by Kurt Nimmo

Republished from www.kurtnimmo.com

Thursday June 29th 2006, 8:23 am

Now that Israel has attacked Gaza and the West Bank and kidnapped members of the democratically elected government there, it will be interesting to see if the United Nations condemns these criminal acts and moves to pass another worthless resolution.

Israel’s “Operation Summer Rain” is not specifically intended to win the release of prisoner of war corporal Gilad Shalit so much as continue the nearly sixty year aggression against the Palestinian people. “According to some Western analysts, the military action, rather than being aimed at rescuing the captured Israeli soldier, is aimed at preempting the consequences of a recent agreement [to recognize Israel] reached by the Fatah block and Hamas,” notes the Arab Monitor.

Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades and the Popular Resistance Committees, responsible for taking Shalit, want to use him as a “bargaining chip” to gain the release of women and children held in Israel’s dungeons in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

It should be noted, although this will not be mentioned in the corporate media, that Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that abducting Arabs and holding them hostage is entirely legal according to the laws of the tiny outlaw state. As well, the Israeli government has attempted to codify GSS (General Security Services) torture during “interrogation.” According to Amnesty International official, “Israel is the only country in the world known to have effectively legalized torture by officially allowing such methods,” namely beatings, electric shock, sleep deprivation, forcing prisoners to remain in painful positions, violent shaking, hooding, confinement in tiny spaces, exposure to temperature extremes, prolonged toilet and hygiene deprivation, degrading treatment, and other methods, which have in cases led to the death of the detainees.

Osama Hamdan, a Hamas official, put the capture of Gilad Shalit into perspective. “He’s an Israeli soldier, a prisoner of war, taken in a battle and falls under a legal category,” Hamdan told the Associated Press. “What happened yesterday [the abduction of elected Palestinians] were hostage-takings and acts of terrorism.” Israel, however, has nothing but contempt for such legal categories, as the systematic murder and maiming of more than 24,500 Palestinians since the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada reveals.

“On Wednesday, the crisis seemed to be tipping toward escalation as Israeli tanks hunkered down inside southern Gaza at the airport after warplanes had knocked out half of Gaza’s electricity and pounded sonic booms over houses,” reports the New York Times. “Also on Wednesday, Israel battered northern Gazan towns with artillery and sent warplanes over the house of the Syrian president, who is influential with the Palestinian leader believed to have ordered the kidnapping.”

In other words, the Israelis violated Syrian airspace and terrorized Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, basically an act of war. “In a predawn operation Wednesday morning, Israel Air Force warplanes carried out a low-altitude flight over Assad’s palace in the Mediterranean port city of Latakia in northwestern Syria,” explains Haaretz. [Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin] said it was ‘absolutely unacceptable’ to breach the border or air space of any country,” a fact lost on the neocon, pro-Jabotinsky, AIPAC seduced government of the United States.

Ehud Olmert, who got his start in the Arab-hating revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar (founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky), declares Israel has “no interest to harm the Palestinian people, and in the operation we carried out tonight, civilians were not harmed. The Hamas Government and its sources in Syria are directly responsible for the reality we’ve fallen into,” according to a translation provided by the World Today.

Granted, according to news reports, the IOF has yet to slaughter Palestinians outright, although it is disingenuous for Olmert to claim “civilians were not harmed,” considering the IOF has bombed electrical facilities and “destroyed the main water pipe feeding Nuseirat and El-Bureij refugee camps,” according to an by Electronic Intifada press release posted last night.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights “strongly condemns IOF retaliatory measures targeting Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, including the destruction of properties that are not classified as a legitimate military targets. The Center calls upon the international community, particularly the High Contracting Parties of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to force IOF to respect the convention, which prohibits reprisals against protected persons, as stipulated in article 33. In addition, the convention prohibits the destruction of private properties belonging to individuals, groups, organizations or official bodies. The Center calls upon the High Contracting Parties to enforce article 3 regarding adherence to the convention and respect of its stipulations, and to take appropriate sanctions against the serious violations currently being perpetrated.”

Of course, this will be ignored, both in Israel and the United States, where the dutiful corporate media portrays the invasion of the Gaza Strip and West Bank as a defensive move against terrorists.

In effect, Israel is attempting to break any agreement between Fatah and Hamas in regard to recognizing Israel’s “right” to exist, a “right” predicated on more than sixty years of violence and ethnic cleansing.

Olmert and the Jabotinsky Likudites are engaged in a long-term plan to deny not only Palestinian statehood, but the most basic of human rights. “Zionism is a colonizing adventure and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces,” Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote.

As well, it stands or falls on the ability to use such armed forces to terrorize Palestinians, run them off the land, bomb their civilian infrastructure, abduct their elected representatives, throw their women and children in torture dungeons, dynamite their homes, plow under their olive groves, shoot peace activists in the head (or run them over with military bulldozers), and engage in other crimes, illegal and shameful in more civilized places in the world.

STEVEN R. HURST and QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA Associated Press | June 28 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Eleven Sunni insurgent groups have offered an immediate halt to all attacks including those on American troops if the United States agrees to withdraw foreign forces from Iraq in two years, insurgent and government officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Withdrawal is the centerpiece of a set of demands from the groups, which operate north of Baghdad in the heavily Sunni Arab provinces of Salahuddin and Diyala. Although much of the fighting has been to the west, those provinces are increasingly violent and attacks there have crippled oil and commerce routes.

The groups who've made contact have largely shunned attacks on Iraqi civilians, focusing instead on the U.S.-led coalition forces. Their offer coincides with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's decision to reach out to the Sunni insurgency with a reconciliation plan that includes an amnesty for fighters.

The Islamic Army in Iraq, Muhammad Army and the Mujahedeen Shura Council the umbrella group that covers eight militant groups including al-Qaida in Iraq were not party to any offers to the government.

Naseer al-Ani, a Sunni Arab politician and official with the largest Sunni political group, the Iraqi Islamic Party, said that al-Maliki should encourage the process by guaranteeing security for those making the offer and not immediately reject their demands.

"The government should prove its goodwill and not establish red lines," al-Ani said. "If the initiative is implemented in a good way, 70 percent of the insurgent groups will respond positively."

Al-Maliki, in televised remarks Wednesday, did not issue an outright rejection of the timetable demand. But he said it was unrealistic, because he could not be certain when the Iraqi army and police would be strong enough to make a foreign presence unnecessary for Iraq's security.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that President Bush's "view has been and remains that a timetable is not something that is useful. It is a signal to the enemies that all you have to do is just wait and it's yours.

"The goal is not to trade something off for something else to make somebody happy, the goal is to succeed," he said.

Bush has said U.S. troops will remain in Iraq for years to guarantee the success of the new Iraqi government. However, American military officials have said substantial reductions of the current force of 127,000 U.S. troops could be made before the end of 2007.

Eight of the 11 insurgent groups banded together to approach al-Maliki's government under The 1920 Revolution Brigade, which has claimed credit for killing U.S. troops in the past. All 11, working through intermediaries, have issued identical demands, according to insurgent spokesmen and government officials.

The officials spoke on condition of anomymity because of the sensitivity of the information and for fear of retribution.

The total number of insurgents is not known, nor how many men belong to each group. But there are believed to be about two dozen insurgent organizations in Iraq, so the 11 contacting the government could represent a substantial part of the Sunni-led insurgency.

Al-Maliki's offer of amnesty for insurgents would not absolve those who have killed Iraqis or American coalition troops. But proving which individuals have carried out fatal attacks would, in many if not most cases, be a difficult task.

The issue is extremely sensitive in the United States, which has lost more than 2,500 uniformed men and women in Iraq, many to the insurgents' bombs and ambushes.

Coinciding with al-Maliki's attempts to bring Sunni Arabs to the bargaining table, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad held talks Tuesday in Saudi Arabia with King Abdullah. The Saudis have influence with many Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

Al-Maliki also set up an e-mail account to communicate with insurgents, flashing the address on the screen during a broadcast Sunday night.

For al-Maliki, reaching out to the Sunnis risks heightening tensions in his ruling coalition of mostly Shiite Muslim political groups. Al-Maliki is said to be increasingly disenchanted with the close ties between the country's most powerful Shiite organization and Iran, which is ruled by a Shiite theocracy.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite group with historic ties to the Iranians, favors close relations with Iran. Many of Iraq's most powerful Shiite politicians and religious figures spent years in Iranian exile during Saddam Hussein's regime.

In addition to the withdrawal timetable, the Iraqi insurgents have demanded:

An end to U.S. and Iraqi military operations against insurgent forces.

Compensation for Iraqis killed by U.S. and government forces and reimbursement for property damage.

An end to the ban on army officers from Saddam's regime in the Iraqi military.

An end to the government ban on former members of the Baath Party which ruled the country under Saddam.

The release of insurgent detainees.

The 1920 Revolution Brigades, the umbrella for seven other groups, was established in the so-called Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad shortly after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Its name refers to Iraq's historical fight against British colonialism.

The group has claimed responsibility for attacking American troops, including the downing of two helicopters in 2004.

"If they set a two-year timetable for the withdrawal we will stop all our operations immediately," said the leader in a telephone interview with the AP. The man, who refused to give his name for security reasons, spoke from the telephone of one of the mediators. Others present made similar remarks.

Besides the 1920 Revolution Brigades, the eight include Abtal al-Iraq (Heroes of Iraq), the 9th of April Group, al-Fateh Brigades, al-Mukhtar Brigades, Salahuddin Brigades, Mujahedeen Army and the Brigades of the General Command of the Armed Forces. The three other groups are small organizations that also mainly operate in areas north of Baghdad.

In other developments Wednesday:

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his special services to hunt down and "destroy" the killers of four Russian Embassy workers in Iraq.

National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie said a key al-Qaida suspect wanted in the bombing of a Shiite shrine a Tunisian identified as Yousri Fakher Mohammed Ali was captured. However, he said the Iraqi mastermind of the attack that pushed the country to the brink of civil war, Haitham Sabah Shaker Mohammed al-Badri, was at large. There never was a claim of responsibility for the bombing.

By Henry Porter

Republished from Independent Online: 29 June 2006

In the guise of fighting terrorism and maintaining public order, Tony Blair's Government has quietly and systematically taken power from Parliament and the British people. The author charts a nine-year assault on civil liberties that reveals the danger of trading freedom for security - and must have Churchill spinning in his grave

In the shadow of Winston Churchill's statue opposite the House of Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A small group of people - mostly young and dressed outlandishly - hold a tea party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much like Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while other members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on the afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket.

Sometimes the police move in and arrest the picnickers, but on this occasion the officers stood at a distance, presumably consulting on the question of whether this was a demonstration or a non-demonstration. It is all rather silly and yet in Blair's Britain there is a kind of nobility in the amateurishness and persistence of the gesture. This collection of oddballs, looking for all the world as if they had stepped out of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, are challenging a new law which says that no one may demonstrate within a kilometre, or a little more than half a mile, of Parliament Square if they have not first acquired written permission from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This effectively places the entire centre of British government, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, off-limits to the protesters and marchers who have traditionally brought their grievances to those in power without ever having to ask a policeman's permission.

The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law. If anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech, then he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is arrested. The device doesn't always work. After drinking tea in the square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the Cenotaph, Britain's national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred yards away.

On that dank spring afternoon I looked up at Churchill and reflected that he almost certainly would have approved of these people insisting on their right to demonstrate in front of his beloved Parliament. "If you will not fight for the right," he once growled, "when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

Churchill lived in far more testing times than ours, but he always revered the ancient tradition of Britain's "unwritten constitution". I imagined him becoming flesh again and walking purposefully toward Downing Street - without security, of course - there to address Tony Blair and his aides on their sacred duty as the guardians of Britain's Parliament and the people's rights.

For Blair, that youthful baby-boomer who came to power nine years ago as the embodiment of democratic liberalism as well as the new spirit of optimism in Britain, turns out to have an authoritarian streak that respects neither those rights nor, it seems, the independence of the elected representatives in Parliament. And what is remarkable - in fact almost a historic phenomenon - is the harm his government has done to the unwritten British constitution in those nine years, without anyone really noticing, without the press objecting or the public mounting mass protests. At the inception of Cool Britannia, British democracy became subject to a silent takeover.

Last year - rather late in the day, I must admit - I started to notice trends in Blair's legislation which seemed to attack individual rights and freedoms, to favour ministers (politicians appointed by the Prime Minister to run departments of government) over the scrutiny of Parliament, and to put in place all the necessary laws for total surveillance of society.

There was nothing else to do but to go back and read the Acts - at least 15 of them - and to write about them in my weekly column in The Observer. After about eight weeks, the Prime Minister privately let it be known that he was displeased at being called authoritarian by me. Very soon I found myself in the odd position of conducting a formal e-mail exchange with him on the rule of law, I sitting in my London home with nothing but Google and a stack of legislation, the Prime Minister in No 10 with all the resources of government at his disposal. Incidentally, I was assured that he had taken time out of his schedule so that he himself could compose the thunderous responses calling for action against terrorism, crime, and antisocial behaviour.

The day after the exchange was published, the grudging truce between the Government and me was broken. Blair gave a press conference, in which he attacked media exaggeration, and the then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, weighed in with a speech at the London School of Economics naming me and two other journalists and complaining about "the pernicious and even dangerous poison" in the media.

So, I guess this column comes with a health warning from the British Government, but please don't pay it any mind. When governments attack the media, it is often a sign that the media have for once gotten something right. I might add that this column also comes with the more serious warning that, if rights have been eroded in the land once called "the Mother of Parliaments", it can happen in any country where a government actively promotes the fear of terrorism and crime and uses it to persuade people that they must exchange their freedom for security.

Blair's campaign against rights contained in the Rule of Law - that is, that ancient amalgam of common law, convention, and the opinion of experts, which makes up one half of the British constitution - is often well concealed. Many of the measures have been slipped through under legislation that appears to address problems the public is concerned about. For instance, the law banning people from demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament is contained in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. The right to protest freely has been affected by the Terrorism Act of 2000, which allows police to stop and search people in a designated area - which can be anywhere - and by antisocial behaviour laws, which allow police to issue an order banning someone from a particular activity, waving a banner, for instance. If a person breaks that order, he or she risks a prison sentence of up to five years. Likewise, the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997 - designed to combat stalkers and campaigns of intimidation - is being used to control protest. A woman who sent two e-mails to a pharmaceutical company politely asking a member of the staff not to work with a company that did testing on animals was prosecuted for "repeated conduct" in sending an e-mail twice, which the Act defines as harassment.

There is a demonic versatility to Blair's laws. Kenneth Clarke, a former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, despairs at the way they are being used. "What is assured as being harmless when it is introduced gets used more and more in a way which is sometimes alarming," he says. His colleague David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair's Labour Party: "If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit - in some cases eradicate - habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up."

Indeed they would. But there's more, so much in fact that it is difficult to grasp the scope of the campaign against British freedoms. But here goes. The right to a jury trial is removed in complicated fraud cases and where there is a fear of jury tampering. The right not to be tried twice for the same offence - the law of double jeopardy - no longer exists. The presumption of innocence is compromised, especially in antisocial behaviour legislation, which also makes hearsay admissible as evidence. The right not to be punished unless a court decides that the law has been broken is removed in the system of control orders by which a terrorist suspect is prevented from moving about freely and using the phone and internet, without at any stage being allowed to hear the evidence against him - house arrest in all but name.

Freedom of speech is attacked by Section Five of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which preceded Blair's Government, but which is now being used to patrol opinion. In Oxford last year a 21-year-old graduate of Balliol College named Sam Brown drunkenly shouted in the direction of two mounted police officers, "Mate, you know your horse is gay. I hope you don't have a problem with that." He was given one of the new, on-the-spot fines - £80 - which he refused to pay, with the result that he was taken to court. Some 10 months later the Crown Prosecution Service dropped its case that he had made homophobic remarks likely to cause disorder.

There are other people the police have investigated but failed to prosecute: the columnist Cristina Odone, who made a barely disparaging aside about Welsh people on TV (she referred to them as "little Welshies"); and the head of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who said that homosexual practices were "not acceptable" and civil partnerships between gays were "harmful".

The remarks may be a little inappropriate, but I find myself regretting that my countrymen's opinions - their bloody-mindedness, their truculence in the face of authority, their love of insult and robust debate - are being edged out by this fussy, hairsplitting, second-guessing, politically correct state that Blair is trying to build with what he calls his "respect agenda".

Do these tiny cuts to British freedom amount to much more than a few people being told to be more considerate? Shami Chakrabarti, the petite whirlwind who runs Liberty believes that "the small measures of increasing ferocity add up over time to a society of a completely different flavour". That is exactly the phrase I was looking for. Britain is not a police state - the fact that Tony Blair felt it necessary to answer me by e-mail proves that - but it is becoming a very different place under his rule, and all sides of the House of Commons agree. The Liberal Democrats' spokesman on human rights and civil liberties, David Heath, is sceptical about Blair's use of the terrorist threat. "The age-old technique of any authoritarian or repressive government has always been to exaggerate the terrorist threat to justify their actions," he says. "I am not one to underestimate the threat of terrorism, but I think it has been used to justify measures which have no relevance to attacking terrorism effectively." And Bob Marshall-Andrews - a Labour MP who, like quite a number of others on Blair's side of the House of Commons, is deeply worried about the tone of government - says of his boss, "Underneath, there is an unstable authoritarianism which has seeped into the [Labour] Party."

Chakrabarti, who once worked as a lawyer in the Home Office, explains: "If you throw live frogs into a pan of boiling water, they will sensibly jump out and save themselves. If you put them in a pan of cold water and gently apply heat until the water boils they will lie in the pan and boil to death. It's like that." In Blair you see the champion frog boiler of modern times. He is also a lawyer who suffers acute impatience with the processes of the law. In one of his e-mails to me he painted a lurid - and often true - picture of the delinquency in some of Britain's poorer areas, as well as the helplessness of the victims. His response to the problem of societal breakdown was to invent a new category of restraint called the antisocial behaviour order, or Asbo.

"Please speak to the victims of this menace," he wrote. "They are people whose lives have been turned into a daily hell. Suppose they live next door to someone whose kids are out of control: who play their music loud until 2 am; who vilify anyone who asks them to stop; who are often into drugs or alcohol? Or visit a park where children can't play because of needles, used condoms, and hooligans hanging around.

"It is true that, in theory, each of these acts is a crime for which the police could prosecute. In practice, they don't. It would involve in each case a disproportionate amount of time, money and commitment for what would be, for any single act, a low-level sentence. Instead, they can now use an Asbo or a parenting order or other measures that attack not an offence but behaviour that causes harm and distress to people, and impose restrictions on the person doing it, breach of which would mean they go to prison."

How the Asbo works is that a complaint is lodged with a magistrates' court which names an individual or parent of a child who is said to be the source of antisocial behaviour. The actions which cause the trouble do not have to be illegal in themselves before an Asbo is granted and the court insists on the cessation of that behaviour - which may be nothing more than walking a dog, playing music, or shouting in the street. It is important to understand that the standards of evidence are much lower here than in a normal court hearing because hearsay - that is, rumour and gossip - is admissible. If a person is found to have broken an Asbo, he or she is liable to a maximum of five years in prison, regardless of whether the act is in itself illegal. So, in effect, the person is being punished for disobedience to the state.

Blair is untroubled by the precedent that this law might offer a real live despot, or by the fact that Asbos are being used to stifle legitimate protest, and indeed, in his exchange with me, he seemed to suggest that he was considering a kind of super-Asbo for more serious criminals to "harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country". It was significant that nowhere in this rant did he mention the process of law or a court.

He offers something new: not a police state but a controlled state, in which he seeks to alter radically the political and philosophical context of the criminal-justice system. "I believe we require a profound rebalancing of the civil liberties debate," he said in a speech in May. "The issue is not whether we care about civil liberties but what that means in the early 21st century." He now wants legislation to limit powers of British courts to interpret the Human Rights Act. The Act, imported from the European Convention on Human Rights, was originally inspired by Winston Churchill, who had suggested it as a means to entrench certain rights in Europe after the war.

Blair says that this thinking springs from the instincts of his generation, which is "hard on behaviour and soft on lifestyle." Actually, I was born six weeks before Blair, 53 years ago, and I can categorically say that he does not speak for all my generation. But I agree with his other self-description, in which he claims to be a moderniser, because he tends to deny the importance of history and tradition, particularly when it comes to Parliament, whose powers of scrutiny have suffered dreadfully under his government.

There can be few duller documents than the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 or the Inquiries Act of 2005, which is perhaps just as well for the Government, for both vastly extend the arbitrary powers of ministers while making them less answerable to Parliament. The Civil Contingencies Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state of emergency in which assets can be seized without compensation, courts may be set up, assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from, or held in, particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might be about to occur. Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance to assess the situation. If the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad faith, he cannot be punished.

One response might be to look into his actions by holding a government investigation under the Inquiries Act, but then the minister may set its terms, suppress evidence, close the hearing to the public, and terminate it without explanation. Under this Act, the reports of government inquiries are presented to ministers, not, as they once were, to Parliament. This fits very well into a pattern where the executive branch demands more and more unfettered power, as does Charles Clarke's suggestion that the press should be subject to statutory regulation.

I realise that it would be testing your patience to go too deeply into the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government has been trying to smuggle through Parliament this year, but let me just say that its original draft would have allowed ministers to make laws without reference to elected representatives.

Imagine the President of the United States trying to neuter the Congress in this manner, so flagrantly robbing it of its power. Yet until recently all this has occurred in Britain with barely a whisper of coverage in the British media.

Blair is the lowest he has ever been in the polls, but he is still energetically fighting off his rival, Gordon Brown, with a cabinet reshuffle and a stout defence of his record. In an e-mail to me, Blair denied that he was trying to abolish parliamentary democracy, then swiftly moved to say how out of touch the political and legal establishments were, which is perhaps the way that he justifies these actions to himself. It was striking how he got one of his own pieces of legislation wrong when discussing control orders - or house arrest - for terrorist suspects in relation to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is incorporated into British law under the Human Rights Act. "The point about the Human Rights Act," he declared, "is that it does allow the courts to strike down the act of our 'sovereign Parliament'." As Marcel Berlins, the legal columnist of The Guardian, remarked, "It does no such thing."

How can the Prime Minister get such a fundamentally important principle concerning human rights so utterly wrong, especially when it so exercised both sides of the House of Commons? The answer is that he is probably not a man for detail, but Charles Moore, the former editor of The Daily Telegraph, now a columnist and the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, believes that New Labour contains strands of rather sinister political DNA.

"My theory is that the Blairites are Marxist in process, though not in ideology - well, actually it is more Leninist." It is true that several senior ministers had socialist periods. Charles Clarke, John Reid, recently anointed Home Secretary, and Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, were all on the extreme left, if not self-declared Leninists. Moore's implication is that the sacred Blair project of modernising Britain has become a kind of ersatz ideology and that this is more important to Blair than any of the country's political or legal institutions. "He's very shallow," says Moore. "He's got a few things he wants to do and he rather impressively pursues them."

One of these is the national ID card scheme, opposition to which brings together such disparate figures as the Earl of Onslow, a Conservative peer of the realm; Commander George Churchill-Coleman, the famous head of New Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist unit during the worst years of IRA bombings; and Neil Tennant, one half of the hugely successful pop group Pet Shop Boys.

The idea of the ID card seems sensible in the age of terrorism, identity theft, and illegal immigration until you realise that the centralised database - the National Identity Register - will log and store details of every important action in a person's life. When the ID card is swiped as someone identifies himself at, say, a bank, hospital, pharmacy, or insurance company, those details are retained and may be inspected by, among others, the police, tax authorities, customs, and MI5, the domestic intelligence service. The system will locate and track the entire adult population. If you put it together with the national system of licence-plate-recognition cameras, which is about to go live on British highways and in town centres, and understand that the ID card, under a new regulation, will also carry details of a person's medical records, you realise that the state will be able to keep tabs on anyone it chooses and find out about the most private parts of a person's life.

Despite the cost of the ID card system - estimated by the Government as being about £5.8bn and by the London School of Economics as being between £10bn and £19bn - few think that it will attack the problems of terrorism and ID theft.

George Churchill-Coleman described it to me as an absolute waste of time. "You and I will carry them because we are upright citizens. But a terrorist isn't going to carry [his own]. He will be carrying yours."

Neil Tennant, a former Labour donor who has stopped giving money to and voting for Labour because of ID cards, says: "My specific fear is that we are going to create a society where a policeman stops me on the way to Waitrose on the King's Road and says, 'Can I see your identity card?' I don't see why I should have to do that." Tennant says he may leave the country if a compulsory ID card comes into force. "We can't live in a total-surveillance society," he adds. "It is to disrespect us."

Defending myself against claims of paranoia and the attacks of Labour's former home secretary, I have simply referred people to the statute book of British law, where the evidence of what I have been saying is there for all to see. But two other factors in this silent takeover are not so visible. The first is a profound change in the relationship between the individual and the state. Nothing demonstrates the sense of the state's entitlement over the average citizen more than the new laws that came in at the beginning of the year and allow anyone to be arrested for any crime - even dropping litter. And here's the crucial point. Once a person is arrested he or she may be fingerprinted and photographed by the police and have a DNA sample removed with an oral swab - by force if necessary. And this is before that person has been found guilty of any crime, whether it be dropping litter or shooting someone.

So much for the presumption of innocence, but there again we have no reason to be surprised. Last year, in his annual Labour Party conference speech, Blair said this: "The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety. It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. It means deciding whose come first." The point of human rights, as Churchill noted, is that they treat the innocent, the suspect, and the convict equally: "These are the symbols, in the treatment of crime and criminals, which mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are a sign and proof of the living virtue in it."

The DNA database is part of this presumption of guilt. Naturally the police support it, because it has obvious benefits in solving crimes, but it should be pointed out to any country considering the compulsory retention of the DNA of innocent people that in Britain 38 per cent of all black men are represented on the database, while just 10 percent of white men are. There will be an inbuilt racism in the system until - heaven forbid - we all have our DNA taken and recorded on our ID cards.

Baroness Kennedy, a lawyer and Labour peer, is one of the most vocal critics of Blair's new laws. In the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture at the City University, London, in April she gave a devastating account of her own party's waywardness. She accused government ministers of seeing themselves as the embodiment of the state, rather than, as I would put it, the servants of the state.

"The common law is built on moral wisdom," she said, "grounded in the experience of ages, acknowledging that governments can abuse power and when a person is on trial the burden of proof must be on the state and no one's liberty should be removed without evidence of the highest standard. By removing trial by jury and seeking to detain people on civil Asbo orders as a pre-emptive strike, by introducing ID cards, the Government is creating new paradigms of state power. Being required to produce your papers to show who you are is a public manifestation of who is in control. What we seem to have forgotten is that the state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state."

The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the British people. "We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free environment," he says. "That architecture only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the Government to have control.

"That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate. They've bought the Government's arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively And that is the great lesson that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of individual freedom."

Those who understand what has gone on in Britain have the sense of being in one of those nightmares where you are crying out to warn someone of impending danger, but they cannot hear you. And yet I do take some hope from the picnickers of Parliament Square. May the numbers of these young eccentrics swell and swell over the coming months, for their actions are a sign that the spirit of liberty and dogged defiance are not yet dead in Britain.

This article is taken from the current issue of Vanity Fair

Charged for quoting George Orwell in public

In another example of the Government's draconian stance on political protest, Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the latest person to be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George Orwell quote: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." In his possession, he had several copies of an article in the American magazine Vanity Fair headlined "Blair's Big Brother Legacy", which were confiscated by the police. "The implication that I read from this statement at the time was that I was being accused of handing out subversive material," said Mr Jago. Yesterday, the author, Henry Porter, the magazine's London editor, wrote to Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing concern that the freedom of the press would be severely curtailed if such articles were used in evidence under the Act.

Mr Porter said: "The police told Mr Jago this was 'politically motivated' material, and suggested it was evidence of his desire to break the law. I therefore seek your assurance that possession of Vanity Fair within a designated area is not regarded as 'politically motivated' and evidence of conscious law-breaking."

Scotland Yard has declined to comment.

Enemies of the state?

Maya Evans 25

The chef was arrested at the Cenotaph in Whitehall reading out the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. She was the first person to be convicted under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which requires protesters to obtain police permission before demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament.

Helen John 68, and Sylvia Boyes 62

The Greenham Common veterans were arrested in April by Ministry of Defence police after walking 15ft across the sentry line at the US military base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Protesters who breach any one of 10 military bases across Britain can be jailed for a year or fined £5,000.

Brian Haw 56

Mr Haw has become a fixture in Parliament Square with placards berating Tony Blair and President Bush. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was designed mainly with his vigil in mind. After being arrested, he refused to enter a plea. However, Bow Street magistrates' court entered a not guilty plea on his behalf in May.

Walter Wolfgang 82

The octogenarian heckled Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, during his speech to the Labour Party conference. He shouted "That's a lie" as Mr Straw justified keeping British troops in Iraq. He was manhandled by stewards and ejected from the Brighton Centre. He was briefly detained under Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act.

Three terrible dangers face the world.

The first, global warming, has received much attention, if only relatively modest political action so far.

The second threat is the very real and increasing dangers of nuclear proliferation, and the dangers of terrorists acquiring nuclear materials and weapons. The collapse of the May 2005 non-proliferation talks, mostly due to U.S. intransigence, is a tragedy. And, despite the importance of nuclear proliferation, I doubt if one in a thousand are even aware of or concerned with the issue. The Bush administration failed to send a single high-ranking official to the May talks, even though they were held in New York with 153 nations in attendance.

The third issue, the weaponization of space, may represent the greatest and most urgent danger for the future and the survival of our civilization.

When we talk about the weaponization of space, we're not simply postulating about something that might happen in the distant future. There is already an abundance of irrefutable evidence that the United States intends to place weapons in space, beginning as early as 2008.

Here's a recent quote from the New York Times, May 3, 2006:

The Bush administration is seeking to develop a powerful ground-based laser weapon that would use beams of concentrated light to destroy enemy satellites in orbit.

The largely secret project, parts of which have been made public through Air Force budget documents submitted to Congress in February, is a part of a wide-ranging effort to develop space weapons, both defensive and offensive.

Some Congressional Democrats and other experts fault the research as potential fuel for an anti-satellite arms race that could ultimately hurt the U.S. more than others because the United States relies so heavily on military satellites.

The Air Force has pursued the secret research for several years. In January 2001, a commission led by Donald Rumsfeld warned that the American military faced a potential "Pearl Harbor" in space and called for a defensive arsenal of space weapons.

There is zero question that the U.S. plans to "control space" and plans to "deny others the use of space" for any purpose the U.S. now opposes, or might oppose in the future.

Both the Russians and the Chinese understand that although they strongly oppose the weaponization of space, they will have no choice but to deploy their own offensive and defensive space weapons, regardless of the potentially cataclysmic consequences.

Even though ultimately the U.S. would be infinitely more secure by joining with other nations in opposing space weaponization, the military-industrial complex in the U.S. has grown so powerful in Washington that rationality relating to perceived threats from China no longer exists, and growing administration paranoia reigns supreme.

The China syndrome

While Russia once again is considered a threat in the Pentagon, it is Beijing that is the focus of growing fears in Washington.

The result now is rising tensions in all three countries and plans for large new military expenditures and deployments. There is no longer a potential for a horrendously expensive new arms race. It's here already. The potential for a disastrous conflict over Taiwan is real and increasing.

In a widely circulated article in Foreign Affairs during the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, George W. Bush's then foreign adviser, one Condoleezza Rice, warned that China, even six years ago, presented a danger to U.S. interests, and that the U.S. must prevent China's rise as a regional power.

In the spring of last year, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, of all things, complained about China's military buildup, suggesting that clearly this will be threatening to the U.S. (Rumsfeld somehow neglected to mention that total U.S. military spending in 2006 will be $562 billion, over eight and half times China's military spending.)

Meanwhile, as has been widely reported, the Bush administration is doing everything it can to curtail Chinese influence in Asia, while the U.S. Defense Department is expanding and enlarging the American military presence in areas adjacent to China.

In a February, 2006 Pentagon document, a long-standing U.S. position is repeated. The United States "will attempt to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the United States" and China is clearly identified as the greatest threat.

New arms race

What are the implications according to Mr. Rumsfeld's Pentagon? No question. The U.S. must and will develop new weapons systems to guarantee American victory in a major all-out military confrontation.

In the words of Peace and World Security Professor Michael T. Klare of Hampshire College in Massachusetts:

Preparing for war with China, in other words, is to be the future cash cow for the giant U.S weapons-making corporations in the military-industrial complex (and it) will be the prime justification for the acquisition of the costly new weapons systems such as the F-22A Raptor air-superiority fighter, the DDX destroyer, the Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine and a new inter-continental penetrating bomber.

Even now, the U.S. Navy is upgrading its presence in the Western Pacific to six aircraft carriers and 60 per cent of its submarines will be in the area, and the U.S. has been conducting its largest military maneuvers near China since the end of the Vietnam War. Klare continues:

From Beijing's perspective, the reality must be unmistakable: a steady buildup of American military power along China's eastern, southern, and western boundaries.

China...has always responded to perceived threats of encirclement in a vigorous and muscular fashion...Beijing will (respond) with a military buildup of its own.

What is happening in Washington now is almost beyond belief. The embarrassing downgrading to "official visit," instead of a state visit, of President Hu Jintao's trip to Washington was a serious loss of face for President Hu. The same neocon theocons who brought us Iraq planned the event and are now clearly dedicated to and relishing a China-U.S. confrontation.

Dangerous prize: oil

Anyone considering a potential for conflict between the U.S. and China must consider the principal reason the U.S. invaded Iraq: oil. And anyone considering oil must regard recent American warnings to China not to attempt to secure more oil supplies in the future as the height of the most arrogant hypocrisy.

The U.S. now uses just over 20 million barrels of oil a day. China consumes about 6.5 million. Keeping in mind China's 1.3 billion population, and that it is now the second-biggest consumer of oil in the world, and considering its real annual GDP growth of about 9 per cent, plus the fact that within a very few years China's number of automobiles will be almost 100 times what it was in the mid-to-late 1980s, the New York Times suggests that by 2030 the country will have more cars than the U.S. The Times puts it well:

The United States doesn't have the right to tell a third of humanity to go back to their bicycles...Asking other countries to lay off the world's oil supply so America can continue to support its gas-guzzling Hummers doesn't really cut it.

The bottom line here? It's not just Taiwan that could provoke a deadly confrontation between the world's major superpower and a rapidly emerging new giant superpower. Oil and other resources are bound to pose significant dangers to peace.

Last month, American generals invited representatives of 91 countries to discuss the U.S. war on terrorism. China, which borders on so many countries involved in terrorist activities, was not invited to the meeting. But the intentional snub was carefully noted. The Pentagon regards China as a "strategic competitor." Obviously, for the U.S., more important in the war against terrorism are the likes of Albania, Tonga and Tajikistan.

Russians ramp up

A few words about Russia.

Last month, the Kremlin chief of staff accused the United States of planning "a whole arsenal of new destabilizing weapons."

Meanwhile, for over a year, Russia has been claiming unrivalled success in the development of new missiles capable of penetrating any missile shield. The new Topol-M and Bulava ballistic missiles are each equipped with six nuclear warheads, and Russia has reaffirmed plans to maintain a minimum of 2000 warheads for as far as one can speculate into the future.

The head of the top Russian missile-design centre, Yuri Solomonov, says Russia will soon unveil plans to adapt the new Bulava missile for both land-based strategic use and for its nuclear submarines.

Not to be ignored are the many and increasing signs of unprecedented Russian and Chinese military, economic and political cooperation.

Both countries are firmly opposed to the weaponization of space. Both have pleaded many times for an effective anti-weapons-in-space-treaty.

And both will certainly respond with their own space weapons when the U.S. forces them to do so.

Misguided weapons

Well, of course, the greatest irony of all in the U.S. policy is that placing weapons in space will seriously reduce U.S. security rather than increasing it, just as the invasion of Iraq substantially increased the potential for future attacks on the U.S., rather than increasing so-called "homeland" security.

A further irony is that by withdrawing from the existing international agreements such as the 1972 ABM Treaty and by failing to support or actively block effective agreements on non-proliferation, fissile materials, nuclear testing, the development of space weapons, and other international agreements, the U.S. rather than increasing protection for the American people, is actually increasing the danger of attacks.

Yet another further irony is that there is an abundance of scientific documentation showing that space weapons are not only terribly expensive, but are at the same time vulnerable to far less costly countermeasures.

For the Rumsfelds, the Cheneys, the White House and Defense hawks, it is inevitable that space will be weaponized, so the U.S. "had better be the first" in this "ultimate high ground" battlefield of the future.

This means deploying anti-satellite weapons, sensors and lasers and hit-to-kill weapons, plus space to ground weapons including powerful, enormously destructive lasers, so-called tungsten "rods or god," etc. It means satellite jamming and destruction and the disruption of communications.

For the Pentagon, space superiority will be essential and of the utmost importance in the battles of the future.

Accidental doomsday

Four respected American space weapons experts, Bruce M. DeBlois, Richard L. Garwin, Scott Kemp and Jeremy C. Maxwell note that:

In a recent space war game, U.S. commanders found that preemptively deploying or denying an opponent's space based information assets could lead to a rapid escalation into full scale war, even triggering nuclear weapon use. As one "enemy" commander commented: "If I don't know what's doing on, I have no choice but to hit everything, using everything I have."

...war through accident, misunderstanding, or the action of a third party (would be a grave danger without) multilateral agreements on space.

Space weapons, paradoxically, seem more likely to imperil than to protect overall U.S. military capability.

Not to mention the overall safety of millions of men, women and children around the world.

Stop for a moment to contemplate the meaning of a decision to "hit everything" and "use everything."

The deployment of space weapons will be certain to inflame, will immediately produce dangerous instability and feelings of vulnerability that other nations will feel must be addressed. As DeBlois, Garwin, Kemp and Maxwell suggest, the best strategy for the U.S. would be:

An aggressive campaign to prevent the deployment of weapons by other nations which might best be implemented as a U.S. commitment not to be the first to deploy or test a space weapon or to further test destructive anti-satellite weapons. A treaty would have the added benefit of legitimizing the use of sanctions or force...

Harper's shift

Well, this is very nice, except for one problem. It will never happen as long as George W. Bush is President of the United States. And, it will never happen even with a Democrat is the Oval Office, so long as the military-industrial complex continues to finance a corrupt, undemocratic American electoral system. The failure of efforts to reform elections and election financing in the U.S. is a tragedy, not only for that country, but a real potential tragedy for all of mankind. If the U.S. proceeds with its plans to weaponize space, the chances of a cataclysmic nuclear holocaust will be real and not far over the horizon.

Canada's position on the weaponization of space has been clear for over 30 years. Canada has not only been strongly opposed to the weaponization of space, but has long been a leader among nations in this opposition.

The question for Canadians now is what will the Harper government do in response to the dangerous American plans? Given Harper's desire to move closer to the Bush administration, given his decision to further integrate Canada's military with the U.S. military as we have already seen with the renewal and expansion of NORAD, given the government's dedication to helping the U.S. out in Afghanistan, given the governments desire to revisit the question of missile defence, is there much doubt that Canada's opposition to U.S. plans for the weaponization of space will be muted, if not entirely non-existent?

So to summarize:

The United States plans to weaponize space.
The Chinese and Russia reaction will surely be to do the same thing.
The potential for a horrendous, cataclysmic nuclear confrontation will be inevitable.
There is no reason to believe that traditional government diplomacy and negotiation will alter any of the above.
There are currently no political leaders in Canada or in the United States who are likely capable of changing any of this.

A citizens' revolt

Bleak? Yes.

Realistic? Unfortunately yes.

The question, the paramount question, is do we want to save this planet, save our families and our friends, save our civilization, or are we going to allow the Strangelovean madman in Washington to destroy the world?

Can anything be done? Perhaps.

What can we do if we can't rely on our political leaders, or on a conservative media increasingly owned and controlled by wealthy right-wing plutocrats?

I can think of only one thing we can try, a people's revolt employing the internet.

In Canada in 2004, we used the internet to dramatically turn around the debate about Canada's participation in the absurd American missile defence plan. Through the wide dissemination of authoritative scientific information, in a few months we turned the public opinion polls around from roughly 65 per cent in favour to 65 per cent opposed. We had press conferences featuring our own Canadian experts, and we brought in respected experts from outside the country. We provided such an abundance of valuable information that citizens were previously not aware of, that the growing passion and anger across the country left the Martin government with little choice.

Even though the Liberals fully intended to join in with the Americans, even though our defence minister was sent down to Washington to inform Donald Rumsfeld that they could count on Canada, the growing strongly-opposed to polls forced Ottawa to change its mind with an election on the horizon and with more and more Liberal MP's now opposed. Yes, there were a few books, lots of speeches, and articles supporting our position, but the single most effective tool we had was the internet and the information we provided Canadians across the country via the net.

Organize in cyberspace

With so many peace, disarmament, environmental and other groups to call on, a properly organized viral internet campaign could force even the Harper government to renew our long-standing Canadian strong opposition to the weaponization of space.

A long shot? You bet.

Could it succeed? Absolutely

Citizens won't be able to rely on our current government leadership in Canada or the U.S. for us to win this one. We have to do it ourselves. Canada could lead the way.

I wish we could rely on our politicians, but we can't.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps there's a better idea.

If there is, I'd certainly like to hear about it.

Bombs Away, a youth-driven campaign of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, opposed the Liberal government's aim to join the U.S. effort to weaponize space. Their web site is here.

This article is drawn from an address given yesterday by Mel Hurtig to the World Peace Forum in Vancouver. Hurtig is the National Chairman of the Committee for an Independent Canada and is the founder and former Chairman of the Council of Canadians. Among his many bestselling books is Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence and Star Wars, which the Globe and Mail review called "perhaps the most important book published in Canada this year."

The favourable business environment in Africa is of course no secret to the multinationals and post 9-11 investments into Africa have been flowing in from various countries at a feverish pace. China, the fastest growing economy on the planet, has started making inroads into the African markets after establishing a Sino-Africa Business Council. Trade between China and Africa registed an unprecedented growth of ninefold between 1999 and 2003 and stands at approximately $18 billion. Trade analysyts expect this figure to reach a whopping $110 Billion by 2008.

China National Petroleum Company has acquired a 40 per cent stake in one of Sudan’s major oil exploration project and Chinese workers built a 1,600 kilometre long pipeline in Sudan. In fact, China has been actively partnering with African governments to meet its rising demand for oil. In March, 2004 the Chinese governemnt extended a soft loan of $2billion to Angola to secure a regular supply of 10,00 barels of oil per day.

In Zimbabwe, China has reportedly finalised a deal to supply the African nation with fighter jets and other military goods worth $200 million. China has taken advantage of the isolation resulting from the moral and financial bankrupcy of Mugabe's government in the eyes of the Western powers. Indeed, Trade and tourism ties between China and Zimbabwe have been "flourishing" in recent years. A growing number of Chinese citizens are now travelling to Zimbabwe "to enjoy the many tourist attractions that the country of Robert Mugabe as to offer"!! The increased trade and tourism ties between Zimbabwe and China has resulted in the recent announcement of twice-weekly direct flights between Harare and Beijing. In fact, speculation is rife that the exiled western farmers of Zimbabwe will eventually be replaced by Chinese investors eager to capitalise in Zimbawe’s ailing tobbaco farming industry. Chinese companies are also reportedly vying to gain a major share of Zimbabwe’s lucrative mineral extraction industry.

In Zambia, Chinese contractors have said to have won a contract worth $600 million to build a hydroelectric plant at Kague Gorge. Other Chinese construction companies are also reportedly working on lucrative contracts to build hotels, roads and bridges in Botswana and South Africa. High level delegations from China have been busy forging trade ties with various African countries and have bee touring countries like Nigeria, Gabon, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

Exports from Africa to China have also been registering a marked growth in recent years. South Africa’s exports to China have more than doubled in the last five years. Notable among these exports are raw materials needed to meet the rising demand for China’s manufacturing sector – commodities like coal and gold. Chinese companies have also been using African factories to stitch garments using Chinese raw materials and cloth for exports to the United States under the AGOA agreement that allows duty free imports from certian African countries into the United States.

China's position with regard to its relationship with African countries is that it has simply been making efforts to establish "a new strategic partnership with political equality and mutual trust, economic cooperation and cultural exchange". However, some of the talking heads have recently attempted to "discredit Sino-African relations" by, "propagating their African version of the 'China threat' theory".

Among other things, the charge has been levelled that China is trying to impose "a kind of neo-colonialism on Africa" and that they are plundering Africa's resources. This is seen by China as an attempt to "drive a wedge between China and African countries and to destroy the Sino-Africa Cooperation". Indeed these statements could be said to lack historical basis and are open to obvious charges of hypocrisy. China has a very dark side undoubtedly with regard to its Human Rights record. But for Western pundits to accuse China of colonialism in Africa really is the pot calling the kettle black. Its likely purpose is to obstruct Chinese enterprises from accessing the African market and safeguard the interests of Western countries in Africa.

It is well noted that Western colonial powers committed numerous crimes including slavery in their exploitation of Africa. At a conference in Berlin in 1885, European powers secretly divided up Africa between them and rewrote the map of Africa by setting up about 50 colonies and protectorates. In addition to trade and military control, European powers also gradually molded African countries into their material suppliers and product-dumping markets. This too can be used as a measure of exploitation. It resulted in single and abnormal economic structures in many countries, thereby having a long-term impact on the sustainable economic development of these nations.

European colonial powers also introduced new languages and new clans to Africa, which created ethnic conflicts, incited religious dissent and provoked religious conflict, thereby undermining the traditional African social and economic order. As a result, African countries have been in a poor and backward state since they were granted independence. Even today, those industries which are of utmost importance to African countries' economic lifeline such as heavy industry, mining and manufacturing are owned by Western multinational corporations.

Since the 9/11 attacks, Western countries have adjusted their policies toward Africa. starting to attach greater importance to African countries because of the significance of its resources. The proportion of African oil imported by the United States has risen to 16 percent and is expected to hit 25 percent by 2015. Nigeria is Africa's largest oil producer and the world's sixth largest oil exporter. However 95 percent of its daily oil output is under the control of Western oil companies.

In order to maximize profits in Niger Delta oil-producing areas, major Western oil companies reduced spending on infrastructure construction. Frequent pipeline ruptures have led to the spontaneous combustion of oil spill fire. Large areas of farmland and forest have been burned to ashes. Thick smoke has generated heavy pollution in the air, soil and rivers. Surrounding residents cannot even drink clean water. Long-term exploitation by these companies has led to recurrent violence in the area. Since the second half of last year, the unstable situation in this region has become the major reason for the rise in international crude oil prices. The predatory exploitation of African resources by largely Western transnational corporations is the real cause of the so-called "economic colonialism" of Africa, despite transparent mainstream media attempts to snipe at the easy target of China so enthusiastically.

Venezuela will set fire to its oil deposits in the event of a US military operation, Venezuelan Ambassador to Russia, Navarro Alexis Rojas said at a news conference in Moscow, Wednesday.

“Such an invasion would be aimed at gaining control over oil. We will set our oil fields on fire in the event of any invasion. It will be our first response to it,” the Interfax news agency quoted the diplomat as saying.

Oil prices would skyrocket if reports claiming any imminent aggression appeared, the ambassador said. Venezuela would also take advantage of Latin America’s solidarity agreements, he said.

Venezuela has raised worries in the United States by purchasing a large batch of assault rifles from Russia and reportedly being in talks to buy several Russian combat aircraft.

The Rosoboronexport Federal State Unitary Enterprise displayed one hundred and fifty types of armaments and other military hardware at the “Expo Ejercito-2006” international show, which ended in Venezuela, last weekend

This annual exhibition was held for the first time in spite of the embargo on arms deliveries to Venezuela, which the Bush administration had clamped down on the country last May.

The American sanctions were allegedly imposed due to the Venezuelan authorities’ insufficient backing of Washington’s fight against terrorism. The embargo was clamped down, in particular, on the deliveries of spares for the American F-16 fighters with which the Venezuelan Air Force is armed. Due to this, President Hugo Chavez announced last week a decision to buy twenty-four Russian multi-functional Su-30 fighters to renew the country’s aviation pool and to replace the American F-16 planes.

Leader of the Russian delegation and Chief of the Rosoboronexport Regional Department Sergei Ladygin held talks in the course of the show on the promotion of Russia’s defense contacts with Venezuela, which are being implemented in keeping with the inter-state agreement on military-technology cooperation between the two countries.
Interviewed by Itar-Tass, Ladygin confirmed that the negotiations were all by completed on the delivery of Russian fighters and helicopters to Venezuela and on the licensed production within the country of AK-103 submachine-guns and ammunition for them, on the establishment of a servicing and training centre to take care of the delivered helicopters.

Ladygin spoke highly of the level of military-technology cooperation with Venezuela, which he stated was "mutually profitable and in keeping with the international agreements, regulating the sale of armaments and military equipment".

By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press Writer

June 29, 2006, 4:36 AM EDT

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. humanitarian chief urged the Security Council to do more to protect civilians from conflicts and terror attacks, saying thousands have died in recent months in Iraq, Afghanistan and several African countries.

The Security Council should have acted against those in Ivory Coast who inspired and directed mob violence against civilians and humanitarian organizations in January, and against the militias and warlords receiving daily arms shipments in Somalia in violation of an embargo, Jan Egeland told an open meeting of the panel on Wednesday.

Egeland said the council didn't act because it was "overburdened by many responsibilities" and should give Ivory Coast and Somalia the same attention that the conflicts in Congo and Sudan's western Darfur region have received in recent months.

"The world is indeed a safer place for most of us, but it is still a death trap for too many defenseless civilians, men, women and children," Egeland said. "Despite all our efforts, women are still raped and violated as a matter of course, children are still forcibly recruited, and defenseless civilians continue to be killed."

Despite the council's focus, the situation in Congo and Sudan remains precarious, he said.

"Up to 1,200 people are dying in silence every day" in Congo, he said. In Darfur, the African Union has reported 69 people killed since the Darfur Peace Agreement was signed on May 3, but "we know the real figures are much higher," he added.

"However, it is in Iraq that the greatest numbers of civilians are being killed by indiscriminate acts of terror and sectarian and conflict violence," Egeland said.

Baghdad's main mortuary has received over 6,000 bodies of Iraqis killed since the beginning of the year, he said, citing Iraqi Health Ministry figures. President Bush, he noted, has estimated more than 30,000 Iraqis were killed between March 2003 -- the start of the Iraq war -- and the end of 2005.

In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai said recently that up to 600 civilians had been killed in recent weeks, Egeland said.

He called for stepped-up action by local, national and regional leaders and groups to protect civilians. Egeland also called for earlier efforts to mediate conflicts, new approaches to peacekeeping, access for humanitarian workers and, most importantly, well-trained and financed peacekeepers with strong mandates to protect civilians.

The international community needs peacekeepers trained to deal with human rights abuses in Darfur and across the border in eastern Chad, where the conflict has spilled over, he said. Nor are there enough trained policemen to deal with groups like Ivory Coast's pro-government Young Patriots militia, which is using street violence to advance its agenda, he said.

June 2006 By: Oliver Luft

Republished from www.journalism.co.uk

Internet journalism is still in its infancy.

Yet already websites are a primary source of news and information for millions and the web seems certain to become the dominant journalistic medium within a few years.

It's no secret why. Most simply and obviously, the internet is the most versatile and complete of media - the only one that can mix words, pictures, video and sound and be constantly and instantaneously updated.

Our audience expects, when they log on, to get the very latest news. They don't want to wait until the next bulletin on the hour or the following day's paper.

A news website can and should be like a newspaper that is published and republished every minute of every day.

Even more important is the relationship that internet companies encourage with their audience.

We don't simply want to bring people the news; we want to be the medium through which people share and discuss what is going on, through messageboards, chatrooms and blogs.

The two big news events of 2005 - the tsunami and the July 7 bombings - were key landmarks in internet journalism as online sites such as AOL produced compelling packages that mixed words, pictures, audio, video and contributions from witnesses and those involved in the incidents.

Millions came to our sites to see the news unfold and to discuss it and react to it. The mix of content we provided seems like the model for the way internet journalism will develop.

So where does this leave newspapers? On the most brutal view they are stuck on the hard shoulder of the information superhighway.

Circulations are falling but the press seems content to churn out a tired editorial mix that hasn't substantially changed in the past forty or fifty years.

The process of getting journalists' words to readers' breakfast tables is a daily organisational miracle but, compared with the immediacy of the internet, is practically guaranteed to provide a product that is out-of-date before it is consumed.

The same malaise by and large infects papers' websites. In newsrooms geared up to the daily ritual of producing a print edition, the internet is a poor relation.

Journalists expect to see their best work in the paper. Editors and business managers want to preserve the commercial value of their print editions.

So readers must wait until the following morning for the best articles, the biggest exclusives.

Newspapers continue to cling to an "us and them" world in which journalists are clever, informed, well-connected experts who find out what is going on, decide what is important and what isn't, analyse what it all means and present it to their grateful readers.

And if readers have opinions on the issues of the day, well, the journalists are frankly not terribly interested.

They may publish a handful of readers' letters but they don't really want to know what you think. It's your job to listen to them - not the other way around.

This is a state of affairs that clearly suits journalists and flatters their egos but readers seem to find it less satisfying.

They want to have their say, to react to the news and to the media's take on the news. The internet, with its messageboards, chatrooms and blogs, provides them with that opportunity.

Newspapers initially ignored the phenomenon or looked down on it as a kind of inadequate, amateurish version of journalism.

Even now, some newspaper sites still refuse to accept comments from their users, while others pre-vet and post only a 'representative selection'.

In the face of a wave of media democratisation, many are still behaving rather like Iron Curtain commissars in 1989.

Newspapers as dinosaurs lumbering towards their own extinction: that's the gloomy view of the current media landscape. But there are grounds for a more optimistic outlook.

Papers remain hugely powerful brands. To say that someone is a Sun reader, Guardian reader or Mail reader is instantly understood shorthand and shows that papers still stand for something.

It is possible to produce a newspaper that makes sense in the modern media age. Look at the Metro papers: rigorously designed to meet the needs of a young, time-pressured commuter audience and hugely successful.

Another positive sign is that newspapers are starting to address the internet seriously.

The Guardian’s Comment is Free site is a genuine attempt to get to grips with the blogging phenomenon.

Several papers are taking cautious steps into 'web-first' publishing. Time will tell whether they are adapting quickly enough.

Technology may yet ride to papers' rescue. 'Electronic paper' - digital screens that you can roll up and stuff in your back pocket - has been promised for years and could soon be with us. When it finally arrives, it could breathe new life into the press.

Most importantly, newspapers have the knowledge and resources to provide great journalism.

Though sites like AOL are producing more and more of our own content, in key areas like news and sport reporting, we continue to utilise the expertise of long-standing newsgathering organisations.

We don't have reporters on the scene of breaking stories or networks of correspondents and experts around the world. One future for some newspapers may be as suppliers to big online brands.

Some papers will manage to make the transition from print to online in their own right and those that succeed will do so because of the quality of their journalism.

Specifically, what will set them apart is quality reporting in breadth and depth combined with radical thinking about how to present information in a new medium, rather than simply reproducing the conventions of print on a computer screen.

Like any other medium, the internet depends on great content. Newspapers need to make sure they are in a position to supply it.

Republished from Antiwar

(REUTERS) The prosecutor in the first U.S. federal trial over the U.N. oil-for-food program said on Tuesday he would show evidence of kickbacks, intrigue and back channel tactics during the United Nations dealings with Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

Prosecutor Michael Farbiarz laid out his case in opening arguments at the trial of South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park, who is accused of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the former Iraqi President .

Farbiarz said evidence would show that during 1996 Park received substantial cash payments from Iraq, including an envelope with $100,000, and by the end of 1996 the oil-for-food program was in place.

But defense attorney Michael Kim said Park was just "a middleman or facilitator, like almost everybody else involved in the giant international game of oil and money."

The oil-for-food program allowed Iraq to sell oil and use the proceeds to buy nonmilitary goods, under U.N. supervision. It aimed to ease the impact of U.N. sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, but the $67 billion program was rife with corruption, investigators say.

Several defendants are facing criminal charges in federal court in New York in connection with the program.

Kim urged jurors not to be blinded by the prosecution's presentation of intrigue and reminded them that Park was not charged with spying or selling access to the United Nations.

Park, 71, faces charges in U.S. District Court of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government and money laundering. He has pleaded not guilty and faces a maximum of five years in jail

By Diana Cariboni

Republished from Inter Press Service

Legend has it that Ciudad Bolivar, a poor neighbourhood strung along the hills on the south side of the Colombian capital, is so called because independence hero Simon Bolivar briefly took refuge in the area after narrowly escaping an assassination attempt in 1828. Today, it is riddled with the concrete failure of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s push for paramilitary demobilisation. Large urban areas are now finding themselves run by organized crime

Some eight ultra-right paramilitary groups are said to have a toehold in Ciudad Bolivar and neighbouring Altos de Cazuca (Cazuca Heights) in the municipality of Soacha.The situation is basically like living in an area controlled by a well-organized, heavily armed mafia.This new breed of paramilitaries will be easier for the government to ignore, since Uribe can simply say, “we already disarmed them.” And as long as the FARC and the government are fighting openly, Uribe can simply ignore his urban areas.

At least three are offshoots of the bloc of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC- the paramilitary umbrella organisation) that was headed by drug lord Miguel Arroyave until his death in 2004—likely at the hands of his own men. At the time he had been negotiating with the government as part of the disarmament process.

Ombudsman Roberto Sicard says there are three groups made up of former AUC members, from the Central-Santander Bloc and the Capital Bloc, in the slums of Altos de Cazuca, where 17,000 of the area’s 50,000 residents took refuge after being displaced by the civil war.

Sicard coordinates the United Nations-funded “House of Rights,” almost the only presence the state has in Altos de Cazuca, a marginalised zone where water runs only two hours a week.

Some sources report that the right-wing groups threaten and murder community leaders and activists, more or less force youth into “social cleansing” of suspected criminals (indeed, rampant unemployment provides little incentive for young people to refuse the opportunity for steady pay) and forcibly collect “taxes” from businesses and bus and taxi drivers.

The area is also ripe with cocaine labs—the fuel for the country’s long-running armed conflict.

Thrown into the mix, say these sources, are “pseudo-paramilitaries,” who operate as “subsidiaries” of the AUC or rent their criminal services to the highest bidder.

“In Colombia, I don’t think people kill for ideology—they kill for food or power,” Sicard told some 20 journalists from several South American countries who visited the area in mid-June.

In Ciudad Bolivar, the armed conflict is reflected in “the network of informants (who give information to the police and army), paramilitary control and the collection of ‘taxes’,” explained Michael Jordan, director of the Latin American regional office of Diakonia, a German non-governmental organisation that provides aid in disaster situations.

“Constant threats and selective killings” are the norm, and the situation does not involve classic military confrontation, Jordan said.

One 40-year-old man, the president of a town council in Cazuca who wished to remain anonymous, told IPS that he and 13 other community leaders have received death threats from illegal groups. “On May 30 they attacked me with knives and ordered me to leave the area.”

“People are scared. We thought carefully about whether we should file a joint complaint, but in the end we decided it was safer to do it individually,” he added.

“We don’t want to become victims of these organisations, which is why I decided to file a legal complaint,” said the former member of the now-defunct leftist Patriotic Union party, most of whose members were murdered.

He said they do not want to have anything to do with the politicians. “They hand out food for votes,” he maintained.

This month, several people spoke up to denounce murders and frequent disappearances on the southern outskirts of Bogota. The bodies are not always recovered; nearby Rincon del Lago is believed to be the dumping ground of choice.

It is almost impossible to report attacks or crimes to the authorities. The closest police station is a 20-minute car ride away. But also, some sources say that lower-ranking police officials have ties to the criminal world.

The right-wing Uribe, whose term began in 2002 and who was reelected in late May, negotiated with the AUC a controversial demobilisation process under a legal framework that basically pardons most of the human rights abuses committed by the paramilitaries.

At their height, the groups were responsible for 80 percent of the country’s human rights violations, according to the United Nations.

Before the negotiations began, the paramilitaries numbered fewer than 5,000. Today, authorities talk of 32,000 demobilised members who are benefiting from different kinds of assistance aimed at their reinsertion into society, and approximately 17,000 surrendered weapons.

The press, analysts and human rights activists have already pointed to the emergence of a third generation of these illegal groups, who had well-documented ties to members of the armed forces.

Ciudad Bolivar and the neighbouring Altos de Cazuca provide squalid refuge to tens of thousands of campesinos fleeing the armed conflict. They have come to the capital from rural areas around the country, seeking government protection.

But they arrive only to discover the same threats they thought they were leaving behind. And having sacrificed their houses, land and livelihoods, the displaced families have the added burden of poverty in the cities.

According to 1993 figures, Ciudad Bolivar was home at tha