owner Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2001.
These criminal cases also are reminders of George H.W. Bush’s long record of unsavory associations, including with a Nicaraguan contra network permeated by cocaine traffickers, Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s multi-million-dollar money-laundering operations, and anti-communist Cuban extremists tied to acts of international terrorism. [For details on these cases, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq .]
Now, George W. Bush is faced with his own challenge of containing a rupture of scandals – involving prominent conservatives Abramoff, DeLay and potentially Rove – that have bubbled to the surface and are beginning to flow toward the White House.
Mobbed Up
On Sept. 27, 2005 – in possibly the most troubling of these cases – Fort Lauderdale police charged three men, including reputed Gambino crime family bookkeeper Anthony Moscatiello, with Boulis’s murder. Boulis was gunned down in his car on Feb. 6, 2001, amid a feud with an Abramoff business group that had purchased Boulis’s SunCruz casino cruise line in 2000.
As part of the murder probe, police are investigating payments that SunCruz made to Moscatiello, his daughter and Anthony Ferrari, another defendant in the Boulis murder case. Moscatiello and Ferrari allegedly collaborated with a third man, James Fiorillo, in the slaying. [For more on the case, see Sun-Sentinel, Sept. 28, 2005 .]
The SunCruz deal also led to the August 2005 indictment of Abramoff and his partner, Adam Kidan, on charges of conspiracy and wire fraud over a $60 million loan for buying the casino company in 2000. Prosecutors allege that Abramoff and Kidan made a phony $23 million wire transfer as a fake down payment.
In pursuing the casino deal, the Abramoff-Kidan group got help, too, from DeLay and Rep. Robert W. Ney, R-Ohio, the Washington Post reported. Abramoff impressed one lender by putting him together with DeLay in Abramoff’s skybox at FedEx Field during a football game between the Washington Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys.
globalresearch.ca
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 05:42 PM CST [
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Bush will veto anti-torture law after Senate revolt
The Bush administration pledged yesterday to veto legislation banning the torture of prisoners by US troops after an overwhelming and almost unprecedented revolt by loyalist congressmen.
...The administration's extraordinary isolation was underlined when the Senate Republican majority leader, Bill Frist, supported the amendment.
The man behind the legislation, Republican Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner in Vietnam, said the move was backed by American soldiers. His amendment would prohibit the "cruel, inhumane or degrading" treatment of prisoners in the custody of America's defence department.
The vote was one of the largest and best supported congressional revolts during President George W Bush's five years in office and shocked the White House.
"We have put out a Statement of Administration Policy saying that his advisers would recommend that he vetoes it if it contains such language," White House spokesman Scott McClellan warned yesterday.
The administration said Congress was attempting to tie its hands in the war against terrorism.
telegraph.co.ukI'd like to do a lot more than tie their hands...
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 05:36 PM CST [
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11 Hurt in Plastics Plant Explosion: "Unreasonable Woman" Isn't Surprised
LAVACA - In an increasingly familiar scene along the Texas coast, black smoke and flames streamed from a Point Comfort industrial plant Thursday, following an explosion that injured at least 11 workers.
...The blast at the Formosa plant was the third to strike a Texas industrial facility this year and the second to hit one of the Taiwan-based company's U.S. facilities in 17 months.
...Diane Wilson, an activist and local shrimper who has protested against the company — a campaign that culminated in August 2002, when she chained herself to one of the plant's towers — said a serious incident was bound to happen.
"When Formosa was building this plant we had so much evidence about the shoddy way it was put together and the poor quality of the work," said Wilson, who was in New York City promoting her first book An Unreasonable Woman, about her fight against large petrochemical companies. "I'm not surprised at all."
Last April, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality fined the facility $150,000 for violations of air pollution laws that included releases of toxic chemicals such as vinyl chloride.
commondreams.org
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 05:15 PM CST [
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Big Easy cleanup a foreign affair
NEW ORLEANS -- They clear rotten seafood from stinking restaurant freezers, wash excrement from the floors of the Superdome, rip out wads of soaked insulation. The work is hot, nasty and critical to the recovery of New Orleans.
And yet, many of the workers are not actually from New Orleans. Many of those engaged in the huge cleanup and reconstruction effort here -- nobody has an exact count -- are immigrants, both legal and illegal, from Mexico and Central America.
Meanwhile, as many as 80,000 New Orleanians sit idle in shelters around the country. They are out of work, homeless and destitute. That irks some civic and union leaders.
"I've got nothing against our Hispanic brothers, but we have a whole lot of skilled laborers in shelters that could be doing this work," said Oliver Thomas, president of the City Council. "We could put a whole lot of money in the pockets of New Orleanians by doing this reconstruction work."
washtimes.comCrazy ain't it? What are they making, 5 bucks an hour?Republicans in Congress Propose Budget Cuts to Fund Storm Relief ...“As usual, the prime targets are the poor and others who rely on federal programs for their health, education, disability, agriculture, and veterans’ benefits,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the senior Democrat on the Agriculture Committee.
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 04:59 PM CST [
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Rachel was bulldozed to death, but her words are a spur to action
When our daughter Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza strip on March 16 2003, an immediate impulse was to get her words out to the world. She had been working in Rafah with a nonviolent resistance organisation, the International Solidarity Movement, trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes and wells. Her emails home had had a powerful impact on our family, making us think about the situation in the Middle East in ways we had never done before. Without a direct connection to Israel and Palestine, we had not understood the devastating nature of the Palestinians' situation. Coming from the US, our allegiance and empathy had always been with the people of Israel.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 04:54 PM CST [
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Quarantine call after Romania detects first bird flu cases
Romanian authorities called for all farm birds in the southeastern Danube delta to be kept indoors after the country's first three cases of bird flu were detected in the region.
"The virus has been identified in three ducks in the village of Ceanurlia de Jos (southeastern Romania)," Agriculture Minister Gheorghe Flutur said.
"We have already imposed quarantine measures in the village and the health authorities in the Danube delta have been put on alert," he told a press conference.
"The virus was probably carried into Romania by migrating birds from Russia," Flutur said.
The Romanian test results were to be sent to a European Union-approved laboratory in Britain for further analysis.
breitbart.com.news1918 Killer Flu Was From Birds, Shares H5N1 Gene MutationsFrom Patricia Doyle, PhD BBC News
The Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people in 1918-19 was probably a strain that originated in birds, research has shown. US scientists have found the 1918 virus shares genetic mutations with the bird flu virus now circulating in Asia.
Writing in Nature, they say their work underlines the threat the current strain poses to humans worldwide. A second paper in Science reveals another US team has successfully recreated the 1918 virus in mice. The virus is contained at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] under stringent safety conditions. It is hoped to carry out experiments to further understand the biological properties that made the virus so virulent.
www.nature.comPlane Carrying Viruses Crashes in CanadaBush Plan Shows U.S. Is Not Ready for Deadly Flu A plan developed by the Bush administration to deal with any possible outbreak of pandemic flu shows that the United States is woefully unprepared for what could become the worst disaster in the nation's history.
A draft of the final plan, which has been years in the making and is expected to be released later this month, says a large outbreak that began in Asia would be likely, because of modern travel patterns, to reach the United States within "a few months or even weeks."
If such an outbreak occurred, hospitals would become overwhelmed, riots would engulf vaccination clinics, and even power and food would be in short supply, according to the plan, which was obtained by The New York Times.
The 381-page plan calls for quarantine and travel restrictions but concedes that such measures "are unlikely to delay introduction of pandemic disease into the U.S. by more than a month or two."
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 04:26 PM CST [
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Officials Reopen Penn Station After Probe
Authorities briefly closed part of Penn Station on Friday and commuters headed to work under the watchful eyes of police after a newly disclosed terror threat against the New York subway system.
A discarded soda bottle filled with an unidentified green liquid was found at the station during morning rush hour, Amtrak officials said. The substance did not pose a threat to passengers and was removed for testing.
breitbart.comYeah I hear it's called...Mountain Dew.
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 04:15 PM CST [
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David Frost joins al-Jazeera TV
Veteran UK broadcaster Sir David Frost is to join Arabic-language TV station al-Jazeera, the network has confirmed.
Sir David is to appear on al-Jazeera International, the pan-Arab news network's new English-language channel, due to be launched next spring.
The Qatar-based channel said Sir David, who broadcast his final Breakfast with Frost programme for the BBC in May, would be among the "key on-air talent".
Sir David was quoted as saying he felt "excitement" about his new role.
"Most of the television I have done over the years has been aimed at British and American audiences," he said.
"This time, while our target is still Britain and America, the excitement is that it is also the six billion other inhabitants of the globe."
bbc.co.uk
rootsie on 10.08.05 @ 04:11 PM CST [
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Friday, October 7th
San Antonio Proudly Lines Up Behind the Military Recruiter
SAN ANTONIO - This city has its critics of the war in Iraq and its angry mothers who try to shame recruiters into going home. More than anything, though, it has a powerful patriotism and a deep respect for the military life.
At a time when the divide is widening between the cities and regions that send their children to war and those that do not, San Antonio remains a ready source of what the military needs most: people.
This metropolis - the home of the Alamo and the site of an Army presence since 1845 - is a top recruiting market for every branch of the military. The Army, in particular, which has struggled to sign up new soldiers during the continuing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, has found the San Antonio area to be a reliable and steady source of recruits.
Nationwide, every one of the Army's 41 recruiting battalions failed to meet its recruiting goal in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, falling 7,000 soldiers short of the goal needed to refill the ranks, according to Army figures. Not since 1979 has the Army missed its annual quota by so many recruits. And yet San Antonio's recruiters, covering the city of 1.2 million people as well as the area stretching north to Austin and south to the Mexican border, ranked first among battalions by signing up 2,118 people for active duty, 86 percent of its goal.
nytimes.comThat's right, send the Mexicans. They do all the work here.
rootsie on 10.07.05 @ 08:06 AM CST [
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Exploiting Africa
Britain was the principal slaving nation of the modern world. In The Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel 4 on Monday, Robert Beckford called on the British to take stock of this past. Why, he asked, had Britain made no apology for African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato famine? Why was there no substantial public monument of national contrition equivalent to Berlin's Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially, was there no recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the vigour and prosperity of modern Britain? Was there not a case for Britain to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves?
These are timely questions in a summer in which Blair and Bush, their hands still wet with Iraqi blood, sought to rebrand themselves as the saviours of Africa. The G8's debt-forgiveness initiative was spun successfully as an act of western altruism. The generous Massas never bothered to explain that, in order to benefit, governments must agree to "conditions", which included allowing profit-making companies to take over public services. This was no gift; it was what the merchant bankers would call a "debt-for-equity swap", the equity here being national sovereignty. The sweetest bit of the deal was that the money owed, already more than repaid in interest, had mostly gone to buy industrial imports from the west and Japan, and oil from nations who bank their profits in London and New York. Only in a bookkeeping sense had it ever left the rich world. No one considered that Africa's debt was trivial compared to what the west really owes Africa.
zmag.org
rootsie on 10.07.05 @ 07:46 AM CST [
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Five Tried for Italian Banker's '82 Death
ROME - Five people, including a convicted Mafia figure, went on trial Thursday for murder in the 1982 death of the Italian financier known as "God's banker" for his close ties with the Vatican.
ADVERTISEMENT
The body of Roberto Calvi was found hanging from scaffolding under London's Blackfriars Bridge on June 18, 1982, with rocks and cash stuffed into his suit.
Although initially ruled a suicide, his family pressed for further investigation, and Italian prosecutors concluded in 2003 that he had been slain.
Calvi was a key figure in one of modern Italy's biggest banking scandals, which involved elements of the country's power brokers — businessmen, politicians, Masonic groups and the Vatican hierarchy.
He was found dead as his Banco Ambrosiano collapsed following the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans the bank had provided to several dummy companies in Latin America.
The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans, and the Vatican's bank agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano's creditors but denied any wrongdoing.
yahoo.comThis was the moment when, briefly, the international fascist network,the P-2 Masonic cell in Italy, Latin American death squads, the Vatican, the mafia, elements of the U.S. governmant were briefly revealed to be parts of the same many-headed dragon. What transpired after this was the collapse of the Italian government, the bankruptcy of the Continental Bank of Illinois (through which the Vatican Bank laundered $500 million worth of counterfeit Mafia bonds, and very likely, the murder of the first Pope John Paul 33 days into his reign.
rootsie on 10.07.05 @ 07:42 AM CST [
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Gore: t is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse
I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.
How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe"?
I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.
At first I thought the exhaustive, non-stop coverage of the O.J. trial was just an unfortunate excess that marked an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. But now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.
Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?
On the eve of the nation's decision to invade Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor asked: "Why is this chamber empty? Why are these halls silent?"
The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said, "The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history."
But whether you agree with his assessment or not, Senator Byrd's question is like the others that I have just posed here: he was saying, in effect, this is strange, isn't it? Aren't we supposed to have full and vigorous debates about questions as important as the choice between war and peace?
commondreams.orgDems' Strategy on Iraq: Hit the Gas When You Can See the Cliff Up Ahead ...The fact is, Harman's efforts will likely be nothing but another veiled attempt by the insulated Democratic "Strategic Class" in Washington to continue perpetuating the worst right-wing lies about progressives on foreign policy. You know the lies: progressives are unpatriotic because they opposed blindly invading Iraq on the basis of what we knew were clearly fabrications; because progressives advocate for a more multilateral, cooperative foreign policy, they are weak; And because progressives want our military to actually focus on the real enemies in the War on Terror (ie. al Qaeda and the 9/11 bombers rather than Iraq and Saddam Hussein), they are not tough.
These lies, mind you, haven't gained real traction without the help of self-destructive Democrats themselves. People like Harman, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) have all openly reinforced these "Democrats-are-weak-on-national-security" lies in order to get themselves headlines. It is the political equivalent of saying "Thank you sir, may I have another?" instead of simply calling out the right-wing spin on progressives' defense positions for what it is: a bunch of steaming horse manure.
And remember -- America knows it is horse manure. The public opposes the war, wants an exit strategy, believes the conflict is damaging U.S. national security, and thinks the war is hurting the effort to win the War on Terror. It seems the only people who are unwilling to say that the "weak-on-national-security" line is a lie are Democrats themselves -- the very people being smeared with the lie in the first place.
Instead, Democrats have refused to support legislation forcing the President to outline an exit strategy from Iraq, and have sent their top leaders out to telling the public that the party simply doesn't need a coherent position on the War. Just see profile-in-courage Rahm Emanuel's embarrassingly inane verbal acrobatics on Meet the Press this last week. Then, read here and here his cadre of D.C. Democratic operative friends kissing his ass for the performance and praising him as a saint as American troops are left in a violent quagmire (hmm...wonder if anyone is jonesing for a nice fat DCCC consulting contract?).
True, we shouldn't be surprised by the "Strategic Class's" behavior. Harman and the elitist cadre of foreign policy "experts" in D.C. are by and large people who never have to actually experience the bloody, life-and-death real-world consequences of their complicity in the neocon's pro-war agenda. These people, who have paralyzed the party from taking an official and coherent position on the war, are the personification of the thumb-in-the-wind political prevarication that the public disdains.
But even these morally bankrupt souls have to be able to see the obvious, right? Even if they are willing to sell out America's national security in order to feel "tough" and "strong," at the very least shouldn't they still respond to their own selfish electoral prospects? Can they not understand that ignoring Iraq is not only hideously heartless and woefully weak, but also politically precarious as the 2006 elections approach?
rootsie on 10.07.05 @ 07:30 AM CST [
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God told me to invade Iraq, Bush tells Palestinian ministers
President George W Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.
In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.
Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"
Abu Mazen was at the same meeting and recounts how President Bush told him: "I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."
bbc.co.ukhelp us, Jeebus.Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.
The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.
“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.
rootsie on 10.07.05 @ 07:20 AM CST [
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Thursday, October 6th
Bush: Radicals Seek to Intimidate World
WASHINGTON - President Bush, trying to reverse a slide in public support for the war in Iraq, said Thursday that Islamic
radicals are seeking to "enslave whole nations and intimidate the world," and called that a prime reason not to cut and run in Iraq.
"There's always a temptation in the middle of a long struggle to seek the quiet life, to escape the duties and problems of the world and to hope the enemy grows weary of fanaticism and tired of murder," he said, seeking to address calls from anti-war activists for a U.S. troop withdrawal.
news.yahoo.comNot surprising that Bush doesn't get the irony of his words, since they apply to him and his better than anybody.
rootsie on 10.06.05 @ 01:49 PM CST [
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DEATH SENTENCES LINKED TO HISTORY OF LYNCHING IN STATES
COLUMBUS , Ohio – States that sentence the most criminals to death also tend to be the states that had the most lynchings in the past, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that the number of death sentences for all criminals – Black and white – were higher in states with a history of lynchings. But the link was even stronger when only Black death sentences were analyzed.
The results may be shocking to many people, but they aren’t surprising to sociologists who study the racial aspects of the death penalty, said David Jacobs, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at Ohio State University .
“Our results suggest that the death penalty has become a sort of legal replacement for the lynchings in the past,” Jacobs said. “This hasn’t been done overtly, and probably no one has consciously made such a decision. But the results show a clear connection.”
Another study finding reinforces this idea. Results showed that the number of death sentences in states with the most lynchings increased as the state’s population of African Americans grew larger, at least to a certain point. The researchers believe that is because, as their numbers increase, Blacks are seen by the white majority as a growing threat.
axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 10.06.05 @ 08:26 AM CST [
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Security fears as flu virus that killed 50 million is recreated
Scientists have recreated the 1918 Spanish flu virus, one of the deadliest ever to emerge, to the alarm of many researchers who fear it presents a serious security risk.
Undisclosed quantities of the virus are being held in a high-security government laboratory in Atlanta, Georgia, after a nine-year effort to rebuild the agent that swept the globe in record time and claimed the lives of an estimated 50 million people.
The genetic sequence is also being made available to scientists online, a move which some fear adds a further risk of the virus being created in other labs.
guardian.co.ukA researcher interviewed on NPR talked about the "eerie parallels" between the 1918 influenza and bird flu. I don't know what the heck is going on, but not so eerie, I'm afraid...
rootsie on 10.06.05 @ 08:21 AM CST [
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Will Harriet Miers Vote to Overturn Bush’s Conspiracy Conviction?
An angry groundswell has risen against the appointment of George W. Bush’s personal attorney to the US Supreme Court.
One key question must be asked: as a Justice, would she soon be asked to rule on a conspiracy conviction against her present boss?
...Indeed, the labyrinthian complications of the Plame case multiply the odds overshadowing any simple case against any single individual from the White House.
But conspiracy would be a different story. It would seem patently obvious that outing Plame had to have been discussed in some form by the very top of the Bush junta.
That Bush himself knew Plame was a CIA agent has long since been established. That Libby, Rove and Cheney knew is also beyond doubt.
So how the knowledge of Plame’s status somehow leapt to the ears of columnist Robert Novak and the likes of Judith Miller may be more important than the outing itself.
If Bush, Cheney, Rove and Libby did discuss such a retaliation, and then found a way to make it happen, we are suddenly out of the playoffs and into the World Series.
In Watergate, the coverup became the crime of importance. In Iran-Contra, it was who knew what when. In the Plame case, it could well be who discussed what with whom when.
commondreams.org
rootsie on 10.06.05 @ 08:15 AM CST [
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Bin Laden to surface after new attack on US soil: ex-CIA expert
Osama bin laden is expected to remain in hiding until he stages another attack on the United States, an ex-CIA expert who had tracked the terror mastermind for two decades warned in an interview.
"As soon as he hits us in the United States again we'll see how important he is in the Islamic world," Michael Scheuer, the former head of the "bin Laden unit" at the CIA, told AFP in an interview.
Despite his low profile, bin Laden remains powerful, Scheuer said, shrugging off reports that the Al-Qaeda chief was isolated and his communication network shattered due to a relentless hunt for him.
"We mistake quiet for defeat or irrelevance. And all quiet is disquiet," said Scheuer, a fierce critic of the Bush administration and its "War on Terror" policy since he left the CIA in November last year.
breitbart.comMaybe he took a brief leave of absence to plan the damn thing.With 'fierce critics' like this, who needs allies?
rootsie on 10.06.05 @ 08:09 AM CST [
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UK accuses Iran over killings of soldiers
Britain and Iran clashed openly last night after a senior British official directly accused Tehran of supplying Iraqi insurgents with sophisticated roadside bombs that have killed eight British soldiers and two security guards since May.
The bombs, triggered when an infra-red beam is touched, have created havoc among British forces in southern Iraq. They release a projectile capable of penetrating armoured vehicles, against which the British army has virtually no defence.
The British official said that Iranian interference in Iraq could be related to British pressure on Iran over its suspected nuclear weapons ambitions. "It would be entirely natural that they would want to send a message 'Don't mess with us'," he said. An Iranian government spokesman rejected the British accusations and said it was opposed to the insurgency in Iraq.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 10.06.05 @ 08:01 AM CST [
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Death Squads And Diplomacy
10/05/05 "TomPaine.com" -- -- A flurry of Arab diplomacy over the last few days is unfolding in a rear-guard effort to prevent the crisis in Iraq from exploding into what Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al Faisal warned last month could be a regional civil war involving not only Iraq, but all of its neighbors.
The main, and well-deserved, target of Saud’s ire was the increasingly authoritarian and brutal rule of the main Iraqi Shiite parties, especially the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), whose Badr Brigade militia are terrorizing Iraq’s secular, urban Shiite population and carrying out death-squad attacks against Sunnis. The attacks against the Sunnis are aimed not only at the Iraqi armed resistance but at secular, nationalist Sunni leaders and activists.
Last week, I reported on the fear of Shiite militias and death squads as reported by Aiham Al Sammarae, an Iraqi oppositionist and former minister under the interim government in 2004 who is trying to broker a deal with the Iraqi resistance. Since then, other reports have surfaced concerning the extensive violence carried out by paramilitary forces tied to SCIRI and to Al Dawa, SCIRI’s partner in the Shiite religious bloc in Iraq. By now it is clear that if Tony Soprano lived in Iraq, he’d be a member of the Shiite militia. Consider the following report from CBS News:
CBS News correspondent Lara Logan reports there is a secret, ruthless cleansing of the country's towns and cities. Bodies—blindfolded, bound and executed—just appear, like the rotting corpses of 36 Sunni men that turned up in a dry riverbed south of Baghdad.
CBS News traced 16 of those men to a single street in a Baghdad suburb, where family members showed CBS News how the killers forced their way into their homes in the middle of the night and dragged away their sons and fathers.
"My uncles were tortured, they even poured acid on them," a young boy told CBS News.
Clutching photographs of the murdered men, the women and children left behind came together to grieve.
One woman said as her husband was marched away she sent her son after him with his slippers, but his abductor sent the child back with a chilling message: No need for slippers—he will come back dead.
They were targeted for one reason alone: all were Sunnis.
Or this, from the Chicago Tribune :
In the dead of night, bands of armed men in Iraqi commando uniforms stormed Baghdad's Hurriyah neighborhood in late August, breaking down doors with sledgehammers and grenades.
If the family inside was Shiite, the gunmen moved on to another house, witnesses said. If the family was Sunni, the gunmen tore through the building, demolishing furniture and manhandling those inside. More than 70 young Sunni Arab men were whisked away.
Countless atrocities, too, have been perpetrated by Sunni gangs and by terrorists associated with Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. But the killings by the Shiite militias are far more chilling because they have an entirely different quality: They are carried out by gunmen tied to the U.S.-supported regime in Baghdad. They don’t draw criticism from U.S. officials, and most American media reports continue to portray the Shiites as victims and the Sunnis as aggressors.
Still, it is the ferocity of the Shiite fanaticism governing Iraq today, and the ruling circle’s ever-closer ties to Iran, that prompted Prince Saud to warn of a regional civil war sparked by the Shiites. He brought that message to Washington last week, talking to senators and to the Washington press corps. He then flew back to the Middle East to attend a meeting of Arab foreign ministers, including Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hossein Zebari. We’ll come to the Arab League meeting shortly, but first some background:
informationclearinghouse.infoWolfowitz and Negroponte: "The Salvador Option."A Wolfowitz in sheep's clothing 10/04/05 "New York Times" -- -- WASHINGTON - Paul Wolfowitz is having fun.
"It's fun to have the chance to be a retail politician again," he told Andrew Balls of The Financial Times on a recent trip to India. It was an economic odyssey designed to warm up his image by tipping off the press to record his shirt-sleeve visit to a slum and his street-dancing with children in Andhra Pradesh.
When the reporter noted that Wolfowitz's role as No.2 at the Pentagon must seem distant, he agreed, saying, "Yes, it does seem like a long time ago."
A lot has changed for this architect of the Iraq war since he left the scene of the accident. Following the lead of that other wooly-headed war theoretician, Robert McNamara, Wolfie scuttled to the World Bank, where he changed the subject from bollixing up Iraq to fixing up Africa.
Unlike the Powell maxim "If you break it, you own it," the Wolfowitz philosophy is "If you break it, walk away from it."
Where on earth are those who egged on the Iraq civil war?
Puppets, Policies and Priorities...The most flagrant example of this tactic in the modern world is the Presidency of the United States of America, where one expendable, and not totally obedient, President has been replaced by another who has been programmed to do exactly as his operators wish. We saw this when disaster struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and the current puppet was seen to be seeking help in reading from a class of small children, or, when the hurricane Katrina struck the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans was flooded, the string-pullers overlooked the need to tell him about it for several days. In both cases, he was left for vital (though short) periods without instructions, since the puppet-masters had not realised that this time-lag would be noticed by so many.
I am not suggesting that these shadowy and extremely sinister figures should come out of hiding to speak for themselves, but it makes it essential for every citizen to try to unmask these manipulators who exercise real power over the state and the lives of every single person within it.
What we do know, because of the policies which have been revealed to the world, is that these puppet-masters have no interest in, or loyalty towards, the country which they control. They clearly have other loyalties, and there are three groups which have come to light, and some of the rulers are loyal to all three, others to two of them and still others just to one. The common factor in these three loyalty groups is that they are all bound to harm the interests of the general population of the U.S.A.
Although they are often intertwined, it is worthwhile to examine each of these strands of crude treachery separately, and I will call them, for the sake of simplicity, rampant capitalism, Zionism and (supposedly Christian) obfuscation.
rootsie on 10.06.05 @ 07:54 AM CST [
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Gaza: A Prison for Palestinians
In August 2005, Israel configured its 38-year illegal military occupation of the Gaza Strip by unilaterally ‘disengaging’ from the territory and evacuating its illegal Jewish settlers. However, the Palestinian territory continues to be under Israel’s brutal occupation. Israel’s ‘disengagement’ plan is nothing but Israeli PR, over-sold by Western media to divert the public from the brutality of Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian land. Israeli military control of the world’s largest open-air prison will continue unhindered, with tacit support of Western powers.
axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 10.06.05 @ 07:43 AM CST [
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Police admit using rubber bullets against Bushmen
Botswana's police commissioner said on Tuesday that officers had fired rubber bullets to disperse a group of about 35 Bushmen protesting their eviction from ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
The Basarwa tribesmen had been trying to break through blockades and enter the reserve on Saturday, police commissioner Edwin Batshu said. Some demonstrators, including mothers with infants and young children, were briefly detained, but were not charged, he said.
The Kalahari Bushmen said their leader, Roy Sesana, was arrested and beaten by police. One protester was shot in the jaw and hospitalised, according to a tribal spokesperson who did not want to be named for fear of police retaliation.
The Batswara accused the government of evicting them to relocation camps in an effort to clear the land for De Beers mining giant to explore for diamonds and minerals.
An estimated 2 000 people have been relocated to camps. However, several families were still living in the reserve, cut off from food and water, the Bushmen said.
mg.co.za
rootsie on 10.06.05 @ 07:39 AM CST [
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Missionary 'planned genocide'
Kigali - Rwanda will conditionally accept a request from Belgium to hand over a Belgian missionary charged with inciting and planning Rwanda's 1994 genocide, said the attorney general on Wednesday.
A Rwandan community court in September charged Belgian priest Guy Theunis with inciting and planning the 1994 genocide in which more than half a million people were killed.
Because the local court said Theunis was an alleged leader of the 100-day slaughter, the case was transferred for trial to a conventional court, where the missionary faces the death penalty. Belgium has no death penalty.
"The major aspect left to deal with before the handover is a guarantee from Belgium that whatever process he goes through, he will stand trial," said Attorney General Jean de Dieu Mucyo.
Belgium's request for Theunis' handover was sent to Rwanda on September 28, said Emmanuel Rukangira, a senior prosecutor in charge of the priest's case.
Theunis - who worked as the editor of Rwanda's periodical Le Dialogue - denied allegations that he incited the genocide by reproducing articles from the Kangura, a newspaper that promoted the killing of members of the Tutsi ethnic minority.
A United Nations tribunal had convicted the editor of Kangura, Hassan Ngeze, and sentenced him to life in prison.
news24.com
rootsie on 10.06.05 @ 07:30 AM CST [
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Black Bodies Remain Still.....
...From CNN:
Five weeks after Katrina, New Orleans is calling off the house- to-house search for bodies. Teams have pulled 964 corpses from storm- ravaged areas across southeastern Louisiana. Authorities admit more bodies are probably out there. They'll be handled on a case-by-case basis. The count is far short of the 10,000 dead once predicted by New Orleans mayor. As of today, the death toll from Hurricane Katrina stands at just under 1,200.
Searchers and residents insist there are still plenty of dead to find in New Orleans. Once again, they say the Ninth Ward is being ignored because it is poor and black.
scoutprime.blogspot.comOrleans Parish DA Eddie Jordan on Racial Stereotyping, Police Looting and Private Military Contractors
rootsie on 10.06.05 @ 07:29 AM CST [
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Growing Gulf Between Rich and Rest of US
Guess which country the CIA World Factbook describes when it says, "Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20 percent of households."
If you guessed the United States, you're right.
The United States has rising levels of poverty and inequality not found in other rich democracies. It also has less mobility out of poverty.
Since 2000, America's billionaire club has gained 76 more members while the typical household has lost income and the poverty count has grown by more than 5 million people.
Poverty and inequality take a daily toll seldom seen on television. "The infant mortality rate in the United States compares with that in Malaysia -- a country with a quarter the income." says the 2005 Human Development Report. "Infant death rates are higher for [black] children in Washington, D.C., than for children in Kerala, India."
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 10.06.05 @ 07:23 AM CST [
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Wednesday, October 5th
Bush wants right to use military if bird flu hits
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush asked Congress on Tuesday to consider giving him powers to use the military to enforce quarantines in case of an avian influenza epidemic.
He said the military, and perhaps the National Guard, might be needed to take such a role if the feared H5N1 bird flu virus changes enough to cause widespread human infection.
"If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country? And how do you, then, enforce a quarantine?" Bush asked at a news conference.
"It's one thing to shut down airplanes. It's another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to the avian flu. And who best to be able to effect a quarantine?" Bush added.
"One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move. So that's why I put it on the table. I think it's an important debate for Congress to have."
reuters.myway.com
rootsie on 10.05.05 @ 07:48 AM CST [
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Jesse Jackson: Eased out of the Big Easy
After his administration's incompetence and indifference had lethal consequences in Katrina's wake, President Bush has been scrambling to regain his footing. He's called for an "unprecedented response to an unprecedented crisis." In religious services at the National Cathedral, he called on America to "erase this legacy of racism" exposed by those abandoned in Katrina's wake. He's called on Congress to appropriate more than $60 billion in emergency relief and outlined a recovery program likely to cost up to $200 billion, or nearly as much as the Iraq War.
All this has led the press to compare his plans to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Don't fall for it. A close look at the Bush plan reveals that this is a bad deal from a deck stacked against the poor who suffered the most in Katrina's wake.
The first clue came from Bush's first act. He issued orders erasing the prevailing wage for work on rebuilding the Gulf, and his administration gave Halliburton a lucrative no-bid contract to begin the work. Then he designated Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana an enterprise zone, and, using emergency authority, waived all worker protections in the region -- protections for equal employment, for minority contractors, for health and safety, for environmental protection.
We're learning that when Bush promised to remove the legacy of racism in New Orleans, he meant he'd remove the poor who were victims of that racism. Bush's secretary for Housing and Urban Development, Alphonso Jackson, revealed that to the Houston Chronicle.
"Whether we like it or not, New Orleans is not going to be 500,000 people for a long time," the HUD secretary said. "New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again." Jackson predicted New Orleans will slowly draw back as many as 375,000 people, but that only 35 percent to 40 percent of the post-Katrina population would be black. (Before Katrina, New Orleans was two-thirds black.) "I'm telling you, as HUD secretary and having been a developer and a planner, that's how it's going to be." Jackson revealed that he advised Mayor Ray Nagin not to rebuild the overwhelmingly black 9th Ward.
suntimes.com
rootsie on 10.05.05 @ 07:43 AM CST [
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Nominee Found Jesus, Turned Republican
ALLAS, Oct. 4 - By 1979, Harriet E. Miers, then in her mid-30's, had accomplished what some people take a lifetime to achieve. She was a partner at Locke Purnell Boren Laney & Neely, one of the most prestigious law firms in the South, with an office on the 35th floor of the Republic National Bank Tower in downtown Dallas.
But she still felt something was missing in her life, and it was after a series of long discussions - rambling conversations about family and religion and other matters that typically stretched from early evening into the night - with Nathan L. Hecht, a junior colleague at the law firm, that she made a decision that many of the people around her say changed her life.
"She decided that she wanted faith to be a bigger part of her life," Justice Hecht, who now serves on the Texas Supreme Court, said in an interview. "One evening she called me to her office and said she was ready to make a commitment" to accept Jesus Christ as her savior and be born again, he said. He walked down the hallway from his office to hers, and there amid the legal briefs and court papers, Ms. Miers and Justice Hecht "prayed and talked," he said.
She was baptized not long after that, at the Valley View Christian Church.
It was a pivotal personal transformation for the woman now named for a seat on the United States Supreme Court, not entirely unlike that experienced by President Bush and others in the Texas political and business establishment of that time.
Ms. Miers, born Roman Catholic, became an evangelical Christian and began identifying more with Republicans than with the Democrats who had long held sway over Texas politics. She joined the missions committee of her church, which is against legalized abortion, and friends and colleagues say she rarely looked back at her past as a Democrat.
"There weren't that many Republicans in Texas in those days," said Merrie Spaeth, a director of media relations at the White House under Ronald Reagan who met Ms. Miers after moving to Dallas in 1985. "Harriet is what you would call a Southern lady. It is marvelous to watch her in meetings with huge egos, where she allows people to think good results are the product of their own ideas."
nytimes.com
rootsie on 10.05.05 @ 07:38 AM CST [
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Army Moves to Recruit More High School Dropouts
WASHINGTON - Army Secretary Noel Harvey and vice chief of staff Gen. Richard Cody said Monday that the Army was using looser Defense Department rules that permitted it to sign up more high school dropouts and people who score lower on mental-qualification tests, but they denied that this meant it was lowering standards.
Until Army recruiters began having trouble signing up enough recruits earlier this year, the Army had set minimum standards that were higher than those of the Defense Department.
commondrams.org
rootsie on 10.05.05 @ 07:30 AM CST [
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In the Beginning, There Was Abramoff
...Those who still live in the reality-based community, however, may sense they're watching the beginning of the end of something big. It's not just Mr. DeLay, a k a the Hammer, who is on life support, but a Washington establishment whose infatuation with power and money has contaminated nearly every limb of government and turned off a public that by two to one finds the country on the wrong track.
But don't take my word for it. And don't listen to the canned talking points of the Democrats, who are still so busy trying to explain why they were for the war in Iraq before they were against it that it's hard to trust their logic on anything else. Listen instead to Andrew Ferguson, of the conservative Rupert Murdoch magazine, The Weekly Standard. As far back as last December in a cover article on the sleazy lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Mr. Ferguson was already declaring "the end of the Republican Revolution."
He painted the big picture of the Abramoff ethos in vibrant strokes: the ill-gotten Indian gambling moolah snaking through the bank accounts of a network of DeLay cronies and former aides; the "fact-finding" Congressional golfing trips to further the cause of sweatshop garment factories in the Marianas islands; the bogus "think tank" in Rehoboth Beach, Del., where the two scholars in residence were a yoga instructor and a lifeguard (albeit a "lifeguard of the year"). Certain names kept recurring in Mr. Ferguson's epic narrative, most prominently Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, Republican money-changers who are as tightly tied to President Bush and Karl Rove as they are to Mr. Abramoff and Mr. DeLay, if not more so.
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 10.05.05 @ 07:29 AM CST [
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Soldier Reports More Abuses to Senator
...In separate statements to Human Rights Watch, Captain Fishback and two sergeants related their experiences as they recounted how members of the First Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry, had repeatedly beaten Iraqi prisoners, exposed them to extremes of hot and cold, and stacked them in human pyramids at Camp Mercury, a forward operating base near Falluja.
The abuses reportedly took place between September 2003 and April 2004, before and during the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 10.05.05 @ 07:24 AM CST [
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More Israeli Jews favor transfer of Palestinians, Israeli Arabs - poll finds
10/04/05 "Haaretz" -- -- Some 46 percent of Israel's Jewish citizens favor transferring Palestinians out of the territories, while 31 percent favor transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country, according to the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies' annual national security public opinion poll.
In 1991, 38 percent of Israel's Jewish population was in favor of transferring the Palestinians out of the territories while 24 percent supported transferring Israeli Arabs.
When the question of transfer was posed in a more roundabout way, 60 percent of respondents said that they were in favor of encouraging Israeli Arabs to leave the country. The results of the survey also reveal that 24 percent of Israel's Jewish citizens believe that Israeli Arabs are not loyal to the state, compared to 38 percent who think the Arabs were loyal to the state at the beginning of the intifada.
The poll, overseen by Prof. Asher Arian, also finds that Jewish public opinion is Israel has become more extreme on issues of foreign affairs and defense as well as on possible concessions by Israel during peace talks in particular.
A representative sample of 1,264 Jewish residents of Israel were polled for the survey last month in face-to-face interviews.
Israeli-Arabs pose a threat to Israel's security, according to 61 percent of the Jewish population, while around 80 percent are opposed to Israeli-Arabs being involved in important decisions, such as delineating the country's borders, up from 75 percent last year and 67 percent in 2000.
informationclearinghouse.infoU.S., Israel discuss Syria regime change – Report Senior American officials discussed with Israeli counterparts the prospects of a regime change in Syria and possible successors to President Bashar al-Assad, an Israeli newspaper reported
Government officials quoted by the Haaretz daily said the U.S. officials expressed interest in Israel’s assessment of possible successors to Assad, asking them who they thought could replace him and maintain regional stability.
rootsie on 10.05.05 @ 07:19 AM CST [
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Tuesday, October 4th
The Myth - Scarcity. The Reality- There is Enough Food
The world today produces enough grain alone to provide every human being on the planet with 3,500 calories a day.' That's enough to make most people fat! And this estimate does not even count many other commonly eaten foods-vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. In fact, if all foods are considered together, enough is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day. That includes two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs.
Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the supply of food in the world today. Increases in food production during the past 35 years have outstripped the world's unprecedented population growth by about 16 percent. Indeed, mountains of unsold grain on world markets have pushed prices strongly downward over the past three and a half decades. Grain prices rose briefly during the early 1990s, as bad weather coincided with policies geared toward reducing overproduction, but still remained well below the highs observed in the early sixties and mid-seventies.
All well and good for the global picture, you might be thinking, but doesn't such a broad stroke tell us little? Aren't most of the world's hungry living in countries with food shortages - countries in Latin America, in Asia, and especially in Africa?
Hunger in the face of ample food is all the more shocking in the Third World. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, gains in food production since 1950 have kept ahead of population growth in every region except Africa. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) found in a 1997 study that 78% of all malnourished children under five in the developing world live in countries with food surpluses.
Thus, even most "hungry countries have enough food for all their people right now. This finding turns out to be true using official statistics even though experts warn us that newly modernizing societies invariably underestimate farm production-just as a century ago at least a third of the U.S. wheat crop went uncounted. Moreover, many nations can't realize their full food production potential because of the gross inefficiencies caused by inequitable ownership of resources.
Finally, many of the countries in which hunger is rampant export much more in agricultural goods than they import. Northern countries are the main food importers, their purchases representing 71.2 percent of the total value of food items imported in the world in 1992. Imports by the 30 lowest-income countries, on the other hand, accounted for only 5.2 percent of all international commerce in food and farm commodities.
foodfirst institutePRIVATE INVESTMENT MAKES AFRICA POOR Anyone remember the pronouncements by Blair and Brown, Bono and Sir Bob, earlier this year about saving Africa? The white knights riding to the rescue were specifically named as the forces of private enterprise, as part of a package of measures that included fine-sounding phrases about aid, trade and 'better governance'. It is only weeks later, yet this September those illusions seem so shallow -- with little aid, no real debt 'relief', and many NGOs roundly condemning the G8/Live8 deals as enforcing further economic restructuring on poor countries.
African countries have tried in the 1990s to attract foreign investment, by de-regulating and privatising their economies. Now a UN report has been published that shows how private investment and multinational corporations can be a curse, rather than a blessing, for Africa.
The report, 'Economic Development in Africa, Rethinking the Role of Foreign Direct Investment', by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), September 2005, is highly critical of poverty reduction solutions that rely on attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). Such investment is usually the result of corporate involvement in a particular area, and the report says that 'expectations have been raised that by creating jobs, transferring new technologies and building linkages with the rest of the economy, FDI will directly address the continent´s poverty challenge'.
On the contrary, FDI can sometimes mean that a country is getting poorer -- a privatisation of a state owned company, for example, would show a net 'increase' in investment, but not necessarily result in an improved service or more jobs. 'M&As [mergers and acquisitions] have accounted for a very high percentage of inflows in particular years, often as the outcome of privatization programmes.' And where FDI has occured, it has often been isolated in 'enclaves' and oriented towards export industries. This could mean a company investing heavily in a single mine or cash crop plantation, but with little benefit to the rest of the country outside this small area of high investment. In addition, profits from this small enclave will often mostly flow overseas, back to the corporation's home market, rather than circulating within the country or Africa itself. UNCTAD states that a balanced approach 'will recognize that the inflow of capital from FDI may be a benefit, but that the subsequent outflow of profits earned on the investment may be so high as to make it a very substantial cost... Where the firm does not create new assets, but merely takes over existing locally owned ones, the net benefits may be particularly hard to discern.' (pp 25-26)
rootsie on 10.04.05 @ 08:11 AM CST [
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Families Lose Loved Ones Again -- in a Bureaucratic Mire
10/02/05 "Los Angeles Times" -- -- BATON ROUGE, La. — When he could finally leave his post guarding a nuclear power plant after Hurricane Katrina struck, Richard George Reysack III sped east of New Orleans to the flooded home of his 80-year-old father. Slogging through the muck, he found his father's corpse face-down in the hallway.
As devastating as that discovery was, at least Reysack had the body. Then even that was taken away. The authorities who moved the corpse to a temporary morgue not only won't return it to Reysack for burial, he said, they won't even confirm that they have it.
Reysack's family published an obituary and held a memorial service — all without a body.
"My family has had to endure that memorial service knowing Lord knows when we'll get my father's body … and put this behind us," Reysack said.
A month after Katrina upended the lives of hundreds of thousands, families of the dead have been traumatized again by the ordeal of trying to pry their loved ones' bodies from a bureaucratic quagmire. They say they have spent weeks being rebuffed or ignored by state and federal officials at a massive temporary morgue that houses hundreds of decomposed corpses.
Many of those bodies don't have names, the remains so badly damaged by floodwater that fingerprints and other methods of identification are useless. But although authorities have been provided with ample information to identify dozens of corpses, they are still holding onto them — to the dismay of family members scattered across the country.
The state official in charge of the morgue, Dr. Louis Cataldie, said through a spokesman that he was concerned about the flow of information from the morgue. At a news conference here last week, he acknowledged that many families were suffering.
"These are horrible times," Cataldie said.
Even funeral home directors, who routinely retrieve bodies from authorities, say they have been turned away at the heavily guarded morgue in St. Gabriel, La.
informationclearinghouse.infoThe Occupation of New Orleans The appearance of fully-armed mercenaries on the streets of New Orleans tells us that the city is currently under occupation. Whenever foreign troops are deployed within an urban area it can only mean one thing; the loss of sovereignty. It’s no different here. Blackwater mercenaries are part of a privately owned army that has seized control of the streets from their rightful owners, the people of New Orleans. They are an integral part of a much broader plan to militarize the nation and turn America into a garrison-state.
Blackwater employees may work for the United States government, but, in fact, they represent the exclusive interests of an elite cadre of corporate globalists who are transforming America into a base for future operations. New Orleans is simply the testing-grounds for their radical theories of establishing order. It provides a pilot-program for working out the kinks that inevitably arise from revamping society from the ground up. So far, the project is moving ahead better than anyone could have expected, mainly due to the media’s skillful diversion of the public’s attention from the militarization-process to the many human-interest stories of suffering and rebirth. It is a cynical way of exploiting misery and obfuscating the truth.
Just like Iraq, the propaganda-system has been the most successful part of the entire campaign; working flawlessly to provide a storyline that runs counter to the facts as we know them.
New Orleans is the first American city to come under the direct control of the global-corporate oligarchy. By taking advantage of loopholes in the current law created by terrorist legislation, Rumsfeld has been able to insert both the military and private security organizations into a major metropolitan area without as much as a peep from his critics. There’s simply been no opposition from any quarter to a draconian move that will have sweeping affects on the future of liberty in the US.
rootsie on 10.04.05 @ 08:04 AM CST [
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Ethnic Cleansing as Economic Policy
U.S. employers added 169,000 new nonagricultural jobs in August, while the national unemployment rate declined to 4.9 percent from 5.0 percent, the Labor Department reported on September 2. Crucially the nation’s payrolls are expanding, finally, at rates of job growth similar to those 10 years ago. Yet for one group of workers in America’s labor force, there is little to cheer about.
The August jobless rate for America's black teens (ages 16 to 19 years) was 35.8 percent, up by 2.7 percentage points from July. The over-all jobless rate for U.S. teenagers was 16.5 percent in August versus July’s 16.1 percent. Black teenagers are out of a job at more than twice the national rate for their age group. It is worth noting that the Labor Department’s August jobs data was collected before the disaster of Hurricane Katrina that affected African Americans most harshly.
Against that backdrop, employment for black teens living in urban areas across the nation is worsened by two factors. “Housing discrimination and inadequate transportation make it difficult for these youth to leave the central cities,” writes author and economist Michael D. Yates.
The under-funded U.S. public transit system is a result of over-investment in the private auto. Since skin color correlates to economic class in the U.S., it stands to reason that those who lack funds for a car would also be most reliant upon mass transit to travel to and from work.
Concerning shelter, the G.I. Bill for returning World War II veterans discriminated against blacks, adversely impacting them and their descendants. “The military, the Veterans’ Administration, the U.S. Employment Service, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) effectively denied African-American GIs access to their benefits and to the new educational, occupational, and residential opportunities,” writes author and scholar Karen Brodkin Sacks. As a result of this institutional racism, blacks’ equality has suffered. This blight on the nation continues in 2005.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 10.04.05 @ 07:57 AM CST [
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The CIA Leak Case: The Bush spinmeisters' Kabuki dance with Patrick Fitzgerald.
There is an interesting stylized dance taking place between the White House and Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special Prosecutor in the CIA leak case.
For weeks, there have been rumors inside the Beltway that something big would be announced about the case during the last weeks of September. The silence and lack of substantial leaks were indications that a major turn of events would soon occur. Yesterday afternoon, the White House quickly swore in John G. Roberts as Chief Justice, just hours after his Senate confirmation. Rather than wait for the next morning and thus get two days of puff ball coverage by the media, the White House wanted to clear the calendar on Friday for a possible announcement by Fitzgerald. The White House, unsure of what might be coming from the prosecutor, floated the story that Bush would "definitely" name a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor on Friday.
globalresearch.caInstead, Bush announced the appointment on Monday at 8am to quash the Stephanopoulos story.Times reporter tried to cut earlier CIA leak deal...Tate disputes Abrams' account of that conversation. In a September 16, 2005, letter, Tate said he told Miller's attorney more than a year ago that Libby's waiver of confidentiality was "voluntary and not coerced."
Tate said he believed Miller's goal in refusing to accept that waiver was to protect other sources.
Abrams said: "She has other sources and was very concerned about the possibility of having to reveal those sources or going back to jail because of them."
That appears to conflict with comments by attorney Robert Bennett, who also represents Miller in the case. Bennett said on Friday that "Judy is not protecting anybody else."
rootsie on 10.04.05 @ 07:52 AM CST [
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Abu Ghraib guard tells of worse abuse
England, appearing on NBC's Dateline programme, said the pictures did not convey the full extent of the abuse that took place in the cell block.
"I know worse things were happening over there," said the 22-year-old convict.
She said one night she heard blood-curdling screams coming from the block's shower room, where non-military interrogators had taken an Arab detainee.
"They had the shower on to muffle it, but it wasn't helping," she recalled.
"They never screamed like that when we were humiliating. But this guy was like screaming bloody murder. I mean it still haunts me. I can still hear it just like it happened yesterday."
aljazeera.net
rootsie on 10.04.05 @ 07:42 AM CST [
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Who is Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi?
The US intelligence apparatus has created it own terrorist organizations. And at the same time, it creates its own terrorist warnings concerning the terrorist organizations which it has itself created. In turn, it has developed a cohesive multibillion dollar counterterrorism program "to go after" these terrorist organizations.
Counterterrorism and war propaganda are intertwined. The propaganda apparatus feeds disinformation into the news chain. The terror warnings must appear to be "genuine". The objective is to present the terror groups as "enemies of America."
The underlying objective is to galvanize public opinion in support of America's war agenda.
The "war on terrorism" requires a humanitarian mandate. The war on terrorism is presented as a "Just War", which is to be fought on moral grounds "to redress a wrong suffered."
The Just War theory defines "good" and "evil." It concretely portrays and personifies the terrorist leaders as "evil individuals".
Several prominent American intellectuals and antiwar activists, who stand firmly opposed to the Bush administration, are nonetheless supporters of the Just War theory: "We are against war in all its forms but we support the campaign against international terrorism."
To reach its foreign policy objectives, the images of terrorism must remain vivid in the minds of the citizens, who are constantly reminded of the terrorist threat.
The propaganda campaign presents the portraits of the leaders behind the terror network. In other words, at the level of what constitutes an "advertising" campaign, "it gives a face to terror." The "war on terrorism" rests on the creation of one or more evil bogeymen, the terror leaders, Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, et al, whose names and photos are presented ad nauseam in daily news reports.
globalresearch.ca
rootsie on 10.04.05 @ 07:36 AM CST [
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Robert Fisk: How the world was duped: the race to invade Iraq.
...
If Powell's address merited front-page treatment, the American media had never chosen to give the same attention to the men driving Bush to war, most of whom were former or still active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years they had advocated destroying the most powerful Arab nation. Richard Perle, one of Bush's most influential advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning for the overthrow of Iraq long before George W Bush was elected US president. And they weren't doing so for the benefit of Americans or Britons. A 1996 report, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, called for war on Iraq. It was written not for the US but for the incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and produced by a group headed by Perle. The destruction of Iraq would, of course, protect Israel's monopoly of nuclear weapons - always supposing Saddam also possessed them - and allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose whatever colonial settlement Sharon had in store for them.
Although Bush and Blair dared not discuss this aspect of the coming war - a conflict for Israel was not going to have Americans or Britons lining up at recruiting offices - Jewish-American leaders talked about the advantages of an Iraqi war with enthusiasm. Indeed, those very courageous Jewish-American groups who opposed this madness were the first to point out how pro-Israeli organisations foresaw Iraq not only as a new source of oil but of water, too; why should canals not link the Tigris river to the parched Levant? No wonder, then, that any discussion of this topic had to be censored, as Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University tried to do in The Wall Street Journal the day after Powell's UN speech. Cohen suggested that European nations' objections to the war might - yet again - be ascribed to " anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead in the West, a loathing that ascribes to Jews a malignant intent". This nonsense was opposed by many Israeli intellectuals who, like Uri Avnery, argued that an Iraq war would leave Israel with even more Arab enemies.
The slur of "anti-Semitism" also lay behind Rumsfeld's insulting remarks about "old Europe". He was talking about the "old" Germany of Nazism and the "old" France of collaboration. But the France and Germany that opposed this war were the "new" Europe, the continent that refused, ever again, to slaughter the innocent. It was Rumsfeld and Bush who represented the "old" America; not the " new" America of freedom, the America of F D Roosevelt.
Rumsfeld and Bush symbolised the old America that killed its native inhabitants and embarked on imperial adventures. It was "old" America we were being asked to fight for - linked to a new form of colonialism - an America that first threatened the United Nations with irrelevancy and then did the same to Nato. This was not the last chance for the UN, nor for Nato. But it might well have been the last chance for America to be taken seriously by her friends as well as her enemies.
Israeli and US ambitions in the region were now entwined, almost synonymous. This war, about oil and regional control, was being cheer-led by a president who was treacherously telling us that this was part of an eternal war against "terror". The British and most Europeans didn't believe him. It's not that Britons wouldn't fight for America. They just didn't want to fight for Bush or his friends. And if that included the prime minister, they didn't want to fight for Blair either. Still less did they wish to embark on endless wars with a Texas governor-executioner who dodged the Vietnam draft and who, with his oil buddies, was now sending America's poor to destroy a Muslim nation that had nothing at all to do with the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001.
informationclearinghouse.infoIran's official warns against Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities Visiting Iranian parliament Speaker Haddad Adel warned in Damascus Sunday that if Israel ventured to attack Iran's nuclear facilities it would incur severe retaliation.
"If Israel takes such crazy actions as attacking our nuclear facilities, we will give it an unforgettable lesson," Adel told a press conference after meeting with his Syrian counterpart Mahmoud Abrash.
rootsie on 10.04.05 @ 07:32 AM CST [
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Iraqi minister lashes out at Saudi Arabia
AMMAN (AFP) - Iraq's interior minister delivered a scathing attack on neighbouring Saudi Arabia, saying his country would not be lectured by "a bedouin on a camel" about human rights and democracy.
"We do not accept a bedouin on a camel teaching us about human rights and democracy. In Iraq, we are proud of our civilisation," Bayan Baqer Sulagh told a press conference in Amman after talks on boosting border security.
The Shiite minister said the oil-rich Sunni-ruled kingdom had several problems of its own to take care of.
"Saudis should first allow women to drive, as is the case in Iraq," he said Sunday, adding that "four million Shiites live like second-class citizens in the Saudi kingdom."
He was responding to Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal's accusations that Iran was seeking to spread its influence in Iraq and that sectarian divisions were threatening to break up the country.
news.yahoo.comIraq's President Calls for PM to Step Down KIRKUK, Iraq (AP) - Iraq's Kurdish president called on the country's Shiite prime minister to step down, the spokesman for the president's party said Sunday, escalating a political split between the two factions that make up the government.
Sunni Arab leaders, meanwhile, were angered after the Shiite-dominated parliament passed a new ruling on a key Oct. 15 that makes it more difficult for Sunnis to defeat the draft constitution that they oppose.
The political wrangling deepened the splits between Iraq's three main communities amid a constitutional process that was aimed at bringing them together to build a democratic nation. Kurds complained that Shiites were monopolizing the government, while Sunnis - who have made up the backbone of the violent insurgency - accused Shiites of stacking the deck against them in the political process.
The Kurdish-Shiite split hits the core of the coalition that has made up the transitional government. President Jalal Talabani has made veiled threats to pull the Kurds out of the coalition if their demands are not met, a step that could bring the government's collapse.
Talabani has accused the Shiite-led United Iraqi Alliance, which holds the majority in parliament, of failing to fairly distribute government positions to Kurds, neglecting ministries run by Kurdish officials and refusing to move ahead on the resettlement of Kurds in the northern city of Kirkuk.
rootsie on 10.04.05 @ 07:24 AM CST [
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Monday, October 3rd
August Wilson, Theater's Poet of Black America, Is Dead at 60
August Wilson, who chronicled the African-American experience in the 20th century in a series of plays that will stand as a landmark in the history of black culture, of American literature and of Broadway theater, died yesterday at a hospital in Seattle. He was 60 and lived in Seattle.
...In his work, Mr. Wilson depicted the struggles of black Americans with uncommon lyrical richness, theatrical density and emotional heft, in plays that gave vivid voices to people on the frayed margins of life: cabdrivers and maids, garbagemen and side men and petty criminals. In bringing to the popular American stage the gritty specifics of the lives of his poor, trouble-plagued and sometimes powerfully embittered black characters, Mr. Wilson also described universal truths about the struggle for dignity, love, security and happiness in the face of often overwhelming obstacles.
...In dialogue that married the complexity of jazz to the emotional power of the blues, he also argued eloquently for the importance of black Americans' honoring the pain and passion in their history, not burying it to smooth the road to assimilation. For Mr. Wilson, it was imperative for black Americans to draw upon the moral and spiritual nobility of their ancestors' struggles to inspire their own ongoing fight against the legacies of white racism.
nytimes.comThe 4-page accolade goes on and on and begs the question: what is relationship between art and life? Why is it such a simple thing for whites to celebrate the artistic achievement of blacks while maintaining such a deafening silence about the real people on whose Mr. Wilson's characters were based?
rootsie on 10.03.05 @ 08:20 AM CST [
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Iraq Rejects Saudi Charge of Iran Meddling
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Iraq angrily rejected Saudi Arabian allegations of increasing Iranian involvement in Iraq, as Arab foreign ministers gathered on Sunday to discuss a pan-Arab strategy to help restore stability to the war-torn country.
Top American diplomats, meanwhile, have stepped up efforts with Arab officials to involve them with endeavors to convince Iraqi Sunni Arabs to accept Iraq's contentious constitution.
In a sign of rising tensions, Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, a powerful member of the Shiite-led government, disputed Saudi accusations that Iran now dominates Iraq, instead accusing the Saudis of being ``tyrants'' who discriminate against their own Shiites.
Iraq's Sunni-dominated neighbors, chiefly Saudi Arabia and Jordan, have expressed concern that too much influence from Iran could empower Iraq's majority Shiites and cause a political shift in the region, including a possible split of the country into a Kurdish north, a Sunni center and a Shiite south.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 10.03.05 @ 08:07 AM CST [
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Florida city considers eminent domain
Florida's Riviera Beach is a poor, predominantly black, coastal community that intends to revitalize its economy by using eminent domain, if necessary, to displace about 6,000 local residents and build a billion-dollar waterfront yachting and housing complex.
"This is a community that's in dire need of jobs, which has a median income of less than $19,000 a year," said Riviera Beach Mayor Michael Brown.
He defends the use of eminent domain by saying the city is "using tools that have been available to governments for years to bring communities like ours out of the economic doldrums and the trauma centers."
washtimes.comSounds like Gaza.
rootsie on 10.03.05 @ 08:03 AM CST [
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20% of Seniors Flunk High School Graduation Exam
Nearly 100,000 California 12th graders — or about 20% of this year's senior class — have failed the state's graduation exam, potentially jeopardizing their chances of earning diplomas, according to the most definitive report on the mandatory test, released Friday.
Students in the class of 2006, the first group to face the graduation requirement, must pass both the English and math sections of the test by June.
The exit exam — which has come under criticism by some educators, legislators and civil rights advocates — is geared to an eighth-grade level in math and to ninth- and 10th-grade levels in English.
But the report by the Virginia-based Human Resources Research Organization showed that tens of thousands of students, particularly those in special education and others who speak English as a second language, may fail the test by the end of their senior year despite remedial classes, after-school tutoring and other academic help.
Teachers, according to the report, said that many students arrive unprepared and unmotivated for their high school courses and that their grades often reflect poor attendance and low parental involvement.
The group reviewed the test results as part of a report ordered by the Legislature when it instituted the exit exam several years ago.
Among its findings: 63% of African Americans and 68% of Latinos in the class of 2006 have passed both parts of the exam.
By comparison, 89% of Asians and 90% of whites have passed. The report recommended that the state keep the exam but consider several alternatives for students who can't pass.
latimes.comYeah and guess the educational status of the majority of jail inmates.Locked Away Forever After Crimes as Teenagers About 9,700 American prisoners are serving life sentences for crimes they committed before they could vote, serve on a jury or gamble in a casino - in short, before they turned 18. More than a fifth have no chance for parole.
...The United States is one of only a handful of countries that does that. Life without parole, the most severe form of life sentence, is theoretically available for juvenile criminals in about a dozen countries. But a report to be issued on Oct. 12 by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found juveniles serving such sentences in only three others. Israel has seven, South Africa has four and Tanzania has one.
...Juvenile lifers are overwhelmingly male and mostly black. Ninety-five percent of those admitted in 2001 were male and 55 percent were black.
rootsie on 10.03.05 @ 07:57 AM CST [
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High Oil Prices Prompt New Look at Shale
The brush-covered landscape of buttes and desert just west of the Rockies, already dotted with oil and gas rigs, could be in store for another resource boom as the energy industry turns a fresh eye toward developing oil shale.
A reserve estimated at nearly 1 trillion barrels of oil buried deep in rock formations stretching from western Colorado into northeastern Utah and southwestern Wyoming may be a way to ease U.S. dependence on shrinking foreign oil supplies. The newly enacted energy bill was written to help open the way for research programs and commercial leasing of federal land containing oil shale.
Yet shale isn't a quick panacea to the nation's energy woes. This is oil that is locked up in rock, not deposits of liquid crude that are relatively easy to tap.
Companies have spent years researching how to melt oil out of rock, but it could be 2010 before any decide whether shale mining is commercially and environmentally feasible. It takes a large amount of water to recover the oil and the process can take months.
guardian.co.ukA Quest for Oil Collides With Nature in Alaska
rootsie on 10.03.05 @ 07:46 AM CST [
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CIA faces spy shortages as staffers go private
...But current and former officials say Goss does face problems stemming from the agency's reliance on a robust private contracting market for skilled intelligence and security workers that has grown more lucrative since the September 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
"Goss realizes he has a major problem in the (clandestine service) because he's having major bailouts among the old guard and also retention problems all the way down the ranks," said a former clandestine officer.
Experienced spies have been surrendering their blue staff badges and leaving the CIA in droves, often to return the next day as better paid, green-badged private contractors, current and former officials say.
breitbart.com
rootsie on 10.03.05 @ 07:41 AM CST [
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Sunday, October 2nd
Source to Stephanopoulos: President Bush Directly Involved In Leak Scandal
Near the end of a round table discussion on ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos dropped this bomb:
Definitely a political problem but I wonder, George Will, do you think it’s a manageable one for the White House especially if we don’t know whether Fitzgerald is going to write a report or have indictments but if he is able to show as a source close to this told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions.
This would explain why Bush spent more than an hour answering questions from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. It would also fundamentally change the dynamics of the scandal. President Bush could no longer claim he was merely a bystander who wants to “get to the bottom of it.” As Stephanopoulos notes, if Bush played a direct role it could make this scandal completely unmanageable.
thinkprogress.orgVideo
rootsie on 10.02.05 @ 09:05 PM CST [
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Chavez' Oil-Fuled Revolution
It seems there's no stopping Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. He's already curbing the power of the big oil companies operating in Venezuela. Now he's stepping up a program of expropriation that could bedevil a number of businesses, both locally owned and foreign. The moves come just as Chávez seems prepared to further consolidate his power at legislative elections in December. The pro-Chávez coalition hopes to increase its majority in the 167-member National Assembly by more than 20 seats, to around 110. "It's going to be a battle for us," concedes Gerardo Blyde, a legislator from the opposition First Justice Party.
The opposition has pledged to join forces for the elections, but remains discredited after last year's defeat in a referendum that attempted to oust Chávez from office. If voters reward Chávez with a big win, as expected, the way will be clear for sweeping new moves in his Bolivarian revolution -- his populist effort to tap Venezuela's oil wealth to impose socialism in the country. "Chávez is dead set on his revolution; there's no turning back," says Aníbal Romero, a political scientist at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas. "The question is how fast and how far."
Food fight
Chávez is moving quickly. He has been boosting spending on health and education since coming to power in 1999, but he is now increasing government control of the economy, to investors' dismay. Oil companies with operating contracts in Venezuela, such as Chevron (CVX ) and BP PLC. (BP ), have been ordered to set up joint ventures controlled by state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), and royalties have been hiked from 16.7% to 30%. Chávez now has targeted more than 700 plants, particularly in the food industry, that are idle or not operating at capacity for possible expropriation. On Sept. 26 the state seized control of a plant operated by Alimentos Polar, the country's No. 1 private food manufacturer. "This is an unfair and arbitrary expropriation," Polar President Lorenzo Mendoza told reporters, adding that the facility was operational. The move followed the seizure of a shuttered H.J. Heinz Co. (HNZ ) tomato processing facility. The company is negotiating to sell the plant to the state. Chavez defends the moves. "We will only expropriate what is necessary," he said in a recent speech.
The President is also going after rich landowners. Authorities recently began taking control of 21 large ranches spread over hundreds of thousands of acres. Chávez has threatened to hand part of the land to poor Venezuelans unless owners legally document their ownership and show that their spreads are being productively used. In another shock to investors, Chávez disclosed plans to review -- and possibly revoke -- mining concessions and create a national mining company. The news caused shares in Canada's Crystallex International Corp., (KRY ) which has operations in Venezuela, to plunge 52% from Sept. 19 to Sept. 28. "What happens here in Venezuela will undoubtedly have some impact on the commercial decisions of companies, not just from the U.S. but from all over the world," U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield told reporters in Caracas. "Nationalization is a step backward," adds a State Dept. official in Washington.
businessweek.comWell then, he must be stopped. The ironic problem facing Bush's corporate oil buddies is that unless oil goes down $20 a barrel, Chavez will have plenty of money to transform his country. Chavez points the way for every country with resources the Yankees want.
rootsie on 10.02.05 @ 03:00 PM CST [
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Top Graduates Line Up to Teach to the Poor
Lucas E. Nikkel, a Dartmouth graduate, wants to be a doctor, but for now he is teaching eighth-grade chemistry at a middle school in North Carolina, one of nearly 2,200 new members of Teach for America.
"I'm looking at medical school, and everybody says taking time off first is a good idea," he said. "I think I'm like a lot of people who know they want to do something meaningful before they start their careers."
For a surprisingly large number of bright young people, Teach for America - which sends recent college graduates into poor rural and urban schools for two years for the same pay and benefits as other beginning teachers at those schools - has become the next step after graduation. It is the postcollege do-good program with buzz, drawing those who want to contribute to improving society while keeping their options open, building an ever-more impressive résumé and delaying long-term career decisions.
nytimes.comHow totally creepy. Before they start their meaningless careers they go to 'teach to the poor' to experience meaning. And to build their resumes.
rootsie on 10.02.05 @ 12:11 PM CST [
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Straight Out of Sudan: A Child Soldier Raps
...Given his background, it is easy to view Mr. Jal as more of a metaphor than an artist - a Christian seeking peace with Muslims, a product of violence who rejects violence, a refugee turned spokesman. In Britain last year he became a cause célèbre with a thick press packet even though his sole recording, the religious-minded 2004 LP "Gua," was (and still is) available only as an obscure Kenyan import. The publicity even helped earn him an invitation to perform in the multicity Live 8 concerts organized by Sir Bob Geldof to raise awareness of global poverty - although Mr. Jal was relegated to a tiny satellite event for African artists that never made the broadcast.
"I met Bob Geldof and he told me I have to sell four million copies of my CD before I can perform at Hyde Park," Mr. Jal recalled, referring to the event's main location in London. "I was thinking someone like me needs to be exposed so people would hear the message I have. And if they like my music, they could buy it - it would be a good chance for practicing fair trade," he added, laughing.
nytimes.com"More of a metaphor than an artist"...more imperialist discourse. It's always what blacks represent, and never who they are.
rootsie on 10.02.05 @ 12:05 PM CST [
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Britain warns of clash of civilisations in row over Turkey
...Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, is warning of the geopolitical consequences of delivering a rebuff to Turkey. "We're concerned about a so-called clash of civilisations," he told The Politics Show, to be broadcast on BBC1 at noon today. "We're concerned about this theological-political divide, which could open up even further down the boundary between so-called Christian-heritage states and those of Islamic heritage. We need to see Turkey in the European Union and not pushed the other way."
independent.co.ukIt's so 21st century: instead of fighting the alien Ottomans we remove their dread threat by turning them into collaborators.
rootsie on 10.02.05 @ 11:57 AM CST [
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Colin MacCabe: Why I'm tearing up my Labour party card
Dear Tony,
I'm writing to you as the leader of the party from which I am now resigning. I joined the Labour party in 1964 but this week is the first time I have felt ashamed of my membership. You will say it was an accident that two men were viciously bundled from the conference hall on Wednesday. But then you lie as you breathe. It is impossible that you do not know that when you took power as Labour leader you were determined to stamp out all public dissent and discussion within the party. It is impossible, in a more recent time frame, that you did not know and approve of the decision that there would be no debate on Iraq.
Even as I write this phrase, its absurdity, its grotesqueness hits me again. No debate on Iraq, no debate on the most important foreign policy issue that has confronted Britain since World War Two. No debate on Iraq, which has brought such a fear of violence to London. No debate on Iraq - on the national disaster with which the names of Guantanamo and Britain will be linked in infamy for our generation and probably beyond.
It is unthinkable that the Labour party could not debate the Iraqi war. But, of course, it is equally unthinkable that it could. For the situation there is so dire, the peril in which you have placed the nation is so acute that if even the smallest murmurs of evidence and argument were to be heard they would soon become a gale that would sweep you from office. It was telling that you did not even dare to speak to the old geezer they roughed up. But you had only to take one look at Walter Wolfgang and you could see Old Labour incarnate. An Old Labour that believed in swaying democratic opinion by fact and reason. An Old Labour that believed in debate. Given 60 seconds in front of the television cameras with Wolfgang and you'd have been mincemeat. You presided over a government which suborned its security services to provide false headlines for you to mislead the Commons into voting for the war. Worse, you ignored every lesson of our last imperial disaster in Mesopotamia - a campaign which became a byword for our soldiers being slaughtered to satisfy the vanity of politicians.
observor.guardian.co.ukouch.
rootsie on 10.02.05 @ 11:51 AM CST [
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No heroine's welcome for reporter who spent her summer in jail
...Unfortunately for the paper [NY Times] more questions than answers have been thrown up by Ms Miller's abrupt volte-face.
Should she be celebrated as a media martyr who stood up for the right of reporters to protect the identities of sources? Or is this to do with her - and the paper's - mistaken reporting before the Iraq war of Saddam Hussein's purported stash of weapons of mass destruction?
...In March 2004, the paper published an astonishing mea culpa, singling out six articles that had given credence to the administration's claims about weapons of mass destruction without sufficient evidence. Four of those were written by Ms Miller.
...There is much still to be explained. It has also been reported that among those who went to visit Ms Miller in prison was the controversial US envoy to the UN, John Bolton. No one knows what his involvement in this affair might be.
Critics speculate the following, however: Ms Miller's reputation was in shreds after the Iraq invasion. Going to prison on behalf of journalists everywhere provided a good distraction.
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 10.02.05 @ 11:46 AM CST [
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Newspaper Stands by Iran Oil-Threat Story
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - A Dubai-based newspaper said Sunday it stands by a story in which it quoted Iran's president as saying he might curtail oil sales if his nation is referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions over its nuclear program.
However, the Khaleej Times acknowledged that the confusion might have arisen because the reporter, a freelance journalist, told the president she was working for another paper.
After the story quoting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared Saturday, the president's office issued a statement saying he "never had an interview, either oral or written" with the newspaper.
On Sunday, the newspaper said the reporter on several occasions "presented herself (to Ahmadinejad) as a reporter with the American-based Arabic News, and not as a Khaleej Times reporter, though she has given this report exclusively to Khaleej Times."
news.yahoo.comIran Hints of Reductions of Oil Sales Over Nuclear DisputeThe NY Times does not mention the controversy.
rootsie on 10.02.05 @ 11:40 AM CST [
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Melting Planet
Species are dying out faster than we have dared recognise, scientists will warn this week. The erosion of polar ice is the first break in a fragile chain of life extending across the planet, from bears in the north to penguins in the far south.
The polar bear is one of the natural world's most famous predators - the king of the Arctic wastelands. But, like its vast Arctic home, the polar bear is under unprecedented threat. Both are disappearing with alarming speed.
Thinning ice and longer summers are destroying the bears' habitat, and as the ice floes shrink, the desperate animals are driven by starvation into human settlements - to be shot. Stranded polar bears are drowning in large numbers as they try to swim hundreds of miles to find increasingly scarce ice floes. Local hunters find their corpses floating on seas once coated in a thick skin of ice.
It is a phenomenon that frightens the native people that live around the Arctic. Many fear their children will never know the polar bear. "The ice is moving further and further north," said Charlie Johnson, 64, an Alaskan Nupiak from Nome, in the state's far west. "In the Bering Sea the ice leaves earlier and earlier. On the north slope, the ice is retreating as far as 300 or 400 miles offshore."
Last year, hunters found half a dozen bears that had drowned about 200 miles north of Barrow, on Alaska's northern coast. "It seems they had tried to swim for shore ... A polar bear might be able to swim 100 miles but not 400."
His alarming testimony, given at a conference on global warming and native communities held in the Alaskan capital, Anchorage, last week, is just one story of the many changes happening across the globe. Climate change threatens the survival of thousands of species - a threat unparalleled since the last ice age, which ended some 10,000 years ago.
The vast majority, scientists will warn this week, are migratory animals - sperm whales, polar bears, gazelles, garden birds and turtles - whose survival depends on the intricate web of habitats, food supplies and weather conditions which, for some species, can stretch for 6,500 miles. Every link of that chain is slowly but perceptibly altering.
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 10.02.05 @ 11:33 AM CST [
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Israeli army to investigate West Bank shooting of Palestinian boy
...The army said that the boy had been killed when soldiers in the West Bank town encountered Palestinians throwing stones and bottles at them. Thinking an armed Palestinian was approaching them, it said, they opened fire. But Mr Tantawi said a medical examination had shown several bullets were fired at his son's chest.
He told the Yedhiot Ahronot website: "You need to look at the body to understand it was a targeted shooting with the intention to kill.
"One bullet pierced his heart and exited his back. No religion in the world, no morality or law can explain what happened." He said children who had been with the boy at a local park had told him they were playing at the time of the shooting. His comments came as Hamas lost ground to the dominant Fatah party in the West Bank municipal elections.
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 10.02.05 @ 11:29 AM CST [
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On the recent killing "al-Zarqawi's 2nd in command"
Some 'Intelligence' are intelligent enough to question this abundance of "top lietenants":
"U.S. intelligence officials and counterterrorism analysts are questioning whether a slain terrorist—described by President Bush today as the “second-most-wanted Al Qaeda leader in Iraq”—was as significant a figure as the Bush administration is claiming."
The 'Second' Man: The slain Abu Azzam may not have been Zarqawi’s top deputy after all September 29, 2005
Recalling that back in 2004, it was reported :
"A Jordanian extremist suspected of bloody suicide attacks in Iraq was killed some time ago in U.S. bombing and a letter outlining plans for fomenting sectarian war is a forgery, a statement allegedly from an insurgent group west of the capital said.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in the Sulaimaniyah mountains of northern Iraq “during the American bombing there,” according to a statement circulated in Fallujah this week and signed by the “Leadership of the Allahu Akbar Mujahedeen.”
The statement did not say when al-Zarqawi was supposedly killed, but U.S. jets bombed strongholds of the extremist Ansar al-Islam in the north last April as Saddam Hussein’s regime was collapsing.
It said al-Zarqawi was unable to escape the bombing because of his artificial leg.
Before the Iraq conflict began last March, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said al-Zarqawi received hospital treatment in Baghdad after fleeing Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence sources said he apparently was fitted with an artificial leg.
The statement said the “fabricated al-Zarqawi memo” has been used by the U.S.-run coalition “to back up their theory of a civil war” in Iraq."
Iraq militants claim al-Zarqawi is dead March 4, 2004.
Does Zarqawi have an infinite supply of lieutenants/deputies/aides/associates/second-in-commands/etc., or do we just arbitrarily declare that every 100th insurgent we capture or kill is "a top aide" to Zarqawi?
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Below is an almost comprehensive list (I'm sure I missed a few) of Zarqawi's "top lieutenants" we've captured, killed, or acknowledged over the last two and a half years. I count 33.
uruknet.infoSunni death cult is pushing Iraq towards civil war...Most of the insurgents are by the admission of the US military Iraqi Sunni nationalists fighting to end the occupation. The neo-Salafi differ because they see this as only part of their struggle to create a fundamentalist Islamic state in Iraq...
The foreign volunteers are used as cannon-fodder and supply most of the suicide bombs. Most volunteers come from Saudi Arabia. The exact role of Zarqawi is uncertain because he claims all attacks. The US has been happy to promote him as bogeyman and all-purpose demonic enemy. He renamed his group al-Qa'ida in Iraq in October 2004 but appears never to have met Osama bin Laden.
Despite the impact of the foreign suicide bombers, the number of foreign fighters in Iraq is low, about 3,000 out of 30,000 insurgents in total. The US military said this summer that 90 per cent of the resistance is Iraqi and Sunni.
Mr Cordesman believes that "Zarqawi does not dominate the neo-Salafi and Sunni extremist insurgency in Iraq, but he has become its symbol". At times his statements are directed against Shias as whole; at others he distinguishes between the pro-government Shia and Kurdish parties and those that are more nationalist, such Muqtada al-Sadr's movement. Whatever the rhetoric, car bombs and suicide attacks are directed at killing as many Shia civilians as possible.
The neo-Salafi groups, believing they are fighting in God's cause, will never negotiate and have no interest in seeking compromise. Their ferocity makes them difficult to uproot. In Fallujah last year they told 11 imams of mosques whom they considered hostile that they would kill their children in front of them if they did not stop preaching.
Well all these years we have had it pounded into our heads that the Shia are the fundamentalist extremists. How does supposed'Zarqawi' who supposedly fought with the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan emerge as a symbol for Sunnis? You'd think that Shi'ite Nationalists like al Sadr would appeal to peace-loving US and UK, but look at Fallujah. The idea I keep in mind is that anybody fomenting civil war is a friend to/creature of Blair and Bush.Middle-Class Family Life in Iraq Withers Amid the Chaos of War ...Educated, invested in businesses and properties and eager for change, the middle class here had everything to gain from the American effort.
But frustration is hardening into hopelessness, as families feel increasingly trapped by the many forces that are threatening to tear the country apart.
Insurgents fight gun battles on their streets. Sectarian divisions are seeping into their children's classrooms and even their own dinner table discussions. Their secular voices are barely audible above the din of religious politicians and the poorer Iraqis they appeal to.
The daily life the middle class describe is an obstacle course of gasoline lines, blocked roads and late-night generator repairs.
In these families' homes, the talk is mostly about leaving. "For Sale" signs dot the gates of the houses on their block. But gathering children and extended families is proving difficult, and many families, potentially the most skilled builders of democracy here, are bracing themselves for a future that appears to them increasingly under siege.
rootsie on 10.02.05 @ 11:24 AM CST [
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Saturday, October 1st
Abort Every White Baby!
by Justin Felux
Bill Bennett, a prominent right-wing blowhard, has recently come under intense fire for remarks made on his radio show, in which he stated, "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could ... abort every black baby in this country." He quickly backed away from the proposition, saying "That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down." It's unfortunate that Bennett chose to be so politically correct, because I think he may be onto something here. He's just wrong about the target. If we really wanna get tough on crime, it's the white babies who should start getting the coat hanger treatment.
Consider the fact that whites commit three times as many violent crimes as blacks every year, just in raw numbers. This is just for ordinary "street crimes" such as assault. The numbers become skewed out of this world when you consider "white-collar" crimes (typically, the collar isn't the only thing that's white).
For instance, job-related accidents and illnesses claimed the lives of 70,000 Americans in 1992, a significant portion of which can be chalked up to white employers neglecting to comply with occupational health and safety laws. According to studies, up to 64,000 die every year due to pollution and other environmental hazards produced by industry. Another 21,700 die due to consumer product deaths, costing the nation $200 billion a year. Another $200 billion is lost annually due to white-collar embezzlement. These two statistics alone add up to over 26 times the amount of all the robberies and petty thefts committed every year combined!
We should also not forget the ravages of the white-owned health care system and insurance industry. Around 18,000 adults are killed every year as a result of a lack of medical coverage. Over 25 thousand die as a result of unnecessary prescriptions and surgeries performed by mostly white doctors. All in all, corporate criminals take about ten times as many lives as street criminals. And I haven't even mentioned the white men who control the apparatus of state, which through war, sanctions, and other means kills hundreds of thousands, if not millions more. Over 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq alone, for example.
I don't know about you, but every time I see a white man in a suit I find a place to hide. Once I feel safe, I call the Department of Homeland Security to report his suspicious activity. I simply don't feel safe knowing that all these savage, white thugs are out walking the streets. After all, from Bob Chambliss to Timothy McVeigh to Eric Rudolph, by far most of the terrorist attacks in America have been committed by whites.
Which brings me to my next point: even if a white guy isn't wearing a suit, you still shouldn't assume that he isn't dangerous. One can find a plethora of deadly and pathological behaviors uniquely prevalent among whites who look just as ordinary as you and me. Most notable among them are spree killing, serial murder, and cannibalism. About 90% of all serial killers are white men. Some other white pastimes include animal torture, vampirism, Satan worship, witchcraft, self-mutilation, eating disorders, and child sexual molestation. White men engage in child sexual abuse at twice the rate of black men. By aborting all the white babies, we will be protecting a great many children from the horror of enduring abuse at the hands of white male sex perverts (pardon the redundancy), in addition to preventing the creation of new white molesters in the future.
Alas, even if we allowed white fetuses to continue living, and they manage to avoid the pitfalls of vampirism, corporate employment, and serial murder, the odds are still pretty good that they will turn out to be hopeless drunks. Whites are 74% more likely than blacks to binge drink regularly. In fact, there are more binge drinking whites than there are blacks in the entire population of the country! Naturally, whites are twice as likely as blacks to drive drunk, resulting in over ten thousand deaths every year. The same trend can be seen when considering drug use in general, contrary to popular belief. Whites make up 74% of illegal drug users, whereas only 14% are black. Whites make up a majority of drug dealers as well.
Given all of these facts, can there be any doubt that aborting every white baby would not only reduce the crime rate, but would also result in a much safer, cleaner, and happier existence for all Americans? I can already hear some of you sissy liberals whining about "human rights" or some other nonsense. In reality, you are soft on crime and lack the rugged individualism necessary to get things done. At the very least, we should start forcibly sterilizing white males, much in the same way we did to Latinas and black women up until the 1970s.
I think the most interesting debate will be over the question of what to do with mixed race babies. Should we apply the "one drop" rule, whereby one drop of white blood marks the fetus for termination? I doubt we'll need to take it to that extreme. If the baby is say, 1/8 white, then its more destructive tendencies should be sufficiently diluted. Nevertheless, police and homeland security should still apply increased scrutiny to individuals whose skin looks suspiciously pale. I'm sure Bill Bennett wouldn't mind taking a little harassment from the cops if it results in a safer America for everyone.
zmag.org
rootsie on 10.01.05 @ 09:21 PM CST [
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Lloyd Hart:African Food Exports vs. African Starvation
The only reason people in Africa are starving is because Africans do not control the vast majority of traditional prime and irrigated farmland as they once did before the White barbarian came and took control of that land for the very purpose of exporting food back to Europe and America (the prime export the US imported from Africa through their European colonial partners was the result of good African food, well raised healthy African slaves).
If Africans want to raise their standard of living they must seize the land where food is grown for export by the white controlled multinational agribusiness conglomerates and simply internalize those food stocks until everyone in Africa is guaranteed to eat well for the rest of their lives. If after that is accomplished and there's room for exports so be it, but not until then.
As a part of land reform African nations must stop thinking in the western nationalistic format and go back to tribal thinking and simply redraw African borders to recreate tribal homelands in order to reduce tribal conflict over nationalistic power. The tribal system is not perfect however it is a great deal better than the nationalistic system and borders the put in place for the purposes of dividing and conquering tribal thinking.
There was a time when drummers could distribute a message anywhere in Africa in a day through the continent wide communications cooperation system that came out of the tribal thinking. Today with nationalistic thinking Africa is divided by conflict carefully manipulated to advance the European invader’s cause. European’s bought and sold African leaders within the Artificial Nationalistic Monetary System that every day pushes the average African outside the marketplace where they are left to starve to death.
There is a reason why tribal systems developed and tribal territories formed. It is because they work. By working I mean the instinctual hard wired goal of individual health and freedom of movement throughout the tribal territory and beyond to seek procreation are fulfilled. Nationalistic enterprises fail in this matter on all fronts. Nationalism makes malnutrition slaves of everyone allowing disease to set in and decimate populations.
Nationalism has long been a handy tool of Europeans when invading and occupying a territory for its resources and slave labor. This is because Europeans wiped out almost all of their own tribal knowledge and know-how through the tool of Christian imperialism. Tribal leaders became Christian ordained kings. Christian ordained kings built city-state's where power became concentrated and lead poisoning drove the ruling class insane and paranoid causing the destruction of folk or peasant or tribal knowledge forcing the vast majority of the populations in Europe to rely almost completely upon psychotic ruling elite's for guidance in their daily lives.
I know that this solution of rejecting all things colonial and global will be resisted by some corrupt African leaders but just as an example: when Mugabe attempted land reform during the first years of the newly formed government of Zimbabwe that replaced the former European regime of Rhodesia, that effort failed for the simple fact that the European and his global economy did not support it, did everything to sabotage it and most certainly did not give up any of the prime farmland in Zimbabwe in order to make it work. Instead ,corporate farming for export controlled by White corporate interests went on uninterrupted creating and entrenching resentment and the messy results of Mugabe's present land reform program in which the slum dwellers in the cities are having their shanty shacks bulldozed forcing those slum dwellers to migrate back to rural areas in order to populate the recently seized white controlled plantations. Plantations where the Chinese are being contracted to create crop solutions which I am sure the Chinese are looking forward to taking advantage.
In other words Tony Blair and George Bush and for that matter any previous president or prime minister has never once suggested land reform for Zimbabwe or for any other nation and in fact Tony Blair and George Bush have moved aggressively in international currency markets to isolate Zimbabwe by devaluing Zimbabwe's currency to nearly nothing.
When I hear White Liberals here in America complain about Mugabes' latest land reform moves in Zimbabwe I have to scoff at them and ridicule them and say "what did you expect would happen?" "Did you expect the cute little Africans to just accept a limited form of political democracy with absolutely no economic democracy?" "
off you stupid morons!" "Why are you not providing help to Zimbabwe? Economic models for land reform and the democratization of their economy?" "Why isn't Tony Blair offering help to Zimbabwe to make sure land reform in Zimbabwe is really land reform? Instead Der Furor Blair is imposing economic isolation declaring economic warfare on the entire population of Zimbabwe?"
In Zimbabwe one tribe, the Shona, has dominated the other, the Matabele. These are the two major tribes that dominate the Zimbabwean population and politics. This within the single border nation state the British forcibly imposed has led to endless political conflict. Mugabe, who belongs to the Shona guaranteeing perpetual reelection, has finally gotten completely pissed off at the deceit of the Europeans and as much as it is very messy what Mugabe is doing, it is a lot less messy than what the European is doing globally.
If any White American and British subject or for that matter any colonial power with absolute economic control over any portion of Africa's destiny wishes to comment or complain about what Mugabe is doing in Zimbabwe and be heard with any credibility by Africans they must first apologize to Africans at the UN just as the Germans had to apologize to the Jews. Then just as the Germans had to pay for their crimes against the Jews, they must pay reparations to Africa for everything the White barbarian robbed from Africa which includes the land they still control in Africa.
emergingminds.org
rootsie on 10.01.05 @ 11:03 AM CST [
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Chavez: Venezuela Moves Reserves to Europe
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Venezuela has moved its central bank foreign reserves out of U.S. banks, liquidated its investments in U.S. Treasury securities and placed the funds in Europe, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Friday.
"We've had to move the international reserves from U.S. banks because of the threats," from the U.S., Chavez said during televised remarks from a South American summit in Brazil.
"The reserves we had (invested) in U.S. Treasury bonds, we've sold them and we moved them to Europe and other countries," he said.
msn.com
rootsie on 10.01.05 @ 10:58 AM CST [
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Guardian Oct. 1, 1918:Lawrence leads Arabs into Damascus
Arab horsemen from distant Hejaz today galloped in triumph through the streets of Damascus. As the sun was rising over the mosques and spires, Major TE Lawrence, the young British officer whose tactical guidance has ensured the success of the Arab revolt, drove through the lines in an armoured car. One Arab rider waved his head-dress and shouted, "Damascus salutes you".
Led by Emir Feisal, son of Sherif Hussein, now to be King of Syria, and his British friend Lawrence, who had fought the Turks all the way from Arabia, the Arabs were first into the capital.
...
There is a serious danger that law and order may break down in a place packed an excitable mixture of desert and city Arabs. Notables who until the last minute worked with the Turks now proclaim their loyalty to the Allies. Already there are reports that some have been shot. General Allenby's first task will be to install a military government to keep order and restore the city's public services.
Conforming to arrangements agreed with Britain, the French will take control of Syria. General Allenby's army is preparing to move east to link up with French forces whose task is now to take the port of Beirut in Lebanon.
guardian.co.ukHmm...could history provide a clue about Islamic rage? Your war of liberation from the Turks delivers your people into European hands.
rootsie on 10.01.05 @ 10:45 AM CST [
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Educated Fools
Conservative commentator William Bennett yesterday defended comments he made on his radio talk show suggesting that aborting black children would reduce crime, saying he was merely musing about a hypothetical argument and he made plain to listeners that he was not stating his own position.
Bennett, a former U.S. education secretary and national drug policy director, is under fire from Democrats, civil rights leaders, black conservatives and, as of yesterday, the White House and the Republican Party for saying Wednesday that "you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down."
He added immediately that such a thing would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do."
Yesterday, with the storm over these comments intensifying, Bennett released a defiant statement saying critics unfairly had pulled his comment out of context: "A thought experiment about public policy, on national radio, should not have received the condemnations it has."
Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, in a statement typical of a parade of similar comments from Democrats, denounced the remarks and called on Bennett to apologize. "Bill Bennett's hateful, inflammatory remarks regarding African Americans are simply inexcusable," he said. ". . . Are these the values of the Republican Party and its conservative allies?"
The White House and other Republicans made haste to say that the answer to Dean's question is no. Asked President Bush's reaction to Bennett's remarks, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, "The president believes the comments were not appropriate."
Similarly, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, who has been reaching out to African Americans and other minorities, called Bennett's comments "regrettable and inappropriate." But Mehlman also lashed out at liberals whom he accused of engaging in racially divisive rhetoric when it suits their interests: "What's much worse is the hypocrisy . . . from the left."
The combative Bennett, whose syndicated radio show airs on the Salem Radio Network, offered no apologies. He explained that his comments came in response to a caller who suggested that Social Security would be in better financial shape if abortion were illegal, leaving more people to pay into the system. Bennett cautioned against making such far-reaching arguments and drove home his point by offering what he called "a noxious hypothetical analogy" to reducing crime by aborting black children.
Bennett's statement went on to say that "the whole issue of crime and race" has been on people's minds in light of the situation in New Orleans, and is aired frequently in academic settings. Given that, he called his comments barely noteworthy.
"Anyone paying attention to this debate should be offended by those who have selectively quoted me, distorted my meaning, and taken out of context the dialogue I engaged in this week," his statement said.
Others disagreed. Michelle D. Bernard, senior vice president of the conservative Independent Women's Forum, said Bennett's remarks underscore why many African Americans distrust conservatives even if they share similar values on some social and religious issues.
"In choosing to use the hypothetical genocide of black children as a way to reduce crime . . ., Bennett shamefully traded on the pervasive stereotype that it is African Americans who are responsible for all of the crime in the United States," she said. "People wonder why black people don't trust . . . notions such as compassionate conservatism, and Bill Bennett just added fuel to the fire the Bush administration has worked hard to put out."
Robert Woodson Sr., president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, said "it was stupid" for Bennett to even ruminate on such an explosive topic but defended him as a good man. "Sometimes intellectuals become detached from common sense," he said.
washingtonpost.com First 'impossible', then 'ridiculous', and only then 'morally reprehensible.' Arrogant fool that he is Bennett does not get it. A 'thought experiment' indeed. Maybe some wishful thinking. Look at the splitting that goes on: despite it all he's 'a good man.' Hypocrite Dean chimes in, the guy who said the way to deal with race is by not dealing with it at allMedia Matters article: Addressing a caller's suggestion that the "lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years" would be enough to preserve Social Security's solvency, radio host and former Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett dismissed such "far-reaching, extensive extrapolations" by declaring that if "you wanted to reduce crime ... if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Bennett conceded that aborting all African-American babies "would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do," then added again, "but the crime rate would go down."
Bennett's remark was apparently inspired by the claim that legalized abortion has reduced crime rates, which was posited in the book Freakonomics (William Morrow, May 2005) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. But Levitt and Dubner argued that aborted fetuses would have been more likely to grow up poor and in single-parent or teenage-parent households and therefore more likely to commit crimes; they did not put forth Bennett's race-based argument.
From the September 28 broadcast of Salem Radio Network's Bill Bennett's Morning in America:
CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.
BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?
CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.
BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.
CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.
BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --
CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.
BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.
rootsie on 10.01.05 @ 10:44 AM CST [
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Lewis 'Scooter' Libby
Lewis "Scooter" Libby has been called Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney: a constant presence behind the scenes enforcing loyalty providing the means to meet his boss's ends.
Mr Libby (who earned his nickname as a hyperactive infant) played a central role in compiling the White House's allegations of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, travelling with the vice-president to the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, several times in 2002 to chivy sceptical agency analysts.
Before Colin Powell made his fateful presentation of the WMD case to the UN in February 2003, it was Mr Libby who tried to persuade the former secretary of state to include controversial reports that Mohammed Atta, the leader of the September 11 hijackers, had met an Iraqi agent in Prague. Mr Powell rejected the claims but Mr Libby did not give up, telephoning him late into the night on the eve of the presentation, calling for the inclusion of other allegations.
Mr Libby also contacted the Pentagon before a substantial contract to repair Iraq's oil fields was awarded to Halliburton, Mr Cheney's old firm. And he talked to Time magazine's Matt Cooper and the New York Times's Judy Miller in July 2003 about the identity of a CIA undercover agent, Valerie Plame who was the wife of a prominent administration critic.
He joined the Bush administration along the same path followed by many influential officials. After taking a political science class at Yale given by Paul Wolfowitz, the current head of the World Bank, he became part of a network of neo-conservatives known as "the Vulcans". Mr Wolfowitz later persuaded him to drop his private law practice and join the Reagan administration.
He moved from the state department to the Pentagon under the first President Bush, where a policy paper he wrote calling for the US to build up its military strength to the point where it could not be challenged, caught the eye of the then defence secretary, Mr Cheney.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 10.01.05 @ 09:33 AM CST [
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Life for farmer who threw man to lions
A white farmer convicted of murdering a black former employee and throwing him to a pride of lions was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday at the end of a case that hit a raw nerve across South Africa, highlighting simmering racial tensions 11 years after the end of apartheid.
Crowds of angry black people inside and outside the courtroom in the small rural town of Phalaborwa cheered when Judge George Maluleke sentenced Mark Scott-Crossley to life imprisonment. Simon Mathebula, an employee of Scott-Crossleya who was also convicted of the murder, received 15 years, with three years suspended, as the judge ruled that he was merely an accomplice.
The two men were convicted of killing Nelson Chisale in January 2004. Mr Chisale had been sacked by Scott-Crossley a month before but returned to the farm to retrieve some pots and pans. He was seized by Mathebula, who tied him to a tree and, with Scott-Crossley, beat him until he lost consciousness, the court was told.
Scott-Crossley then used his pickup truck to carry Mr Chisale several miles away to a farm where rare white lions were being bred. With the help of Mathebula and two other employees, Scott-Crossley threw Mr Chisale into an enclosure which held five lions.
All that was found of Mr Chisale were a few bones and some shredded clothes. His remains were identified by a single finger from which police could take a print. Although the autopsy stated that Mr Chisale had died from being "mauled by lions", it was not clear whether he was dead before being thrown into the pen or not.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 10.01.05 @ 09:25 AM CST [
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Amazon dries out as worst ever drought hits rainforest
Large parts of the Amazon rainforest are at their driest in living memory, a direct consequence, scientists say, of the severe hurricane season off the US Gulf coast.
Rainfall has been significantly below average this year along the Rio Solimoes and the Rio Madeira, two of the major Brazilian tributaries that flow into the Amazon, causing water levels to drop to record lows. Rivers and lakes are drying up, revealing huge sandbanks and making navigation difficult for boats. Since many towns are only accessible by river, medicine, food and fuel are running out in some communities.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 10.01.05 @ 09:20 AM CST [
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Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal
WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.
In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 10.01.05 @ 09:15 AM CST [
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Blame the Sun: It doesn't have a press secretary
Study: Sun's Changes to Blame for Part of Global Warming
Increased output from the Sun might be to blame for 10 to 30 percent of global warming that has been measured in the past 20 years, according to a new report.
Increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases still play a role, the scientists say.
But climate models of global warming should be corrected to better account for changes in solar activity, according to Nicola Scafetta and Bruce West of Duke University.
livescience.com
rootsie on 10.01.05 @ 09:14 AM CST [
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