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miracle but, compared with the immediacy of the internet, is practically guaranteed to provide a product that is out-of-date before it is consumed.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 that time to 713,000 people in 252 neighbourhoods. But more recent estimates say the number is now closer to one million residents. The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that 100,000 of these are displaced persons.

On this day, Belfa Marin, 37, arrived with two of her children at the House of Rights, clearly upset. Sobbing tearlessly, she explained that the government had closed the local polyclinic. To date the facility had provided care for some 10,000 people, attending an average 1,050 patients per year.

The House of Rights provides legal assistance and education and health services, and organises productive projects for displaced persons.

Mar©looked for paper to collect signatures to protest the polyclinic’s closure. “Why are they abandoning us? I trusted the doctors,” she said, outraged. Three years ago, she fled her small farm in Vista Hermosa, in the central department (province) of Meta, with her husband, three children, brother-in-law and a niece. That area is under the influence of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the biggest rebel group.

They first walked to San Juan de Arama, slightly to the north, only to stumble into paramilitary territory.

Marin won’t hear of returning, even though life in the city is miserable.

In decades gone by, Ciudad Bolivar and Altos de Cazuca were FARC territory, providing logistical support to the group. But paramilitaries, who grew in strength since the 1980s, have long since taken control of the area.

Some walls are scrawled with graffiti with slogans such as “AUC presentes” (The AUC are here.)

Almost all the houses are made of brick. Lower down on the hills of Ciudad Bolivar they even have small yards and the roads are paved, and water and electricity run steadily. The landscape deteriorates the higher one climbs. Sewage streams through open gutters on the sides of the streets, the houses become more squalid, and greenery basically disappears.

The more recent arrivals settle higher up the hill. The process for emergency state aid (approximately 200 dollars per month for up to six months) can take up to two months or more. So it is common to see recently displaced persons panhandling at stoplights.

German Luna was there once. Now he is president of the displaced people’s association “Seeds of Hope,” a collective of 350 families.

Luna gathered some 50 mothers and their children together in a community soup kitchen in Santa Viviana, a neighbourhood in Ciudad Bolivar that has no water, power or telephone service. Today, there will be no lunch. But they have waited patiently to tell their stories to the visiting journalists.

Luna runs the “Little Moons of Love” kitchen. Using the rice, lentils, oil and “panela” bread donated by the World Food Programme through the Bogot©ity government, they provide a daily meal to 417 children.

“We survive on charity,” says Luna. “There is no work here, and the state’s talk of resettlement means nothing. It’s not safe to return.” In September 2001, his wife and 17 others were killed in Montes de Maria, in the northeastern department of Sucre. Luna fled with his children, now seven and eight years old.

One of his children, smiling, approaches with a blank piece of paper, asking for my name and phone number. While writing, I say I live far away, in Uruguay. “It doesn’t matter. If you don’t mind, I could walk all the way there.”

When the journalists are about to leave, a young woman holding a feverish baby approaches. The mother asks for “an autograph” on the sole of the tiny, impeccably white shoe. “It’s for when she grows up, so I can tell her you all were here,” she says.

It can only be hoped that Colombia’s war will be over by then.

But “It will be a long time before we see the end of the conflict and the paramilitaries—killers who work alongside the security forces. They’ve changed their name over the years; before they were “sicarios” (hired killers), then the AUC—and now, we’ll just wait and see,” sighs Jordan.

– By Jack Blood (www.jackblood.com)

I just about fell out of my sneakers when I heard some goon on MSNBC suggest that the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan was due to funding coming from bumper opium crops. The very crops the Taliban nearly eradicated when in power before 9.11.01. Of course many believe that one reason to expel the Taliban in the first place was because they were cutting off supply of the drug, a drug that has a long history connected with the CIA

I am no Taliban sympathizer, but the fact remains; after the Taliban were excused from power in Afghanistan, record poppy harvests begin to roll in. Some would blame this on the “Warlords” who are allegedly funding their former arch enemies the Taliban… but if you believe these regional governors work as independents, free from outside tax, and able to move and refine these huge quantaties of smack – well I have a cliché bridge to sell you.

What we already know through the foreign un-embedded press. That is the “Taliban” who were honored guests of George Bush Jr. at his Crawford Texas ranch in early 2001, were flown out on C-130’s into safe havens in Pakistan. As we speak the former spokesman for the Taliban is attending, you guessed it, Yale University on a scholarship studying political science. The Bush Administration is also locked into business deals with the UAE, who openly support the Taliban… I am sure that you remember the deals to have them secure our Ports that blew up in Ws face.

The Phony war on drugs:

A statue of Nathan Hale stands on Old Campus at Yale University. There is a copy of that statue in front of the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yet another stands in front of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts (where George H.W. Bush ('48) went to prep school

Nathan Hale, along with three other Yale graduates, was a member of the "Culper Ring," one of America's first intelligence operations. Established by George Washington, it was successful throughout the Revolutionary War. Nathan was the only operative to be ferreted out by the British, and after speaking his famous regrets, he was hanged in 1776. Ever since the founding of the Republic, the relationship between Yale and the "Intelligence Community" has been unique.

In 1823, Samuel Russell established Russell and Company for the purpose of acquiring opium in Turkey and smuggling it to China. Russell and Company bought out the Perkins (Boston) syndicate in 1830 and moved the primary center of American opium smuggling to Connecticut. Many of the great American and European fortunes were built on the "China"(opium) trade.

One of Russell and Company's Chief of Operations in Canton was Warren Delano, Jr., grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt. Other Russell partners included John Cleve Green (who financed Princeton), Abiel Low (who financed construction of Columbia), Joseph Coolidge and the Perkins, Sturgis and Forbes families. (Coolidge's son organized the United Fruit Company, and his grandson, Archibald C. Coolidge, was a co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.)

William Huntington Russell ('33), Samuel's cousin, studied in Germany from 1831-32. Germany was a hotbed of new ideas. The "scientific method" was being applied to all forms of human endeavor. Prussia, which blamed the defeat of its forces by Napoleon in 1806 on soldiers only thinking about themselves in the stress of battle, took the principles set forth by John Locke and Jean Rosseau and created a new educational system. Johan Fitche, in his "Address to the German People," declared that the children would be taken over by the State and told what to think and how to think it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took over Fitche's chair at the University Of Berlin in 1817, and was a professor there until his death in 1831. Hegel was the culmination of the German idealistic philosophy school of Immanuel Kant.

It is from this that the Hegelian Dialectic spawns: Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis, or as it is better know today: Problem, Reaction, Solution.

'Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy'

A Documentary Film By John Pilger

Pilger uncovers the shocking complicity of the US and Great Britain governments in the East Timor genocide - the same governments who were willing to go to war with Saddam Hussein for his invasion of Kuwait, but who stood aside as Indonesia broke the exact same UN regulations to rape and pillage East Timor using Western arms. Click here to watch Windows Media - Real Video Here

By JONATHAN COOK

Republished from Counterpunch

The killing by Palestinian militants of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third from an army post close to the Gaza Strip set the scene for Israeli "reprisals" and "retaliation", according to the reports of BBC correspondents in Israel and Gaza yesterday.

The attack by the Palestinians, who sneaked through tunnels under the electronic fence surrounding Gaza, marked a "major escalation in cross-border tension" (Alan Johnston) that threatened to overturn "a week of progress on two fronts" (John Lyon): namely, the recent talks between Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in Jordan, and between rival Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas.

Thus, according to the BBC's analysis, this attack ends the immediate chances for "peace" negotiations and provides the context for the next round of the conflict between the Israeli army and the Palestinians of Gaza. We are left to infer that all the suffering the army inflicts in the coming days and weeks should be attributed to this moment of "escalation" by the Palestinians.

We can ignore the weeks of shelling by the Israeli army of Gaza, the firing of hundreds of missiles into the crowded Strip that have destroyed Palestinian lives and property, while spreading terror among the civilian population and deepening the psychological trauma suffered by a generation of children.

We can ignore the deaths of more than 30 civilians, and dozens of horrific injuries, in the past few weeks at the hands of the Israeli military, including three children hit in a botched air strike last week, and a heavily pregnant woman and her doctor brother killed a day later as a missile slammed into the room where they were eating dinner.

We can ignore the blockade of Gaza's "borders" by the Israeli army for months on end, which has prevented Palestinians in the Strip from trading goods at crossing points with Israel and from receiving vital supplies of food and medicines. As a captive population besieged by Israeli soldiers, Gazans are facing a humanitarian catastrophe sanctioned by Israeli government policy and implemented by the Israeli army.

We can ignore Israel's bullying of the international community to connive in the starving of the Hamas-led government of funds and diplomatic room for manoeuvre, thereby preventing the elected Palestinian leadership from running Gaza. So desperate is the situation there that Hamas officials are being forced to smuggle in millions of dollars of cash stuffed in suitcases to pay salaries.

And finally we can ignore the violation of Palestinian territory by Israeli commandos who infiltrated Gaza a day before the Palestinian attack to kidnap two Palestinians Israel claims are terrorists. They have been "disappeared", doubtless to be be held in administrative detention, where they can denied access to lawyers, the courts and, of course, justice.

None of this provides the context for the Palestinian attack on the army post -- any more than, in the BBC's worldview, do the previous four decades of occupation. None is apparently relevant to understanding the Palestinian attack, or for judging the legitimacy of Israel's imminent military "reprisals".

In short, according to the BBC, we can ignore Israel's long-standing policy of unilateralism -- a refusal to negotiate meaningfully with the Palestinians, either the old guard of Fatah or the new one of Hamas -- with its resort to a strategy of collective punishment of Gaza's population to make it submit to the continuing occupation.

In the skewed moral and news priorities of the BBC, the killing of two Israeli soldiers by Palestinian militants -- the "escalation" -- provides a justification for "fierce retaliation" against Gaza, with the inevitable toll on Palestinian civilians and militants alike. The earlier killing of tens of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, however, is not presented as justification for yesterday's Palestinian retaliation against the army.

In other words, on the scale of moral outrage the BBC ranks the deaths of Israeli soldiers enforcing an illegal occupation far above those of Palestinian civilians enduring the illegal occupation.

There is another notable asymmetry in the BBC's assessment of the "escalation". Participation by the military wing of Hamas in the attack is evidence, suggest the reporters, of the role of the Palestinian leadership in "escalating tension". But the killing by the Israeli army of a Palestinian family of seven on a Gaza beach on June 9, and many more civilians since, was apparently not an "escalation", even though it provoked Hamas to renounce a ceasefire it had maintained for 16 months in the face of continuous Israeli military assaults.

So how is the ordinary viewer to make sense of these events -- the endless "cycle of violence" -- with the BBC as guide. (And the BBC is no worse, and possibly better, than most of other Western broadcasters. At least its reporter Alan Johnston is based in Gaza.)

Not only do its reporters exhibit the biases associated with its institutional racism -- as an organisation, the BBC chooses to identify with Israeli concerns before Palestinian ones -- but they then compound this distortion by repeating uncritically Israel's own misrepresentation of events.

The reporters, like so many of their colleagues, fall into the trap of presenting the conflict through the eyes of the Israeli government, the same government whose prime minister, Ehud Olmert, last week proudly displayed his ethnic chauvinism by setting the suffering of the Jewish residents of Sderot, who face a mostly non-lethal smattering of Palestinian home-made Qassam rockets, far above the rising death toll of Gaza's civilians from the army's constant aerial and artillery bombardment. "I am sorry with all my heart for the residents of Gaza," Olmert said, "but the lives and well-being of Sderot's residents are more important than those of Gaza residents." In other words, a potential threat to a single Jew is more important than the deaths of dozens of Palestinian innocents.

Thus we learn without comment from the BBC that Olmert has denounced the killing of the two soldiers as "terrorism", even though the word cannot describe an attack by an occupied people on an occupying army. How is it possible for a few men with light arms to terrorise one of the most powerful armies in the world? What next: are we to listen sympathetically to claims by the US that its soldiers are being "terrorised" by Iraqi insurgents?

The defence that the BBC is simply reporting Israel's position does not stand up to scrutiny. Is it even conceivable that we might hear a BBC reporter neutrally repeat a Hamas statement that the Israeli army is terrorising Palestinians by reckless shelling civilians in Gaza, even though the word's usage in this case would better satisfy the dictionary definition? The shells most certainly do spread terror among Gaza's civilian population.

We hear too without comment that Olmert is holding both Hamas and the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas responsible for the attack. The BBC dutily repeats Israeli claims that Abbas has the resources to fight "terror" even as the money to pay Palestinian security forces is held by foreign banks unwilling, at Israeli and American behest, to hand it over, and as Hamas and Abbas are locked in battle for control of the Palestinians' shrinking government.

Does common sense not recoil from the suggestion that both Hamas and Abbas can be equally blamed for the attack when the two are bitter rivals for power? Or that either can be held accountable when Israel has refused to negotiate with them or treat them as the genuine representatives of the Palestinian people?

Again, would the BBC report with due solemnity claims by the Palestinians that they hold Olmert and Peretz personally guilty for the civilian deaths in Gaza over the past fortnight, even though in an enlightened world both should be standing trial for war crimes?

Instead, however implausible the Israeli version of reality, the BBC happily sows confusion on behalf of the Israeli army. Like other broadcasters, it credulously reports preposterous arguments seeking to exonerate the Israeli army of responsibility for the shelling of the beach in Gaza that killed a Palestinian family of seven. It treats as equally credible the army's belated version in which Palestinian militants are said to have laid a single mine at a favourite seaside picnic spot in the futile hope of preventing the Israeli navy landing along the Strip's miles of coastline. (In consequence, the BBC excludes the seven dead and dozens of Palestinian injured in that Israeli attack from its list of recent civilian casualties in Gaza).

And both BBC reporters note gravely Israel's concerns that this is the first time Palestinian militants have broken out of the fenced-off Strip since Israel withdrew from Gaza nearly a year ago. Somehow the fact that the Palestinians have briefly escaped from their cage appears to make the attack all the more shocking not only for Israel but for the two reporters.

This attack in Israel, they tell us, is the most serious to date, with the implication that it is therefore illegitimate and part of the same "escalation". Even ignoring the fact that this attack was against Israeli soldiers besieging, imprisoning and shelling the Palestinians of Gaza, does the BBC not to pause to consider the double standard it is applying?

Was the Israeli army's incursion into Gaza a day earlier to capture two alleged Palestinian militants not an equal escalation? Was it not an equal violation of Palestinian sovereignty? Of course not. The BBC knows, as do the rest of us, that the army never really left Gaza and the occupation never really ended. But you won't hear that from any of its reporters.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

The costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wil pass the $500 billion mark next year, says a Congressional Research Service report, the National Journal's CONGRESS DAILY has reported today. The Congressional Research Service is a non-partisan arm of Congress. Excerpts from the registration restricted article follow:

The overall cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other global anti-terror operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will top $500 billion next year, according to congressional estimates and expectations of future funding.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said in a report that through the current fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the government will have spent $437 billion on overseas military and foreign aid funding. That includes the latest supplemental spending bill signed into law this month, which provided $69 billion for the war effort.

Add in roughly $1.5 billion in FY07 Foreign Operations funds for Iraq and Afghanistan; $50 billion in Pentagon "bridge" funds for the first half of FY07, plus as-yet-undetermined supplemental funds for the remainder of the next fiscal year, and total war-related costs will easily soar over $500 billion one year from now.

At least $37 billion or so will have gone to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development for Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction, embassy operations and other foreign aid programs. War costs alone are expected to be at least $450 billion, not including the expected supplemental request early next year.