Understanding Root Causes, by Charles Sullivan

Imagine, if you will, that you are fielding a baseball team. You are a player on a team that possesses immense talent. Your opponent has never lost a game. The opposition is undefeated not because its players are superior to your own, but because it makes the rules of the game to assure its own victory. It wins because your team has to play by a fixed set of rules that it does not. Although you have an excellent pitcher on the mound, the strike zone is microscopic and in constant flux. Your opponent’s pitcher, however, enjoys a huge strike zone. Your opponent also owns all of the umpires officiating the contest. Who but a fool would play such a game with the expectation of competing, much less winning? The outcome of that game, no matter how well your team performs, has already been determined. To participate in such a charade is an exercise in futility.

Those of us who demand a better America find ourselves the unwitting participants in just such a game. We are in good faith trying to operate in a system that is inherently unjust. Corporate lobbyists have overrun the capitol, as well as every branch of government, including the judiciary. Corporations lord immense power over both people and process, when they should be servants to the people. Legislation is sold to the highest bidder. Workers, comprising some ninety percent of the populace, have no representation or protection against the industry predators that exploits them. We are bound by rules that our rulers are not. We cannot possibly compete in this system; much less create democratic freedoms and equality. The system operates on monetary capital, not moral capital. The system does not deserve our loyalty or our participation. The time has come to create a new game with a level playing field. Working people are weary of serving “The Man.”

Justice cannot be served without the full participation of the people in the process, and at every level.

Thinking that we can reform a system of economics and politics that is rotten to the core only serves the interest of wealth and power. Reform can do no more than maintain the status quo; it will assure the continuation of the present system in which power and influence is concentrated in the hands of a few, at the expense of the many.

Let us finally have the courage to acknowledge that the root cause of virtually everything that ails America can trace its origins to capitalism in its various incarnations. We have built our political and economic institutions upon a rotten foundation. The system cannot long stand. Under capitalism, the large majority will always be subservient to the small minority. To call this form of plutocratic despotism a democracy is an insult to our intelligence. How can any nation declare itself free when the great majority of its people are wage slaves to plutocrats and corporations? When they are cannon fodder for its powerful military?

If ever we are to have a chance at becoming a free and democratic society, rather than the permanent war economy we have become, capitalism must go. Working class people must come to see capitalism as the enemy it is. The way to democracy lies in putting the means of production into the hands of the workers themselves. But first the economy must be pried lose from the fingers of the plutocrats and the corporatists who claim to own it.

Political freedom can only occur through economic emancipation. Not only can the present economy not long endure -- it must inevitably collapse of its own excess and waste. Meanwhile, we must organize the work place with an old revolutionary unionism that was in vogue more than a hundred years ago. It was revolutionary unionism that gave us the weekend, paid vacation, and the eight-hour workday by prying them from the hands of the capitalists.

Loyalty to a system that is inherently unjust cannot provide justice to the masses. This will only assure the unbroken continuation of the unjust outcomes that are injurious to the great majority of the people. America is dying from the cancer of capitalism. The malignancy cannot be cured by giving her a few aspirins. Radical treatment is the only hope for her survival. The alternative is the certain death of hope for the vast majority of the people. Hope lies in the smoldering rubble of empire.

Working people must be more than the property of their employers. We must be more than machines to be exploited by those with wealth and power. Workers must emancipate themselves from the system of power and corruption that enslaves them and smothers their dreams for social and economic justice. The way to that freedom is through the economy -- industrial freedom.

The machinery that produces wealth for the small minority through the enslavement of the great majority came into being with public funds. For example, huge tracts of land were given to the railroads at the behest of corporate lawyers -- an advantage not enjoyed by people of average means. Never mind that this land was stolen from the Indians. However, capitalism allows the private ownership of the economic engines that drive the country. It fosters the concentration of wealth at the top by exploiting everyone below the top. That which was created with public funds belongs to the public, not to those with the capital to buy control through the courts and congress. Power to the people means that those who produce should enjoy fully the fruits of their labor, not merely a small percentage of it. This is assuredly the most just and expeditious means of self-emancipation from industrial slavery.

Through the deliberate perversion of language, with the aid of the commercial media and its lackeys, truth has been distorted almost beyond recognition. We the people must wake up from our stupor and understand how and why we are in the present predicament. Let us speak plain and clear truth to power whose meaning cannot be mistaken: Power to the people!

It is the pervasion of language that enables those who plunder the earth, which enslave the work force; and buy legislation from the law makers that legalizes criminality, to be called patriots or super patriots; while those who defend the earth from corporate marauders; who uphold and defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, are labeled unpatriotic or terrorists. We cannot allow this perversion of language to stand. Its sole purpose betrays our just cause and serves those with wealth and power, by betraying the core values that govern the behavior of the rest of us.

George Bush and his minions are not an aberration. They are the natural and expected fruit of capitalism run amok. Capitalists believe in plutocratic and corporate rule, the concentration of wealth and power. They are the product of a system of economic inequality and privilege that exploits the huge majority of the population and subjugates them into wage slavery as ‘at will’ employees. It preys upon the just -- those who play by the rules. The quagmire in Iraq, and the one to come in Iran, and in hundreds of other places, is the result of the social and economic injustice fostered by capitalism. Treating the symptoms will not affect a cure. Only addressing root causes can do that.

By engaging in party politics, the practice of pitting conservative against liberal, liberal against conservative, we are playing into the hands of the status quo. I have been all too guilty of this practice myself. It is an easy trap to fall into. By so doing we are unwittingly creating a diversion, a smoke screen, for the empire builders and power brokers to continue to play the game safely out of public view, assuring the same results, regardless of which party is in power.

To illustrate this point, consider the difference between George Bush and John Kerry in the last presidential election was more a matter of semantics than of substance. Both men are the product of wealth and privilege; neither of them represents the great majority of the people, the working class. Neither do their cohorts in Congress, an increasing number of which are millionaires. The appearance of choice is only an illusion, designed to deceive and to paralyze. By such means the system – capitalism -- wins and the people lose by being the unwittingly servants of empire. The ruling class remains in power and the working class remain their obedient servants. We must stop working against ourselves. We have enough to do to overcome the real enemy.

As incredible as it may seem, the average liberal and the average conservative have more in common with one another, than they have in common with their respective political parties and their champions. The great majority of conservatives and liberals are victims of a system that not only does not serve them -- it exploits them. Thus when conservatives take to heart the rhetoric of the vitriolic Rush Limbaugh, a wealthy white man, a product of the system; a member of the ruling class -- they are in fact working against their own self interest. They are allowing themselves to be exploited and played for fools, while thieves make off with everything they own. Who benefits? Limbaugh and the ruling class who are using the system for their own ends -- that is who benefits. Ordinary people of average means would be wise not to set foot into that trap because it does not serve their cause. We are spending too much time and energy fighting one another, rather than the real enemy, the system itself -- capitalism.

History bears me out on my assertion that capitalism has never served the interest of ordinary working people. It never will. The sooner we understand this fact, the better.

FBI Agents Back Down When Librarian Refuses to Let Them Seize 30 Computers Without a Warrant, by Andrea Foster

An e-mail threat that prompted the evacuation of more than a dozen Brandeis University buildings on January 18 led to an unusual standoff in a public library in Newton, Mass., a few miles from the Brandeis campus.

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents tried to seize 30 of the library's computers without a warrant, saying someone had used the library's Internet connection to send the threat to Brandeis. But the library director, Kathy Glick-Weil, told the agents they could not take the machines unless they got a warrant first. Newton's mayor, David Cohen, backed Ms. Glick-Weil up.

After a brief standoff, FBI officials relented and sought a warrant from a judge. Meanwhile, Ms. Glick-Weil allowed an FBI computer-forensics examiner to work with information-technology specialists at the library to narrow down which computers might have been used to send the threatening message. They determined that three computers were implicated in the alleged crime.

Late that evening, the FBI received a warrant to cart away the three computers. According to Mayor Cohen, the warrant allows the FBI to view only the threatening e-mail message and the messages sent immediately before and after that message.

Mr. Cohen said in an interview on Monday that he and Ms. Glick-Weil demanded the warrant because the FBI agents did not indicate that anyone at Brandeis faced a "clear and present danger." If there had been such a danger, Mr. Cohen added, agents probably would have seized the computers without even asking for them.

"We were able to both protect public safety and also protect the rights of people, the sense of privacy of many, many innocent users of the computers," he said. "Had we given them the computers, they would have gotten to see e-mails from ordinary citizens doing ordinary things and would not have preserved privacy."

About a half hour before FBI agents arrived at the library, Mr. Cohen had received a call from the U.S. attorney's office in Boston saying that Brandeis had received a credible threat, and that it had come from a computer in a Newton library. Newton and Waltham, where Brandeis is located, are suburbs of Boston.

Ms. Glick-Weil was not available for comment Monday.

Dennis Nealon, a spokesman for Brandeis, declined to disclose details about the e-mail message other than to say that it warned of an impending terrorist attack against the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. The message was sent to the university's office of public safety that day at about 11 a.m.

Local police and FBI agents came to the campus, said Mr. Nealon, and advised the university to evacuate the Heller building and 12 surrounding structures. The buildings, along with a local elementary school, remained empty for six-and-a-half hours.

"Since September 11th, the university's response is to take something like this very seriously," Mr. Nealon said, "and go above and beyond to make sure that there is no threat to anybody on campus."

Gail Marcinkiewicz, a spokesman for the FBI's Boston branch, declined to talk about the investigation into who sent the e-mail message.

But she said the FBI had a right to seize the computers because the agents who went to the Newton library thought Brandeis students, professors, and staff members were in immediate danger. "We could have done this," said Ms. Marcinkiewicz. "It is supported by case law."

Nonetheless, she said, the FBI decided to seek a warrant. By the time agents had determined that they needed to seize only three of the computers, about 5 p.m., they realized that people at Brandeis were not about to be killed, she added.

Michael J. Sullivan, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, also said in an interview Monday that the FBI had acted within its authority to ask for the computers without a warrant.

The event prompted talk-show hosts and newspaper columnists in Boston to lash out at Newton officials, arguing that they acted irresponsibly and could have jeopardized people's lives. But Mr. Cohen said he had also received many positive comments from people all over the country supporting his actions.

Iran Strikes Back at Big Five, by Ali Akbar Dareini

Iran struck back Tuesday at the Big Five powers' decision to refer Iran's nuclear file to the Security Council, saying referral would mean the end of diplomacy over its nuclear program.

Still, in what appeared to be an attempt to show cooperation with the West, Iran handed over documents last week on casting uranium into the shape of a warhead to the U.N. nuclear agency, diplomats in Vienna revealed.

At a London meeting that lasted into the early hours of Tuesday, envoys of Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States decided they would recommend that at its Thursday meeting the International Atomic Energy Agency should report Iran to the U.N. Security Council. They also decided the Security Council should wait until the agency issues a formal report on Iran in March before tackling the issue.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, reproached Europe for the London decision.

"Reporting Iran's dossier to the U.N. Security Council will be unconstructive and the end of diplomacy," he said, according to state-run television.

"Europeans should pay more attention. Iran has called for dialogue and is moving in the direction of reaching an agreement through peaceful means," Larijani said. "The Islamic Republic of Iran doesn't welcome this. We still think that this issue can be resolved peacefully. We recommend them not to do it."

Iran has previously threatened to stop allowing surprise IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities if it is put before the Security Council. Iran's parliament has passed a law requiring the government to stop such cooperation and resume large-scale uranium enrichment in case of referral to the Council.

Iran insists it has the right as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to build nuclear power stations and produce fuel by enriching its own uranium. But the United States and Europe suspect Iran aims touse enrichment to produce nuclear weapons, an accusation Iran denies.

Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who also runs Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, said there was no "legal justification to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council," according to the the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency.

In Vienna, Iran's oil minister said the gathering storm over the nuclear issue would not affect Iran's oil policy.

"We have no reason to stop our exports" because of the nuclear issue, Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh said before Tuesday's meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. "From our point of view there's no link between the two."

British, French and German representatives met Larijani's deputy, Javad Vaedi, in Brussels on Tuesday for last-ditch talks on the dispute, but failed to make any progress.

The decision by Russia and China to vote for referral surprised observers as they have consistently counselled caution on Iran's nuclear file. Both have major economic ties with Iran.

In an apparent attempt to reassure Tehran, Russia underlined that referral to the Security Council will not mean immediate action.

"The Security Council will not make any decisions," Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said said.

Russian and Chinese diplomats will head to Tehran shortly to explain the meaning of the agreement reached in London and urge Iran to meet IAEA demands, he said, according to the RIA-Novosti news agency.

Moscow is trying to prevent the referral from scuttling negotiations that it hopes will persuade Iran to accept a compromise proposal -- that Iranian uranium enrichment take place on Russian territory.

Diplomats close to IAEA in Vienna said Tuesday that agency inspectors in Iran had received last week 1{ pages that describe how to cast fissile uranium into the hemispherical shape of warheads. The document, which Iran acquired on the nuclear black market, was apparently handed over to allay suspicions ahead of Thursday's meeting.

The diplomats said the IAEA inspectors asked Iran for a response to U.S. intelligence that suggested it has been pursuing nuclear weapons.

Iran broke IAEA seals at a uranium enrichment plant Jan. 10 and resumed small-scale enrichment. That prompted Britain, France and Germany, who had been negotiating with Iran, to press for referral to the Security Council.

While the IAEA has said it has found no evidence of Iran's building nuclear weapons, it has refused to give Iran a clean bill of health because of numerous unanswered questions over its atomic program.

Iran says Security Council vote means end of talks

Iran struck back today at the Big Five powers' decision to refer the country's nuclear file to the Security Council, saying it would be the end of diplomacy.

At a London meeting that lasted into the early hours of today, envoys of Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States decided they would recommend that the International Atomic Energy Agency, when it meets on Thursday, should report Iran to the UN Security Council. They also decided the Security Council should wait until March to take up Iran's nuclear file after a formal report on Tehran's activities from the atomic agency.

"Reporting Iran's dossier to the UN Security Council will be unconstructive and the end of diplomacy," said top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, according to state television.

Iranian Foreign Ministry officials could not be reached for further comment today.

StopDrugAds.org

A New Website Against DTC Prescription Drug Advertising

Last week, Commercial Alert launched the website StopDrugAds.org (www.stopdrugads.org), devoted to ending direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising in the United States. The purpose of the website is to educate the public about the dangers of prescription drug advertising, and to mobilize thousands of Americans to voice their opposition to the ads.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is accepting public comment on DTC prescription drug advertising until February 28th. The stopdrugads.org website says that is not the proper role of drug executives to tell Americans what drugs to buy, and it encourages visitors to send comments to the FDA in opposition to DTC drug advertising.

“In effect, drug companies are practicing medicine without a license, and that should be illegal,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert. “We’ve got to halt prescription drug advertising before the next Vioxx tragedy happens.”

On October 27th, Commercial Alert released a statement from 211 professors from U.S. medical schools that “direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs should be prohibited.” The statement’s endorsers include prominent medical school professors from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, Duke, University of California, San Francisco and other top medical schools, along with two former editors-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The American public has little trust for the pharmaceutical industry, and believes it should be more closely regulated. According to a Harris Poll in November, only 9% of American adults believe that the pharmaceutical industry is “generally honest and trustworthy.” Fifty-one percent believe that the pharmaceutical industry “should be more regulated by the government.”

Commercial Alert is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy. For more information, see our website at: http://www.commercialalert.org.

::Misc.:: day

World Oil Transit Choke Points

Control all 'tyrannical' world oil chokepoints?

In recent public speeches, George W. Bush and others in the Administration, including Condi Rice, have begun to make a significant shift in the rhetoric of war. A new 'War on Tyranny' is being groomed to replace the outmoded War on Terror. Far from being a semantic nuance, the shift is highly revealing of the next phase of Washington's global agenda.

In his 20 January inaugural speech, Bush declared, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Bush repeated the last formulation, 'ending tyranny in our world' in the State of the Union. (author's emphasis). In 1917 it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy," and in 1941 it was a "war to end all wars."

The use of tyranny as justification for US military intervention marks a dramatic new step on the road to Washington's quest for global domination. Washington of course today is shorthand for the policy domination by a private group of military and energy conglomerates, from Halliburton to McDonnell Douglas, from Bechtel to ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, not unlike that foreseen in Eisenhower's 1961 speech warning of excessive control of government by a military-industrial complex............

*

Poverty Around the World January 28, 2006

http://www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstract.html


"Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions."

— Albert Einstein

“Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”

— Albert Einstein

I want a NONE OF THE ABOVE option on the ballot.

Posted by: A. at January 30, 2006 09:39 PM

------------------------------------------------

Support my Ballots Must Be Cast By A Minimum Required Percentage Of Total Registered Voters initiative.

Posted by: Crank Bait at January 30, 2006 09:47 PM

Hamas drops call for Destruction of Israel from its Manifesto

Hamas has dropped its call for the destruction of Israel from its manifesto for the Palestinian parliamentary election in a fortnight, a move that brings the group closer to the mainstream Palestinian position of building a state within the boundaries of the occupied territories.

The Islamist faction, responsible for a long campaign of suicide bombings and other attacks on Israelis, still calls for the maintenance of the armed struggle against occupation. But it steps back from Hamas's 1988 charter demanding Israel's eradication and the establishment of a Palestinian state in its place.

The manifesto makes no mention of the destruction of the Jewish state and instead takes a more ambiguous position by saying that Hamas had decided to compete in the elections because it would contribute to "the establishment of an independent state whose capital is Jerusalem".

The shift in emphasis comes as Hamas finds itself under pressure from the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and from foreign governments to accept Israel's right to exist and to end its violence if it wants to be accepted as a political partner in a future administration.

The group is expected to emerge as the second largest party after Mr Abbas's Fatah in the next Palestinian parliament. Opinion polls give it more than a third of the popular vote, built on a campaign against Fatah's endemic corruption and mismanagement and failure to contain growing criminality, and by claiming credit for driving the Israeli army and settlers out of Gaza.

But the manifesto continues to emphasise the armed struggle. "Our nation is at a stage of national liberation, and it has the right to act to regain its rights and end the occupation by using all means, including armed resistance," it says.

Gazi Hamad, a Hamas candidate in the Gaza Strip, yesterday said the manifesto reflected the group's position of accepting an interim state based on 1967 borders but leaving a final decision on whether to recognise Israel to future generations.

"Hamas is talking about the end of the occupation as the basis for a state, but at the same time Hamas is still not ready to recognise the right of Israel to exist," he said. "We cannot give up the right of the armed struggle because our territory is occupied in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That is the territory we are fighting to liberate."

But Mr Hamad said the armed resistance was no longer Hamas's primary strategy. "The policy is to maintain the armed struggle but it is not our first priority. We know that first of all we have to put more effort into resolving the internal problems, dealing with corruption, blackmail, chaos. This is our priority because if we change the situation for the Palestinians it will make our cause stronger.

"Hamas is looking to establish a new political strategy in which all Palestinian groups will participate, not just dominated by Fatah. We will discuss the negotiation strategy, how can we run the conflict with Israel but by different means."

Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian cabinet minister and member of the secular Palestinian People's party, said he believed Hamas was being forced to face reality as it prepared to sit in parliament, and that it would have to embrace a negotiated settlement with Israel: "Having Hamas inside the system is a positive development whereby they have to abide by the rules of the majority and respect the arguments of the administration they are part of, which includes a state built on 1967 borders. It will take time but Hamas will no longer have their own militia. It will be solely a political force."

But Israel's security establishment predicts that if Hamas does as well as expected in the election it will damage the Palestinian Authority and further undermine the prospects for an agreement.

Before Nuclear Regulators' Meeting, Iran Allows Inspectors Access to One Site

By ELAINE SCIOLINO and MICHAEL SLACKMAN

PARIS, Jan. 29
After more than a year and a half of resistance, Iran has given inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency access to a razed military site, but it has failed to meet other demands under its international treaty obligations, officials knowledgeable about the inspections said Sunday.

The concession seemed aimed at derailing an American and European initiative to immediately send Iran's nuclear case for judgment by the United Nations Security Council.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the foreign ministers of Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany will meet in London on Monday to plot a joint strategy on how best to curb Iran's nuclear activities. Then on Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-country board will hold an emergency session in Vienna to decide whether and how the case should be considered by the Security Council.

But the limited cooperation given to the inspectors leaves open a number of major issues about the nature and scope of Iran's nuclear program that have been raised by the United States and Europe.

News of Iran's uneven cooperation came as the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, in an interview in Tehran on Sunday, reiterated Iran's position that it would not close down its uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, as demanded by the United States, Russia, China, the Europeans and the atomic energy agency. Like other Iranian officials, he argued that Iran has only restarted nuclear research, a sovereign right it would never relinquish.

"Nuclear technology is the right of Iran," he said. "We can discuss about the way this right can be implemented, but realization of this right is not bound by any preconditions."

Iran's decision to allow inspectors into the razed military facility in Tehran, named Lavisan, followed repeated demands by the atomic energy agency for access and information since June 2004, several months after the site was dismantled, the officials said.

Inspectors were allowed to take environmental samples that they will examine for traces of uranium particles. They also examined equipment taken from the site when it was bulldozed, before it could be inspected, the officials said.

A report by the nuclear agency's director, Mohamed ElBaradei, in November 2004 said that the destruction of the site raised "the possibility of a concealment effort" by Iran to hide uranium-enrichment activities.

But the inspectors failed to persuade Iran to be more forthcoming on a number of other outstanding issues. That means that the agency will most likely deliver a mixed report to its board before the emergency session, the officials said. The officials were speaking on condition of anonymity under customary diplomatic rules.

"Some people will see this as an important step; others won't," said one diplomat familiar with the issue. "It can be said that this should have happened a year and a half ago. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done."

Iran's cooperation on the visit to Lavisan is certain to be seen as an inadequate gesture by the United States and its European allies, which believe that the Security Council must begin to pass judgment now on Iran for its nuclear behavior, most recently its reopening of its nuclear enrichment plant.

But the small steps by Iran may strengthen the position of Russia and China, which are resisting Security Council action and at the very least prefer to give Iran another month, as it was promised, to meet international demands.

Among the other unresolved issues is the inspectors' limited access to documents and materials that Iran received from the clandestine nuclear network of Pakistan's nuclear research pioneer, A. Q. Khan, and others in 1987 and 1994. The agency has not resolved the mystery of how Iran first obtained centrifuges used to enrich uranium, for example, or how many of them the Iranians may have built. There is particular mystery around a more sophisticated version of the centrifuges that Iran denies ever building.

In addition, the inspectors may not have had access to the nuclear scientists who worked at the Lavisan site, a key demand, one official said.

In a more recent issue, Iran has yet to explain its possession of computer data, obtained secretly by the United States, that suggests work on a missile that some experts believe could be fitted with a nuclear weapon. Intelligence information on the issue was provided by the United States to the agency, which presented it to Iran earlier this month.

In the interview in Tehran, Mr. Mottaki dismissed the issues that needed to be resolved under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which Iran has signed, as "ambiguities, questions, uncertainties."

Mr. Mottaki did not discuss the visit by the international inspectors to Lavisan or address the matter of the inspections last week, which were intended to give Iran a last chance to cooperate fully with the agency's demands concerning the country's nuclear activities in past years.

The immediate trigger for the emergency meeting in Vienna was Iran's reopening of the Natanz enrichment facility this month in violation of an agreement with France, Britain and Germany in late 2004 that froze most of its nuclear activities.

Inspectors with access to the Natanz site, which is under strict agency monitoring, have reported that there was no evidence that nuclear fuel was being enriched.

Enriched uranium can be used for energy purposes or for making atomic bombs; the process of enrichment for peaceful purposes is allowed under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

But Iran's concealment of secret and suspicious nuclear activities over nearly two decades has contributed to such deep distrust of the country that there is an increasing unwillingness by the international community to allow it to do work that could contribute to its mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle.

Mr. Mottaki reiterated Iranian statements in recent days that the country was seriously examining a compromise proposal by Russia allowing Iran to enrich uranium, but only in Russia and only to levels suitable for use in nuclear reactors.

Mr. Mottaki also reiterated that Iran had agreed to bring additional "partners" into the Russian project, without elaborating.

But he suggested that Iran had not violated the 2004 agreement with the Europeans because Iran had proceeded only with research and not with fuel production.

He also accused Washington of raising the specter of nuclear weapons to serve its own domestic political needs.

"In the nuclear issue we are not seeking anything other than nuclear energy, neither military, nor political, nor anything else," he said. "But others want to, as we say in Farsi, make a hat out of this wool to use to their own benefit. When the polls were showing Mr. Bush may not get enough votes, he tried to change the general atmosphere of the American public into a security one and by insinuating insecurity, to gain some votes."

Despite his defiant tone, Mr. Mottaki also repeatedly said there was still room for negotiation. "There exists a readiness for compromise, why not?" he said. "The first element is to alleviate the concerns that some European countries have been expressing. We are committed to alleviating those concerns."

In a separate news conference on Sunday, Mr. Mottaki said he would be in London, attending a donor conference on Afghanistan, on Monday, and available to meet the six foreign ministers discussing Iran's case.

STATE OF EMERGENCY: BUSH STEP DOWN!!!

World Can't Wait, Philadelphia Chapter 30 Jan 2006 04:42 GMT

Bush Step Down -

Join the mass demonstrations nationwide on January 31st during Bush’s State of the Union Address and come to Washington DC on February 4th to demand that BUSH STEP DOWN!

STATE OF EMERGENCY: BUSH STEP DOWN!

Waging murderous war in Iraq, the open torture of people, illegally spying domestically, the unprecedented violation of civil and human rights both domestically and abroad, the Bush regime has made their agenda clear and now it is time for us to state our agenda loud and clear during Bush’s State of the Union Speech 1/31: BUSH STEP DOWN and take your agenda with you!!!

As each day passes we are faced with revelations that reveal the truth of the Bush regime’s dangerous and malevolent agenda. It was only a short month ago that it was revealed that illegal wiretapping is being conducted on large numbers of the population phrased by Bush as the ‘terrorists surveillance program’ in an attempt to distract us from his complete disregard to civil liberties and personal privacy. And with the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court already underway the threat of denying women the right to birth control, family planning, and abortion may soon become a harsh reality. We are at a cross roads: Either the Bush Regime will successfully sweep away another indictment and lying scandal under the rug by fooling the country OR the people successfully mobilize a nation-wide movement that halts the whole Bush program of war, repression, and religious fundamentalism.

“That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn - or be forced– to accept.”

THE WORLD CAN’T WAIT!

There are no Democratic Saviors to stop the Alito nominations, to Stop the War in Iraq, or to rebuild New Orleans for New Orleans people. Only a movement of resistance can drive out the Bush regime now! In less than one week on January 31st George W. Bush will deliver his State of the Union address in an attempt to reset his agenda for 2006 and legitimize his criminal actions to the American people. We must demonstrate the urgency and threat of this regime and declare our opposition to the Bush agenda loud and clear. The opposition to the Bush regime is growing rapidly and we must continue to mobilize and unite across differences to make our voices heard that we are tired of their lies and injustice. And as we get this movement going we are determined to bring together the millions and millions of people who have been so badly fooled. We must politically confront Bush and repudiate his agenda to drive out this regime and their relentless abuse of executive power. The Bush regime’s criminal agenda does not represent us or our views. The challenge is before us to take responsibility to change history.

TAKE ACTION NOW!!!

Join the mass demonstrations nationwide on January 31st during Bush’s State of the Union Address and come to Washington DC on February 4th to demand that BUSH STEP DOWN!

Tuesday, January 31st 2005

12th & Market – 8pm

Drown out Bush’s Lies: Bring noise makers, pots & pans, bring flashlights too

Saturday, February 4th 2005
Get your tickets to D.C.
Moblize for a national protest marching around
the White House. Bush Lied. Bush Spied. Bush Step
Down. 2006. 2008. Too late. Turn your outrage into mass political action.

The Bush regime is wasting no time pushing their agenda and that is why we must waste no time pushing ours.

The world can’t wait any longer, the time is now, the task is clear, DRIVE OUT THE BUSH REGIME!

Contact: World Can't Wait: Philadelphia

email: philly@worldcantwait.org

phone: 215.888.7563

World Can't Wait: Nationwide

www.worldcantwait.net

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Banned BBC Bush Election Footage Americans Aren’t Allowed To See, by Rickwrites

Whether or not one believes a single word of absolutely anything emanating from anyone, anywhere within the current US maladministration isn’t really important right now.

But this is important.

This shows the shocking but true state of the current neo-con maladministration’s American nation. Watch it and weep. Then ask not for whom the bell tolls — for it tolls for thee

This is a banned BBC video/documentary by made Greg Palast which Americans are not [officially] allowed to see.

But thanks to one of Richard and This Old Brit’s finest fellow bloggers, courageous cyber patriot and fearless, truth telling kindred spirit Tom Rushen — today things are different. Damned different.

For a full fourteen minutes and more, censorship itself is censored. Which means both the the Bush brothers and their larger controlling cabal can be shown up for the shady, scary SOBs they actually are.

The fact is that together they helped to pull off the greatest heist in history.

With the encouragement, connivance, financing, backing and blessings of the real [corporate criminal] powers that be, the Bush brothers helped see to it that the United States of America — was stolen from it’s citizens.

Yep. It was that plain & simple. Stolen.

Okay, enough preamble already. Bugger any more big build up. Why are we wasting time waffling ?

Go right now to Tom Rushen’s ‘Current Era’ blog.

Then like we said earlier, since it’s well worth repeating - watch the banned BBC block-buster — and weep. And afterwards, ask not for whom the bell tools, for it tolls for thee.

Incidentally, thanking Tom Rushen for his tireless work would be greatly appreciated. Of that, This Old Brit is certain.

Perhaps paying some attention to his ‘Depleted Uranium’ video piece would prove extremely enlightening too. Of that, Tom tells us he is certain.

Easier Said Than Done, by John Gray

There is a strange presumption in recent thought about human values. When we think about basic issues in ethics and politics, it is taken as a given that we face a choice between liberalism and relativism. Believing that human values are cultural constructions that vary widely across time and space, relativists urge us to be conscious of difference. If they have a political message it is one of tolerance: "Don't try to impose your way of life on others; be sensitive to the claims of cultural minorities in your own society." Liberals, on the other hand, insist that there are requirements of justice or rights that apply to all human beings regardless of the communities or cultures to which they belong. The liberal political message is one of universalism: "The human species is--or may one day become--a single moral community in which the same values are honored everywhere." Either we commit ourselves to liberal universalism or we must embrace moral relativism.

There are many things wrong with this dichotomy. One of the most obvious is that it is highly parochial. Liberalism may look like the only game in town these days, but just a generation ago there were Marxists, anarchists, socialists and others who believed a systematic alternative to liberal society was desirable, imaginable and practically feasible. Further back in the history of thought, there were many versions of universalism--most of them nonliberal. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas all believed in universal values, but no one would call them liberals. Looking outside the Western tradition, the same is true of Confucian, Buddhist and Islamic thinkers. It is one thing to assert the existence of universal values, quite another to claim these values are in some sense liberal. It is also true that most relativists have not been greatly concerned with issues of difference. Often relativism has gone hand in hand with the idea that society is an organic whole--a highly dubious notion, which if it tends to support diversity does so only at the level of entire cultures. Herder and the Romantics celebrated the differences among peoples, but they were indifferent or hostile to the claims of cultural minorities.

The idea that we must choose between liberalism and relativism reflects the poverty of the contemporary political imagination and a disabling loss of historical memory. Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers is a welcome attempt to resurrect an older tradition of moral and political reflection and to show its relevance to our current condition. Appiah, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, seeks to revive cosmopolitanism, a view of humans as citizens of the world that was advanced by the Cynics in Greece in the fourth century BCE and elaborated by Stoic philosophers in Roman times. In Appiah's view cosmopolitanism has two intertwined strands: the idea that we have obligations to other human beings above and beyond those to whom we are related by ties of family, kinship or formal citizenship; and an attitude that values others not just as specimens of universal humanity but as having lives whose meaning is bound up with particular practices and beliefs that are often different from our own. Appiah sees this cosmopolitan perspective re-emerging in the Enlightenment and expressed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Kant's idea of a League of Nations.

As a position in ethical theory, cosmopolitanism is distinct from relativism and universalism. It affirms the possibility of mutual understanding between adherents to different moralities but without holding out the promise of any ultimate consensus. There are human universals that make species-wide communication possible--and yet these commonalities do not ground anything like a single universally valid morality or way of life. Clearly this is a position that carries within it a certain tension. The idea that we have universal moral obligations is not always easily reconciled with the practices and beliefs that give particular human lives their meaning. Appiah recognizes this tension, and writes: "There will be times when these two ideals--universal concern and respect for legitimate difference--clash. There's a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge."

A large part of Cosmopolitanism spells out the philosophy that underpins this position. What Appiah has to say in defense of cosmopolitanism is eminently sensible, but it is in no way new. In a move that will be familiar to anyone who recalls the ideas about "open texture" and "essential contestability" that were at the forefront of philosophical debate about language and values a generation ago, Appiah suggests that moral discourse is essentially practical in character. It seeks to express our desires and shape the attitudes of others rather than to report the way things are in the world. Like other types of discourse, moral language requires the use of judgment, which means different people will use it in different ways; but that does not mean morality is subjective. Rather, it means the possibility of moral conflict is built into language itself. As Appiah puts it: "When we describe past acts with words like 'courageous' and 'cowardly,' 'cruel' and 'kind,' we are shaping what people think and feel about what was done--and shaping our understanding of our moral language as well. Because that language is open-textured and essentially contestable, even people who share a moral vocabulary have plenty to fight about."

Appiah argues that as a result of the influence of positivism, an erroneous view of moral language has come to be widely accepted. For positivists science is the model for all other modes of discourse, and since moral reasoning contains nothing like the procedures for verification and falsification that are found in science, ethics is bound to seem a second-rate form of thought. Quite correctly, Appiah maintains that a great deal of human discourse does not fit this positivist model. When people with divergent moral outlooks talk to one another about the good life, he suggests, they are usually not engaged in argument. They are best understood as partners in conversation--an open-ended encounter that can be useful and enlightening even if, as is commonly the case, it does not end in consensus. As Appiah elegantly puts it: "We enter every conversation--whether with neighbors or with strangers--without a promise of final agreement." We can enter into the moral worlds of others and come to see that we partake in a common humanity without ever converging on a shared morality.

Appiah's version of cosmopolitan ethics strikes me as being very close to the value-pluralism defended by Isaiah Berlin, and it suffers from some of the same weaknesses. The advantage of Berlin's view is that it can acknowledge rationally insuperable moral differences without falling into relativism. Contemporary relativists follow the ancient Greek Sophists in holding that judgments of value are matters of opinion. However, human life contains goods and evils that do not depend on our opinions. To be at risk of genocide or subject to torture is an evil for all human beings whatever their beliefs. These evils are not culture-relative, and protection from them is a species-wide good. Once we recognize this, we cannot avoid speaking of universal human values; but this is not the same as having a universal morality. As Berlin never ceased to remind us, the most fundamental human values can make conflicting demands in practice, and in some of these conflicts reasonable people end up with different views of what is right. That is one reason there are different ways of life.

Value-pluralism undercuts the claims of all universal moralities, including liberal morality. Like Berlin in some of his writings, Appiah seems to want to celebrate moral diversity and at the same time endorse the universality of liberal values. The result is that he is constantly pulling liberal rabbits out of cosmopolitan hats. In discussing the issue of gay marriage, for example, Appiah informs us that while most Americans are against it they don't quite know why, whereas for those who favor gay marriage it just seems right. He adds: "The younger they are, the more likely it is that they think gay marriage is fine. And if they don't, it will probably be because they have had religious objections reinforced regularly throughout life in church, mosque or temple." It's not clear how Appiah knows this to be true, but that is not the point. What some people end up feeling cannot decide a question of this kind. If many religious people preach against gay marriage, it is because they believe being gay is wrong. If others think that "gay marriage is fine," it is because they believe there is nothing wrong with being gay. The point is that one cannot avoid making a moral judgment, and this inescapably means accepting or rejecting certain religious beliefs. Those who favor gay marriage--as I do--do so because they reject the belief that being gay is in any way bad or wrong. Cosmopolitanism has very little bearing on the issue.

Appiah defends cosmopolitanism in the apparent belief that it tends to bolster liberal values, when in fact it is bound to be open-ended. Cosmopolitan thinkers may endorse some liberal positions, but this has nothing to do with the logic of cosmopolitan theory. As a political theory, cosmopolitanism is a doctrine of live and let live--a very different thing from liberalism as usually understood today. Appiah tells us that the cosmopolitan view was expressed in modern times in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but actually it was most clearly held by thinkers who had no truck with declarations of rights. For Thomas Hobbes and David Hume the end of politics was not a regime of rights but peace--and they were ready to curb freedom whenever it posed a serious threat to the achievement of that end. Again, Michel de Montaigne is surely one of the great early modern exponents of cosmopolitan ethics. He affirmed a common humanity transcending differences of custom and tradition--and at the same time denied that any one way of life was best for everyone. These modern cosmopolitans were too aware of the intractability of human affairs to imagine that great human evils such as anarchy, war and tyranny could be overcome by seeking to make a single form of government universal. They believed--to my mind rightly--that pursuing such a goal would only add to the sum of human evils. Nothing could be more alien to these cosmopolitan thinkers than the missionary certainties of the kind of liberalism that seeks to establish one type of regime throughout the world.

Appiah believes that cosmopolitan theory has a special relevance today, and he succeeds in showing that this neglected and attractive tradition of thought deserves serious attention as a habitable middle ground between liberalism and relativism. Where he fails is in not exploring the points at which cosmopolitanism and liberalism diverge. Yet these are precisely the areas where a cosmopolitan viewpoint is currently most needed. As Appiah notes, contemporary thought is beset by the notion that we can live together only if we are alike. In international relations this idea is expressed in the prevailing belief that only regimes that respect human rights or practice democracy (it's not always clear which) can be legitimate--a view that has been used by the neoconservative right to justify the calamitous attack on Iraq. If we are to avoid similar disasters in the future, we need an account of legitimacy as applied in the society of states that is not just a recent version of liberalism writ large. Cosmopolitanism could surely help frame such an account, but it would have to be more willing to challenge current pieties than the version presented by Appiah.

Peace activist Cindy Sheehan considers run against Sen. Feinstein

CARACAS, Venezuela
U.S. peace activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, said she was considering running for office against Sen. Diane Feinstein while she waited for the California lawmaker to back a filibuster of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito.

Sheehan issued her statement Friday, the same day Feinstein announced she would support the filibuster, despite saying earlier this month that she did not see anything to justify one. Democrats fear Alito would shift the court rightward on issues including abortion, affirmative action and the death penalty.

Sheehan's statement was sent by e-mail while she was in Venezuela attending the World Social Forum. She said she had "decided to run" against Feinstein if the lawmaker did not join the filibuster.

"I'm appalled that Diane Feinstein wouldn't recognize how dangerous Alito's nomination is to upholding the values of our constitution and restricting the usurpation of presidential powers, for which I've already paid the ultimate price," Sheehan said in the statement.

Sheehan, a 48-year-old from Berkeley, California, emerged as an anti-war activist after her son was killed in Iraq in 2004. She gained international attention when she set up a protest camp near U.S. President George W. Bush's ranch in Texas last year.

Sheehan couldn't immediately be reached for comment after Feinstein's announcement that she would back the filibuster.

But her close confidante and assistant Dede Miller, a co-founder of the group Gold Star Families for Peace, said she believed Sheehan still was considering running.

"We'll see. There are still a lot of other issues," Miller said, noting Sheehan strongly disagreed with Feinstein's stance on Iraq as well.

Miller said it was good news that Feinstein would back the filibuster.

"It's the right thing to do," Miller said. "It still remains to be seen how well she follows it through."

Miller said many supporters have been asking Sheehan to run for office. "Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if she did," she said.

Will The Neocon-Christian-Israeli Axis Push Bush into War on Iran?, by Ed Strong

The United States and Israel have been itching to go to Tehran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

That Revolution was a strategic setback for both powers. It overthrew the Iranian monarchy, a great friend of the US and Israel, and brought to power the Shi'ite Mullahs, who saw themselves as the legitimate heirs of the Prophet's legacy, and, therefore, the true defenders of Islam.

As a result, the Iranian Revolution was certain to clash with both the US and Israel, as well as their client states in the Arab world.

Israel was unacceptable because it was an alien intrusion that had displaced a Muslim people: it was a foreign implant in the Islamic heartland. But the US was the greater antagonist.

On its own account, through Israel, and on the behalf of Israel, it sought to keep the Middle East firmly bound in the chains of American hegemony.

The US-Israeli hegemony over the Middle East had won a great victory in 1978. At Camp David, the leading Arab country, Egypt, chose to surrender its leadership of the Arab world, and signed a separate 'peace' with Israel.

This freed Israel to pursue its plans to annex the West Bank and Gaza, and to project unchecked power over the entire region. The Arab world could now be squeezed between Israel in the West and Iran to the East, the twin pillars of US hegemony over the region's peoples and resources.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 ended this partnership. At that point, real men in Washington would have loved to take back Tehran from the Mullahs but for the inconvenience of Soviet opposition.

But great powers are rarely stymied by any single development however adverse. It took little encouragement from Washington to get Iraq to mount an unprovoked invasion of Iran.

In the twentieth century, few Arab leaders have seen the difference between entrapment and opportunity.

The war between Iran and Iraq served the United States and Israel quite well. It blunted the energies of Iran, diverting it from any serious attempts to export the revolution, or challenging American influence in the region. The Israeli gains were more substantial.

With Egypt neutered at Camp David, and Iraq and Iran locked in a bloody war, Israel was free during the 1980s to do what it pleased.

It expanded its settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak, expelled the Palestinian fighters from Lebanon, and established a long-term occupation over much of Southern Lebanon. Israel was closer to its goal of commanding unchallenged power over the Middle East.

The end of the Cold War in 1990 offered a bigger opening to the United States and Israel.

Freed from the Soviet check on their ambitions, and with Iran devastated by the war, the United States began working on plans to establish a military control over the region, in the style of earlier colonial empires.

This happened quickly when, with American assurance of non-intervention in intra-Arab conflicts, Iraq invaded Kuwaiti in August 1990.

The US response was massive and swift. In January 1990, after assembling 600,000 allied troops in Saudi Arabia ­ about half of them America,n­ it pushed Iraq out of Kuwait, and mounted massive air strikes against Iraq itself, destroying much of its industry, power-generating capacity and infrastructure.

The US had now established a massive military beachhead in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. It established permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia, continued its economic sanctions against Iraq, created a Kurdish autonomous zone in the north of Iraq, and, together with Britain, continued to bomb Iraq on a nearly daily basis for the next thirteen years.

With the US beachhead in place, where did the real men in the US and Israel want to go next? There was no secrecy about their plans.

At a minimum, the Neoconservatives in the US and their Likud allies in Israel wanted 'regime change' in Iraq, Syria and Iran.

This would be delivered by covert action, air strikes, or invasion - whatever it took -­ to be mounted by the US military. Israel would stay out of these wars, ready to reap the benefits of their aftermath.

The Likud plans were more ambitious. They wanted to redraw the map of the Middle East, using ethnic, sectarian, and religious differences to carve up the existing states in the region into weak micro-states that could be easily bullied by Israel.

This was the Kivunim plan first made public in 1982. It would give Israel a thousand years of dominance over the Middle East.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were the 'catalyzing event' that put these plans into motion. The US wasted no time in seizing the moment. Instantly, President George Bush declared a global war against terrorism.

The first target of this war was Afghanistan, but this was only a sideshow. On January 29, 2002, the President announced his initial targets for regime change: the 'axis of evil' that included Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

The plan was to invade and consolidate control over Iraq as a base for operations against Iran, Syria and perhaps Saudi Arabia. This sequencing was based on two assumptions: that the invasion of Iraq would be a cake-walk and American troops would be greeted as liberators.

The US invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003 and Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003. It was indeed a cake-walk, and it appeared to television audiences that American troops were also being greeted as liberators.

Understandably, the mood in Washington and Tel Aviv was triumphant. The US is unstoppable: it was time for real men now to go to Tehran.

Nearly three years after the Iraqi invasion, the real men are still stuck in Baghdad. Yes, there has been a great deal of talk about attacking Iran: plans in place for air strikes on Iran's revolutionary guards, on its nuclear installations and other WMD sites, and even talk of a ground invasion.

There have been reports of spy flights over Iran and operations by special forces inside Iran. Israel too has been goading the US to strike, and if the US shrinks from this duty, threatening to go solo.

What has been holding back the real men in Washington and Tel Aviv? One reason of course is that the cake walk very quickly turned into a quagmire.

The apparent Iraqi welcome was replaced by a growing and hardy insurgency, which has exacted a high toll on US plans for Iraq even though it was led mostly by Sunni Arabs.

As a result, close to 150,000 US troops remain tied down in Iraq, with little prospect that they can be freed soon for action against Iran.

Most Shi'ites aren't resisting the American occupation, but they are ready to take power in Iraq, and want the Americans to leave.

While the US cannot mount a full-scale invasion of Iran without a draft, it does possesses the capability, despite the Iraqi quagmire, to launch air and missile strikes at Iranian targets, using nuclear weapons to destroy underground weapon sites.

On the other hand, despite its saber rattling, most analysts agree that Israel does not possess this capability on its own. Unlike Iraq, Iran has dispersed its nuclear assets to dozens of sites, some unknown. Then, why hasn't the US mounted air attacks against Iran yet? Or will it any time soon?

More and more, as the Americans have taken a more sober reckoning of Iran's political and military capabilities, they realize that Iran is not Iraq. When Osirak was attacked by Israel in June 1981, Iraq did nothing: it could do nothing.

One thing is nearly certain: Iran will respond to any attack on its nuclear sites. Iran's nuclear program has the broadest public support: as a result, the Iranian Revolution would suffer a serious loss of prestige if it did nothing to punish the attacks. The question is: what can Iran do in retaliation?

Both the CIA and DIA have conducted war games to determine the consequences of an American air attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. According to Newsweek (September 27, 2004), "No one liked the outcome."

According to an Air Force source, "The war games were unsuccessful at preventing the conflict from escalating." In December 2004, The Atlantic Monthly reported similar results for its own war game on this question. The architect of these games, Sam Gardner, concluded, "You have no military solution for the issues of Iran."

What is the damage Iran can inflict? Since preparations for any US strike could not be kept secret, Iran may choose to preempt such a strike. According to the participants in the Atlantic Monthly war game, Iran could attack American troops across the border in Iraq.

In responding to these attacks, the US troops would become even more vulnerable to the Iraqi insurgency. One participant expressed the view that Iran "may decide that a bloody defeat for the United States, even if it means chaos in Iraq, is something they actually prefer."

Iran could also join hands with al-Qaida to mount attacks on civilian targets within the US. If Iranian losses mount, Iran may launch missiles against Israel or decide to block the flow of oil from the Gulf, options not considered in the Atlantic Monthly war game.

What are the realistic options available to the US? It could drag Iran to the UN Security Council and, if Russia and China climb on board, pass a motion for limited economic sanctions. Most likely, the US will not be asking for an Iraq-style oil embargo.

Not only would this roil the markets for oil, Iran will respond by ending inspections, and accelerate its uranium enrichment.

If Iran is indeed pursuing a nuclear program, then it will, perhaps sooner rather than later, have its bomb. Once that happens, one Israeli official in the Newsweek report said, "Look at ways to make sure it's not the mullahs who have their finger on the trigger." But the US and Israel have been pursuing that option since 1979.

It would appear that US-Israeli power over the Middle East, which had been growing since World War II, may have finally run into an obstacle.

And that obstacle is Iran, a country the CIA had returned to a despotic monarch in 1953. Paradoxically, this has happened when American dominance over the region appears to be at its peak; when its troops occupy a key Arab country.

When it has Iran sandwiched between US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; and when it has trapped Iran inside a ring of US military bases running from Qatar, through Turkey and Tajikistan, to Pakistan.

Could it be that al-Qaida's gambit is beginning to pay off? It had hoped that the attacks of September 11 would provoke the US into invading the Islamic heartland. That the US did, but the mass upheaval al-Qaida had expected in the Arab streets did not materialize.

Instead, it is Iran that has been the chief beneficiary of the US invasion. As a result, it is Iran that now possesses the leverage to oppose US-Israeli aims in the region. Al-Qaida had not planned on a Shi'ite country leading the Islamic world.

It is possible that the US, choosing to ignore the colossal risks, may yet launch air attacks against Iran. President Bush could be pushed into this by pressure from messianic Christians, by Neoconservatives, by Israelis, or by the illusion that he needs to do something bold and desperate to save his presidency.

By refusing to wilt under US-Israeli threats, it appears that the Iranians too may be following al-Qaida's logic. We cannot tell if this is what motivates Iran. But that is where matters will go if the US decides to attack or invade Iran.

No one have yet remarked on some eerie parallels between the US determination to deepen its intervention in the Islamic world and Napoleons' relentless pursuit of the Russian forces, retreating, drawing them into the trap of the Russian winter.

It would appear that the United States too is irretrievably committed to pursuing its Islamic foe to the finish, to keep moving forward even if this risks getting caught in a harsh Islamic winter.

On the other hand, the Neoconservatives, the messianic Christians, and the Israelis are convinced that with their searing firepower, the US and Israel will succeed and plant a hundred pliant democracies in the Middle East.

We will have to wait and see if these real men ever get to add Tehran to their next travel itinerary ­ or they have to give up the comforts of the Green Zone in Baghdad.

Who Will Tell The People?, by Sheila Samples

And who will tell the people
that free speech is a ruse;
The corporations run the country
and then they make the news.
Is it media or mind control
heroic victories or crime?
Who will tell the people...
that we are living in these times.
~Song by Willie Nelson

In his essay on "Character" Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "A chief event in life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us." I've had such days, many of them through encounters with Emerson himself, but never have I been startled or even remotely surprised by anything belched out by the Barbie and Ken assembly line of today's corporate mind-control media.

George Orwell wrote that people who neither read nor ask questions will ultimately lose all desire to question "Big Brother." What is so frightening as we descend into the new world order fascism is not that we no longer read -- it's that we no longer can read.

Researchers estimate as many as 30 million Americans -- many of them college graduates -- cannot read. They're unable to comprehend news stories or even instructions. They said they were "stunned," but could offer no explanation for the steep drop in literacy. I don't know what's more depressing -- that Americans can't read or, after studying the phenomenon, researchers lack the critical skills to discern why.

Today, as in Orwell's 1984, the sound and fury of Big Brother's repetitive visual stimuli has apparently crippled our ability to think critically. If it's not on television, it isn't happening. Even then, we can't be sure of what is true until the paid TV "analyst" or pundit with the biggest stash of "Newspeak" talking points wins the debate. When there's no one left to tell the people the truth, Orwell said, "the people will believe what the media tells them they believe."

I had almost come to the sad conclusion that Orwell was right when, late one September night in 2004 as I was surfing for something "soothing" on the radio, the door of my mind was unceremoniously bashed in and I was startled by...

"I'm pissed off -- and I'm Mike Malloy."

Malloy, clean-up guy for Air America Radio (10pm-1am), rode in on the strident vibrations of Pink Floyd's Run Like Hell and, for the next three hours, relentlessly hit both spineless Democrats and Republican "sonszabitches" with the truth about the Bush crime family, pummelled them with the truth about spineless and quivering democrats, bitch-slapped them with the truth about where we're headed if we don't wake up, stand up and speak up...

Then, with a friendly and quiet "watch your back," he was gone. I just sat there, grinning. Maybe we aren't doomed to slip-slide into fascist hell after all. By sheer luck, I had stumbled across a guy with the ability to see the truth and the courage to tell the people...

Who IS this guy?

Mike Malloy is the canary in the political coal mine -- the bane of the Bush administration and of hypocrites of all stripes. He is a liberal gadfly whose light shines so brightly on the truth that even Air America struggles to keep him hidden under its late-night barrel. Far from being a "loose liberal cannon," Malloy has a solid background of writing, reporting, editing and broadcasting. He is a former news writer and editor for both CNN and CNN-international, and a former publisher of Atlanta's Creative Loafing newspaper.

But it was in radio broadcasting in the 90's that Malloy literally came into his own. Malloy has been named "One of the Heavy Hundred" three times by Talkers Magazine, an honor given to only the top 100 radio talk show hosts out of more than 4,000, of which all but a handful are right-wing blustering liars like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, et al.

Malloy has worked for WSB in Atlanta, WLS in Chicago and the now defunct I.E. America Radio Network. So, some may ask -- if Malloy's so damn good, why did WSB, WLS -- let him go? Why is Air America Radio afraid to stick him in prime time so more people can hear the truth?

Because he is so damn good, that's why. Because the truth Malloy tells is raw, straightforward, stripped of all spin -- every word shoved right in the faces of those who have seized power to destroy the democratic safeguards of the U.S. Constitution, to steal elections, to abandon society's most vulnerable, and to slaughter their own citizens as a pretext for war. But even Air America knows that not everybody can handle the truth, especially in prime time. Malloy can be heard each night on Air America affiliate stations, the Internet, and on XM Satellite Radio, Channel 167. Missed programs are available at the White Rose Society website.

Each night, Malloy exposes the Bush administration for what it is -- a murderous, evil, lying, fascist regime. Each night, I am amazed that he has somehow managed to slip through enemy lines yet again to shout truth to power. He asks no quarter, and gives none, regardless of the consequences.

"I'm like a cork," Malloy says with a laugh, "You can't submerge me. You push me down and I pop up somewhere else. That's a given." He's uncomfortable with praise, and stresses often that he is there neither to educate nor entertain, but to "get together" with sane people in the evening and talk about the insanity. "I'm not arrogant enough to think I can educate you," he said. "I'm not that condescending, not that patronizing. Take what you want from this program and run with it."

"Truthseekers" get a fast-moving mixture of music selected by Malloy's producer-wife Kathy Bay, occasional interviews, self-incriminating audio clips straight from the mouths of right-wing rat bastards, raisin brain politicians, simple Scotty McClellan, and President Chuckle Nuts himself. Malloy encourages listeners to call the show, although he warns Republicans they will get bounced if they start slinging Rovian "flying monkey" talking points at him. Most Republican callers, incapable of applying logic to the message, get their butts kicked off the air by the messenger in about five seconds -- seven tops.

Like most progressives, Malloy is disillusioned with the state of the Democratic Party, but maintains he will always be a "traditional" Democrat. Republicans accuse him of being nothing but a "Bush basher" or a "left-wing nutcase," but Malloy's late-night "Paul Revere" cry emanating from Air America comes straight from a man who is angrily committed to ousting the criminals who are hell-bent on destroying all that is good and decent not only in this country, but throughout the world.

Considering the wounds inflicted on this country in the last five years, Malloy has concluded that the Republican Party is now the American Nazi Party, and most of its members are vile deceivers.

"Republicans are liars, cheats, and sneaks; they are deceivers," he said. "They are immoral, and they have no ethical structure whatsoever...If they are Republicans, they are thugs. They have abondoned whatever moral sense they ever had, if any. They support mass murder. They support the destruction of this country."

Malloy is not known for pulling punches when addressing the administration or the Bush Crime Family either. "I hate you to the depths of my soul," he said. "I will hate you when I'm dead. I will hate you a million years after I'm dead...My hate will be a star in the firmament that will shine down on your Republican asses forever. That's how deep my hatred is, because of what you're doing to this country."

A good way to end the day

Malloy is not alone. His counterparts at Air America are all conversant with history and capable of critical thinking. Like Malloy, they struggle each day to tell the people the truth about what the Bush administration is doing to this country.

Scores of books have been written pointing out that Bush has arrogantly placed himself above the law and outside the constraints of the U.S. Constitution. He has bestowed upon himself a god-like superiority to decide who deserves to live or die. And Bush kills with malevolent, inhuman brutishness. Authors sound the alarm that what happened in 1933 in Hitler's Germany and in Orwell's 1984 is descending upon us today because we are losing the will to combat it. The Internet is throbbing with articles on the same subject.

The vigilance required to preserve our freedoms is impossible when we're whipped into submission by terror and convinced to give up a few freedoms we never use anyway, such as questioning those who are waging war to protect us.

We are no longer vigilant. That's why Malloy and those like him are so important. Over and over, Malloy tells the people that their continued silence will soon crush all of us into a 1984 world so aptly described by Aristotle as being fit for "only the gods and the beasts."

Malloy is a modern-day Tom Paine, who told the people in 1776 that the time had come to break free from oppression. "Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their own families," Paine wrote in Common Sense, his little 47-page pamphlet that ultimately sparked a revolution and gave us our world. But then, people could read back then...

It's time to take that world back. Last week, Malloy began reading to the people, devoting a short six-minute segment of the show's second hour to Orwell's 1984. He will read the book in its entirety, and has completed Chapter 1 and a portion of Chapter 2. For those few chilling minutes each night Malloy transports us to London and into the dreary world of "Big Brother," a world much like Bush is striving for today -- constant surveillance and total obedience.

Malloy quietly records the slow, but steady eradication of individuality -- of humanity itself -- through fear. The parallels are obvious. Now, as in 1984, in the words of former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleisher, we must "watch what we say; watch what we do" lest we be found guilty of the heinous offense of "thoughtcrime."

Now, as in 1984, Malloy says there are three things we can take to the bank as Bush's "truth." He encourages people to not only watch Bush's speeches for amusement as he mangles the language while stammering and stumbling through one photo Op after another -- but to listen to the words and phrases he repeats endlessly. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. After we accept that, the rest is easy...

Encountering Malloy may startle you; rock your world. You may even go to bed screaming. But hey -- it's a good way to end the day.

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net.

Misc. Links from the 2001 Book "The Invisible Web"

http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/supreme.html

NewsLibrary.com

http://www.ethics.state.tx.us/

http://publicradiofan.com/

http://www.festivals.com/

http://libdex.com/

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/main.htm

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/

http://thinker.org/

Multilingual Term Bank of the EU

http://www.eduref.org/

http://www.thegateway.org/

http://hpol.org

Studio that scrubbed Abramoff/Bush photo earned $140,000 from 2004 campaign, by Ron Brynaert

A photograpy studio which admitted to scrubbing at least one photograph of President George Bush and disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff was paid more that $140,000 by the Bush/Cheney campaign in 2004, RAW STORY has learned.

Reflections Photography president Joanne Amos told Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo that a "business decision" led the company to remove a photograph taken in late 2003 that is believed to feature Bush and Abramoff together. According to Amos, the photograph is "not relevant."

Another blog reported that Amos donated $2,000 to President Bush. The studio owner also gavecontributed $2,000 to Bush and $4150 to the RNC. According to Political Money Line, each gave the RNC $750 on the same day last April. $4,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2004. Steven Amos, vice president of Reflections, has

A press release from July of 2003 shows that the photography studio was awarded a contract with the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign. "We are, of course, extremely pleased about this contract," said Joanne Amos in the press release. "This is an incredible opportunity for our company."

Two years ago, The Washington Post reported that the studio was paid over $140,000.

This link which lists itemized disbursements from the campaign in 2004 shows that the studio was paid $28,520 for photography services on February 26, 2004.

On October 1, 2003 Congressman Tom Davis (Rep-VA) gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives in recognition of the "achievments" of Joanne Amos in her 25 years of work in photography (pdf link). Davis also noted her contract with Bush/Cheney 2004.

"Joanne Amos now resides in the 11th district of Virginia; from this base she will be providing event photography for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign," said Rep. Davis. "This contract was won on the sheer quality of Reflection's reputation and will grant them the opportunity to show they can coordinate nationwide media coverage. Reflections will make full use of their extensive network of photographers and web-based technology to keep pace with the aggressive schedule set by the President's campaign."

A few weeks later, on October 31, Joanne Amos contributed $2,000 to the Bush/Cheney campaign.

(Update: Added more details to Amos' contributions, quote from press release and Rep. Davis paragraphs.)

Library forces FBI to get warrant first, by Dan Atkinson

Law enforcement and Newton Free Library officials were embroiled in a tense standoff for nearly 10 hours last week when the city refused to let police and the FBI examine library computers without a warrant.

Police rushed to the main library last Wednesday after it was determined that a terrorist threat to Brandeis University had been sent from a computer at the library.

But requests to examine any of its computers were rebuffed by library Director Kathy Glick-Weil and Mayor David Cohen on the grounds that they did not have a warrant.

While one law enforcement official said he was "totally disgusted" with the city’s attempt to hold up a time-sensitive investigation of potential terrorist threat, Cohen is defending the library’s actions, calling it one of Newton’s "finest hours."

"We showed you can enforce the law ... without jeopardizing the privacy of innocent citizens," Cohen said.

Brandeis received the alleged e-mail threat at about 11 a.m. on Jan. 18, according to Waltham Lt. Brian Navin. While police reportedly didn’t find anything threatening after evacuating 12 buildings at Brandeis and a nearby elementary school, by about 2 p.m., the e-mail was traced to a computer at the Newton Free Library on Homer Street.

Newton Police, followed shortly by FBI and State Police officers, rushed to the library to lock the building down, Glick-Weil said.

"There was a lot of excitement going on," she said.

Police traced the origin of the e-mail to one of the 21 computers in the second-floor lab, Glick-Weil said. She agreed to have her information technology worker examine the computers, but said the FBI requested for information about the computers without a warrant, even though they were familiar with library privacy laws.

"You’ll have to ask them why they did that," she said.

An FBI spokesman, as well as Lt. Bruce Apotheker of the Newton Police, both said their offices would not comment on the investigation.

Cohen was asked by FBI officials to turn over information on all the computers, but said he could not without a warrant. It took U.S. attorneys several hours to finally get a warrant, Glick-Weil said, and they took the computer from the library at about 11:30 that night, after the library had closed.

But a law enforcement official who was close to the investigation but said he was not authorized to speak on the record, described the incident in an e-mail as a "nightmare."

He said Glick-Weil was told "we were dealing with a potential terrorism plot" but became "close to uncontrollable, saying that we had no right to be there."

Nancy Murray, director of education for the Boston branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, said she was surprised the FBI asked for information without a warrant.

"They couldn’t possibly expect to get [the computer] without a warrant," she said. "Good for the library for knowing more about warrants than the police."

"The law requires us to protect the privacy of library users," Glick-Weil said.
Glick-Weil said there was a "little bit of tension" during the investigation, but overall thought it went smoothly.

"I found the process encouraging," she said. "If law enforcement thinks it has probable cause, it can get a warrant in a timely fashion."

CommonGroundRelief.org

Common Ground Collective formed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to provide immediate aid and long-term solidarity along the Gulf Coast. We are a community-initiated organization offering mutual aid and support to Gulf Coast communities that have been historically neglected and underserved. Common Ground's teams of volunteers include: medical and health providers, aid workers, community organizers, legal representatives, independent journalists, builders and people from all over with broad skills from all walks of life.

Background and Problem: The Common Ground Collective was established in the first week after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans. It was the first organization to open up a medical clinic in Algiers, and provide immediate assistance (food, water, supplies) to the thousands of low-income residents unable to evacuate.

The recent hurricanes not only devastated much of the city of New Orleans, they exposed long-standing injustices faced by the residents of the lower income, African American communities. It is estimated that over 275,000 housing units were destroyed and efforts to clean up, repair or open livable housing has been slow. In New Orleans Parish, nearly 40% of the community earns under $20,000 per year, and more than 70% of the households are headed by a single parent. Literacy rate in New Orleans is roughly 39%. It is critical, therefore, that the immediate needs of the community are being met while long-term strategies to stabilize the community are initiated.

Mission and Vision: Common Ground's mission is to provide short term relief for victims of hurricane disasters in the gulf coast region, and long term support in rebuilding the communities affected in the New Orleans area.

Common Ground is a community-initiated volunteer organization offering assistance, mutual aid and support. The work gives hope to communities by working with them, providing for their immediate needs and emphasizes people working together to rebuild their lives in sustainable ways.

You Say This is Your Country, by Monica Benderman

To those who speak behind the veil of aliases from computers in coffee shops so their addresses cannot be traced

To those ex-patriots of America who profess solidarity with the actions of Americans who are speaking out against the corruption and abuse of our Constitution and the rights it affords the American people:

To those who speak behind the veil of aliases from computers in coffee shops so their addresses cannot be traced:

To those who sit in easy chairs and try to pretend that nothing is wrong with corruption of the moral values of the country they live in, forgetting their responsibility to their own personal values in the process:

How can we trust you when you say you have our backs? You say we are your courage – no we are not. We are ours. You will have to find yours and stand with us if you want this country back.

How can we trust you when you write from other countries speaking of this country as if it were still your home? If it is your home, then why are you not here defending it?

How can we trust teachers and professors who say they are activists for this country, and yet tell us that they now write from abroad and encourage others to dissent through their writing? Who is going to believe that? You say you love your country? Where is your country? Is it America? Then why are you not here defending it?

You say you are teaching in other countries, working with students who care about global peace efforts. But you left us. Who is here teaching our students? What does your running do to demonstrate the power we have to change the corruption your country now faces? What does your moving away do when you are leaving bright-minded students in America who could learn from you to be the change we need? Or is it your country? You are not here.

How can we trust those who write copious amounts of activist rhetoric from computers with addresses that trace to nowhere? You say you stand by our sides in solidarity. How can we know that? With aliases and unknown addresses you are not seen. We have learned not to trust what will not come into the light.

For those in easy chairs believing that soldiers are fighting for your freedom, wake up and turn the movie off. Soldiers are dying because you refuse to do anything for yourself. Soldiers are dying because of your apathy and selfish conviction that as an American, your taxes buy your freedom on the blood of men you will never know.

For those who write of their inactions in another war, who regret running from service and not then having the courage to stand openly against the actions that made you run, don’t regret what you didn’t do. Do it now. Be strong enough to have the courage now.

One person will not save this country. Thousands of protest marches will not save this country, and yearlong discussions of what went wrong will not save this country. Writing of what you see from across the border will not save this country. Turning another reality show on and grabbing more potato chips, believing that our soldiers are saving this country, will most definitely not save this country.

Individuals will save this country. One at a time, working together. Individuals will make the difference when we realize that we must look at ourselves and what we have become. We must seek to be the change in our individual lives that we want to see in our country.

Simple acts can change what we now face. It takes many tugboats to turn a giant ship around, but to do so the tugboats must work together: the operative word being “WORK.” Each one of us is a tugboat. But the ship isn’t turning because still too few are working, and many are working against each other.

As we speak out against the corruption and disregard our administration shows for the laws defined by our constitution, we must remember to uphold those same laws in our actions. Disrespecting private property, defacing public property, and not allowing others the right to express their views when they differ from ours, simply to make a statement against the actions of our government, does little to restore the foundation of laws that is our constitution. Closing down recruiting offices because we don’t like war does little to give others the freedom to choose. Setting up counter recruiting stations beside the recruiting offices to educate people to their choices gives them the knowledge to make the right choice for them, and upholds the constitution we are fighting so hard to defend.

Demanding a higher standard from our government by demonstrating a higher standard in our actions makes for a far stronger, more believable statement with respect to the changes we are trying to encourage.

We must work for a common goal, but we must realize that until we all work with the same standard, the same direction and as common team members, change will not happen.

Working against a system that is corrupt is overwhelming; a formidable task destined to fail when we believe that we must fight that system at its level. With every failed attempt more people desert the cause, run to another country, change their name, stop trying and turn the TV louder.

We do not have to change the system. We only have to change ourselves. As the people become the change, the system will become what the people have chosen. We must raise our standards, and know that because we maintain respect for ourselves we can expect the same from others.

We should demand that the work we ask of others be the highest standard possible. We can only do this with a clear conscience if we know that we are giving the highest standard possible in the work that we do.

We should expect that our children be taught well in the schools our taxes pay for. But we can only demand that if we know that, as parents, we have not forsaken our children in our own responsibilities to them.

We should ask that our community programs provide the kind of quality that we expect of the tax dollars we put into them. But we can only demand that if we are willing to participate in the programs, actively contributing to ensure that the standards are maintained.

We should expect that our government act with high moral standards and accountability to those it serves. But we can only do that if we give attentiveness to the process with the same moral standards and ethical principles that we demand of the government.

We can make America what it is now only professed to be. We can bring moral values and ethical principles back to our government. We can raise a new generation of Americans who will not want to leave when the going gets a little tough.

How can we do that? -- By living our individual lives with the same standards of moral values and ethical principles that we demand of our country as a whole. By holding our government accountable for their actions, and by not running from our responsibilities as Americans, living in America, we can restore what is now in disarray.

How do we change a country? The answer is simple. We start by changing ourselves.

Monica Benderman is the wife of Sgt. Kevin Benderman, a Conscientious Objector wrongfully imprisoned at the Ft. Lewis RCF in Washington, for taking a principled stand to defend our constitution and the rights it gives all American citizens. Please visit www.BendermanTimeline.com and www.BendermanDefense.org to learn more.

Monica and Kevin may be reached at mdawnb@coastalnow.net

e-mail:: mdawnb@coastalnow.net homepage:: http://www.BendermanTimeline.com AND www.BendermanDefense.org

U.S. Gvt. Channels Millions Through National Endowment for Democracy to Fund Anti-Lavalas Groups in Haiti

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now:

We take a look at Haiti, which is preparing for upcoming national elections. Independent Canadian journalist, Anthony Fenton, joins us to discuss the National Endowment for Democracy - the US government-funded group - that is pouring millions of dollars into trying to influence Haiti's political future. [includes rush transcript] Nearly two years after the overthrow of President Jean Bertrand Aristide, Haiti will be holding national elections next month. Former President Rene Preval, a Aristide ally, is leading in the polls. Meanwhile, a judge has dropped the most serious charges against jailed priest Gerard Jean Juste. Jean Juste was imprisoned in July over the murder of journalist Jacques Roche - killed while Jean Juste was in Miami. After Jean Juste's arrest, Haitian officials prevented Lavalas - the political movement aligned with Aristide - from registering him as their presidential candidate, on the grounds he was imprisoned. Although he has been cleared in Roche's murder, authorities say Jean Juste will remain in prison over weapons charges. Amnesty International calls him a prisoner of conscience. Calls for his release have intensified with the recent announcement he's been diagnosed with leukemia.

Meanwhile, violence continues to affect Haiti's poorest areas. Last week, two Jordanian troops with the UN mission were killed in a gun-battle in the poor neighborhood of Cite Soleil. Local residents later reported UN troops had shot at a hospital in the area. UN troops have stepped up armed raids on Cite Soleil amid pressure from business leaders and foreign officials.

We want to continue our Haiti coverage leading up to the election by looking at the activities of a government-funded organization that is pouring millions of dollars into trying to influence the country's political future. The National Endowment for Democracy is one of a handful of state-funded groups that have played a pivotal role in the internal politics of several Latin American and Caribbean countries in the service of the US government.

The NED operates with an annual budget of $80 million dollars from U.S. Congress and the State Department. In Venezuela, it's given money to several political opponents of President Hugo Chavez. With elections underway in Haiti, it's reportedly doing the same to groups linked to the country's tiny elite and former military.

Last week Democracy Now! interviewed Anthony Fenton about NED's activities in Haiti and across the Caribbean and Latin America. Fenton is an independent journalist and co-author of the book "Canada in Haiti: Waging War On The Poor Majority." He has interviewed several top governmental and non-governmental officials dealing with Haiti as well as leading members of Haiti's business community. Last month, he helped expose an NED-funded journalist who was filing stories for the Associated Press from Haiti. The Associated Press subsequently terminated its relationship with the journalist.

* Anthony Fenton, independent Canadian journalist and co-author of the book "Canada in Haiti: Waging War On The Poor Majority." He will be posting leaked NED documents on Haiti at www.inthenameofdemocracy.org -- a new group dedicated to monitoring government-funded "democracy-enhancement" projects.

Related coverage: Did the Bush Administration Allow a Network of Right-Wing Republicans to Foment a Violent Coup in Haiti?

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Posted by: catharine at January 23, 2006

OK. So on a previous post about Chomsky stating that the CIA metrics show that terrorism has gone up since 9/11 and Bush's so called "War on Terrorism" ... I have been looking for the metrics...

Interesting find: the CIA stopped keeping metrics after their botched job earlier this year and the fact that they show terrorism is increasing...

http://www.freemuslims.org/news/article.php?article=587
*
U.S. eliminates annual terrorism report

By Jonathan S. Landay, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.
....
"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.
...
According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004. That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.

The statistics didn't include attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called "a central front in the war on terror."

The intelligence officials requested anonymity because the information is classified and because, they said, they feared White House retribution.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002243262_terror16.html
*
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/2601/1/145/

Remember: Repubs are going to RUN ON THEIR RECORD ON THE WAR ON TERRORISM.... POINT OUT THAT THEIR RECORD SUCKS AND THAT TERRORISM HAS INCREASED ACCORDING TO THE CIA'S REPORTS. SIGNIFICANTLY.

Here's the larger text of what Johnson had to say about the fact that they are not reporting Terrorism statistics:

Rather than admit that the seventh floor at State was stunned by the figures, Phil Zelikow offers spin that this is a new effort that flows from the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission. This my friends is pure, unadulterated horse manure. What is truly ironic is that although the 9-11 Commission called for greater coordination within the intelligence community and between the intelligence community and policymakers, it is Zelikow, the Commission's former Staff Director, who is leading the charge to hinder such cooperation. Here are the facts about how Patterns of Global Terrorism has been produced prior to this year:

Starting at least in June 1981, the CIA released a report titled, PATTERNS OF INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM: 1980. The CIA was responsible for collecting the data and writing the analysis. This was produced by the National Foreign Assessment Center. (I have one of the originals.)

http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterrorism_blog/2005/04/the_facts_about.html

"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.
...
According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004. That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.

The statistics didn't include attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called "a central front in the war on terror."

Posted by akaMAT January 22, 2006

It's Cold Outside

Lewis Black says, "we have a two party system, the Democratic Party, a party of no ideas, and the Republican Party, a party of bad ideas," and offers his own plan for the economy.

Sonar threat to world's whales

By Geoffrey Lean, Cole Moreton and Jonathan Owen

Secret sonar from naval ships is killing thousands of whales around the world and could have disoriented the two-ton mammal that died last night after becoming stranded in the Thames, an investigation by The Independent on Sunday has established.

The northern bottlenose whale died despite dramatic attempts at a rescue witnessed by thousands of people on the banks of the river, and millions on television. The whale was lifted on to a barge and carried down the river, in the hope that it could be taken to the open sea. But its condition deteriorated, it began to suffer muscle spasms, and it died before anything further could be done.

Experts believe that the whale's senses could have been damaged by military sonar. Some 30 strandings and deaths of whales around the world - from Tasmania to North America - have been linked to its use. The United Nations and other international bodies have warned that it is a major threat to the animals.

The investigation has also revealed that - in a separate, but deeply embarrassing development - the Government faces being hauled before the European Court for failing to take enough care of the whales and dolphins around Britain's shores.

Professor Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Canada - acknowledged to be the world's leading expert on northern bottlenose whales - said yesterday that he had never known the deep-ocean species to wander so far from its habitat.

"It would be unusual, and cause concern, for one to be found in the North Sea or English Channel, let alone a long way up a pretty shallow river," he said. "Its nearest habitat would be south-west of Cornwall. We know that beaked whales - the group of species to which the northern bottlenose whale belongs - are particularly sensitive to underwater noise. There has been a lot of seismic activity off northern Scotland and in the North Sea, and I understand that the Royal Navy exercises frequently."

Many strandings and deaths of whales and dolphins have been linked to sonar surveys in recent years (see table). In March 2000, for example, whales of four species beached themselves in the Bahamas after a battle group from the US navy used sonar nearby. A US government investigation established that they had been affected by the sonar. Since then, the area's population of Cuvier's beaked whales has virtually disappeared; investigators conclude that they have either abandoned the area or died at sea.

The Washington-based National Resources Defence Council says that more than 30 such incidents have been linked to sonar use around the world.

Last week, a US court discovered that the US government had cut references to the effects of naval sonar from a report on the stranding of 37 whales in North Carolina a year ago, shortly after military manoeuvres.

Strandings in Britain have more than doubled in the past decade, from 360 in 1994 to 782 in 2004, and vets believe that the number of whales that wash up on shore are only one-tenth of those that die, suggesting that there are thousands of casualties.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has started legal proceedings against Britain for failing adequately to monitor the health of whales and dolphins in its seas.

Strandings: Sonar takes a deadly toll

JAPAN 1990: Six whales die after US Navy tests sonar

GREECE MAY 1996: Twelve Cuvier's beaked whales stranded on the west coast of Greece as Nato sweep the area with sonar.

CANARY ISLANDS JULY 2004: Fourteen whales beach during Nato exercises involving sonar. Strandings in 1985, 1988, 1989, 1991 and 2002 all coincide with naval exercises.

AUSTRALIA NOV 2004: Seventeen whales die in Bass Strait; 50 get stranded 300 miles away; 165 whales and dolphins later found dying. All coincide with sonar activities and seismic surveys.

US JAN 2005: Thirty-nine whales die after US Navy uses sonar in waters off North Carolina.

US March 2005 : Eighty dolphins beach as US Navy sub trails sonar off Florida Keys; 30 die.

TASMANIA OCT 2005: More than 110 pilot whales die; Australian Navy admits to using sonar.

NEW ZEALAND DECEMBER 2005: About 120 pilot whales die in the country's largest beaching for 12 years.

Secret sonar from naval ships is killing thousands of whales around the world and could have disoriented the two-ton mammal that died last night after becoming stranded in the Thames, an investigation by The Independent on Sunday has established.

The northern bottlenose whale died despite dramatic attempts at a rescue witnessed by thousands of people on the banks of the river, and millions on television. The whale was lifted on to a barge and carried down the river, in the hope that it could be taken to the open sea. But its condition deteriorated, it began to suffer muscle spasms, and it died before anything further could be done.

Experts believe that the whale's senses could have been damaged by military sonar. Some 30 strandings and deaths of whales around the world - from Tasmania to North America - have been linked to its use. The United Nations and other international bodies have warned that it is a major threat to the animals.

The investigation has also revealed that - in a separate, but deeply embarrassing development - the Government faces being hauled before the European Court for failing to take enough care of the whales and dolphins around Britain's shores.

Professor Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Canada - acknowledged to be the world's leading expert on northern bottlenose whales - said yesterday that he had never known the deep-ocean species to wander so far from its habitat.

"It would be unusual, and cause concern, for one to be found in the North Sea or English Channel, let alone a long way up a pretty shallow river," he said. "Its nearest habitat would be south-west of Cornwall. We know that beaked whales - the group of species to which the northern bottlenose whale belongs - are particularly sensitive to underwater noise. There has been a lot of seismic activity off northern Scotland and in the North Sea, and I understand that the Royal Navy exercises frequently."

Many strandings and deaths of whales and dolphins have been linked to sonar surveys in recent years (see table). In March 2000, for example, whales of four species beached themselves in the Bahamas after a battle group from the US navy used sonar nearby. A US government investigation established that they had been affected by the sonar. Since then, the area's population of Cuvier's beaked whales has virtually disappeared; investigators conclude that they have either abandoned the area or died at sea.

The Washington-based National Resources Defence Council says that more than 30 such incidents have been linked to sonar use around the world.

Last week, a US court discovered that the US government had cut references to the effects of naval sonar from a report on the stranding of 37 whales in North Carolina a year ago, shortly after military manoeuvres.

Strandings in Britain have more than doubled in the past decade, from 360 in 1994 to 782 in 2004, and vets believe that the number of whales that wash up on shore are only one-tenth of those that die, suggesting that there are thousands of casualties.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has started legal proceedings against Britain for failing adequately to monitor the health of whales and dolphins in its seas.

Strandings: Sonar takes a deadly toll

JAPAN 1990: Six whales die after US Navy tests sonar

GREECE MAY 1996: Twelve Cuvier's beaked whales stranded on the west coast of Greece as Nato sweep the area with sonar.

CANARY ISLANDS JULY 2004: Fourteen whales beach during Nato exercises involving sonar. Strandings in 1985, 1988, 1989, 1991 and 2002 all coincide with naval exercises.

AUSTRALIA NOV 2004: Seventeen whales die in Bass Strait; 50 get stranded 300 miles away; 165 whales and dolphins later found dying. All coincide with sonar activities and seismic surveys.

US JAN 2005: Thirty-nine whales die after US Navy uses sonar in waters off North Carolina.

US March 2005 : Eighty dolphins beach as US Navy sub trails sonar off Florida Keys; 30 die.

TASMANIA OCT 2005: More than 110 pilot whales die; Australian Navy admits to using sonar.

NEW ZEALAND DECEMBER 2005: About 120 pilot whales die in the country's largest beaching for 12 years.

US officer guilty over death of Iraqi general

By Steven Saint, Fort Carson, Colorado

THE highest-ranking US Army officer charged with killing a detainee in Iraq has been found guilty of negligent homicide, but not guilty on the more serious charge of murder of an Iraqi general during an interrogation.

A jury of six army officers convicted Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer jnr on charges resulting from the suffocation death of Iraqi Major-General Abed Hamed Mowhoush in Iraq in November 2003.

The general was placed head-first in a sleeping bag as Welshofer covered his mouth and sat on his chest during a fatal interrogation.

Prosecutors accused Welshofer of using harsh techniques to try to get information from General Mowhoush, describing them as torture.

A Tangled Web woven

The CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence is one of the agency's most open branches. The in-house think tank sponsors studies on how to improve intelligence collection and analysis and publishes a respected journal, Studies in Intelligence. But since 2003, at least three unclassified CSI reports--all critical of the agency--have been withheld from the CIA's website, U.S. News has learned. During that same time, the agency has placed online three other CSI reports, all of those relatively positive or neutral.
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Among the documents withheld: a tough 69-page report, "Curing Analytic Pathologies."The study, published quietly in December, argues that reform efforts have centralized authority but failed to change the intelligence community's core problem--"dysfunctional behaviors and practices within the individual agencies." A second report, "Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community," was published last May and found the nation's intelligence analysts isolated and lacking overseas experience and training in research techniques. A third report, "Intelligence for a New Era in American Foreign Policy," from 2004, is the record of an unclassified conference of intelligence veterans, several of whom made comments sharply critical of the intelligence community.

The three reports are available through the CIA's public-affairs office, but only by mail, and one must know to ask for them. The CIA declined to say why the reports are not posted online nor would it provide a full list of the center's unclassified publications. "I find it baffling and bizarre to suggest we are not disseminating reports," says CIA spokeswoman Michelle Neff, "when the CSI independently mails out the final version of every unclassified finished paper." But some experts say it is the agency's response that is baffling. "This does not inspire confidence," says Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.

As Elections Near, Officials Challenge Balloting Security

By Zachary Goldfarb, Special to The Washington Post

In Controlled Test, Results Are Manipulated in Florida System

As the Leon County supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho's job is to make sure voting is free of fraud. But the most brazen effort lately to manipulate election results in this Florida locality was carried out by Sancho himself.

Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. To Sancho, the results showed the vulnerability of voting equipment manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, which is used by Leon County and many other jurisdictions around the country.

Iran: Israeli military strike would be 'fatal mistake'

By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent and News Agencies

Iran on Sunday said Israel would be making a "fatal mistake" if it resorted to military action against Tehran's nuclear program and dismissed veiled threats made by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz as a "childish game."

On Saturday, Mofaz said "Israel will not accept Iran's nuclear armament," and added that Israel was prepared for military action to stop Iran's nuclear program.

Mofaz, speaking at the Herzliya Conference, said that although Israel is currently satisfied with the international diplomatic efforts aimed at containing Tehran's nuclear program, Israel must prepare to defend itself.
...

Ex-Pentagon Analyst Sentenced to 12 Years

By Matthew Barakat

A former Pentagon analyst was sentenced Friday to more than 12 years in prison for giving classified information to an Israeli diplomat and members of a pro-Israel lobbying group.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III said he gave Lawrence A. Franklin a sentence on the low end of federal guidelines because it appeared Franklin was trying help the United States, not hurt it.

The judge also agreed to let Franklin remain free while the government continues with the wider case. His prison time could be sharply reduced in return for his help in prosecuting two former members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Franklin - who had worked with top Pentagon officials, including Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy, and has expertise on Iraq and Iran - pleaded guilty in October to three felony counts. Three other counts were dropped in exchange.

Franklin, 59, did not speak at his sentencing.

At his plea hearing, he said he was motivated by frustration with U.S. policy in the Middle East when he gave the classified information to the diplomat and AIPAC. He said he received far more information from the Israeli diplomat than he ever disclosed and did not intend to harm the United States.

The two former AIPAC members, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, are scheduled to go on trial in April. Their lawyers have argued the two were engaged in routine lobbying work.

The judge said Friday that Franklin believed the National Security Council was insufficiently concerned with the threat posed by an unspecified Middle Eastern nation. Franklin thought leaking information might eventually persuade the Security Council to take more serious action, he said.

While the Middle Eastern country was not identified in the court record, sources and facts in the case point to Iran.

Ellis said he viewed Franklin’s case differently from a case involving information leaked to the Soviets at height of the Cold War. “But not different to the extent of excuse. Not at all,'’ Ellis said.

Franklin admitted that he met periodically with Rosen and Weissman between 2002 and 2004 and discussed classified information, including information about potential attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. Rosen and Weissman would later share what they learned with reporters and Israeli officials.

Rosen was a top lobbyist for Washington-based AIPAC for more than 20 years, and Weissman was the organization’s top Iran expert. AIPAC fired them in April and said it has cooperated with the investigation.

For More Information on this Subject See: www.freedemocracy.blogspot.com

Not. Backing. Hillary., by Molly Ivins

Equivocation in Democratic party has gone on far too long -- time for real leadership

I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.

Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.

The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.

If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, "Look, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes." Bobby Kennedy -- rough, tough Bobby Kennedy -- didn't do it. Just this quiet man trained by Benedictines who liked to quote poetry.

What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.

The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win elections.") Can't you even read the damn polls?

Here's a prize example by someone named Barry Casselman, who writes, "There is an invisible civil war in the Democratic Party, and it is between those who are attempting to satisfy the defeatist and pacifist left base of the party and those who are attempting to prepare the party for successful elections in 2006 and 2008."

This supposedly pits Howard Dean, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, emboldened by "a string of bad new from the Middle East ... into calling for premature retreat from Iraq," versus those pragmatic folk like Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emmanuel, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman.

Oh come on, people -- get a grip on the concept of leadership. Look at this war -- from the lies that led us into it, to the lies they continue to dump on us daily.

You sit there in Washington so frightened of the big, bad Republican machine you have no idea what people are thinking. I'm telling you right now, Tom DeLay is going to lose in his district. If Democrats in Washington haven't got enough sense to OWN the issue of political reform, I give up on them entirely.

Do it all, go long, go for public campaign financing for Congress. I'm serious as a stroke about this -- that is the only reform that will work, and you know it, as well as everyone else who's ever studied this. Do all the goo-goo stuff everybody has made fun of all these years: embrace redistricting reform, electoral reform, House rules changes, the whole package. Put up, or shut up. Own this issue, or let Jack Abramoff politics continue to run your town.

Bush, Cheney and Co. will continue to play the patriotic bully card just as long as you let them. I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were "German dogs." They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds. The MINUTE someone impugns your patriotism for opposing this war, turn on them like a snarling dog and explain what loving your country really means. That, or you could just piss on them elegantly, as Rep. John Murtha did. Or eviscerate them with wit (look up Mark Twain on the war in the Philippines). Or point out the latest in the endless "string of bad news."

Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as Republican-lite. If the Washington-based party can't get up and fight, we'll find someone who can.

Protests greet Washington refusal to turn over rapist US Marines; Lawmakers demand Visiting Forces Agreement termination

Members of the two Houses of the Philippine Congress have crossed party lines to support the Filipino people's demand for the termination of the Visiting Forces Agreement that allows renewed US military presence in the Philippines in the guise of military exercises with the local police and military.

Public uproar and the resulting joint action by Members of Congress were spurred by the refusal of the US to turn over custody over four US Marines accused of raping a 21-year old Filipina at the former Subic Naval Base in Nov. 2005. Rape is a heinous, non-bailable offense under Philippine law.

In its note verbale in response to a Philippine request for custody, the US Embassy justified its continued custody over the four rapist US Marines on the basis of provisions of the VFA. Dated Jan. 16, the note verbale came after exactly two months from the filing of the Philippine request.

The League of Filipino Students (LFS) immediately responded with a lightning rally near the US Embassy and burned a US flag to dramatize nationwide uproar over the US decision.

Bayan Muna (People First) Representative Satur C. Ocampo, the House Deputy Minority Leader, said the US refusal to turnover custody shows “US arrogance and disrespect of Philippine interests and laws” and confirms the “master-slave” relationship between Washington and Manila.

Ocampo, a long-time critic of US imperialism, has vowed to lead House sponsors of the joint resolution for the VFA's termination. “The case before us today should finally erase all doubts that the VFA is a fair agreement. It is a very unfair and onerous agreement that should be terminated in defense of our national interests.”

US military bases were shut down in 1992 after the Philippine Senate voted to junk a proposed treaty. US military forces were allowed reentry under the Arroyo government by virtue of the VFA.

Philippine and US military officials claim that military exercises were aimed at improving local defense capability to defeat the Abu Sayyaf Group, a bandit group which was first organized by the Armed Forces of the Philippines and US military advisors as a foil to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front waging a war for independence in Southern Philippines.

Full text of Visiting Forces Agreement

Google Earth fingers CIA rendition flights?, by Lester Haines

What we’ve got here is three USAF C-5 Galaxies sitting on an otherwise virtually deserted airport. Thoughfully, the local bus company has in one case nipped out to pick up passengers, as can be seen.

All of this caused a small flurry of emails from readers because the Scottish National party yesterday published a dossier in which it claims that so-called "rendition flights" had passed through Prestwick airport.

Specifically, the document "lists in detail the planes, dates on which they landed and 10 firms which allegedly operated on behalf of the CIA", as summarised thus:

Among the planes was a Gulfstream jet (Registration number N379P/N8068V) nicknamed the "Guantanamo Bay Express" and was reportedly used to transport suspects to the US prison on Cuba. That plane is listed in the report as having landed five times at Glasgow and Prestwick airports between 2002 and the end of 2004.

The report also lists details about a DC 9 airliner (Registration number N822US) which has been the subject of diplomatic inquiries by the Norwegian government and debate in the Canadian Parliament. The plane is listed in the report as having landed at both Glasgow and Prestwick airports in 2002 and 2003.

Naturally, the SNP is not very happy about any of this. Spokesman Angus Robertson MP said: "There is disquiet across Europe about this whole issue. This report gives worrying details about alleged rendition flights through Scotland. The planes in question have been subject to diplomatic and parliamentary inquiries in different countries. This report establishes that they did pass through Scottish airports."

So, has Google Earth given the SNP the ammunition it needs to go after the spooks? Sadly not. The aircraft in question are, our investigations suggest, carrying President Bush’s personal fleet of limos and other assorted kit that the average US prez needs when attending a G8 summit. The images, therefore, were taken in July 2005 - the summit taking place on 6-8 of that month.

You can find more info about the quite astounding lengths the US went to in order to prevent Mr Bush getting a cap popped in his ass in a pre-G8 Scotsman piece. As the paper notes: "Prestwick has been chosen as the main arrival airport for the world leaders because it is more difficult for protesters to get to than Edinburgh or Glasgow."

So there you have it. The huge security operation did not, however, stop crack teams of planespotters getting to Prestwick. Have a look here for a nice pic of one of Bush’s limo delivery vehicles. ® http://www.theregister.co.uk

Indonesia's E Timor abuses listed, by Worker Freedom

East Timor's President Xanana Gusmao wants to move on

A report into Indonesia's conduct during its 24-year annexation of East Timor says that as many as 180,000 civilians died of hunger or illness.
It documents abuses committed by Indonesian security forces, including the use of starvation as a weapon.

East Timor's president will formally hand over the report to the United Nations on Friday.

Indonesia has dismissed the report, saying it is time for the two countries to look to the future.

"We have agreed to co-operate for reconciliation and for solving our problems, therefore there is no need to look into the past because that does not help," Indonesia's State Secretary Yusril Ihza Mahendra said.

A copy of the document has been leaked to The Australian newspaper, which has published extensive details.

The 2,500-page report, produced by the East Timorese Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation, makes profoundly disturbing reading, according to the BBC's Jakarta correspondent, Rachel Harvey.

EAST TIMOR

1975: Indonesia invades after colonial power Portugal withdraws
Indonesia's often brutal rule opposed by Fretilin fighters
1999: More than 1,000 people killed over independence referendum
2002: East Timor becomes independent nation

E Timor: Birth of a Nation

Based on testimony from thousands of witnesses, the report documents a catalogue of abuses committed by Indonesian security forces.

Starvation, rape, torture and execution-style killings were all used as part of what the report describes as a "systematic plan".

"Rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence were tools used as part of the campaign designed to inflict a deep experience of terror, powerlessness and hopelessness upon pro-independence supporters," the report says, according to The Australian.

The report said that Indonesia's policy of deliberate starvation could have cost the lives of between 84,000 and 183,000 people between 1975 and 1999.

Reluctant to publish

It is understood the report is also critical of the tactics used by the Timorese resistance movement, led by the man who is now East Timor's President, Xanana Gusmao.

The territory won independence after a UN-sponsored referendum in 1999, which was itself the focus of widespread violence. Mr Gusmao has had a copy of the report for some months, but has been extremely reluctant to make it public.

The governments of both East Timor and Indonesia have consistently said they wish to leave the past behind and look to the future.

Since he first came to power, President Gusmao has called on the East Timorese to move on - focusing on reconciliation, not retribution.

He argues that as a small territory, dominated by its giant neighbour, East Timor has to achieve good working links with Indonesia. But others are dismayed that various attempts so far to prosecute those responsible for the suffering in East Timor have achieved little.

Critics of the government's approach say East Timor needs to see justice before it can come to terms with the past.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4630122.stm

Unfortunately this article from the BBC does not mention the US support and complicity in the 1975 Invasion of East Timor and the atrocities of the Indonesian military.This happend after the Indonesian Military killed many Indonesians in an anti-communist purge after General Shuharto's coop.

Worker Freedom

Reexamining the Sacco-Vanzetti Case,

Howard Zinn interviewed by Gabriel San Roman and Sonali Kolhatkar

In 1920, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were charged with the murders of Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Their trial in 1921, riddled with anti-immigrant bias, was one of the most significant political events of the time. Many leading intellectuals, writers and artists such as Dorothy Parker, H.G. Wells, and Upton Sinclair mobilized to try and obtain a retrial citing their beliefs that Sacco and Vanzetti were targeted for their anarchist activities and Italian ethnicity, and hance did not receive a fair trial. Nevertheless, the two men were eventually convicted and executed on August 23rd, 1927. Their case inspired leading political writer, Upton Sinclair, to write a novel called “Boston”.

Sacco and Vanzetti are now back in the news. The Los Angeles Times reported in December 2005 that an Orange County man found a letter allegedly written by Upton Sinclair in which Sinclair wrote that an attorney for the two men, Fred Moore, had confided to him of his clients’ guilt. Many conservative commentators, such as Jonah Goldberg of the LA Times, have responded by issuing blanket condemnations of the left’s support for various political prisoners.

People’s historian, Howard Zinn, who wrote the introduction for the reissue of Sinclair’s novel “Boston”, spoke to us about the significance of the alleged Sinclair letter, and what it means for the left today.

This interview aired on Wednesday January 18th, 2006 on Uprising at KPFK, Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, and is available on an audiostream at www.uprisingradio.org.

...
ZINN: I believe that the importance of the Sacco and Vanzetti case is that it took place very shortly after the end of World War I [when] the country was still living in an atmosphere created by the war. It was an atmosphere in which there was a government hunt for radicals. In 1919, right after the war the Palmer Raids took place and people who were not born in the United States were rounded up by the thousands and deported without trial, without due process, very much the kind of thing that is happening today where people are rounded up and if they’re are not citizens they can be detained and nobody will hear from them or about them. So it was a war-time atmosphere. At the time that they went on trial, there were still bodies coming back from Europe of the G.I.’s, soldiers who had died. Patriotism was still in the air. In fact, the trial took place just shortly after Memorial Day. Memorial Day was an occasion for patriotic fervor and in this case, a kind of wartime spirit. And so the important thing about their case is really not the question of their guilt or innocence - which certainly was not resolved by their trial, and I don’t know if it will ever be resolved - the important thing about it was that it revealed the nature of the justice system in the United States, a system of justice which has always been unfair to foreigners, unfair to poor people, unfair to radicals and which becomes especially notorious in times of war, in times of a Marshall atmosphere. So I would say that the importance of their case was that it was one of those many cases in American history. I’m thinking of the Haymarket affair 1886, I’m thinking of the case of Tom Mooney and [Warren] Billings which took place during the war. I’m thinking of what happened later after World War II, the Rosenberg case, which interestingly enough started shortly after the Communist victory in China, just as the Sacco and Vanzetti case started shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. And then, coming down to our time, I’m thinking of the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. In other words, throughout American history there’s certain critical cases that come into the courts and are decided in an atmosphere which is not conducive to fair play for black people, for radicals, for non-citizens, for poor people. And I think that the Sacco-Vanzetti case takes its place in that line up.
...

Scots CIA Flights Dossier Released

The Scottish National Party (opposition) denounced that the US Central Intelligence Agency used local airports to transport detained alleged terrorists.

The SNP released the dossier Wednesday with data collected from air companies used by the CIA to transport the suspects to secret prisons in Europe and other locations.

The document confirms rendition flights in Glasgow and Prestwick to Guantanamo, east Cuban territory occupied by the US, from 2002 to 2004 involving Gulfstream airlines.

More than 500 prisoners have been held in inhumane conditions at Guantanamo since late 2001.

British The News daily quoted an official source claiming the executive did not know Scotland was a route of the Rendition Operation the CIA used to load secret prisons with terror suspects, many of whom are believed to have been tortured.

SNP said they will supply this data to the British and European Parliament. The latter is investigating to determine whether the CIA had airports and illegal prisons on the continent.

The European Commission also opened an investigation. EP legislator, Swiss Dick Marty, said that the European governments were fully aware, but pretended to know nothing.

Marty called some European officials hypocrites because they knew of the developments and remained silent or looked the other way.

A report from the European Commission issued last week indicates that the CIA abducted over 150 "terrorists" and took them to secret prisons in Eastern Europe.

Democracy Now! EXCLUSIVE: Ex-British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray on Why He Defied UK Foreign Office by Posting Classified Memos Blasting US

EXCLUSIVE: Ex-British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray on Why He Defied UK Foreign Office by Posting Classified Memos Blasting U.S., British Support of Torture by Uzbek Regime

A new Human Rights Watch report examines the state of human rights around the world. On Wednesday the group released its 2006 annual report which accused the Bush administration of undermining human rights around the world by the way its waging the so-called war on terror.

The group also called on Congress to set up an independent panel and investigate U.S. human rights abuses. These are excerpts of what Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch had to say.

* Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

Later in the day White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan responded to the charges.

* Scott McClellan, White House press secretary.

Another country highlighted in the Human Rights Watch report is Uzbekistan - the former Soviet Republic that sits in Central Asia north of Afghanistan. The report accuses Uzbekistan of having a "disastrous human rights record."

Three weeks ago the former British Ambassador to the country, Craig Murray, defied Britain's Official Secrets Act by posting a series of classified memos that he wrote from his days in Uzbekistan, which up until recently was a close U.S. ally.

Fearing that the British government would shut down his website, Murray encouraged other website owners to republish the material on their sites. Hundreds have since taken up the call.

In one classified memo from July 2004, Murray wrote, "We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services via the US. We should stop... This is morally, legally and practically wrong."

A summary of one of Murray's memos read: "U.S. plays down human rights situation in Uzbekistan. A dangerous policy: increasing repression combined with poverty will promote Islamic terrorism." In another secret memo Murray estimated the Uzbek government was holding up to 10,000 political and religious prisoners.

One revealing letter that Murray posts online is from now-indicted Enron CEO Kenneth Lay to then-Texas governor George W Bush in which Lay crosses out the words "Governor Bush" and writes "Dear George." In it, Lay writes he is "delighted" Bush is meeting with the Uzbek ambassador to the US and tells Bush of Enron's plans in Uzbekistan.

Perhaps the most damning memo is one that was not written by Murray but by a British legal advisor named Michael Wood. In the memo, Wood claims that using information extracted through torture is not technically a violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

All of the memos date from between August 2002 and October 2004 - the period when Murray served as British ambassador to Uzbekistan. He was removed from the post in part because of his outspoken criticism of Uzbekistan's human rights record.

* Craig Murray, joins us today in his first interview in the United States since he posted the memos online.

- For more information: http://CraigMurray.co.uk
- Link to classified documents
- Craig Murray is testifying at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration.
- Link to letter from Enron CEO Kenneth Lay to George W. Bush See below:

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: These are excerpts of what Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, had to say.

KENNETH ROTH: I’m sorry to report that the global defense of human rights was profoundly compromised over the last year by the Bush administration's policy-level decisions to flout some of the most basic human rights norms, out of a misguided sense that that’s the best way to fight against terrorism.

Now, it's long been understood that the Bush administration’s use of torture and inhumane treatment could not be blamed on a handful of low-level soldiers on the night shift. At minimum, we understood up until now that policy decisions taken at the top had created an atmosphere of tolerance for abuse. And among those policy decisions that one could cite would be, for example, the Bush administration’s ripping up of the Geneva Conventions, with respect to Guantanamo, its extraordinarily narrow definition of torture to the point that most forms of abuse were not considered torture.

Now, other governments, obviously, mistreat detainees. Many of them mistreat detainees even worse than the United States, but uniformly they do it clandestinely. The United States government, over the last year, became the only government in the world to claim as a matter of right, as a matter of official policy, the power to treat detainees inhumanely. This U.S. disregard for Human Rights in the name of fighting terrorism has been extraordinarily counterproductive, even for the effort to defeat terrorism. It has lost the United States the moral high ground. It has breeded resentment, which has been a boon for terrorist recruiters.

Now, I think there is a copycat phenomenon. I will just give you one example. I met just about a year ago with the prime minister of Egypt and was complaining about the rounding up of suspects in the Taba bombing and the torture of scores, if not hundreds, of suspects. And he said to me really without batting an eyelash, ‘Well, what do you want? That's what the United States does.’ And so, you know, there is an enormous problem, that when a government as influential as the United States flouts basic human rights standards, it --

AMY GOODMAN: That was Human Rights Watch executive director, Kenneth Roth, speaking on Wednesday. Later in the day, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan responded to the charges.

SCOTT McCLELLAN: It appears that the report is based more on a political agenda than on facts. The United States of America does more than other country in the world to advance freedom and promote human rights. Our focus should be on those who are denying people human dignity and who are violating human rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Another country highlighted in the Human Rights Watch report is Uzbekistan, the former Soviet republic that sits in Central Asia, north of Afghanistan. The report accuses Uzbekistan of having a “disastrous human rights record.” Three weeks ago, the former British ambassador to the country, Craig Murray, defied Britain's Official Secrets Act by posting a series of classified memos that he wrote from his days in Uzbekistan, which up until recently was a close U.S. ally. Fearing that the British government would shut down his website, Murray encouraged other website owners to republish the materials on their sites. Hundreds have since taken up the call.

In one classified memo from July 2004, Ambassador Murray wrote, “We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services via the U.S. We should stop... This is morally, legally, and practically wrong.” A summary of Craig Murray’s memos read, “The U.S. plays down human rights situation in Uzbekistan. A dangerous policy: increasing repression combined with poverty will promote Islamic terrorism.” In another secret memo, Murray estimated the Uzbek government was holding up to 10,000 political and religious prisoners.

Perhaps the most damning memo is one that was not written by Murray, but by a British legal advisor named Michael Wood. In the memo, Wood claims that using information extracted through torture is not technically a violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. All of the memos date from between August 2002 and October 2004, the period when Murray served as British ambassador to Uzbekistan. He was removed from the post, in part because of his outspoken criticism of Uzbekistan’s human rights record.

Craig Murray joins us today in the Firehouse studio in his first interview in the United States since he posted the memos online. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

CRAIG MURRAY: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: You just flew in from Britain last night. We’d like to spend this hour talking about your experiences in Uzbekistan. When did you become ambassador there?

CRAIG MURRAY: In August of 2002, I became ambassador, went out to Uzbekistan.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you find when you got there?

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, I found a country which lives in fear. There’s palpable fear in the place. It’s a totalitarian state. Effectively they haven't reformed much from the old Soviet system, and then they have added a new level of brutality and violence and an extra level of corruption to that. It’s a state where everyone is scared of their neighbor, where there are 40,000 secret police in the city of Tashkent alone. And the astonishing thing was it was a state where people were being disappeared and tortured on an industrial basis and which was being financed and organized by the United States of America.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what did you begin to do as British ambassador? What could you do?

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, the first thing I did was make a speech, openly pointing out the abuses, which hadn't been done for many years. When I arrived, one of the things you have to do as a new ambassador is call on your fellow ambassadors, pay courtesy calls. And I kept saying to them, you know, to the French, the German, the Italian: “This is awful. It’s terrible what's happening here. There are thousands of people being rounded up in prisons, tortured, killed, disappeared, and it all seems to have the backing of the U.S.A.”

And they said to me absolutely straight, they said, “Yes, but we don't mention that. You know, President Karimov is an important ally of George Bush in the war on terror, so there’s an unspoken agreement that we keep quiet about the abuses.” I decided not to do that and so went very public, making a speech outlining the abuses and drawing international attention to them.

AMY GOODMAN: What evidence did you have of the support that the U.S. government was giving Uzbekistan, the Uzbek regime?

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, the United States had a large military air base in Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan is situated immediately north of Afghanistan, and the airbase had been used for operations into Afghanistan, but it was also being made into a permanent facility. It was intend to be a permanent facility. Halliburton were there building all the facilities. And the United States was pumping huge amounts of American taxpayers' money into the Uzbek regime. According to a U.S. embassy press release of December 2002, in 2002 alone, the United States government gave Uzbekistan over $500 million, of which $120 million was in military support and $80 million was in support of the Uzbek security services who were working alongside their C.I.A. colleagues.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to former ambassador, Craig Murray. He is the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. We’ll be back with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, has since resigned, was forced out as ambassador, fired as ambassador to Uzbekistan. Craig Murray, who from the time he became ambassador in 2002, began speaking out and also talking about the U.S. relationship with the Uzbek regime. The relationship between President Bush and the president of Uzbekistan, Karimov.

CRAIG MURRAY: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: What about it?

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, it goes back to before George Bush became President. In 1997 or 1998, George Bush, as Governor of Texas, had a meeting with the Uzbek ambassador to the United States, Ambassador Safayev, which was actually organized and set up by Kenneth Lay of Enron. And if you go to my website, you can find a facsimile of Kenneth Lay's letter to George Bush, telling him to meet Ambassador Safayev in order to conclude a billion-dollar gas deal between Uzbekistan and Enron. And that was the start of the Bush relationship with the Karimov regime.

Karimov is one of the most vicious dictators in the world, a man who is responsible for the death of thousands of people. Prisoners are boiled to death in Uzbek jails. And he was a guest in the White House in 2002. It's very easy to find photos of George Bush shaking Karimov's hand. Rumsfeld is particularly chummy with Karimov, so –

AMY GOODMAN: Boiled to death?

CRAIG MURRAY: Yeah, it was one of the first cases I came across, back in August or September of 2002. Two Muslim prisoners in Jaslyk gulag, which is an old Soviet gulag in the middle of the Karakum Desert, a sort of forced-labor camp, a terrible place where people are sent to die, effectively, two Islamic prisoners were boiled to death. They died of immersion in boiling water. The mother of one of the prisoners received her son's body back in a sealed casket, was ordered not to open the casket, and just to bury it the next morning. Despite being in her sixties, she managed to get the casket open in the middle of the night, even though police were guarding the house outside.

She got the body onto the kitchen table and took a series of detailed photos, which she got to the British embassy. I sent them back to London -- or, in fact, to Scotland, to the University of Glasgow, the pathology department. On the basis of these detailed photos, they did an autopsy report, in which they said that he had had his fingernails extracted, he had been severely beaten, particularly about the face, and he died of immersion in boiling liquid. And it was immersion, rather than splashing, because there is a clear tide mark around the upper torso and arms, which gives you some idea of the level of brutality of this regime.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you got this information out, and then what happened?

CRAIG MURRAY: It was very difficult for the British government, which, officially, of course, supports human rights, so it was very hard for them to reprimand me for making points on human rights. But also, internally, I was making other points, which I wasn't making in public at that time, and that was about the intelligence material we were getting from the Uzbek secret service, because I was seeing C.I.A. reports, which were passed on to MI6, which had been extracted from the Uzbek torture chambers.

I had been there for two or three months, which was long enough to know that, effectively, any Uzbek political or religious detainee is going to be tortured. There's no question of definition here. You know, we're not talking about ‘Is that or is that not torture?’ We're talking about people having their fingernails pulled, having their teeth smashed with hammers, having their limbs broken, and being raped with objects, including broken bottles; both male and female rape, extremely common in Uzbek prisons. And from the security service, which was operating right alongside the C.I.A., we were getting this intelligence.

I mean, the intelligence itself was nonsense. The purpose of the intelligence was to say that all the Uzbek opposition were related to al-Qaeda, that the democratic Uzbek opposition were all Islamic terrorists, that they'd traveled to Afghanistan, held meetings with Osama bin Laden. It was designed to promote the myth that Uzbekistan was, in total, part of the war on terror, and that by aligning himself with Karimov, Bush and the Bush Administration were backing or improving United States security, which wasn't true at all. I mean, the intelligence was false. If you torture people, they will say anything. I couldn't believe that the C.I.A. was working so closely with these dreadful security services and then were accepting intelligence which was obviously untrue. When I started complaining about that, even though I was only complaining internally, that's when the British government started to lose its patience with me and get very angry with me.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did the British government do, and when did they do it?

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, initially, I was summoned back to London for a meeting, which happened in March of 2003.

AMY GOODMAN: Right before the invasion.

CRAIG MURRAY: Just before the invasion. At that meeting, Sir Michael Wood, the Foreign Office’s chief legal advisor, said that it wasn't illegal for us to obtain this information that was got under torture, which he then confirmed in the follow-up memo, which is the memo which we’ve published on the web. He said that as long as we didn't specifically ask for an individual to be tortured, if he was tortured and we were passed the material, then that was not breaking the U.N. Convention Against Torture, and therefore the C.I.A. and MI6 were acting perfectly legally in getting this information from torture.

AMY GOODMAN: So you could know they were tortured, but you hadn't directly asked for their torture?

CRAIG MURRAY: Exactly. That made it not illegal, which is a line which, frankly, no international lawyer or not-in-government employee would take, but that was the view given. And I was told that this question had been considered at the highest level by the British Secretary of State, Jack Straw, who discussed it with the head of MI6, and they had decided that we should continue to receive this intelligence material, which was all C.I.A.-sourced, even though it was obtained through torture.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you have evidence of C.I.A. or other U.S. or British or other government officials in the torture chambers with the intelligence or prison officials in Uzbekistan torturing people?

CRAIG MURRAY: No, I don't think they ever did that, and I think they carefully avoided it. There is a fabric of deniability over the whole thing. They don't go actually into the torture chamber. They receive the intelligence that comes out of the torture chamber, but they don't enter it.

The C.I.A. will then process the material, so that when it actually arrives on the desk of Colin Powell, as it was then, or Condoleezza Rice or Donald Rumsfeld, or on the desk of a British minister, it just says this intelligence was got from an Uzbek prisoner related to al-Qaeda. It doesn't say who he was. It doesn't say his name. It doesn’t say when he was interrogated. So you can't trace it back, in order to say it was that individual and he was tortured in this way.

We know that they were being tortured. As I say, the United Nations did an investigation in which they said that torture in Uzbekistan was widespread and systemic, but the information is sanitized carefully. So when it arrives on the desk of, let's say, Condoleezza Rice, all she sees is it says, you know, this came from a terrorist detainee in Uzbekistan. So she can say, “I, to my knowledge, have never seen information obtained under torture.” And that's a fabric of deceit set up to enable her to say that, in effect.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray. He was fired from that position. He ultimately quit the British foreign service, was ambassador 2002 to 2004. So, you were there in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. You were there afterwards. How did the time change the U.S. and British relationship with Uzbekistan and Karimov?

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, I should say that one thing, which completely astonished me, was, as we went into the Iraq war, I saw George Bush on CNN, making a speech the day the real fighting started, where he said we are going in basically to dismantle the torture chambers and the rape rooms. And yet, the United States was subsidizing the torture chambers and the rape rooms in Uzbekistan. The sheer hypocrisy of that led me to write another one of the telegrams, which we've published on the web.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you say in that telegram? And, by the way, we will also post all of these on our website at DemocracyNow.org.

CRAIG MURRAY: Effectively, I said just that: How could we pretend that we were going to war to bring democracy to Iraq or to support human rights, when, at the same time, one of our allies, one of the members of the “Coalition of the Willing,” was Uzbekistan, which is one of the worst regimes in the world and every bit as bad as Saddam Hussein’s regime? And that if Karimov was on our side, plainly, we weren’t the goodies. And so, I put that fairly bluntly, which again didn't go down too well with Tony Blair and his people, I understand.

AMY GOODMAN: When did they ultimately pull you out?

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, what happened next was I suddenly found in August of 2003 -- I was on holiday in Canada -- I was called back early from holiday and told they wanted me to resign as ambassador in Tashkent. They said that they would find me another job somewhere else. I could be ambassador somewhere peaceful, like Copenhagen or somewhere. And I said, “No, I'm not going to resign. Why should I resign?” You know, I'm arguing my case internally, as I should. I'm not leaving. So they then said, “Well, in that case, we're going to have to investigate these disciplinary allegations,” and they handed me a list of 18 allegations, which included stealing money, which included issuing visas in exchange for sex and various other quite extraordinary allegations, and then said they’d give me a week to consider whether I wanted to resign or not.

Of course, I didn't resign. I said that these are just totally untrue. But they then proceeded to leak the allegations to the media, in order to dent my credibility, in effect. I refused to go, and there was a full formal investigation, which cleared me of all the allegations. I was acquitted of them all. But they had already -- although they hadn’t succeeded in getting me to resign , which was the purpose of the allegations, they had, from their point of view, achieved something in tarnishing my name. But I fought the allegations.

I went back, I stayed another year, and then one of my confidential papers was leaked to the Financial Times back in October of 2004. And that wasn't I who leaked it, but it was the leak of that paper which was the excuse for sacking me. And I strongly suspect that they leaked it themselves, in order to give them an excuse to sack me, having failed to get rid of me any other way.

AMY GOODMAN: And what is it that was leaked?

CRAIG MURRAY: It was a complaint about our cooperation with the Uzbek government.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you say?

CRAIG MURRAY: I said, effectively, that Uzbekistan is morally beyond the pale, that we shouldn’t be treating it as an ally, and we certainly shouldn’t be cooperating with the Uzbek security services.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us about Jamal Mirsaidov?

CRAIG MURRAY: Yes. Jamal Mirsaidov is a very brave man. He’s an old man, a professor of Tajik literature at the University of Samarkand, who was a dissident in Soviet times. I went and had dinner with him at the end of March 2003. While we were having dinner, his grandson, who lived in his house, was abducted off the streets, tortured, severely tortured, and murdered. His elbows and knees were smashed. His right hand was dipped in boiling liquid until the flesh peeled away. And, ultimately, he was killed with a blow to the back of the head.

I left after dinner with the professor, and a few hours, three, four hours after I left, the body was dumped on the professor's doorstep, and this was intended as a warning, both to the professor and to me, I mean, a warning not to meet dissidents and for dissidents not to meet me. It was -- the grandson was either 17 or 18 years old and, obviously, you know, that again gives an example of how dreadful the regime is. But also, it has troubled my own conscience greatly, because if I hadn't met his grandfather, he probably wouldn't have died that terrible death. So, it had a profound effect on me.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who has spoken out about the Uzbek regime, the U.S. relationship with that regime, and the financial support, as well as the British government's. When we come back, we will continue to talk about this and about his book that he has tried to publish about his experiences. The British government has stopped him from doing that, but hasn’t stopped him from posting on his website his confidential memos that he wrote to the British government after viewing U.S. and British intelligence coming out of Uzbekistan based on people who were tortured.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. He was there in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and afterwards, from 2002 to 2004. Finally, he was fired, and he ultimately quit the British foreign service. We are talking to Ambassador Craig Murray, who has just flown into the United States, speaking for the first time in the United States since he posted confidential memos online that he had written to the British government at the time, of course, privately, writing about the horrendous human rights record of the Uzbek regime and what it had to do with the British and U.S. governments. He is here to testify this weekend at an international commission of inquiry on crimes against humanity committed by the Bush administration, at an event at Riverside Church in New York City. And you can read more about that at BushCommission.org.

I wanted to talk about what happened last year in the eastern Uzbek town of Andijan. On May 10, protests began over the jailing of 23 businessmen who had been identified by the government as Islamic extremists. The protesters broke the men out of jail, and in the process freed thousands of other prisoners. By May 12, the protests intensified, and demonstrators tried to take over government buildings in Andijan. The Uzbek government responded by sealing off the city and then killing over 700 people. At the time, Uzbekistan was a key ally to both the United States and Britain in Central Asia. Initially, the U.S. downplayed the killings. On May 13, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was asked whether the United States blamed the violence on the government of Uzbekistan. This is how Boucher responded.

RICHARD BOUCHER: I would note that while we have been very consistently critical of the human rights situation in Uzbekistan, we're very concerned about the outbreak of violence in Andijan, in particular the escape of prisoners, including possibly members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an organization we consider a terrorist organization. I think at this point we're looking to all the parties involved to exercise restraint to avoid any unnecessary loss of life.

AMY GOODMAN: State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher. I also want to play a clip of Human Rights Watch executive director, Kenneth Roth, from May of last year and then ask the ambassador about the U.S. response to the killings. This is Kenneth Roth.

KENNETH ROTH: Human Rights Watch’s main conclusions are, first, that the scale of the killing and the deliberateness of the slaughter means that this can only be fairly classified as a massacre.

AMY GOODMAN: Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch. Former ambassador Craig Murray, you were in Uzbekistan leading up to this. You were not there during what happened in Andijan. Your response?

CRAIG MURRAY: I think it was a dreadful massacre. I mean, what was happening in Andijan was effectively no different to the pro-democracy demonstrations that you saw in Ukraine or in Georgia, that brought down a, you know, dictatorial regime and succeeded in doing so. In Andijan, the Uzbek government rather predictably responded by shooting the demonstrators, and those 700 people who died were not armed. I was completely flabbergasted by the White House’s approach. On one hand, you’ve got unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators, and on the other side you’ve got the government troops with tanks and heavy weapons shooting them down, and the White House called for restraint on both sides. You know, what do they want the people to do, die more peacefully? It was sickening, frankly. It really was a sickening response from the United States, but, you know, of a peace with their relationship with the Karimov regime, which they were trying desperately to maintain.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you say that this president, President Bush's relationship with Karimov in the Uzbek regime goes way back, and one of the links is Enron. Can you elaborate more on this?

CRAIG MURRAY: Yes. Enron cut a deal with Uzbekistan to exploit Uzbekistan's natural gas reserves. Central Asia has the largest untapped reserves of oil and gas in the world. Uzbekistan doesn’t have much oil; it has a terrific amount of natural gas. And Uzbekistan dominates Central Asia. It has half the population of the whole region. It has, by far, the biggest army and the most muscle. So Uzbekistan was key to the energy policy, and that's why Enron and Halliburton and all of the companies you very much associate with the Bush administration were in there plugging this policy of staying close to Karimov. And that’s why he was such a welcome guest in the White House.

The war on terror, if you like, was a cover for these activities. And that's why they needed this false intelligence, saying that the Uzbek opposition was all Islamic terrorists. I mean, it’s quite astonishing. Again, the White House spokesman in that clip was saying that the prison break in Andijan would have released terrorists. The majority of people in Andijan jail -- and I’ve been to Andijan; I knew two people who were killed in the massacre -- the majority of people in Andijan jail were perfectly peaceful political and religious prisoners. There were also some petty criminals who released, too. But the wellspring of the whole policy of the United States was the ruthless pursuit of sectional oil and gas interests, and that originated with Enron. Obviously, once Enron collapsed, those interests passed on to other U.S. companies.

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

CRAIG MURRAY: Basically other major oil companies. But the sad thing, or the ironic thing, I suppose is the way to put it, is that ultimately the policy didn't work, because having given probably about $1 billion over a three-year period and having even supported the Uzbek government at the time of the Andijan massacre, when the rest of the world was expressing outrage. The Uzbeks eventually cut a deal with Gazprom of Russia, and the United States then got kicked out of Uzbekistan very unceremoniously. They didn't leave.

The Bush administration is trying now to put the best possible gloss on it, and say, ‘We left because of the human rights situation.’ Absolutely untrue. The human rights situation seemed not to bother them at all. They left because they were kicked out. The Uzbek government withdrew the lease on the American Air Force base there. They kicked out the Peace Corps, kicked out most American NGOs and U.S. Aid operations, and, you know, we had the very pathetic sight of America having really kowtowed to this terrible dictator, then being humiliated by him and chucked out of the country. So, all that loss of moral authority, all that waste of money and resource has come to nothing.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the Bush administration will succeed in getting back in?

CRAIG MURRAY: It’s not impossible. Karimov is a person entirely motivated by cash and power, basically, and he saw short-term advantage, effectively short-term advantage in massive, massive bribes paid to his daughter by Gazprom, in going with Russia on the gas deal. And part of that was that Putin insisted that the United States be removed from Uzbekistan as part of that deal. In a couple of years time, if Karimov sees personal advantage and the chance to make money out of letting the United States back, he will equally do it, too, to Putin.

AMY GOODMAN: We know about black sites, about the U.S. sending people to prisons in Eastern Europe. It’s believed Romania, Poland are among those places. Is Uzbekistan one of those places, and do you know anything about secret flights, these so-called torture flights where prisoners are taken, spirited away to other places to be tortured?

CRAIG MURRAY: I think the most important thing I can say about extraordinary rendition is that the end product exists. The United States, as a matter of policy, is willing to accept intelligence got by torture by foreign agencies. I can give direct firsthand evidence of that and back it up with documents.

On the existence of flights, the C.I.A. planes did come into Uzbekistan. They did bring prisoners, Uzbek prisoners, back from Afghanistan into Uzbekistan, to my certain knowledge. They also came in from other places. For example, the C.I.A. flight, which famously stopped at this secret location in Poland, went on Tashkent. That was the next destination of that plane. I cannot say, to my knowledge, while I was ambassador there, that the C.I.A. had any secret imprisonment facilities or brought in third country nationals to Uzbekistan. If that was happening, I wasn't aware of it. Since I left, a number of journalists, in particular reputable journalists, have told me that they have inside C.I.A. sources who tell them that is happening. I believe that’s probably true. I believe it probably is happening, but I would be lying if I said that I knew it was happening while I was there. I didn't. But what I can say for sure is that the C.I.A. is happy to get information from foreign torture chambers, and that is, of course, the basis of this program of shipping people around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who has just flown into this country, to the United States, last night. I want to read you a bit from a Reuters report that says, “Britain believes the C.I.A.’s reported secret transfer of terrorism suspects to foreign countries for interrogation is illegal, according to a leaked government document that has just been published today. The Foreign Office memo says the practice known as extraordinary rendition could never be legal if the detainee is at risk of torture, according to extracts that are printed in The Guardian newspaper.” It adds, “British cooperation would also be illegal, if we knew of the circumstances, according to the paper. Human right groups have accused the C.I.A. of running secret prisons in Europe and elsewhere, abducting suspects, transferring them between countries by plane. President Bush last month said the United States does not secretly move terrorism suspects to foreign countries that torture to get information. He said, ‘We do not render to countries that torture. That has been our policy, and that policy will remain the same.’

”Washington has come under growing pressure to explain why hundreds of flights by C.I.A. planes have crisscrossed the world, stopping in many European countries. Britain, a key U.S. ally, has repeatedly sought to play down its role in the rendition controversy. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told Parliament, January 10, Britain has approved only two C.I.A. rendition flights. However, the leaked document dated December 7, 2005, says the C.I.A. may have used British airports more often. According to the BBC News website, quoting from an extract of the memo, the papers we have uncovered so far suggest there could be more than two cases referred to in the House of Commons by the Foreign Secretary. It was sent by an official in Straw’s department to an aide in Prime Minister Tony Blair's office. It was leaked to the New Statesman magazine, parts were reprinted in several British newspapers today. The briefing document's author, named as Irfan Siddiq, appears to suggest that British government should seek to sidestep difficult questions over its role in renditions. ‘We should try to avoid getting drawn on detail and to try to move to debate on,’ he wrote, according to the newspaper. A spokesperson for Blair declined to comment. A Foreign Office spokesman had no comment. He said in a statement, ‘The government does not deport or extradite anyone to another state where there are substantive grounds to believe they would be subject to torture.’” You actually ran against Jack Straw, is that right?

CRAIG MURRAY: I did. I stood against him on the torture issue in his Blackburn constituency.

AMY GOODMAN: He won.

CRAIG MURRAY: Yes. I didn't have a backing of any political party. So I didn't get a huge number of votes, but it was worth doing.

AMY GOODMAN: So what about this latest leaked document?

CRAIG MURRAY: I think there's no doubt now that extraordinary rendition is happening. I mean, this is just further documentary evidence. And the, you know, certainly, ethnic Uzbeks, the United States was bringing into Uzbekistan. So that, itself, proves that President Bush is lying in saying that they don't take people to countries that torture. And, you know, one of the amazing things is that even a country like Syria, which occasionally is in the sort of list of evil places, cooperates with the C.I.A. in the extraordinary rendition program and in giving intelligence. So, there is no doubt that George Bush and Condoleezza Rice have been lying through their teeth about extraordinary rendition for some time. And more and more information is going to come out about it. The Council of Europe is conducting an investigation, and I’m going to be testifying before that inquiry.

AMY GOODMAN: When is that?

CRAIG MURRAY: That’s on Monday in Strasbourg.

AMY GOODMAN: And what will you say?

CRAIG MURRAY: I will again say that what I can testify to for certain is that the C.I.A. is prepared to get intelligence from foreign torture chambers, that as a matter of policy, it will do that, and I have firsthand experience with that. I’d like to mention one thing --

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that firsthand experience.

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, when I was complaining about our obtaining this torture material, before I went back to London, I asked my deputy to call up the American embassy just to make sure I wasn't missing something here and to ask them, ask the C.I.A. station there, whether they, too, believed that this Uzbek intelligence was probably coming from torture. And so, my deputy went off to the American embassy. She had a meeting there, which was either with a political counselor or the head of the C.I.A. station. I’m not quite certain which [inaudible]. She came back and reported to me that she had had the meeting, and the American embassy had said, yes, it probably did come from torture, but they didn't see that as a problem.

And then, of course, I was called back to this meeting in London, where I was told that it was quite legal to get the information, even though it was obtained under torture. So no one, no one was denying internally that the information came from torture. And no one -- it hasn’t yet been denied. Neither the British government nor the American government has denied what I’m saying, that they were getting intelligence from Uzbek torture chambers.

One thing I want to mention, which is very important in this, is the U.K.-U.S. intelligence sharing agreement, under which the C.I.A. and MI6 share everything they've got all over the world across the board, and the N.S.A. and G.C.H.Q. share everything they've got around the world across the board, and that subsisted since it was negotiated by Churchill and Roosevelt, I think. And that means that, in effect, the British government doesn't have an independent policy on these things, The British government is tied to whatever the U.S. policy is, because however the C.I.A. gets its material, however the N.S.A. gets its material, the British intelligence services are getting the same material. So the British policy is the American policy, and that's why this whole question of extraordinary rendition is extraordinarily difficult for the British government, which can't pretend it doesn’t know what’s happening. Plainly, it does know what’s happening, and it’s on very, very difficult grounds.

But frankly, it’s been let, so far, very much off the hook by a very weak media. If you think the media in the United States is bad, I think in some ways it’s worse in the U.K. And people just aren’t asking the difficult questions of ministers. They aren’t pursuing the kind of points that that memo raises. I mean, everyone has known, if you like, the truth about extraordinary rendition and the points in that memo that’s been leaked today. But no one has really backed -- in questioning, no reporter has had the nerve to back Tony Blair up against the wall on it.

AMY GOODMAN: We only have ten seconds. But what has given you the courage to speak out?

CRAIG MURRAY: I think it’s just what any decent person would do, I mean, when you come across people being boiled and their fingernails pulled out or having their children raped in front of them, you just can't go along with it and sleep at night.

AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Craig Murray, I want to thank you very much for joining us. That does it for today’s broadcast. He will speaking this weekend at Riverside Church at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, the title of that, at BushCommission.org. Our website, DemocracyNow.org, will post all of the memos there.

Bin Laden Warns of Attacks, Offers Truce

Al-Jazeera on Thursday aired an audiotape purportedly from Osama bin Laden, who says al-Qaida is making preparations for attacks in the United States but offering a truce "with fair conditions."

The tape's release came days after a U.S. airstrike in Pakistan that was targeting bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, and reportedly killed four leading al-Qaida figures, including possibly al-Zawahri's son-in-law. There was no mention of the attack on the segments that were broadcast.

It was the first purported tape from the al-Qaida leader in more than a year — the longest period without a message since the Sept. 11 2001 suicide hijackings in the United States.

Al-Jazeera said the tape was recorded in the Islamic month that corresponds with December.

The speaker refers to an alleged comment by President Bush about bombing the Qatar headquarters of Al-Jazeera, which was first reported in the British press on Nov. 22.

He also refers indirectly to the July 7 bombings in London that killed 56 people and to poll numbers that showed a fall in Bush's popularity, as occurred in late 2005.

The voice on the tape said he was directing his message to the American people after polls showed that "an overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq but (Bush) opposed that desire."

He said insurgents were winning the conflict in Iraq and warned that security measures in the West and the United States could not prevent attacks there.

"The proof of that is the explosions you have seen in the capitals of European nations," he said "The delay in similar operations happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures. The operations are under preparation and you will see them in your homes the minute they are through (with preparations), with God's permission."

The speaker did not give conditions for a truce in the excerpts aired by Al-Jazeera.

"We do not mind offering you a long-term truce with fair conditions that we adhere to," he said. "We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat. So both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and
Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war.

"There is no shame in this solution, which prevents the wasting of billions of dollars that have gone to those with influence and merchants of war in America," he said.

There was no immediate confirmation of the tape's authenticity, although the voice resembled that of bin Laden's in previous messages.

The last audiotape purported to be from bin Laden was broadcast in December 2004 by Al-Jazeera. In that recording, he endorsed Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi as his deputy in Iraq and called for a boycott of Iraqi elections.

He issued numerous tapes in 2003 and 2004, calling for Muslims to attack U.S. interests and threatening attacks against the United States.

In an April 15, 2004, audiotape, he vowed revenge against the United States for
Israel's assassination of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin — and at the same time offered a truce to European countries.

Bin Laden appeared in a video released October 2004, just ahead of U.S. presidential elections, saying the United States can avoid another Sept. 11 attack if it stops threatening the security of Muslims.

Since December 2004, bin Laden's deputy in al-Qaida, al-Zawahri, has issued a number of video and audiotapes, including one claiming responsibility for the London attacks, which he said came after Europe rejected the terms of a truce al-Qaida had previously offered them.

Al-Jazeera's editor-in-chief Ahmed al-Sheik would not comment on when or where the tape was received. He said the full tape was 10 minutes long. The station aired four excerpts with what it "considered newsworthy," he said, but would not say what was on the remainder.

Annual Amnesty International Lecture: Noam Chomsky, 'The War on Terror'

Described by The New Yorker as 'one of the greatest minds of the 20th century', Noam Chomsky gave the 2006 Amnesty Lecture, hosted by Trinity College Dublin, on January 18th. The theme of the lecture was 'The War on Terror'.

The full text of the lecture has now been made available.

(Amnesty International has filmed the lecture and will make it available in due course. An audio version will also be broadcast on the internet. For further details, please refer back to this web page, which will continue to be updated.)

The full text of Professor Chomsky's lecture is available to download in MS Word format

Human Rights Watch World Report 2006

U.S. Policy of Abuse Undermines Rights Worldwide

New evidence demonstrated in 2005 that torture and mistreatment have been a deliberate part of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism strategy, undermining the global defense of human rights, Human Rights Watch said today in releasing its World Report 2006.

The evidence showed that abusive interrogation cannot be reduced to the misdeeds of a few low-ranking soldiers, but was a conscious policy choice by senior U.S. government officials. The policy has hampered Washington’s ability to cajole or pressure other states into respecting international law, said the 532-page volume’s introductory essay.

“Fighting terrorism is central to the human rights cause,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “But using illegal tactics against alleged terrorists is both wrong and counterproductive.”

Roth said the illegal tactics were fueling terrorist recruitment, discouraging public assistance of counterterrorism efforts and creating a pool of unprosecutable detainees.

U.S. partners such as Britain and Canada compounded the lack of human rights leadership by trying to undermine critical international protections. Britain sought to send suspects to governments likely to torture them based on meaningless assurances of good treatment. Canada sought to dilute a new treaty outlawing enforced disappearances. The European Union continued to subordinate human rights in its relationships with others deemed useful in fighting terrorism, such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.

Many countries – Uzbekistan, Russia and China among them – used the “war on terrorism” to attack their political opponents, branding them as “Islamic terrorists.”

Human Rights Watch documented many serious abuses outside the fight against terrorism. In May, the government of Uzbekistan massacred hundreds of demonstrators in Andijan, the Sudanese government consolidated “ethnic cleansing” in Darfur, western Sudan, and persistent atrocities were reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chechnya. Severe repression continued in Burma, North Korea, Turkmenistan, and Tibet and Xinjiang in China, while Syria and Vietnam maintained tight restrictions on civil society and Zimbabwe conducted massive, politically motivated forced evictions.

There were bright spots in efforts to uphold human rights by the Western powers in Burma and North Korea. Developing nations also played a positive role: India suspended most military aid to Nepal after the king’s coup, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations forced Burma to relinquish its 2006 chairmanship because of its appalling human rights record. Mexico took the lead in convincing the United Nations to maintain a special rapporteur on protecting human rights while countering terrorism. Kyrgyzstan withstood intense pressure from Uzbekistan to rescue all but four of 443 refugees from the Andijan massacre, and Romania gave them temporary refuge.

The lack of leadership by Western powers sometimes ceded the field to Russia and China, which built economic, social and political alliances without regard to human rights.

In his introductory essay to the World Report, Roth writes that it became clear in 2005 that U.S. mistreatment of detainees could not be reduced to a failure of training, discipline or oversight, or reduced to “a few bad apples,” but reflected a deliberate policy choice embraced by the top leadership.

Evidence of that deliberate policy included the threat by President George W. Bush to veto a bill opposing “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” Roth writes, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s attempt to exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from the law. In addition, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales claimed that the United States can mistreat detainees so long as they are non-Americans held abroad, while CIA Director Porter Goss asserted that “waterboarding,” a torture method dating back to the Spanish Inquisition, was simply a “professional interrogation technique.”

“Responsibility for the use of torture and mistreatment can no longer credibly be passed off to misadventures by low-ranking soldiers on the nightshift,” said Roth. “The Bush administration must appoint a special prosecutor to examine these abuses, and Congress should set up an independent, bipartisan panel to investigate.”

The Human Rights Watch World Report 2006 contains survey information on human rights developments in more than 70 countries in 2005. In addition to the introductory essay on torture, the volume contains two essays: “Private Companies and the Public Interest: Why Corporations Should Welcome Global Human Rights Rules” and “Preventing the Further Spread of HIV/AIDS: The Essential Role of Human Rights.”

Privatizing New Orleans, by Jordan Flaherty

“I can’t stand it anymore, being lifted up and then smacked down again, just when we were all trying so hard to experience hope,” a friend tells me.

She was one of several people I know who were bystanders to Saturday’s shootings in New Orleans.

Last weekend, revelers filled the streets for one of our city’s most vital cultural traditions, the second-line -- a roving street celebration put on by New Orleans community institutions known as Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs. This second-line was the biggest anyone I spoke to had seen, put on by 30 different Clubs. Many people came from out of town just for the day, and during the parade thousands were chanting, “we’re back, we’re back!”

The day of hope and celebration was shattered when, towards the end of the route, three people were shot in three separate incidents on Orleans Avenue between Claiborne and Broad, in the Treme, a Black neighborhood with a long history and culture of resistance.

Michelle Longino, one of the event's organizers, was quoted in the Times-Picayune as saying, “It just breaks my heart that some people on the outskirts could do such a horrible thing and have it be associated with the beautiful, glorious, peaceful thing we were putting together,” adding that the event was organized to “testify to the importance of the social clubs and the importance of providing affordable housing and decent schools so people can return.”

The violent end to a hopeful day was devastating. It was horrifying to see a broad community effort shattered and to see a return of the violence that has marred our city.

On top of our personal sorrow, there is also a pressure all of us here in New Orleans feel, this awareness that we are being judged by the media and by politicians in Baton Rouge and Washington. The question constantly comes up, are we deserving of rebuilding? I feel certain no other US city would be facing this questioning, but we have to constantly prove ourselves as being “worthy”.

All of us were immediately aware that those who do not want the city rebuilt would use this incident as evidence against us, just as recent news reports have gloated over the “lack of crime” that has been brought by the mass displacement of our city’s population.

Last week, the mayor’s Bring Back New Orleans commission released its recommendations on rebuilding, which are filled with the expected double talk and half promises regarding what neighborhoods can be rebuilt, pegged to vague tests and benchmarks.

But most infuriating, featured in all the coverage of the report, is the estimate given by the commission, politicians, developers, and media that only half of the city’s population is expected to come back to New Orleans in the next several years. The so-called experts advise us to be “realistic”, and accept that the city has to have a “smaller footprint” because so many people will not be returning.

Where do the reduced population statistics come from? The truth is that the “experts” are manipulating the truth for their own ends. They are creating a situation where half the city is kept from returning; then saying that we need to reduce our expectations to this reality they have created.
...

Muslim Americans Seek Reporter's Release

An American Muslim advocacy group is traveling to the Middle East to plead for the safe return of a journalist facing death at the hands of her kidnappers.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is planning to hold one news conference Thursday in Amman, Jordan, and another Friday in Baghdad. The group hopes to reach Arab television audiences and convince the captors of Jill Carroll, a freelancer for the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor, to release her.

"We're taking a serious step on behalf of our community, and we are hopeful that our words will be heard and our appeal will be listened to," said Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR. "We have been reading about her work ... and though we don't know her, we know it is wrong to kidnap people and hurt innocent people."

Carroll, 28, was kidnapped Jan. 7 in one of Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhoods. She was being driven to meet a Sunni Arab politician, who failed to appear for the interview. Carroll's translator was killed, but her driver escaped.

The group claiming responsibility has threatened to kill Carroll on Friday unless all Iraqi women in military custody are released. A U.S. military spokeswoman, Sgt. Stacy Simon, said eight Iraqi women are currently detained. She provided no further details.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday that Carroll's "safe return is a priority" and he did not want to talk about it further because of the sensitivity of the situation.

CAIR, based in Washington, works to promote a positive image of Islam and Muslims in the United States.

Sources offer new tip in Bogotá DEA corruption case

A memo drafted by Department of Justice attorney Thomas M. Kent alleging major corruption in the Bogotá, Colombia, office of the Drug Enforcement Administration has caused a bit of a stir in the mainstream media over the past few days.

The internal Justice Department document, drafted in December 2004, alleges that DEA agents in Bogotá are on the payroll of narco-traffickers, engaged in money laundering for right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia and also conspired to murder informants. The document also alleges that two government watchdog agencies — the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General and DEA’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) — whitewashed an internal investigation into the corruption charges.

So as the mainstream pack journalism heats up in the wake of Narco News’ exclusive report on the memo and corruption allegations, it seems appropriate to throw some more raw meat into the field for the hungry media wolves.

US Journalist Murdered after Writing Article on US-Bush Supreme Court Nominee Judge Alito

Dr. Les Sachs

New York Times writer and journalist David E. Rosenbaum was just murdered, a mere matter of days after writing a critical article about US President Bush's Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr. The article by Rosenbaum helped expose how Alito was long ago an advocate of unrestrained government power.

Web writer Kurt Nimmo wrote an article questioning Rosenbaum's death, and then Kurt Nimmo suddenly terminated his own long-standing website due to death threats. Mr Nimmo seems to have put his web archives back up for a short time, but in any case the Nimmo article does appear on the Jeff Rense website: http://www.rense.com/general69/ROSEN.HTM

The brutal murder of journalist Rosenbaum, needs to be considered in the light of other mysterious violent deaths, such as that of journalist Gary Webb, and that of other people who wound up dead after daring to oppose the Bush gang or the US government and its corruption.
The criminal influence of US judges is indeed the most forbidden and taboo topic in US media.

The murder of journalist Rosenbaum, directly after he wrote a critical article about the Bush regime and a federal judge, is also relevant to the US death threats against myself, in revenge for my exposing other scandals involving the Bushes and federal judges.

David Rosenbaum was murdered after criticising Bush's US Supreme Court nominee Alito. In my own journalism, I have criticised Bush's Supreme Court candidate J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was interviewed by President Bush, and then dropped (after publication of my article) in favor of candidate and now Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

Judge Harvie Wilkinson was involved in the cover-up of bribery, fraud and extortion involving 4th circuit federal Judge Robert Payne, in a scheme to benefit the flow of bribery and campaign cash to the George Bush family. Payne ("Judge Robert Payne is my name, Federal bribery is my game"), himself a nominee of the first President Bush, staged a fake legal proceeding to ban my freedom of speech, with Payne's own friends posing as my lawyers. Judge Payne, his thugs and Bush's friends, backed their scheme with threats of jail and murder that were made under the cover of Payne's order banning my freedom of speech, which all forced me to take political refuge in the Netherlands.

For more information on this other scandal with Bush and the federal judges (also involving the neo-fascist celebrity author Patricia Cornwell, a long time friend of the Bushes), see my weblog Banned in America: http://bannedinamerica.blogspot.com/

TORTURE AND MISERY IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM, by Harold Pinter

The Independent/UK The great poet Wilfred Owen articulated the tragedy, the horror -and indeed the pity- of war in a way no other poet has. Yet we have learnt nothing. Nearly 100 years after his death the world has become more savage, more brutal, more pitiless.

But the "free world" we are told, as embodied in the United States and Great Britain, is different to the rest of the world since our actions are dictated and sanctioned by a moral authority and a moral passion condoned by someone called God. Some people may find this difficult to comprehend but Osama Bin Laden finds it easy.

What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of International Law. An arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public. An act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading -as a last resort (all other justifications having failed to justify themselves)- as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands upon thousands of innocent people.

An independent and totally objective account of the Iraqi civilian dead in the medical magazine The Lancet estimates that the figure approaches 100,000. But neither the US or the UK bother to count the Iraqi dead. As General Tommy Franks of US Central Command memorably said: "We don't do body counts".

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery and degradation to the Iraqi people and call it "bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East". But, as we all know, we have not been welcomed with the predicted flowers. What we have unleashed is a ferocious and unremitting resistance, mayhem and chaos.

You may say at this point: what about the Iraqi elections? Well, President Bush himself answered this question when he said: "We cannot accept that there can be free democratic elections in a country under foreign military occupation". I had to read that statement twice before I realised that he was talking about Lebanon and Syria.

What do Bush and Blair actually see when they look at themselves in the mirror?

I believe Wilfred Owen would share our contempt, our revulsion, our nausea and our shame at both the language and the actions of the American and British governments.

* Harold Pinter, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, adapted the following from a speech he delivered earlier this year on winning the Wilfred Owen Award.

Propaganda: Military's Information War Is Vast and Often Secretive, by Jeff Gerth

The media center in Fayetteville, N.C., would be the envy of any global communications company.

In state of the art studios, producers prepare the daily mix of music and news for the group's radio stations or spots for friendly television outlets. Writers putting out newspapers and magazines in Baghdad and Kabul converse via teleconferences. Mobile trailers with high-tech gear are parked outside, ready for the next crisis.

The center is not part of a news organization, but a military operation, and those writers and producers are soldiers. The 1,200-strong psychological operations unit based at Fort Bragg turns out what its officers call "truthful messages" to support the United States government's objectives, though its commander acknowledges that those stories are one-sided and their American sponsorship is hidden.

"We call our stuff information and the enemy's propaganda," said Col. Jack N. Summe, then the commander of the Fourth Psychological Operations Group, during a tour in June. Even in the Pentagon, "some public affairs professionals see us unfavorably," and inaccurately, he said, as "lying, dirty tricksters."

The recent disclosures that a Pentagon contractor in Iraq

The Failed U.S. Mission to Capture Iraqi Petroleum, by Michael T. Klare

It has long been an article of faith among America´s senior policymakers -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- that military force is an effective tool for ensuring control over foreign sources of oil. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to embrace this view, in February 1945, when he promised King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia that the United States would establish a military protectorate over his country in return for privileged access to Saudi oil -- a promise that continues to govern U.S. policy today.

Every president since Roosevelt has endorsed this basic proposition, and has contributed in one way or another to the buildup of American military power in the greater Persian Gulf region. American presidents have never hesitated to use this power when deemed necessary to protect U.S. oil interests in the Gulf.

When, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the first President Bush sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, he did so with absolute confidence that the application of American military power would eventually result in the safe delivery of ever-increasing quantities of Middle Eastern oil to the United States.

This presumption was clearly a critical factor in the younger Bush´s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Now, more than two years after that invasion, the growing Iraqi quagmire has demonstrated that the application of military force can have the very opposite effect: It can diminish -- rather than enhance -- America´s access to foreign oil.

An Occupation Floating on a Sea of Oil Oil was certainly not the only concern that prompted the American invasion of Iraq, but it weighed in heavily with many senior administration officials. This was especially true of Vice President Dick Cheney who, in an August 2002 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, highlighted the need to retain control over Persian Gulf oil supplies when listing various reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein. Nor is there any doubt that Cheney´s former colleagues in the oil industry viewed Iraq´s oilfields with covetous eyes.

"For any oil company," one oil executive told the New York Times in February 2003, "being in Iraq is like being a kid in F.A.O. Schwarz." Likewise oil was a factor in the pre-war thinking of many key neoconservatives who argued that Iraqi oilfields -- once under U.S. control -- would cripple OPEC and thereby weaken the Arab states facing Israel. Still, for some U.S. policymakers, other factors were pre-eminent, especially the urge to demonstrate the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine, the precept that preventive war is a practical and legitimate response to possible weapons-of-mass-destruction ambitions on the part of potential adversaries.

The Future of Indymedia?, by Terry Tuesday

This is the first part of three interlinked articles on the potential political role of net based alternative media

The first part looks at American autonomist Marxist Harry Cleaver’s account of how international solidarity networks were built up around the Chiapas revolt in 1994, ‘The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle’ and at the states’ response to on-line social movement organising, in particular at state actions against the Indymedia network.

The second article, An Historical Overview of Media and Class Struggle argues that the full potential of the Internet for political mobilisation has yet to be realised, as societies where Internet usage is currently widespread are pretty quiescent, with relatively little in the way of social protest and class struggle by comparison with say the 1960s and 70s. This argument is made by an historical overview of the role of the media and alternative media in various instances of protest and struggle.

Finally,The Internet, Communication and Horizontal Organisation looks at the role of the internet in communications, and argues that it can facilitate horizontal as opposed to hierarchal forms of social movement organising.

This has a pretty narrow focus looking at the role of the internet in the West, there are also many issues related to it and attempts by authoritarian regimes to suppress its political use in the South.

Furthermore, my argument is based on the assumption of a continuing growth in Internet usage, particularly in regard to the parts on communications and organising.

These articles began life as an essay written over a year ago, for academic purposes, I’ve it edited for indymedia.

A very reasonable criticism of it would be that it largely ignores the digital divide, that is more for reasons of space and time than anything else. Nonetheless the arguments in regard to the potential of alternative media on the net are sound.

The Electronic Fabric of Struggle
Cleaver’s central contention in The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle is that: “While the state has all too effectively limited mass media coverage and serious discussion of Zapatista ideas, their supporters have been able, to an astonishing degree, to circumvent and offset this blockage through the use of electronic networks in conjunction with the more familiar tactics of solidarity movements”

Towards the end of his essay he admits that the mere presence of information on the Internet does not assure this effect, and earlier he argues that initially at least the electronic pro-Zapatista networks were built around earlier anti-NAFTA networks.

We might also consider that the E.Z.L.N. phenomenon occurred during the early 1990s crisis on the left, which made them particularly attractive to some international audiences. That is, that the E.Z.L.N.’s move away from Leninism due to the influence of the indigenous in Chiapas fitted with similar moves for different reasons from parts of what was to become their international network, most notably Italy’s Ya Basta!

Moreover this was a period when the Chiapas rising struck a particularly optimistic note (for some audiences), coming against the backdrop of a massive collapse in the left, and in things large parts of the left regarded as someways good, e.g. trade union power, the Soviet Union, the Sandinistas and most national liberation movements, and social democratic Keynesianism; not just the Internet then.

He argues that this national and international flow of information significantly hindered the Mexican state’s ability to isolate the Zapatistas as the first step to co-opting or destroying them.

As he writes in another article: “We now know that the Mexican government's position has actually been fairly consistent ever since: a public façade of negotiations behind which the state has elaborated a highly repressive counterinsurgency program of systematic terrorism against Zapatista communities using not only every available police and military agency of the state itself but including the financing, arming and cooperation with paramilitary groups that have murdered dozens and driven thousands from their homes and villages. Some time back the Mexican magazine Proceso published a 1994 internal military document outlining this strategy including the use of paramilitaries --and every month that passes has brought more evidence of its systematic and continuing nature. The primary constraint that national and international mobilization has placed on the Mexican government has been to sometimes halt overt military operations (Spring of 1994 and 1995) and sometimes force the state to pretend to negotiate.” (My emphasis)

In that article he further claims that out of the international solidarity networks for Chiapas grew the Zapatista Encounters Against Neoliberalism and For Humanity in 1996 and 1997, which were meetings gathering thousands of grassroots activists from across the world.
From this sprang the Peoples’ Global Action network, which spanned several continents and organised many of the earlier anti-globalisation demonstrations, most notably a caravan of Indian farmers across Europe and the June 18th 1999 international day of protest; all this possible, due to, to a large extent, the Internet.

The significance of all this I would say he overstates, most of the world’s anti-I.M.F. rioters having difficulty affording water, food and housing, let alone Internet access.

Indymedia and the State.
The next section will deal with how the state has attempted to hinder internet based alternative media, and following that the powerful role played by the mainstream media in social conflict and the possibilities for subverting that power through the internet.

I will now turn to look at state actions against the Indymedia network, which we might consider to demonstrate the significance to which the state gives to social movement organising on-line.

In the summer of 2004 Indymedia founding member Lenin Cali Najera of Equador was murdered. His colleagues suspect the robbery during which this killing took place was faked as cover for a political assassination carried out by right wing paramilitaries, such have employed this modus operandi in at least some South American states, Argentina at least, and whom, of course, usually act with the connivance of the authorities.

Meanwhile in Cyprus a major national scandal took place after police admitted to investigating Petros Evdokas at the behest of the C.I.A. due to his publication of material on Indymedia Cyprus claiming American interference in the process of the ‘peace plan’ referendum on the divided island.

Shortly before the protests at the Republican National Convention in New York in the fall several police agencies raided an Indymedia benefit film showing in the city.

Also in the run up to those events the service provider of Indymedia New York was subpoenaed to release connections logs, in an investigation into the posting of the already publicly available details of delegates to the convention.

On the 7th of October the hard drives of two Indymedia servers hosting 20 sites and a couple of radio stations were seized in London by an unknown law enforcement agency. The British government denies responsibility and the most likely suspect is the F.B.I., acting at the instigation of an Italian judge.

Previous to this in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001, the Indymedia Centre established for the duration of the anti-G8 demonstration there was subjected to a violent police raid, and similar, though with less violence, happened to the Indymedia Centre established in Geneva, France, during summit protests there.

In Ireland there have been several instances of the police singling for arrest and/or assault photographers/film makers, some of whom have been Indymedia volunteers.

This happened at the protests at the privatisation conference taking place in the Burlington Hotel in Dublin in the fall of 2001, it also happened during the Reclaim the Streets party in Dublin in May 2002. During a subsequent trial of one of the police officers involved the defence case was that Indymedia had orchestrated the entire episode.

In February 2003 one Indymedia film maker received a court injunction forbidding him from entering the environs of Shannon airport, this while he was making a documentary on military re-fuelling at the airport, and related protests.

In March 2003 one photographer was arrested at the airport and charged under a public order offence, the sum total of the evidence consisting of the assertion by the arresting officer that she found having her photograph taken while arresting someone to be an “aggressive and intimidating” experience.

Since this essay was originally penned over a year ago more of the same has happened, Bristol indymedia ran into trouble with the authorities, as did infoshop.org, and other cameria wielders were arrested at Shannon. In addition “our” “Justice” Minister has been denouncing indymedia.ie .

I consider this to be a pattern which speaks volumes. To see it clearer, consider that in Genoa the police had innumerable sites as potential targets for a raid, all of which were more crucial to actual organising (as opposed to dissemination of information) than the Indymedia Centre, many of which would have been far easier to attack away from the glare of cameras and several of which were actually being used for criminal purposes. Yet which did they select?

Obviously the distaste for being subject to public scrutiny extends further than just Garda in Co. Clare. The following article will look at the wider role of information provision.

Shell may pull out of Niger Delta after 17 die in boat raid

By Daniel Howden,

The oil giant Royal Dutch Shell was considering pulling out of the volatile Niger Delta region yesterday after heavily armed militants stormed one of its facilities and killed at least 17 people.

The attack early on Sunday, the latest during an upsurge of violence in the oil-rich swamp area, came only days after the kidnap of four foreign oil workers. Militant groups demanding local control of oil wealth warned Shell to withdraw immediately from the world's eighth largest oil exporter.

The Anglo-Dutch company has already pulled out 330 employees after gunmen in speedboats overran the Benisede flow station on Sunday. "The attackers invaded the flow-station in speed boats, burnt down two staff accommodations, damaged the processing facilities and left," Shell said in a statement yesterday.

At least 17 troops died in the attack as well as an unknown number of militants and Shell employees, said Brigadier General Elias Zamani, commander of a task force deployed by the government to try to contain spiralling violence in Nigeria's oil-rich southern delta.

A group calling itself the the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) claimed responsibility for the recent spate of attacks in the region, including a raid on 11 January at Shell's EA offshore platform in which four foreigners were kidnapped, and a subsequent explosion that ruptured a major oil pipeline. The group advised oil workers to leave the delta, which produces almost all Nigeria's 2.5 million barrels a day of oil.

"It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it," the group said in an e-mail statement. "Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil."

Injured Shell workers were taken to hospital while workers in nearby facilities - Ogbotobo, Opukushi and Tunu - were evacuated on Sunday, the company said. Violence in the region has flared since the arrest in September of Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, a militant leader who is now in custody awaiting trial on treason charges.

Militants in the delta enjoy widespread support as 20 million people remain rooted in poverty despite the enormous wealth generated in the oil-rich area, putting Nigeria among the leading Opec nations.

The fate of the indigenous people of the delta was brought to global attention by Ken Saro-Wiwa, the human rights campaigner executed in 1995 after a vocal campaign against the practices of major oil companies in Nigeria.

Shell, which controls just under half of Nigeria's daily exports of 2.5 million barrels, has reduced operations by 106,000 barrels a day after the pipeline rupture.

Last month an attack on another key pipeline similarly forced the company to suspend export of large quantities of crude oil from its Bonny oil export terminal for two weeks.

Shell is the largest oil producer in Nigeria, which is key to US hopes of reducing dependence on supplies from the volatile Gulf region. A major staff pullout is likely to trigger more output cuts in the country, already hit by the attacks.

"I think [Shell will] have to evacuate the whole of the swamps around [the city of] Warri," said an oil industry source. A spokesman for Shell declined to comment. The company normally pumps 380,000 barrels a day from the Warri region - three-quarters of it from the swamps.

Ruled by military dictators for most of its history since independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria returned to civilian government in 1999, but ethnic militia and organised thuggery remain a feature of political life. Much of the rhetoric of militant Niger Delta groups is echoed by regional politicians, who have demanded a greater share of Nigerian oil wealth and the right to pick the ruling party candidate for elections in 2007.

"This is a period when both sides who claim power in Nigeria are going to extremes," said Pini Jason, a newspaper columnist.

The oil giant Royal Dutch Shell was considering pulling out of the volatile Niger Delta region yesterday after heavily armed militants stormed one of its facilities and killed at least 17 people.

The attack early on Sunday, the latest during an upsurge of violence in the oil-rich swamp area, came only days after the kidnap of four foreign oil workers. Militant groups demanding local control of oil wealth warned Shell to withdraw immediately from the world's eighth largest oil exporter.

The Anglo-Dutch company has already pulled out 330 employees after gunmen in speedboats overran the Benisede flow station on Sunday. "The attackers invaded the flow-station in speed boats, burnt down two staff accommodations, damaged the processing facilities and left," Shell said in a statement yesterday.

At least 17 troops died in the attack as well as an unknown number of militants and Shell employees, said Brigadier General Elias Zamani, commander of a task force deployed by the government to try to contain spiralling violence in Nigeria's oil-rich southern delta.

A group calling itself the the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) claimed responsibility for the recent spate of attacks in the region, including a raid on 11 January at Shell's EA offshore platform in which four foreigners were kidnapped, and a subsequent explosion that ruptured a major oil pipeline. The group advised oil workers to leave the delta, which produces almost all Nigeria's 2.5 million barrels a day of oil.

"It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it," the group said in an e-mail statement. "Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil."

Injured Shell workers were taken to hospital while workers in nearby facilities - Ogbotobo, Opukushi and Tunu - were evacuated on Sunday, the company said. Violence in the region has flared since the arrest in September of Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, a militant leader who is now in custody awaiting trial on treason charges.

...

Militants in the delta enjoy widespread support as 20 million people remain rooted in poverty despite the enormous wealth generated in the oil-rich area, putting Nigeria among the leading Opec nations.

The fate of the indigenous people of the delta was brought to global attention by Ken Saro-Wiwa, the human rights campaigner executed in 1995 after a vocal campaign against the practices of major oil companies in Nigeria.

Shell, which controls just under half of Nigeria's daily exports of 2.5 million barrels, has reduced operations by 106,000 barrels a day after the pipeline rupture.

Remember Afghanistan?

Years of conflict, By Jerome Taylor

* October 2001 - US-led invasion of Afghanistan begins

* December 2001 - Hamid Karzai is sworn in as president of Afghanistan. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and Osama bin Laden survive the war. Taliban and Arab fighters start anti-government insurgency

* July 2002 - After weeks of guerrilla resistance in the south -east, Haji Abdul Qadir, the vice-president, is killed in Kabul. US air raid kills 48 civilians

* September 2002 - Karzai escapes assassination attempt

* June 2003 - Renewed fighting between government forces and Taliban fighters in Kandahar province kills 49

* September 2004 - Karzai again escapes assassination

* November 2004 - Karzai re-elected with 55 per cent of votes

* May 2005 - Details emerge of prisoner abuse in detention centres run by US authorities

* June 2005 - Three elite Navy Seals and 16 soldiers are killed during combat operations

* August 2005 - US military says 100 militants are killed this month

* September 2005 - Bomb attacks fail to stop Afghans voting in the first parliamentary and local elections for 30 years

* October 2005 - Insurgents renew their attacks on government targets killing a top cleric

* December 2005 - A resurgent Taliban targetspeacekeeping forces. Al Qai'da says the Taliban still controls large parts of Afghanistan

* January 2006 - Increasing violence leaves scores of civilians dead including a senior Canadian diplomat

*
http://www.tdhafghanistan.org/crconsortium.htm
After 23 years of war, Afghanistan is experiencing post-conflict difficulties: infrastructure is inadequate, poverty is widespread and state social protection is inexistent. Critical aspects of the social welfare sector include:
Endemic family poverty resulting in nutrition deficiencies, high rate of infant, child and maternal mortality.
*
High rate of youth population: More than a half of the country’s population is less than 19 years old.
*
Low level of education: of about 10 million school-age children, 4.2 million children attended school in 2004.
*
High levels of family stress, erosion of family support and safety nets due to harsh economic situation: a study carried out by UNICEF in 2004 shows that placement of children in orphanages has dramatically increased due to the erosion of community/family networks and is used as a coping mechanism. Out of the 8,000 children living in children’s institutions throughout the country, 1/3 do not need long-term care by residential institutions and could be returned to their family or extended family with minimal support.
*
Increasing number of street and working children particularly in the capital and large provincial cities. Studies suggest that there has been an increase in the numbers in Kabul, from approx 40,000, to 60,000 in 10 years, mainly due to the returning refugee population from neighbouring countries and the unaffordable cost of living in the capital.
*
Widespread child abuse: More than half the number of girls under 16 are forced into early marriages, physically abusive acts are taking place every day and the sexual abuse of children is very frequent.
*
Emergence of low-level street violence: with the alarming development of drug production and trade, children are more and more likely to be used as drug-dealers and exposed to drug-addiction.

Increasing child kidnapping and abduction: In February 2004, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) reported that human trafficking particularly child kidnapping and abduction within, outside and through the country were identified as one of the most serious violations in recent months in Afghanistan. In the International Organisation for Migrations’ report “Trafficking in Persons, An Analysis of Afghanistan” released in January 2004, it is observed that the forms of trafficking committed in Afghanistan and to Afghans in neighbouring countries include the exploitation of prostitution, forced labour, slavery and practises similar to slavery, servitude.

The work of the CRC
The CRC is the joint project of 5 national and international NGOs: Aschiana, Afghanistan Demain (AD), Children in Crisis (CIC), Enfants du Monde Droits de l'Homme (EMDH) and Terre des Hommes (Tdh), funded by the European Commission to improve living conditions of street and working children and their families with a view of reintegrating them in the mainstream society, and to advocate for the Rights of the Child.

Coordinated and administered by Tdh, the CRC has been operating since June 2003 and has been providing basic services to street and working children of Kabul city through day-care centres and outreach activities, in different districts of the city.

CRC services towards street and working children consist in providing:
Basic education and progressive integration of children in the formal schools.
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Vocational training for children who cannot be integrated in schools.
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Food, health care, psychological care and referral to medical institutions.
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Recreational / psychosocial activities (play, sports, music….), health education, mine-awareness education, child rights education, civic education…. with a view of reintegrating children in the mainstream society.

Family counseling and support.
Since June 2003, CRC activities have benefited to 9,356 children (47% boys, 53% girls). Thanks to the relations developed with the Ministry of Education and the awareness carried out towards children’s families, the CRC has managed to integrate more than 39% into the formal schools (51% of boys and 49% of girls) and enroll 13% in vocational training.

Beside these concrete services provided to the beneficiaries, the CRC has carried out several activities aimed at strengthening the capacities of the CRC and establishing it as a leading advocacy forum in Afghanistan:
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Training and capacity-building of the CRC staff are organised regularly and are carried out by each CRC member according to its field of expertise.
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The CRC has established strong relations with Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (MoLSA): regular meetings, common events, participation of MoLSA’s staff to CRC training sessions.
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The CRC takes part in the elaboration and consultation process of national policies towards children (i.e. : National Plan against Child Trafficking, National Plan for Children at Risk).
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The CRC organises advocacy actions to raise awareness on children in street situation and other child protection related activities (i.e.: meetings with professionals such as the police, organisation of gatherings to promote child rights, participation to children meetings ….).
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The CRC participates to regular meetings, national forum on child protection, i.e.: the Child Protection Action Network (CPAN), the Global Movement for Children (GMC)….

The CRC is engaged in networking activities with other organisations helping street and working children in Afghanistan and in the region (i.e.: exchanges with Tdh’s street and working children project in Peshawar).

The CRC’s strategy for 2006-2007
After 2 years of implementation, the CRC has now the experience and expertise in the field of social work and child protection to increase its support to street and working children and develop appropriate schemes for other children at risk.
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The CRC’s objectives for 2006-2007 are.
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To continue to reintegrate disadvantaged and marginalized boys and girls into mainstream society.
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To continue to ensure the good health and well being of disadvantaged and marginalized boys and girls and families.
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To strengthen the Child Rights Consortium (CRC) and establish it as a leading child rights forum in Afghanistan.
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To influence the development of child protection policy in Afghanistan.

Contact:
Fatma Boggio-Cosadia, CRC Coordinator
Terre des Hommes
E-mail: fatma.cosadia@tdh.ch
Phone: + 93 70 277 225

MLK Day: Dreams and Nightmare, by Robert Jensen

...on April 4, 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York City, in a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam,” King spoke just as eloquently of the nightmare that lies underneath that dream. In that speech to Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, King not only made a compelling case for ending the U.S. attack on Vietnam, but went beyond that to diagnose a failed society.

On this day that we mark with his name, we owe it to King -- and to ourselves -- to face that failure honestly.

........ But I want to put aside for now the issue of wars, past and present, and speak of King’s deeper analysis in that speech.

He knew that simply condemning that war was “seductively tempting,” but that his principles demanded that he “go on now to say something even more disturbing.”

King was blunt: “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” a condition that had left the United States “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” He continued:

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

“Our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men.”

The Impeachment of George W. Bush, by Elizabeth Holtzman

Finally, it has started. People have begun to speak of impeaching President George W. Bush--not in hushed whispers but openly, in newspapers, on the Internet, in ordinary conversations and even in Congress. As a former member of Congress who sat on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon, I believe they are right to do so.

I can still remember the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach during those proceedings, when it became clear that the President had so systematically abused the powers of the presidency and so threatened the rule of law that he had to be removed from office. As a Democrat who opposed many of President Nixon's policies, I still found voting for his impeachment to be one of the most sobering and unpleasant tasks I ever had to undertake. None of the members of the committee took pleasure in voting for impeachment; after all, Democrat or Republican, Nixon was still our President.

At the time, I hoped that our committee's work would send a strong signal to future Presidents that they had to obey the rule of law. I was wrong.

CONTINUED BELOW
Like many others, I have been deeply troubled by Bush's breathtaking scorn for our international treaty obligations under the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Conventions. I have also been disturbed by the torture scandals and the violations of US criminal laws at the highest levels of our government they may entail, something I have written about in these pages [see Holtzman, "Torture and Accountability," July 18/25, 2005]. These concerns have been compounded by growing evidence that the President deliberately misled the country into the war in Iraq. But it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)--and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws--that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate.

As a matter of constitutional law, these and other misdeeds constitute grounds for the impeachment of President Bush. A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law--and repeatedly violates the law--thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment and removal from office. A high crime or misdemeanor is an archaic term that means a serious abuse of power, whether or not it is also a crime, that endangers our constitutional system of government.

The framers of our Constitution feared executive power run amok and provided the remedy of impeachment to protect against it. While impeachment is a last resort, and must never be lightly undertaken (a principle ignored during the proceedings against President Bill Clinton), neither can Congress shirk its responsibility to use that tool to safeguard our democracy. No President can be permitted to commit high crimes and misdemeanors with impunity.

But impeachment and removal from office will not happen unless the American people are convinced of its necessity after a full and fair inquiry into the facts and law is conducted. That inquiry must commence now.
...
(Cont'd at link)

Gitmo's Kangaroo Court, by Joshua Frank

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) obtained two leaked e-mails from former military prosecutors at Guantanamo Bay in late July, 2005, yet the media here in the US hasn’t mentioned it. The e-mails both claim that the military committees set up to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are "rigged, fraudulent, and thin on evidence against the accused."

In the first e-mail obtained by the Australian news organization, Gitmo prosecutor Major Robert Preston wrote to his supervisor that the trial process at Guantanamo was perpetrating a fraud on the American public. Preston also wrote that the cases being tried were insignificant at best.

"I consider the insistence on pressing ahead with cases that would be marginal even if properly prepared to be a severe threat to the reputation of the military justice system and even a fraud on the American people," Preston wrote.

"Surely they don't expect that this fairly half-arsed effort is all that we have been able to put together after all this time. … I lie awake worrying about this every night," he wrote.

"I find it almost impossible to focus on my part of mission. … After all, writing a motion saying that the process will be full and fair when you don't really believe it is kind of hard, particularly when you want to call yourself an officer and lawyer."

Shortly after Preston sent these e-mails to his superior, he was transferred from his post.

In the second e-mail obtained by the ABC, Captain John Carr, who also left his position after his e-mail claimed that the commissions at the prison appeared to be rigged, wrote, "When I volunteered to assist with this process and was assigned to this office, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused. Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged."

Carr also wrote that Gitmo prosecutors were continually told by the chief prosecutor that the panel set up to try detainees was specially selected in order to guarantee convictions.

"You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees and that we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel," Carr wrote.

At this point in the Bush prison saga, we shouldn’t be the least bit surprised by these frightening allegations. As we already know, justice isn't being dished out at Gitmo. It's being choked out. The actions of the U.S. military in Guantanamo's court are in defiance of the Supreme Court's order in the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case in which Justice O'Connor, writing the majority opinion, argued that Guantanamo detainees must be given "a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decision maker."

Alas, fairness isn't the issue here. As the aforementioned case guaranteed, despite the detainees "meaningful opportunity to contest" their detentions, they are still not allowed any meaningful legal retaliatory rights.

Writing for CounterPunch magazine in June 29, 2004, Elaine Cassel explained, "On this one [the Hamdi case], a 6-3 majority ruled that those poor bastards in Guantanamo, those men that have been there for going on three years and, we now presume, subject to all kinds of physical torture and mental and sexual abuse, can file a petition for writ of habeas corpus challenging their detention, but, so what? The court was silent on what trial courts will do with the petitions. Presumably, let them file their papers then promptly toss them out."

So there you have it: first the trials at Gitmo are rigged, then the unjustly convicted are not allowed to challenge their incarcerations. All ethical considerations aside, what we have here is a Constitutional crisis of epic proportions. No wonder there is a hunger strike going on.

Suspicious letter writer is targeting Ney, by Ted Wendling

The anonymous letters began arriving in November -- so meticulously detailed and so well aligned with events unfolding in a national scandal that they appeared plausible.

Since 2001, the letters claimed, Robert Vincenzo, the mayor of St. Clairsville, and U.S. Rep. Bob Ney, a longtime city resident already swept up in the scandal, had been involved in an elaborate plot to strong-arm a local trailer park owner into selling a prime piece of Interstate 70 real estate.

Ney and Vincenzo hoped to redevelop the property with Indian casino money provided by now-notorious convicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, claimed the writer, who sent let ters to The Plain Dealer and several people in the St. Clairsville area.

And there was more -- much more: The writer, who identified himself as a St. Clairsville utilities employee, claimed to have witnessed the payment of thousands of dollars in cash bribes to Ney, Vincenzo and others.

He said he had helped Vincenzo shred documents pertaining to Ney, Abramoff and Ney's American Liberty political action committee.

And he said city officials had retaliated against the trailer park owner for fighting the annexation of his interstate property by sending him tens of thousands of dollars in phony utility bills. All of those explosive allegations, it appears, are false.

A close examination of various documents the anonymous writer included with the letters shows that some have been altered and others are fictitious. In addition, numerous attempts by The Plain Dealer to identify the writer -- who included several personal details in the letters -- concluded that no such city employee exists.

Still, despite vociferous assertions by Vincenzo, St. Clairsville officials and Ney's lawyer that the anonymous allegations are pure fiction, they have seeped into the public record in a civil lawsuit that West Virginia resident Samuel L. Harris has filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus.
...

The Pit's toll rising

James Zadroga, the 34-year-old Manhattan homicide detective buried this week, is believed to be the first member of the NYPD who worked on the Ground Zero cleanup to die.

But the Daily News has learned that an additional 22 men, mostly in their 30s and 40s, have died from causes their families say were accelerated by the toxic mix of chemicals that lodged in their bodies as they searched for survivors or participated in the cleanup after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Among them are private employees, a sanitation worker, a correction officer, a Con Ed worker, transit workers, firefighters and cops. They died from black lung and cancers of the esophagus and pancreas.

David Knecht, a Lucent Technologies employee, worked for two months to reestablish communications at businesses near Ground Zero. He died in March, leaving behind two girls, now ages 3 and 4.

"My husband was only 35 when he was diagnosed with lung cancer," said Cathleen Knecht, 38, of Berkeley Heights, N.J. "He was a nonsmoker and a swimmer."

Thousands more are sick, suffering from respiratory illnesses. Nearly 400 firefighters and paramedics have left the job because of career-ending illnesses that followed their work at Ground Zero.

"This was a toxic waste site," says David Worby, the attorney for some 5,200 Ground Zero workers. "People should have been walking around in moon suits. ... These guys are the tip of the iceberg."

Worby's firm has a class-action lawsuit pending in Manhattan Federal Court that accuses government officials and construction contractors of exposing workers to dangerous levels of toxins. An estimated 40,000 people worked at the site in the months following the attacks.

But city attorneys urge caution, saying a medical link is still to be established.

"Those 22 people did great work and I sympathize with their families," said Gary Shaffer, the attorney who's handling the city's defense of the claims. "I'm sympathetic to their desire to want to find a cause, but I think you need to be careful before making those connections."

Doctors who've treated the Ground Zero workers remain skeptical, particularly because cancers can remain dormant for 15 to 20 years, but they are alarmed at the large numbers of young people who've died.

"It's still too early to say if WTC responders are at increased risk for cancer," said Dr. Robin Herbert, director of the World Trade Center Health Effects Treatment Program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. "But we remain very concerned. "

Bob Shore, a city correction officer, worked at the makeshift morgue at Ground Zero for at least two weeks, wearing only a paper mask.

At the end of his first day handling body parts, Shore climbed into the shower fully dressed and cried for two hours.

"He never regretted doing it," said his wife, Michelle Shore, 53, of Suffolk County, L.I. "He was my hero, the city's hero."

The 53-year-old father of two died last August of pancreatic cancer, which Shore's doctor said was related to his post-9/11 assignment.

Cancer ate away at his body, reducing the 300-pound former bodybuilder to about 110 pounds. His gallbladder, spleen and pancreas were removed.

Like other relatives of Trade Center recovery workers, Shore's widow says she's strapped with medical bills she can't imagine being able to pay.

"I don't even open the envelopes anymore," she said, estimating the debt at at least $200,000. "I write 'deceased' on them and send them back."

Chomsky: 'There Is No War On Terror', by Geov Parrish

Q: Is George Bush in political trouble? And if so, why?

A: George Bush would be in severe political trouble if there were an opposition political party in the country. Just about every day, they're shooting themselves in the foot. The striking fact about contemporary American politics is that the Democrats are making almost no gain from this. The only gain that they're getting is that the Republicans are losing support. Now, again, an opposition party would be making hay, but the Democrats are so close in policy to the Republicans that they can't do anything about it. When they try to say something about Iraq, George Bush turns back to them, or Karl Rove turns back to them, and says, "How can you criticize it? You all voted for it." And, yeah, they're basically correct.

...

Q: What sort of organizing should be done to try and change some of these policies?

A: Well, there's a basis for democratic change. Take what happened in Bolivia a couple of days ago. How did a leftist indigenous leader get elected? Was it showing up at the polls once every four years and saying, "Vote for me!"? No. It's because there are mass popular organizations which are working all the time on everything from blocking privatization of water to resources to local issues and so on, and they're actually participatory organizations. Well, that's democracy. We're a long way from it. And that's one task of organizing.

Bush V. Reality

By Tom Engelhardt

2006 is sure to be the year of living dangerously — for the Bush administration and for the rest of us. In the wake of revelations of warrantless spying by the National Security Agency, we have already embarked on what looks distinctly like a constitutional crisis (which may not come to a full boil until 2007). In the meantime, the President, Vice President, Secretaries of Defense and State, various lesser officials, crony appointees, acolytes, legal advisors, leftover neocons, spy-masters, strategists, spin doctors, ideologues, lobbyists, Republican Party officials, and congressional backers are intent on packing the Supreme Court with supporters of an "obscure philosophy" of unfettered Presidential power called "the unitary executive theory" and then foisting a virtual cult of the imperial presidency on the country.

On the other hand, determined as this administration has been to impose its version of reality on us, the President faces a traffic jam of reality piling up in the environs of the White House. The question is: How long will the omniscient and dominatrix-style fantasies of Bushworld, ranging from "complete victory" in Iraq to non-existent constitutional powers to ignore Congress, the courts, and treaties of every sort, triumph over the realities of the world the rest of humanity inhabits. Will an unconstrained presidency continue to grow — or not?

Here are just a few of the explosive areas where Bush v. Reality is likely to play out, generating roiling crises which could chase the President through the rest of this year. Keep in mind, this just accounts for the modestly predictable, not for the element of surprise which — as with Ariel Sharon’s recent stroke — remains ever present.

Who, after all, can predict what will hit our country this year. From a natural-gas shock to Chinese financial decisions on the dollar, from oil terrorism to the next set of fierce fall hurricanes, from the bursting of the housing bubble to the arrival of the avian flu, so much is possible — but one post-9/11 truth, revealed with special vividness by hurricane Katrina, should by now be self-evident: Whatever the top officials of this administration are capable of doing, they and their cronies in various posts throughout the federal bureaucracy are absolutely incapable of (and perhaps largely uninterested in) running a government. Let’s give this phenomenon a fitting name: FEMAtization. You could almost offer a guarantee that no major problem is likely to arise this year, domestic or foreign, that they will not be quite incapable of handling reasonably, efficiently, or thoughtfully — to hell with compassionately (for anyone who still remembers that museum-piece label, "compassionate conservative," from the Bush version of the Neolithic era). So here are just four of the most expectable crisis areas of 2006 as well as three wild cards that may remain in the administration’s hand and that could chase all of us through this year — adding up, in one way or the other, to the political tsunami of 2006.

1. Iraq. Bush’s War (and occupation) of choice has shadowed him like a boogeyman from the moment that banner over his head on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln announced "Mission Accomplished" and he declared "major combat operations" at an end on May 2, 2003. On that very day, in news hardly noticed by a soul, one of the first acts of insurgency against American troops occurred and seven GIs were wounded in a grenade attack in Falluja. As either a prophet of the future or a master of wish-fulfillment, the President was never more accurate than when, in July 2003, he taunted the Iraqi guerrillas, saying, "Bring ‘em on." Well, they’ve been bringing it on ever since.

Unwilling to face the realities of its trillion-dollar folly of a War and dealing with presidential polling figures entering free fall, the administration did the one thing it has been eternally successful at — it launched a fantasy offensive, not in Iraq, but here at home against the American people and especially the media. A series of aggressive speeches, news conferences, spin-doctored policy papers, and attacks on the opposition as "defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right," all circling around an election likely to put an Islamic theocratic regime in power in Baghdad, pumped up the President’s polling numbers modestly and, more importantly, caused reporters and pundits to back off, wondering yet again whether we weren’t finally seeing the crack of light at the end of that tunnel. (Wasn’t the President implicitly admitting to the odd mistake in Iraq policy? Wasn’t he secretly preparing his own version of withdrawal? Weren’t the Iraqis turning some corner or other?)

It’s been a strange, brain-dead media era in which, far more than the American people, the pundits never seem to learn. Most pathetic of all, in what might have been a straightforward parody of the famed moment when a group of senior advisors from past administrations ("the Wise Men") met with President Lyndon Johnson and urged him to reconsider his Vietnam policy, the Bush administration gathered together 13 former secretaries of state and defense (including Robert McNamara and Melvin Laird from the Vietnam era) for a photo with the President. Also offered was an Iraq dog-and-pony show involving painfully upbeat reports from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Peter Pace and Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalizhad. In return, the 13 former officials, including Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright, got a full 5-10 minute "interchange" with the President or (as the Dreyfuss Report did the math) all of 23 seconds of consultation time per secretary. It was the Wise Men (and Woman) Photo Op and it caught something of Bushworld and its peculiar allure.

However complicated the situation in Iraq may be, here’s an uncomplicated formula for considering administration policy there in the coming year. After every "milestone" from the killing of Saddam Hussein’s sons and the capture of Saddam himself through the "handing over" of sovereignty and various elections, things have only gotten worse. Remind me why it should be different this time? In fact, while the President warned endlessly about violence before the recent election, the violence since has been far worse with 28 Americans and hundreds of Iraqis dying in just a single tumultuous four-day period. Or put another way, whatever government may be formed in Baghdad’s Green Zone, it will preside over a Bush-installed failed state, utterly corrupt (billions of dollars have already been stolen from it) and thoroughly inept, incapable of providing its people with anything like security. In fact, just the other day, two suicide bombers, dressed in the uniforms of "senior police officers" and with the correct security passes, made it through numerous checkpoints and into the well-guarded compound of the Interior Ministry where they blew themselves and many policemen up. Iraq’s government, such as it is, has also proved incapable of delivering electricity or potable water, or of running its only industry of significance, the oil business (overseen by, of all people, Ahmed Chalabi), which is now producing less energy than in the worst moments of the Saddam Hussein/sanctions era. The country is already in a low-level civil War; its American-supported military made up of rival militias preparing to engage in various forms of ethnic cleansing; its police evidently heavily infiltrated by the insurgency; and its most important leaders are Shiite theocrats closely allied with Iran. The insurgency itself shows not the slightest sign of lessening.

Meanwhile, at home, figures as disparate as Congressman John Murtha and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski are demanding a military disengagement by the end of 2006 and in Brzezinski’s case calling on the Democrats to come out against the War. ("Finally, Democratic leaders should stop equivocating while carping. Those who want to lead in 2008 are particularly unwilling to state clearly that ending the War soon is both desirable and feasible.")

Iraq is a minefield for the Bush administration. Prepare for it to blow this year.

2. Trials (and Tribulations) of Every Sort. Of course some of the description of Iraq above has become increasingly applicable to the Bush administration as well. It is, after all, run by fundamentalists and presidential cultists, presiding over what increasingly looks like a FEMA-tized, failed state, riddled with corruption, and at War with itself. In 2006, Bush and his associates face a quagmire of potential scandals, exposures of corrupt and illegal practices, and trials and tribulations of all sorts. There is, as a start, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, still on the Plame case job.

After a brief flurry of activity in November when the National Law Journal’s 2005 "lawyer of the year" convened a new grand jury to hear further evidence, the Fitzgerald investigation dropped off just about everyone’s radar screen. Fitzgerald, however, is a dogged character, playing things very close to the vest. No one can know what exactly he will do, but he is reportedly preparing material on Karl Rove for the new grand jury. It would be reasonable to expect that, sometime in the next two or three months, he might indeed indict "Bush’s brain" and then, rather than winding down his investigation, turn from those who attempted to obstruct his view of the Plame case to the case itself. In other words, if you happen to be a betting soul, you might consider putting your money on the possibility that the Plame case investigation will reach ever higher in the administration — and Fitzgerald seems carefully shielded within the Justice Department from administration tampering.

At the same time, even though former House Majority Leader Tom (the Hammer) DeLay got hammered and officially ended his bid to regain his leadership post last week, the Texas and Washington parts of the Delay corruption scandal are likely only to grow and spread. In Texas, DeLay’s money-laundering case was not, despite his deepest wishes, thrown out of court and is now expanding into an election spending scandal involving the National Republican Congressional Committee and linked to the Abramoff case. Lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who plied endless (mostly Republican) congressional reps with favors and perks in return for influence, pled guilty last week to public corruption charges and turned state’s evidence. He has claimed he possesses incriminating material on 60 congressional lawmakers (as well as many of their aides).

Last week, the Washington Post reported, federal prosecutors turned "up the pressure on a former senior aide to Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) in the clearest signal yet that the sprawling public corruption investigation is now focusing on House Republican leadership offices." Though the career prosecutors from the Justice Department’s Office of Public Integrity who turned Abramoff, seem to have been reasonably insulated from administration pressure, the case threatens to hit the Republican Congress hard, just as the Plame case threatens to empty the higher realms of administration power. It looks like at least a limited number of cases will be brought against lawmakers this election year. Unlike Fitzgerald, however, the career prosecutors in the Abramoff case are overseen by a notorious Bush recess appointee, Alice Fisher. Her nomination was opposed even in a Republican-controlled Senate as she is without prosecutorial experience (though she has some experience in the subject area of Guantanamo interrogations and is tied to Tom DeLay’s defense team). So look for future fireworks, conflicts, scandals, and plenty of leaks on this one.

In the meantime, the courts will be busy indeed. Just count a few of the ways: The question of whether Bush’s warrantless NSA wiretaps have polluted other terrorism cases will hit the courts this year, while the kangaroo "military" tribunals in Guantanamo have just started up again, and various cases having to do with the limits of presidential power (or the lack of them) are likely to arrive, not to speak of the four Texas gerrymandering cases (think, once again, Tom DeLay) the Supreme Court has agreed to take up before the 2006 elections that could put five now-Republican seats in the House up for grabs. (A court already tarred by the 2000 election might rule surprisingly on this one.)

3. War with the Bureaucracy. Until quite recently, with an oppositionless Congress, increasingly right-wing courts, and a cowed media, traditional Constitutional checks and balances on administration claims of massive presidential powers and prerogatives have been missing in action. However, the founding fathers of this nation, who could not have imagined our present National Security State or the size of this imperial presidency, could have had no way of imagining the governmental bureaucracy that has grown up around these either. So how could they have dreamed that the only significant check-and-balance in our system since September 11, 2001 has been that very bureaucracy? Parts of it have been involved in a bitter, shadowy War with the administration for years now. It’s been a take-no-prisoners affair, as Tomdispatch has recorded in the first two posts in its Fallen Legion series, focusing on the startling numbers of men and women who were honorable or steadfast enough in their governmental duties that they found themselves with little alternative but to resign in protest, quit, retire, or simply be pushed off some cliff. This administration has done everything in its power to take control of the bureaucracy. As hurricane Katrina showed with a previously impressive federal agency, FEMA, Bush and his officials have put their pals ("Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job"), often without particular qualifications other than loyalty to this President, into leading positions, while trying to curb or purge their opponents. At the CIA, for instance, just before the last election former Representative Porter Goss, a loyal political hack, was installed to purge and cleanse what had become an agency of leakers and bring it into line. Administration officials have, in fact, conducted little short of a War against leaks and leakers. To give but a single example, the origins of the Plame case lie in part in an attempt by top officials to administer punishment to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for revealing administration lies about an aspect of Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction program. What those officials (as leakers, of course) did to his wife was clearly meant as a warning to others in the bureaucracy that coming forward would mean being whacked.

And yet, despite the carnage, as Frank Rich pointed out last Sunday (The Wiretappers That Couldn’t Shoot Straight), the New York Times reporters who finally broke the NSA story did so based not on one or two sources but on "nearly a dozen current and former officials." Doug Ireland laid out at his blog recently how, despite fears of possible prosecution — the first thing the President did in the wake of these revelations was to denounce the "shameful act" of leaking and the Justice Department almost immediately opened an investigation into who did it — one of them, former NSA analyst Russell Tice, has gone very public with his discontent. He has already been on Democracy Now! and ABC’s Nightline, saying that "he is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the National Security Agency in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists." He claims that the NSA spied on "millions" of Americans, including, it was revealed recently, a Baltimore peace group.

The War with the bureaucracy and even, to some extent, with the military — high-level officers, for instance, clearly leaked crucial information to Rep. Murtha before his withdrawal news conference — will certainly continue this year, probably at an elevated level. The CIA has been a sieve; the NSA clearly will be; at the first sign of pressure, expect the same from career people in the Justice Department; and an unhappy military has already been passing out administration-unfriendly Iraq info left and right. Administration punitive acts only drive this process forward. Any signs of further administration weakness will do the same.

The "warriors" in the bureaucracy will, in turn, fuel further media and congressional criticism. Congress, worried about next year’s election, is an exceedingly fragile pillar of support for the President. Conservatives, as Todd Gitlin pointed out in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, are alienated or worse; certain Republican senators are angry over the way the administration is sidelining Congress. Even some right-wing judges have been acting out. And, of course, there’s the possibility that, in some chain-reaction-like fashion, the dike will simply burst and we will catch sight of something closer to the fullness of Bush administration illegality — sure to be far beyond anything we now imagine.

4. Election 2006. Count on it being down and dirty. This could be a street brawl because, with the Republican loss of even one house of Congress, the power to investigate is turned over to the Democrats as we head into a presidential election cycle.

Consider points 1-3 above: Iraq as a rolling, roiling, ongoing disaster, Republican congressional representatives and administration figures under indictment, bureaucrats leaking madly, possible seats put into play in Texas, presidential polls dropping — all having the potential to threaten an administration already filled with the biggest gamblers in our history and capable of doing almost anything if they think themselves in danger. So what can the President and his pals draw on?

Administration Wildcards

Court-packing: As Noah Feldman pointed out recently in the New York Times Magazine, the rise of the imperial presidency has a history that goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s decision to conclude the Louisiana Purchase, while the presidency’s outsized "War powers" go back at least to Abraham Lincoln. The President has long had powers unimagined by the founding fathers, but the Bush administration still represents a new stage in the obliteration of a checks-and-balances system of government. Last week, in an important, if somewhat overlooked, front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal ("Judge Alito’s View of the Presidency: Expansive Powers"), Jess Bravin reported on a speech Sam Alito gave to the right-wing Federalist Society in 2000 in which he subscribed to the "unitary executive theory" of the presidency ("gospel," he called it) which puts its money on the supposedly unfettered powers of the President as commander-in-chief. This theory has been pushed by administration figures ranging from the Vice President and his Chief of Staff David Addington to former assistant attorney general and torture-memo writer John Yoo. As Alito put the matter in his speech: "[The Constitution] makes the president the head of the executive branch, but it does more than that. The president has not just some executive powers, but the executive power — the whole thing." And Yoo put it even more bluntly while debating the unitary executive theory recently. In answering the question, "If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?" he responded, "No treaty."

Evidently, John Roberts subscribes to the same view of presidential powers (as Harriet Meirs certainly did, at least when it came to George Bush). In other words, the administration is trying to pack the Supreme Court with judges who are, above all, guaranteed to come down on the side of the President in any ultimate face-off with Congress or the courts. This is surely the real significance of the Alito nomination, should it go through. In any Constitutional crisis-to-come the "commander-in-chief" is trying to predetermine how things will fall out if his own power is at stake.

Terrorism: From September 11, 2001, the terrorism/fear card has certainly been the most powerful domestic weapon in the administration’s arsenal. In the event of a major (or several smaller) terrorist strikes in this country, the Bush administration could certainly be the major beneficiary, but even that is no longer a given. History tends not to happen quite the same way twice and no one knows whether, under the shock of such an event or events, the post-9/11 moment would simply be repeated or whether Americans might feel that this administration had completely betrayed them. A terrible War, lousy government, hideous crisis management, and then, on the one thing they swore they did best — protecting the country from terror — failure. Still this is certainly an administration wild card.

Wag the Dog Strategies: In a crisis of power, there is no reason to believe that the officials who already led us into Iraq might not be willing to gamble on a Wag the Dog strategy – that is, launching an operation they had been hankering for anyway that might also turn attention elsewhere. Rumors and speculation about a massive air attack on Iran (or on "regime change" in Syria) have been kicking around since at least the spring of 2005. These have begun circulating again recently. Such a thing is certainly possible (more so, obviously, should Benjamin Netanyahu happen to win the Israeli election in March), but whether the effect of this on the administration’s fortunes would be positive for long is also unknown. It certainly seems one path to madness, not just in Iraq but also on the oil markets. (If you happen to be a devotee of oil at $100 a barrel, you might quickly get your wish.)

Is a Constitutional Crisis in the Cards?

Until 2005, it wasn’t that the Bush administration didn’t make more than its share of mistakes; thanks to 9/11, it simply had plenty of wiggle room. It could always turn attention elsewhere. It always had the fear and terror cards ready to be played. These days, turn people’s attention elsewhere and they’re likely to see yet more disaster, corruption, incompetence, and illegality. In 2006, the administration has a lot less wiggle room than it used to. Polling figures reflect that vividly. When new disasters hit, whether in Iraq or New Orleans, it’s becoming harder to take American eyes off them.

Let me then offer one of those predictions — surrounded by qualifications and caveats — that all writers should be wary of. If in a bitter, dirty mid-term election, filled with "irregularities," one house of Congress or both nonetheless go to the Democrats, which I believe possible (despite their low polling figures at the moment), expect the investigations to begin. Expect as well that the Bush administration will then trot out that "obscure" presidential philosophy of power and claim that the Congress has no right to investigate the President in his guise as Commander-in-Chief.

That is why the Alito nomination is so crucial and why 2007 may prove the year of constitutional crisis in the United States.

DEA Responds to Narco News Story, Says It Will Investigate Agents in Colombia

By Dan Feder,

The DEA is already feeling the heat from Bill Conroy’s explosive report published in Narco News this week. Conroy received a leaked internal memo written by attorney Thomas M. Kent, an attorney with the U.S. Justice Department. The memo accused Drug Enforcement Administration agents working in Colombia of massive corruption, of cooperating with drug traffickers, of murdering informants, and of helping that country’s dreaded rightwing paramilitaries to launder drug money.

Now, just four days later, the DEA is responding to questions from journalists with the following emailed statement, promising a full investigation into these “extremely serious” allegations…

DEA PRESS STATEMENT

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) holds our workforce to the highest ethical standards and regards the ethical performance of duty as our first priority. DEA takes very seriously any allegations of misconduct, abuse of position, or criminal action. The allegations that are reported in the Narco News Bulletin are extremely serious. DEA's Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating the allegations that have been made. DEA will continue to ensure the fair and impartial administration of justice and uphold the integrity and reputation of our outstanding workforce.

Garrison K. Courtney
DEA Public Affairs

The silence has been broken, and soon the DEA will have to explain why it failed to respond to these allegations for over a year and silenced those agents who did try to denounce the corruption.

But take this announcement with a grain of salt. The same DEA Office of Professional Responsibility that promises to investigate these charges is named in the Kent memo as a leader of the cover-up that stopped them from coming to light long ago.

This story is only going to keep gathering speed, so stay tuned…

You're Being Watched

By Laura K. Donohue

Efforts to collect data on Americans go far beyond the NSA’s domestic spying program. Congress will soon hold hearings on the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program, secretly authorized by President Bush in 2002. But that program is just the tip of the iceberg.

Since 9/11, the expansion of efforts to gather and analyze information on U.S. citizens is nothing short of staggering. The government collects vast troves of data, including consumer credit histories and medical and travel records. Databases track Americans’ networks of friends, family and associates, not just to identify who is a terrorist but to try to predict who might become one.

Remember Total Information Awareness, retired Adm. John Poindexter’s effort to harness all government and commercial databases to preempt national security threats? The idea was that disparate, seemingly mundane behaviors can reveal criminal intent when viewed together. More disturbing, it assumed that deviance from social norms can be an early indicator of terrorism. Congress killed that program in 2003, but according to the Associated Press, many related projects continued.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency runs a data-mining program called Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery, which connects pieces of information from vast amounts of data sources. The Defense Intelligence Agency trawls intelligence records and the Internet to identify Americans connected to foreign terrorists. The CIA reportedly runs Quantum Leap, which gathers personal information on individuals from private and public sources. In 2002, Congress authorized $500 million for the Homeland Security Department to develop "data mining and other advanced analytical tools." In 2004, the General Accounting Office surveyed 128 federal departments and agencies to determine the extent of data mining. It found 199 operations, 14 of which related to counterterrorism.

Howard Zinn: After The War

When the war in Iraq ends, and the war syndrome heals, there will be a great opportunity to make that healing permanent.

The war against Iraq, the assault on its people, the occupation of its cities, will come to an end, sooner or later. The process has already begun. The first signs of mutiny are appearing in Congress. The first editorials calling for withdrawal from Iraq are beginning to appear in the press. The anti-war movement has been growing, slowly but persistently, all over the country.

Public opinion polls now show the country decisively against the war and the Bush Administration. The harsh realities have become visible. The troops will have to come home.

And while we work with increased determination to make this happen, should we not think beyond this war? Should we begin to think, even before this shameful war is over, about ending our addiction to massive violence and instead using the enormous wealth of our country for human needs? That is, should we begin to speak about ending war—not just this war or that war, but war itself? Perhaps the time has come to bring an end to war, and turn the human race onto a path of health and healing.

A group of internationally known figures, celebrated both for their talent and their dedication to human rights (Gino Strada, Paul Farmer, Kurt Vonnegut, Nadine Gordimer, Eduardo Galeano, and others), will soon launch a worldwide campaign to enlist tens of millions of people in a movement for the renunciation of war, hoping to reach the point where governments, facing popular resistance, will find it difficult or impossible to wage war.

Iranian president accuses United States of “nuclear apartheid”

Washington supported development of nuclear energy
in Iran under the Shah

BY ROSE ANA DUEÑAS, Special for Granma International

The U.S. government continues to threaten Iran under the pretext that its development of nuclear technology represents a supposed danger. In the most recent development, it was reported that Washington is seeking Turkey’s cooperation for launching airstrikes against that Middle Eastern country.

However, under the dictatorship of the Shah that lasted for more than two decades, Washington supported Iran’s efforts to develop that energy source, which date back to the 1950s.

In an open threat of military aggression U.S. President George W. Bush has said that in regard to Iraq, “all options are on the table.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking before the UN General Assembly in New York in September, defended the nation’s “right to pursue peaceful nuclear energy” and accused the U.S. government of dividing the world into “light and dark countries” and trying to impose “nuclear apartheid.”

Once again, the U.S. is seeking to use its so-called war on terrorism to attack sovereign nations – its threats also extend to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – for having the same technology that the United States and its allies England and France use for producing energy and nuclear weapons.

In doing so, these governments are blocking Third World nations from using that resource to generate electricity, a precondition for developing their economies and offering their people the minimal conditions for a decent life.

According to the World Bank, some two billion people – one-third of the world’s population – have no access to any type of modern energy, neither electricity or fuel for cooking or heating. They have to carry water by hand, and search for firewood or dung for preparing their meals, and of course, owning a refrigerator or television is just a far-off dream.

In contrast, just the United States, with 5% of the world’s population, consumes 25% of its electricity.

According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a business organization of that industry based in Washington D.C., there are 103 commercial nuclear reactors producing energy in 31 U.S. states.

“Nuclear energy provides about 20 percent of the United States' electricity and is its number one source of emission-free electricity,” the institute’s web page says. The same page boasts that nuclear energy is cleaner and more efficient than energy produced through burning coal or fossil fuels, the two main sources of electricity generation in the world.

Bush himself has said that “It is time for this country to start building nuclear power plants again,” arguing that nuclear power would reduce the country’s dependency on oil and natural gas.

And the United States possesses nuclear weapons. Is it necessary to recall that it is the only country that has dropped nuclear bombs on people, when it brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese people at the end of World War II...?

As long as oil, natural gas and coal are scarce and their economic cost and environmental costs are rising, and until a transition can be made toward more secure and less polluting sources of energy, a growing number of countries will seek to use nuclear power.

Hugo Chávez, president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, for example, has affirmed his country’s interest in developing this option – and that of solar energy – for diversifying its energy sources. He said clearly that this technology would be used for “peace and energy,” not for producing nuclear weapons.

While Cuba is not developing nuclear energy at this time, President Fidel Castro has reaffirmed his revolutionary government’s position on this issue, when he spoke by telephone with President Ahmadinejad on January 4 and said: “Iran, like any other country, has the right to produce nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and to have access to the modern technology used for this product.”

Bush to criminalize protesters under Patriot Act as "disruptors"

by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse

Wed Jan 11, 2006 at 07:27:26 PM PDT

Bush wants to create the new criminal of "disruptor" who can be jailed for the crime of "disruptive behavior." A "little-noticed provision" in the latest version of the Patriot Act will empower Secret Service to charge protesters with a new crime of "disrupting major events including political conventions and the Olympics." Secret Service would also be empowered to charge persons with "breaching security" and to charge for "entering a restricted area" which is "where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting." In short, be sure to stay in those wired, fenced containments or free speech zones.

• Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse's diary :: ::
• 
  

Who is the "disruptor"? Bush Team history tells us the disruptor is an American citizen with the audacity to attend Bush events wearing a T-shirt that criticizes Bush; or a member of civil rights, environmental, anti-war or counter-recruiting groups who protest Bush policies; or a person who invades Bush's bubble by criticizing his policies. A disruptor is also a person who interferes in someone else's activity, such as interrupting Bush when he is speaking at a press conference or during an interview.

What are the parameters of the crime of "disruptive behavior"? The dictionary defines "disruptive" as "characterized by unrest or disorder or insubordination." The American Medical Association defines disruptive behavior as a "style of interaction" with people that interferes with patient care, and can include behavior such as "foul language; rude, loud or offensive comments; and intimidation of patients and family members."

What are the rules of engagement for "disruptors"? Some Bush Team history of their treatment of disruptors provide some clues on how this administration will treat disruptors in the future.

(1) People perceived as disruptors may be preemptively ejected from events before engaging in any disruptive conduct.

In the beginning of this war against disruptors, Americans were ejected from taxpayer funded events where Bush was speaking. At first the events were campaign rallies during the election, and then the disruptor ejectment policy was expanded to include Bush's post election campaign-style events on public policy issues on his agenda, such as informing the public on medicare reform and the like. If people drove to the event in a car with a bumper sticker that criticized Bush's policies or wore T-shirts with similar criticism, they were disruptors who could be ejected from the taxpayer event even before they engaged in any disruptive behavior. White House press secretary McClellan defended such ejectments as a proper preemptive strike against persons who may disrupt an event: "If we think people are coming to the event to disrupt it, obviously, they're going to be asked to leave."

(2) Bush Team may check its vast array of databanks to cull out those persons who it deems having "disruptor" potential and then blacklist those persons from events.

The White House even has a list of persons it deems could be "disruptive" to an eventand then blacklists those persons from attending taxpayer funded events where Bush speaks. Sounds like Bush not only has the power to unilaterally designate people as "enemy combatants" in the global "war on terror," but to unilaterally designate Americans as "disruptive" in the domestic war against free speech.

(3) The use of surveillance, monitoring and legal actions against disruptors.

Bush's war against disruptors was then elevated to surveillance, monitoring, and legal actions against disruptor organizations. The FBI conducts political surveillance and obtains intelligence filed in its database on Bush administration critics , such as civil rights groups (e.g., ACLU), antiwar protest groups (e.g., United for Peace and Justice) and environmental groups (e.g., Greenpeace).

This surveillance of American citizens exercising their constitutional rights has been done under the pretext of counterterrorism activities surrounding protests of the Iraq war and the Republican National Convention. The FBI maintains it does not have the intent to monitor political activities and that its surveillance and intelligence gathering is "intended to prevent disruptive and criminal activity at demonstrations, not to quell free speech."

Surveillance of potential disruptors then graduated to legal actions as a preemptive strike against potential disruptive behavior at public events. In addition to monitoring and surveillance of legal groups and legal activities, the FBI issued subpoenas for members to appear before grand juries based on the FBI's "intent" to prevent "disruptive convention protests." The Justice Dept. opened a criminal investigation and subpoenaed records of Internet messages posted by Bush`s critics. And, the Justice Dept. even indicted Greenpeace for a protest that was so lame the federal judge threw out the case.

So now the Patriot Act, which was argued before enactment as a measure to fight foreign terrorists, is being amended to make clear that it also applies to American citizens who have the audacity to disrupt President Bush wherever his bubble may travel. If this provision is enacted into law, then Bush will have a law upon which to expand the type of people who constitute disruptors and the type of activities that constitute disruptive activities. And, then throw them all in jail.

Gay issues largely missing from Alito hearings

On the surface, the looming concerns of this week's confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel Alito Jr. to the U.S. Supreme Court have been abortion and domestic spying. But while gay specific issues got virtually no overt notice during the first days of Alito's hearings, there were specific implications for gays in the discourse on both abortion and spying. Furthermore, right-wing conservatives from political arenas outside the hearing made clear that they consider opposition to gay marriage a big part of the reason they're supporting Alito.

Only two senators – Charles Schumer (D-New York) and Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) – acknowledged a gay specific case in the first two days of the hearing. Both referred to the 1985 Bowers v. Hardwick decision, upholding sodomy laws, and the 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned Bowers. But neither asked Alito a question concerning the cases.

The eight Democrats on the 18-member judiciary committee came out swinging hard questions at Alito during the first days of the hearing. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) did not mention last month's revelation, by NBC News, that the Pentagon has been monitoring protests – including those by gay groups – against military recruiters, but he did express concern about more widely publicized revelations that President Bush has authorized spying on Americans without a court order, purportedly as part of his antiterrorist efforts. He criticized Alito's record, which he said "shows time and again that you have been overly deferential to executive power, whether exercised by the president, the attorney general, or law enforcement officials."
...

INSIDER INFO: 6 million wiretapped conversations per month

Facts from IBM
In a quirk of fate, I met someone from IBM who was directly involved in implementing the wiretapping system that is all over the news. It is much worse than the news would suggest.

As some have reported, this is definitely not just NSA. The bidding for the technology to do this project was conducted by members of the FBI and the CIA. During the proposal process, IBM was told explicitly that they were to answer questions, not ask them.

One of the most noteworthy comments was that the Government had specified 60 Terabytes of monthly storage for digital versions of conversations. MONTHLY!
At about 11k per call, that is about 6 million conversations per month.
(correct my math if you are better at computers!).

This is enormous.
People in the press are concerned that they are tapping the phones of people without just cause. What they are really doing is much, much worse.
In reality, they are tapping hundreds of thousands of lines all the time.

Former Pinochet henchman takes over "peacekeeping" operation in Haiti

By Kevin Skerrett

The apparent suicide on 7 January of the Brazilian general leading the UN military force currently occupying Haiti has exposed serious conflict and disarray within the management of the disastrous “peacekeeping” mission there.

According to Reuters and Agence Haitienne de presse (AHP), pressure from Haiti’s business elite to intensify the repression of poor neighbourhoods that constitute the centre of political opposition to the US and Canada-backed interim government had been growing in recent days. On 5 January, the notorious coup supporter and head of Haiti’s Chamber of Commerce Reginald Boulos called upon the UN generals to carry out a “necessary and courageous action” in Cité Soleil, where “you have to break some eggs to make an omelette”. (Radio Metropole)Boulos, a leader of the elite-led “Group 184” and financier for the Washington DC “Haiti Democracy Project” had been working for months to increase pressure on the UN force to crack down on those resisting Haiti’s coup government.

Two days after Boulos gave this interview the Brazilian commander of the UN force, General Urano Bacellar, was found dead in his apartment, shot in the head in an apparent suicide. According to some media reports, Bacellar had been resisting, in part, the efforts of Boulos and other to induce the “peacekeepers” to become the pure killing machine wanted by Haiti’s business class.

Such resistance may now be gone. Bacellar’s replacement is the controversial Chilean General Aldunate Herman. Aldunate Herman is a 1974 School of the Americas graduate who reportedly participated directly in the attack on la Palacio de la Moneda on 11 September, 1973. He was also accused of direct involvement in the 1976 murder of a Spanish diplomat.

It’s quite possible that Reginald Boulos and his networks could not have asked for a more ideal commander for a force now gearing up to "finish the job" of wiping out Haiti's mobilized popular opposition. Some eggs are about to be broken.

Nobody has surpassed the Cuban doctors

BY LILLIAM RIERA

Pakistani Army chief of staff has praised the Cuban medical contingent’s professionalism, commitment and determination to help earthquake victims

“WE never dreamt that the Cubans would come to this part of the world, so far away, in such difficult times,” affirmed Major General Nadeem, chief of staff of the Pakistani Army, during a visit to field hospital number 20 in Muzafarabad in Kashmir where more than 55,000 people died October 6, 2005 due to a devastating earthquake.

This Cuban field hospital, staffed by 77 participants including 10 rehabilitators, includes intensive care, hospitalization and emergency units, among others, has attended to more than 9,000 patients and saved some 50 lives.

“What I saw during my tour of the installation is an expression of the professionalism, commitment, and determination of every one of you to help us. And in this nobody had been able to surpass you,” said Major General Nadeem.

US puts in $69m for clean air

1/12/06

US President George W Bush had agreed to contribute $US52 million ($69 million) to a clean-air partnership, US Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said today.
…
Mr Howard said a report, to be released today by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE), showed that by adopting cleaner technology greenhouse gas emissions in the six nations taking part in the summit would fall by 20 per cent by 2050.
The report would show that the spill-on effect would be a 13 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions around the world, he said.

"On this basis the adoption of new technologies are therefore a credible and essential part of any suite of measures needed to reduce global emissions growth," he said.

A Test of Wills Between Iran and the West

One day after Iran moved to break the internationally monitored seals on its nuclear facilities, a contest of wills between Iran and its adversaries unfolded, with the Europeans threatening to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council for possible punitive actions and Iran issuing defiant new warnings.

Signaling this strategy, Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview with Fox News, said Wednesday that the United States would seek the adoption of "a resolution that could be enforced by sanctions, were they to fail to comply with it." Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain told the Parliament the same thing, saying that "we have to decide what measures to take and we obviously don't rule out any measures at all."

Among the possibilities being discussed, various officials said, were a ban on travel by Iranian diplomats, restrictions on new commercial contracts or sports contests and other small steps falling short of what would be the toughest sanction of all - either a ban on oil purchases or on the export of refined gasoline to Iran.

But it was unclear whether the Europeans could get Russia, China, India and other countries to join a consensus for sanctions, making it possible for the Security Council to act on them. Nor was it certain that Iran would change its behavior in response to new pressures.

Russell Tice, NSA Whistleblower, Interview with Amy Goodman

Now Congress is considering holding a new round of hearings on Bush’s domestic spying program. A bipartisan group series of Senators have already issued their public support including several top Republicans including Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Two weeks ago, a former NSA intelligence officer publicly announced that he wants to testify before Congress. His name is Russell Tice. For the past two decades he has worked in the intelligence field both inside and outside government, most recently with the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency. He was fired in May 2005 after he spoke out as a whistleblower.

In his letter, Tice wrote, "It is with my oath as a US intelligence officer weighing heavy on my mind that I wish to report to Congress acts that I believe are unlawful and unconstitutional. The freedom of the American people cannot be protected when our constitutional liberties are ignored and our nation has decayed into a police state."

Bush signs Bahrain trade pact, a first for Gulf

The agreement requires Bahrain to immediately eliminate its already low tariffs on U.S. consumer and industrial goods and most agricultural products. The United States will also eliminate tariffs on Bahraini goods.

The pact commits the Gulf financial services hub to further opening its market to U.S. banks and other service industry firms and to strengthen copyright and patent protections.

Congress passed the Bahrain agreement last month by widest margin of any pact since Bush won trade promotion authority in the middle of 2002. That measure allows the White House to negotiate trade deals that lawmakers cannot change.

Bush has now signed into law trade deals with Singapore, Chile, Australia, Morocco and most recently six countries in Central America and the Caribbean -- Costa Rica, El Salvador , Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.

Morocco and Jordan are the only other Arab countries enjoying free-trade status with the United States.

Next week the United States will sign a free-trade agreement with Oman as part of its plan to craft a free-trade zone covering the greater Middle East by 2013. Another agreement with the United Arab Emirates is under negotiation.

Washington recently completed a free-trade deal with Peru and hopes to finish one soon with Panama. Pacts with Thailand, Colombia, Ecuador and South Africa are not as close to completion.

The United States could start free-trade talks this year with Egypt, South Korea and other countries.

A Look at U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq

As of Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2006, at least 2,210 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. At least 1,741 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers. The figures include five military civilians.

The AP count is the same as the Defense Department's tally, last updated at 10 a.m. EST Wednesday.

The British military has reported 98 deaths; Italy, 27; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 17; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Slovakia, three; Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand, two each; Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia one death each.

Since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, 2,071 U.S. military members have died, according to AP's count. That includes at least 1,632 deaths resulting from hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

___

The latest deaths reported by the military:

_ No deaths reported.

___

The latest identifications reported by the military:

_ Marine Lance Cpl. Raul Mercado, 21, Monrovia, Calif.; killed Saturday when his vehicle was attacked with an explosive near Karmah, Iraq; assigned to 2nd Maintenance Battalion, 2nd Marine Logistics Group, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

_ Marine Lance Cpl. Jason T. Little, 20, Climax, Mich.; killed Saturday when his tank was attacked with an explosive near Ferris, Iraq; assigned to 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Three Marines were killed by small arms fire in separate attacks Saturday near Fallujah, Iraq:

_ Marine Lance Cpl. Kyle W. Brown, 22, Newport News, Va.

_ Marine Lance Cpl. Jeriad P. Jacobs, 19, Clayton, N.C.

_ Marine Cpl. Brett L. Lundstrom, 22, Stafford, Va.

They were assigned to 2nd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

___

On the Net:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/

Gang of 14 - The List

Via:
http://massdiscussion.blogspot.com/2006/01/most-annoying-republicansconservatives.html

The Most Annoying Conservatives/Republicans For 2005

After putting together the most annoying liberals of 2005, I thought it was only fair to do a follow-up nailing people on the other side of the aisle. Enjoy!

20) Barbara Bush: Oh yeah Barbara, there's nothing poor people love better than sleeping in the Astrodome.

19) Ralph Peters: All good people hate the French, but even they're better than the rioters.

18) Colorado Governor Bill Owens: For throwing any chance he had to be President out the window by supporting a massive tax increase and the evisceration of one of the best pieces of budget legislation in America, the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights.

17) Steve Sailer: Racist Katrina coverage.

16) Senator Lindsey Graham: John McCain light.

15) Congressman Christopher Shays: The most annoying RINO that you've never heard of and that those of us who have, hope we never hear from again.

14) Senator Ted Stevens: I demand that Alaska get to keep it's pork or I'll quit the Senate! It should have been bye-bye Ted!

13) Senator Lincoln Chafee: Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's super-RINO!

12) Senator Arlen Specter: He's a RINO and that's bad enough, but how arrogant do you have to be to try to name a building after yourself on the Hill?

11) Armstrong Williams: You're not allowed to secretly take money from the White House to promote their agenda, even if you agree with it.

10) Pat Buchanan: Yes, WW2 was worth fighting and all those people who are pointing out that you're getting progressively loonier with age? They're right.

9) Senator Chuck Hagel: An anti-war whiner who's the worst thing to come out of Nebraska since...since...wait, does anything ever come out of Nebraska other than corn? I guess, he's worse than creamed corn -- if it gives you hives or something.

8) White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card: Thanks for talking Bush into foisting Harriet Miers on us. We really needed that intra-party brawl.

7) Michael Chertoff & Michael Brown: Actually, whoever let these two charisma free wonks be the face of the Bush's administration's Hurricane Katrina relief effort deserves this slot, but they'll have to do.

6) Senator George Voinovich: For getting so upset about John Bolton going to the UN that he actually blubbered like a baby.

5) Congressman Tom DeLay: Oh yeah, we really have an "ongoing victory" over spending don't we?

4) Pat Robertson: Can you go more than a few months without saying something so stupid that it makes national headlines? Put a sock in it big mouth!

3) Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham: Crooked as a dog's hind leg and run out of Congress on a rail.

2) Senator John McCain: Nobody fought harder for Al-Qaeda's right to be free of belly slaps.

1) The Gang Of 14 (Republican side): Lindsey Graham, John Warner, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, John McCain, Mike DeWine, & Lincoln Chafee. The gang of idiots who almost led to Supreme Court Justice Harriet Miers would be a more appropriate moniker.

Posted by: John Hawkins

Iraq, Iran & China: A New Global Alliance?

by Noam Chomsky

The US President Bush called last month's Iraqi elections a "major milestone in the march to democracy." They are indeed a milestone -- just not the kind that Washington would welcome.

Disregarding the standard declarations of benign intent on the part of leaders, let's review the history. When Bush and Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, invaded Iraq, the pretext, insistently repeated, was a "single question": Will Iraq eliminate its weapons of mass destruction?

Within a few months this "single question" was answered the wrong way. Then, very quickly, the real reason for the invasion became Bush's "messianic mission" to bring democracy to Iraq and the Middle East.

Even apart from the timing, the democratisation bandwagon runs up against the fact that the United States has tried, in every possible way, to prevent elections in Iraq.

Last January's elections came about because of mass nonviolent resistance, for which the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani became a symbol.

(The violent insurgency is another creature altogether from this popular movement.)

Few competent observers would disagree with the editors of the Financial Times, who wrote last March that "the reason (the elections) took place was the insistence of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who vetoed three schemes by the US-led occupation authorities to shelve or dilute them."

Elections, if taken seriously, mean you pay some attention to the will of the population. The crucial question for an invading army is: "Do they want us to be here?"

There is no lack of information about the answer. One important source is a poll for the British Ministry of Defence this past August, carried out by Iraqi university researchers and leaked to the British Press.

It found that 82 per cent are "strongly opposed" to the presence of coalition troops and less than 1 per cent believe they are responsible for any improvement in security.

Analysts of the Brookings Institution in Washington report that in November, 80 per cent of Iraqis favoured "near-term US troop withdrawal." Other sources generally concur.

So the coalition forces should withdraw, as the population wants them to, instead of trying desperately to set up a client regime with military forces that they can control. But Bush and Blair still refuse to set a timetable for withdrawal, limiting themselves to token withdrawals as their goals are achieved.

There's a good reason why the United States cannot tolerate a sovereign, more or less democratic Iraq.

The issue can scarcely be raised because it conflicts with firmly established doctrine: We're supposed to believe that the United States would have invaded Iraq if it was an island in the Indian Ocean and its main export was pickles, not petroleum.

As is obvious to anyone not committed to the party line, taking control of Iraq will enormously strengthen US power over global energy resources, a crucial lever of world control.

Suppose that Iraq were to become sovereign and democratic. Imagine the policies it would be likely to pursue. The Shia population in the South, where much of Iraq's oil is, would have a predominant influence. They would prefer friendly relations with Shia Iran.

The relations are already close. The Badr brigade, the militia that mostly controls the south, was trained in Iran.

The highly influential clerics also have long- standing relations with Iran, including Sistani, who grew up there. And the Shia-dominant interim government has already begun to establish economic and possibly military relations with Iran.

Furthermore, right across the border in Saudi Arabia is a substantial, bitter Shia population. Any move toward independence in Iraq is likely to increase efforts to gain a degree of autonomy and justice there, too.

This also happens to be the region where most of Saudi Arabia's oil is. The outcome could be a loose Shia alliance comprising Iraq, Iran and the major oil regions of Saudi Arabia, independent of Washington and controlling large portions of the world's oil reserves.

It's not unlikely that an independent bloc of this kind might follow Iran's lead in developing major energy projects jointly with China and India.

Iran may give up on Western Europe, assuming that it will be unwilling to act independently of the United States. China, however, can't be intimidated. That's why the United States is so frightened by China.

China is already establishing relations with Iran -- and even with Saudi Arabia, both military and economic. There is an Asian energy security grid, based on China and Russia, but probably bringing in India, Korea and others.

If Iran moves in that direction, it can become the lynchpin of that power grid.

Such developments, including a sovereign Iraq and possibly even major Saudi energy resources, would be the ultimate nightmare for Washington.

Also, a labour movement is forming in Iraq, a very important one. Washington insists on keeping Saddam Hussein's bitter anti-labour laws, but the labour movement continues its organising work despite them.

Their activists are being killed. Nobody knows by whom, maybe by insurgents, maybe by former Baathists, maybe by somebody else. But they're persisting.

They constitute one of the major democratising forces that have deep roots in Iraqi history, and that might revitalise, also much to the horror of the occupying forces.

One critical question is how Westerners will react. Will we be on the side of the occupying forces trying to prevent democracy and sovereignty? Or will we be on the side of the Iraqi people?

Noam Chomsky @ Counterpunch

USA exports state-sponsored terrorism, By Gregory F. Fegel

The Twin Towers were long regarded as architectural dinosaurs and economic failures by their original owners. I am a citizen of the USA by birth, and it concerns me that the image of the United States that is presented by the international ‘Mainstream Media’ is largely a product of US government and corporate Propaganda. Media monopolies, such as the ones owned and run by Ted Turner in the USA and by Rupert Murdoch in both the USA and Great Britain, present a one-sided, ‘official’ view of US Politics and of US foreign policy.

Many people in the USA disagree with the US government’s foreign policies and also with the ‘official version’ of events that is presented by the corporate-controlled Mainstream Media. There are numerous small, ‘alternative’ media outlets in the USA that present a very different view of US Politics and foreign policy.

A recent poll conducted by Zogby International showed that 49.3 % of the residents of New York City, where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were struck by airliners, believe that the leadership and the intelligence agencies of the US government “Knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act.”

Many Americans do not believe the US government’s ‘official version’ of the 9/11/2001 attacks, and there are now several hundred websites on the Internet that catalog the multiple discrepancies and falsehoods contained in the ‘official version’ presented by the US government and the Mainstream Media regarding the events of 9/11/2001.

A preponderance of evidence shows that the Twin Towers could not have collapsed as a result of the airliners that crashed into them. In fact, the videos and still photos of the collapse of the Twin Towers clearly show the ’squibs’ of smoke that accompany a controlled demolition. Many witnesses reported hearing multiple explosions throughout the Twin Towers just prior to their collapse.

A fresh outcry has risen in the US and Nepal over what could be the American government’s exploitation of Nepali soldiers as human guinea pigs to find

A fresh outcry has risen in the US and Nepal over what could be the American government’s exploitation of Nepali soldiers as human guinea pigs to find a Hepatitis vaccine.

Since the 1980s, the US Army had been studying Hepatitis E, said to account for 50 percent of hepatitis cases in developing countries, in order to come up with a vaccine for the protection of its troops abroad.

In 1995, the US Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences (AFRIMS), the Thai-based branch of Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, set up a unit in Kathmandu to conduct clinical trials.

Robert McNair-Scott of AFRIMS was the principal US investigator and Mrigendra Shrestha his counterpart in Nepal. Lt Col Robert Kuschner was the trial’s project director from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

The vaccine, patented by Californian company Genelabs and licensed by GlaxoSmithKline, is to hit the market in 2007.
...

Last week, Glaxo released information at a scientific meeting, saying the vaccine was successful, but kept silent about making it available in Nepal.

Now epidemiologists at Yale’s School of Medicine and other activists have raised the issue afresh, expressing the fear that the trial might have been unethical.

“The poorest of the poor were used as subjects,” a Yale project staff said on condition of anonymity.

Tales of the Freeway Blogger

Over the last three years I've put over 2,500 signs against the war on the freeways of California.
~ Freeway Blogger ~

Chemtrails Fact or Fiction? Media is starting to report

2 Media Outlets have started to report as well as other local news agencies.
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It has been reported that the "chemtrails" contain ethylene dibromide -- a substance that has been an additive to gasoline and airplane fuels as well as a banned pesticide. Ethylene dibromide has been linked to kidney and liver damage and is an immunosuppressive and a lung irritant.

William Thomas, who has researched chemtrails since their appearance in the latter 90s, has noted stunted plant growth in once-healthy gardens and wilderness areas in Santa Fe and Aspen. Similar plant problems are commonly associated with chemtrails in other regions of the U.S.

A brief history of the chemtrail phenomenon can be traced to a Washington state man who told award-winning investigative reporter William Thomas that he’d become ill on New Year’s Day 1999 after watching several jets make strange lines in the sky. Within six months, Thomas, writing primarily for the Environmental News Service, has detailed 1000s of eyewitness reports of chemtrails from 40 states.

"Mainstream newspapers have gone out of their way to dismiss these eyewitness accounts," Thomas told the New Mexican newspaper in June 1999, "It’s easier to sell UFOs to major media than a phenomena as close in many cities as the nearest window."

Especially disturbing for residents of heavily chemtrailed communities like Las Vegas is a "chemtrail sickness" associated with heavy spray days leaving many stricken people complaining of the "flu" and acute allergic reactions months after the flu season has ended. Upper and lower respiratory and gastrointestinal ailments remain unusually high in many spray areas, along with debilitating fatigue - and something even more worrying.
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What’s going on?
Thomas is convinced that we are under "deliberate biological attack" by agents known only to top military and government officials responsible for permitting continuing over-flights by unmarked spray aircraft.

Iran and the New World Order, by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

The New World Order we see today is based more and more upon a belligerent and bullying Anglo-Saxon Alliance forged between the axis Canberra-London-Washington and its foundations stand upon one simple precept: to have an “us” you need a “them.”

If you go looking for problems they are easy to find. For example, an easy “them” would have been constituted by the Albanian KLA terrorists destabilising Kosovo and against whom Slobodan Milosevic’s troops were fighting, but it was understood in the US Congress that the KLA belonged to the “us” side, for dubious reasons.

While it is true that not all those chosen to belong to “us” remain so forever (for instance, the funding of the Madrassah and the Mujaheddin movement in Afghanistan - one of whose leaders was Osama bin Laden - to destabilise the progressive government of Dr. Najibullah by the USA). It is easy to choose and then maintain a “them” identity primarily among those who follow a different religious banner or a socialist ideal.

Hence the pariahs of today are Cuba (just because Fidel Castro had the substance to stand up to the USA and make socialism work), along with Chavez (Venezuela) and now almost certainly Morales (Bolivia) because Washington likes to think its capitalist model is perfect. However, the truth could not be more different.

The countries which adopted a socialist model proved that their system could work and provide true social welfare programmes, while the capitalist-monetarist model is so flawed from the outset that it has to be sustained by subsidies and tariffs, perpetuating and perpetrating a form of economic imperialism. In plain, simple English, it does not work.

Another easy “them” to pinpoint is any Moslem country with the audacity not to obey Washington’s orders, such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Iran - now even easier to mark down as “them” because of President Ahmadinejad’s habit of not mincing his words.

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Much will be made this year of the growing friendship between Iran, Bolivia and Venezuela, especially now that they are speaking about energy deals. As we all know, the energy lobby which controls Washington”s foreign policy likes to have its fingers in all the pies.

Watch this space. But beware of the false truths spun b